For the Mets, there has rarely been a sense of urgency to get their new ballpark built. In 1998, they presented a model of a stadium with a retractable roof that they hoped to occupy three years ago.
They are still playing at moribund Shea Stadium.
But the team waited long enough so that its quest for a new home jibed nicely with the collapse last Monday of the Jets' proposal to build a $2.2 billion stadium and convention center on the Far West Side of Manhattan; it would have been converted into an Olympic stadium if the city wins its bid to be host for the 2012 Summer Games.
So yesterday, after seven years of waiting and quiet planning, the Mets announced an agreement with the city under which the Mets will get their stadium, at their cost. They will have to vacate it, probably for the new Yankee Stadium, for the entire 2012 season if the city wins its Olympic bid.
But they will be able to stay put in the 45,000-seat ballpark if the city loses the bid to Paris, London, Madrid or Moscow.
Fred Wilpon, the principal owner of the Mets, had in past negotiations with the city sought to pay only a portion of the cost of a new stadium. But in the last 72 hours of talks, he agreed to finance it privately.
He said yesterday that he would not know the cost of the stadium until a design was chosen, but he estimated that the ballpark, which is to open in 2009, would cost about $600 million.
"It's expensive," Wilpon, a Brooklyn native, said at a City Hall news conference, "because it's right for the Mets and it's right for the city."
The long wait for a stadium deal, coupled with the need to revive the Olympic bid, led the Mets to get a commitment from the city and state to make a total of $180 million in infrastructure improvements to the location, far more than was promised in years past.
In addition to the lure of more government aid, the Mets' financial picture will change next year when they start their cable network, with their partners Time Warner and Comcast. Revenue from the network, and from the stadium once it is built, will presumably help finance the cost of the ballpark.
Wilpon said that he was disappointed that the Far West Side stadium plan was defeated, and that as a New Yorker, he wanted the city's Olympic pursuit to continue. And, he said, after years of quiet preparation he was able to move quickly when the Bloomberg administration called him last week.
"The city wanted to move quickly and so did we," Wilpon said.
Wilpon's decision to finance the ballpark on his own comes days before an expected announcement by the Yankees that they will use their own revenues to build a facility in parkland adjacent to Yankee Stadium. Both ventures will get infrastructure help from the city and state.
The Yankees and the Mets will be able to offset revenue-sharing payments to other Major League Baseball teams with the payments needed to service the bonds they will issue to finance the stadiums.
The planned Yankees ballpark will have 50,800 seats, but will be able to expand to 54,000. The Mets would see their proposed ballpark stretch to 80,000 temporarily if it is converted for Olympic use.
Daniel L. Doctoroff, the deputy mayor, said that the city had calculated that it would be responsible for $212 million to maintain Shea Stadium, now 41 years old, over the next 30 years, and concluded that a new Mets park is necessary.
A similar kind of calculation was at the heart of legal disputes between the Giants and the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority. They argued over how much the state would have to pay to keep Giants Stadium "state of the art"; eventually they agreed to a deal to let the Giants privately finance a new $750 million stadium.
If the Jets cannot resurrect the Far West Side stadium, they might become a full partner with the Giants and split the construction costs.
The possible conversion of a new Mets ballpark to an Olympic stadium in 2012 is reminiscent of what occurred in Atlanta for 1996 Summer Games.
In 1990, Atlanta Olympic organizers presented their plan for an 85,000-seat stadium that would be converted into a baseball park for the Braves after the completion of the Olympics and Paralympics.
The stadium cost $209 million and was paid entirely from the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games's facilities budget, which it amassed from television rights paid by NBC and sponsorship fees paid by corporations.
After the Paralympics, the northern half of the stadium was cut away to make room for bleachers, a scoreboard and an entry plaza.
The Braves got it for a price that the Mets could only salivate over: $23 million for various improvements, $500,000 in annual rent and $1 million a year in capital costs. It was renamed Turner Field.
(The Mets will pay no rent in the proposed new stadium.)
David Murphy, who was a project designer for Ellerbe, Becket, the architectural firm that designed the Atlanta stadium, said by telephone, "With Turner Field, everything we did was with baseball in mind."
He said that "it's a good model for New York."
The only difference is that the Mets' ballpark would start life as a baseball stadium and temporarily stretch out to an Olympic configuration.
When Wilpon unveiled his vision for a Mets' ballpark in 1998, the Mets were not part of the Olympic vision first expressed by Doctoroff before he became the deputy mayor. Wilpon showed his model for a $500 million ballpark with a brick and limestone exterior and with exposed steel trusses, and with design touches reminiscent of the lamented Ebbets Field.
Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani twice suggested ways to finance new ballparks for the Mets and the Yankees, the first time with corporate rent taxes, the second with taxes derived from activities at the stadiums. That second plan, Giuliani said, would have let the city issue $1.6 billion in tax-exempt bonds, with the teams splitting about half the debt service costs. But weeks later, when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg took office, he said that stadiums were not a fiscal priority for his administration, which was facing looming budget deficits.