I FIRST saw Shea Stadium the summer it opened, 1964, when the world was still young. My parents were taking me to the World's Fair, which was just across the elevated line in Flushing Meadows, Queens. This was appropriate because Shea, like the fair, was supposed to be a showcase for the world of tomorrow. You could tell this because it looked breezy, and fun, and half-finished - all bright, garish colors, flimsy new materials and unadorned concrete and pipes and steel cables laid out in that functional, neglected-housing-development style that modern architects used to assure us was the best future we could hope for.
I remember that the fair proved disappointing once we got inside, with endless lines and nothing that seemed all that amazing. Perhaps the trouble was that even in 1964, the future was no longer what it once had been.
The same would prove true of Shea. In fairness, no stadium ever started life with more strikes against it: a baseball park without any real bleachers, built in the flight path of an international airport, on the site of a gigantic ash heap. The bad symbolism abounded. Shea sits amid a sea of junkyards and chop shops. Subway riders from the No. 7 train approach it along the curious "Ramp to Nowhere," a concrete walkway that appears to lead directly from the elevated station into Shea's green, beckoning right field - only to stop some 20 yards short, dribbling fans out onto a cracked asphalt sidewalk.
There has always been something tawdry and second-rate about the place, right down to the battered plaster-and-lath apple that rises grudgingly out of a gigantic top hat whenever a Met hits a home run. Since the eradication of all those football-friendly, synthetic-grass excrescences of the 60's, some would argue that Shea is the worst ballpark in the world.
But now, with the planned construction of a new Mets ballpark next door that may also be used for the Olympics, Shea's days are numbered. And so, despite the stadium's flaws, it needs to be said: Right from the beginning, even the worst ballpark in the world was a great place to be. I went to my first game there with my Uncle Bruce, in 1967, to see the Mets play the San Francisco Giants, and it felt like a carnival as much as a ballgame.
The Mets were in last place, but there was a full house, with many of the fans cavorting merrily in the aisles. A poker-faced individual named Karl Ehrhardt but known as Sign Man held up exclamations ("Yikes") after every key play, and for years on Banner Day, the fans were invited to march onto the field and show off their homemade signs. (My favorite: "I'd Bet My Testes On the Metsies.")
This was something altogether new in New York sports, fans defiantly embracing a team of scrappy, lovable losers. The attitude almost seemed designed to send up the lordly crosstown Yankees, with all their ponderous tradition.
Many in the crowd, including my uncle, were rooting for the visitors. In those days, thousands of fans still turned out in droves whenever their beloved West Coast transplants, the Giants and the Dodgers, stopped back in town. But most New Yorkers had moved on.
Bad as the Mets were, they had established an identity that jibed perfectly with the city's as the 60's wore on: embattled, ragged, but facing the long odds against them with brave wit and style. When the team miraculously won the World Series in 1969, behind a fine young pitching staff led by Tom Seaver, all New York reveled in vindication. Fun City, indeed.
BY the time I got back to Shea, in the late 70's, the first bloom was clearly off the rose, for both the team and the city, with their seemingly perpetual crises. New Yorkers enjoy being underdogs for only so long. The Mets had sunk to the bottom again, and even Tom Terrific had been banished for insubordination by the decidedly unlovable and un-scrappy club president, M. Donald Grant. In those years, you could buy a ticket to the cheapest seats in the upper deck, and for an extra dollar an usher would take you all the way down to a lower section. At night, Shea had begun to take on a decidedly spectral mood, cavernous and empty, one more patch of blight and squandered chances.
In truth, the best was yet to come: the Mets of Doc Gooden and Darryl Strawberry, Gary Carter and Keith Hernandez, and Mookie Wilson, et al., a wonderfully cocksure squad that would set team records for wins and brawls, on and off the field, and would capture the 1986 World Series after playing some of the most astonishing games in postseason history. The fans flocked back, screaming and dancing between innings along with a scoreboard video tribute to the Three Stooges called "The Curly Shuffle."
That year, I watched from the upper deck as the Dodger pitcher Tom Niedenfuer surrendered a decisive grand slam to George Foster. Niedenfuer proceeded to hit the next batter, Ray Knight, with a pitch - whereupon the pugnacious Knight jumped up and raced for the mound. Within seconds, both teams had poured onto the field, embroiled in a melee very much akin to the Curly Shuffle.
Soon after, the great Mets teams of the 80's, and their flawed stars, went into an untimely decline. But another pattern had arisen, one of bust and boom, despair and irrational exuberance, that also reflected the New York of the 80's and 90's. And always, one could expect the amazing, the unlikely, the goofy.
During the remarkable 1999 National League Championship Series against Atlanta, I had the privilege to witness what was then the longest postseason game, a 15-inning affair that started in the afternoon and went far into the drizzling October night. The Mets trailed in the series by three games to one, and a loss would end their season.
But a sense of sheer euphoria grew steadily around the park as the game went on, even with Atlanta threatening almost every inning, and two Braves runners being thrown out at the plate. The organist led the crowd in a second "seventh-inning stretch" in the middle of the 14th, and everywhere you could see the grins of fans who were happy just to extend the season by another inning.
The feeling was wholly different from the one I have experienced during big, close games in Yankee Stadium, where everything is magnified by the burden of history. That sensation is more raw and visceral, and one that I cherish as well, but at Shea people seemed as if they were actually having fun, as if it really were a game.
AS the game and the rain continued, and the weak of heart departed, my friends and I kept improving our seats, until we actually ended up sitting next to Bud Harrelson, the excellent former Mets shortstop, coach and manager. Here was a living link to the legacy of 1969, and 1986, as it might appear only at Shea. We sat next to Bud as if clinging to a lucky icon, and watched the Mets rally to win in the bottom of the 15th, on Robin Ventura's grand slam.
Even here, the quirky interceded. Ventura's hit was reduced to a "grand-slam single" when Todd Pratt, the runner just ahead of him, stopped and embraced him on the base paths. One could hardly picture Derek Jeter behaving in such a manner.
The Mets would go down to another, plucky defeat in that series anyway, and again the next year, in their one and only Subway Series against the Yankees. Shea has continued its slow rot, and my friends and I joke about the hokey promotions (Greek Night!), and the once infamously small, foul bathrooms that drove the Jets to New Jersey (good riddance), and the themed concession stands such as "Beers of the World," which might be more aptly titled, "Beers of Your Local Bodega." Last year, we were unable even to sit in the seats we had purchased because of a steady rain of roof water on a perfectly cloudless night, bilge that seemed to be pouring right down through a hole in a steel supporting beam above us.
Mets officials were unruffled by the deluge, but who can blame them? They will have their new stadium by 2009, and if the recent stadium-building craze around America is any indication, it will be a much better (if more expensive) place to watch a game, combining modern comfort with all the trappings of official baseball nostalgia.
Until then, I will be happy to indulge my own nostalgia, sipping a Beer of the World, and gazing from the airy, open exit ramps of Shea toward the Manhattan skyline.