Shea Stadium leaves mark as a 'ballpark for the rest of us'

“The Mets and Shea are the second-class citizens of New York, where the Yankees are royalty,” says Bill Pavlou, a New Jersey native who works in Pennsylvania. “I am a Mets fan because of my father and grandfather, and they are two of the hardest working, down-to-earth people in the world. Shea reminds me of the two-bedroom apartment we used to live in growing up – my dad worked hard and regardless of the fact that it was an apartment, it was our home.”

Forgive us our hyperbole, for there are white-collar Mets fans and blue-collar Yankees fans, certainly. But there’s something to our grasping for gutter pride, for always striving from below, for never wanting a ready-made silver spoonful of championships just given to us.

“Growing up in New Jersey, my best friend was a Yankees fan,” says Andrew Simonelli, who now works in Washington, D.C. “He was a year older, a lot taller, and a better baseball player. Every day each summer we played baseball with a tennis ball and wiffle-ball bat in the backyard – I was the Met; he was the Yankee. I never won. I lost every day. Sometimes the games were close – even extra innings. But I lost every day until one day in September. After years of losing, I somehow managed to pull off a one-run win.”

• • •

For a team that has set the standard for losing – the ’62 Mets still own the worst record for any team in the modern era, and last year’s epic late-season collapse may never be surpassed – hordes of us Mets fans resist the temptation to make the effortless switch and join the popular kids.

“I grew up, ironically, in the Bronx, but the Yankees were never for me,” says Mr. Podair, the history professor. “How could a 10-year-old coming of age in the 1960s root for them? It would be like rooting for an investment bank. The Mets were the new team, the team for the kids, the team with the neat Mr. Met mascot, the team that hired Casey Stengel when the heartless Yankees fired him, the team that brought in Yogi Berra when the Yanks axed him, and the team with the state-of-the-art stadium in Queens across the street from the World’s Fair. How couldn’t you love them?”

A fair question, but Shea Stadium was built on an old ash dump in the early 1960s during the era of multi-purpose concrete donuts. The New York Jets football team called Shea home from 1964 to 1983, before they moved in with the Giants in New Jersey, and even the Yankees had to call it home for the ’74 and ’75 seasons, during the renovation of their historic stadium. Indeed, in 1975, while Giants Stadium was under construction, all four New York teams shared Shea.

But Shea’s charm was and is found in its eccentric, defiant fans. Like all the other concrete donuts – Three Rivers in Pittsburg, Veterans in Philly, and Busch Memorial in St. Louis, among others – Shea will be demolished and the Mets will move across the street to Citi Field, another retro ballpark reminiscent of Ebbets Field, where the Brooklyn Dodgers also toiled for decades in the shadow of Yankee success.

The Yankees are moving into a virtual replica of the old Yankee Stadium, with a new and improved white frieze. Our new digs, with its grasping for nostalgia and comfort and intimacy, may actually disorient us for a while. But don’t expect us to change our fundamental natures.

“We root for the underdog, we care about injustice, we suffer year after year after year with humiliating defeat after humiliating defeat,” says Brooklyn-born and New Jersey native Jon Pushkin. “We appreciate miracles, like 1969 and 1986 – we don’t take winning for granted.”

Previous

1 | 2