Shea Stadium rises, all steel and concrete, out of a mall-sized area of Queens known as Willets Point that is barely fit for human life. Shea, built in 1964, is a relic from another era. It is spectacularly nondescript, save for the 70s-era neon silhouetted baseball players on its edifice that light up at night. Inside, it’s completely symmetrical, 338 feet to each foul pole, 378 to left- and right-center, 410 straight away. Planes fly directly overhead, reminding you that you are not in a terribly important part of the city. About the only flair it has are is the color of the seats, which changes as you move up, from field-level orange, to blue, to green to top-level red.

The Mets’ new park jumps up just beyond Shea’s center field fence, all sharp edges and brick façade.It is modeled after the Brooklyn Dodgers’ bygone Ebbets Field, the Dodgers not, in any way, being the Mets. The Mets have their own memories, which are recorded by 25-foot tall banners that hang around Shea’s field level: Seaver. Orosco. Pratt. Piazza. These banners might move with the team, but it won’t change the fact that those things were special because they happened where they happened. Great things at Shea are special because of the incongruity between their greatness and their surroundings.

Shea Stadium will not be imploded, and that’s a good thing. All of Mets fans’ memories are inextricably intertwined with Shea. Blowing it up would be unnecessary and cruel. To some, it’s an eyesore, but that’s no reason to make the others cry. Shea may be an ugly duckling, but that’s not its fault, is it?

**

There is, I am told, a joke of a city law buried in some book somewhere that says we cannot blow up our sports stadiums when we have no use for them any more. I say: screw that. Come October, let’s throw some depth charges underneath the pitcher’s mound at Shea and blow that sucker to the ground. Let’s watch the sucker burn.

By now you must get the joke: concrete doesn’t burn. There wasn’t a building that was less of the Earth au naturale than Shea: steel, concrete, and whatever’s in those hot dogs are all creations of modern man. Okay, maybe the pyramids, but their builders were hardly “modern.” Ironically, visiting Shea, to some, is no different than trekking to Egypt: it appeals to their sense of adventure. Egypt’s got desert and snakes; Queens has Albanians, Guyanese, and crime. It all comes together at that giant shit sandwich just off the Grand Central Parkway called Shea Stadium, 45,000 people at a time, 81 times a year.

Until the Mets start winning the World Series — or, heck, their division — on a regular basis, there’s not much to get sentimental about here. The Mets are second-fiddle, Queens is second-fiddle. Shea is down to fourth fiddle by simple math.

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You feel like some baseball stadiums are supposed to exist, like they’re a part of the landscape — Fenway Park, AT&T Park in San Francisco — but Shea’s not like that at all. Shea is located right next to Flushing Meadows Park, a jewel of the New York City Parks Department that stretches for miles in two directions. It’s also located right next to the 7 train which, upon disembarking, points people more easily toward the United States Tennis Center, a lush, manicured expanse of tennis courts and gift shops that is professionally used for two weeks per year. The Mets have played at least 81 home games per year for most of the last 44 years, and only with the first signs of the new ballpark did they get more than two staircases leading directly to Shea, leastwise the USTC’s expansive, floating bridge. Now they have four.

All of this, and the strange, silly and playful neon-colored player silhouettes upon Shea’s Roman Coliseum-inspired façade, which you see while buzzing by on the Grand Central Parkway, is the doomed stadium’s external side. That’s the Shea of Out There. Inside Shea is a whole different story. It’s New York’s best and most bizarre baseball party in its final days. No really: it is. Yankee Stadium gets your adrenaline pumping; Shea’s a blank canvas. You never know what to expect. You might see a walk-off home run, a full-on family fracas in the upper deck, or a cat on the field. You can get in for the price of a Pepsi can on Wednesdays, as can everyone else. Shea may not look natural, but its doors are open, and always have been, for anyone hoping to catch a game, a brawl, or — if the cards are right — a little history.

**

It’s always 1986 in Shea Stadium. The year haunts the premises like 1985 at Soldier Field in Chicago or 1994 in Madison Square Garden, when the Rangers won the Stanley Cup for the first time in 54 years. The arena, and the year, are so intertwined that you could say it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins, except that one ended a long time ago.
After the 1986 season the Mets have appeared in only one World Series (in 2000) and were barely squeezed out of another one two years ago. Over the same period of time, the Yankees have re-established themselves as an obnoxious, aristocratic bludgeoning institution, buoyed by an absurd cable deal and $75 seats. ESPN contorts itself to cover the Yankees and Red Sox in as many ways as possible, whereas the Mets exist for the anchors to make off-color jokes about Queens. Mets fans are used to the relationship, used to losing and used to playing second fiddle, but the magic of 1986 was something so superlatively spectacular that it couldn’t have happened to the Yankees. Thanks to Bill Buckner, Shea Stadium was a major character in the 1986 miracle season: the shot of him losing the ball, and the fans (and Ray Knight) collectively blowing a gasket around him, is as vivid today as it was 22 years ago. Shea never rocked that way before, and has not since; you don’t need any special eyes to see the high water mark, where the wave broke and rolled back. It’s all there in Red, Blue, Green. Years from now, the luster of that single play — of the tens of thousands that occurred there — will be the primary measure of Shea, not its hulking façade or crappy hot dogs. One moment.

**

“Queens is not New York” — Martin Scorsese, Quiz Show

This is my high horse, painted Mets orange and blue.

Queens exists, in popular culture, to be ridiculed. Unless you’re a resident, food critic or sociologist, the space between the borough’s borders is one big joke. It’s an easy gag, empty calories best avoided if you’re going for belly laughs. Queens is always good for a chuckle, but it’s not funny in any real way, like the prolonged absurdity of Manhattan’s white ruling class, or Brooklyn’s hipster elite.

Queens just never fights back. Tease Manhattan, and it’ll turn its nose at you; poke Brooklyn, and get ready for an over-the-top tongue-lashing. Make fun of Queens, and you won’t get an argument. Of course, this is the way we were all taught to respond to bullies when we were kids, but the borough as a whole is considered fairly undignified by the world at large. Yankee Stadium is exalted ground, despite being not distinctly nicer than Shea, and I’m guessing that’s not merely partially because of its tony, largely white fanbase. Like Queens, Shea is just different, and for that it is mercilessly ridiculed. I don’t think it’s fair. Actually, I know it’s not fair, but it seems silly to argue in Shea’s dying days. The damage has been done. Keep up the Queens jokes if you want, but let’s let it go in peace.

**
Come November it will be all be done. The nation — though maybe not $2/ticket hoarding locals — is ready for a new, 21st century building to be put in its place; a ballpark with perfect sightlines, a choice of micro-brewed beers and bathrooms with working and accessible toilets. Shea Stadium is a New York City relic along the lines of hookers in Times Square and Coke Is It ballplayers, of things that have long passed by in other parts of New York. It just lasted longer. Chain-smoking, moustachioed Keith Hernandez is still a hero here, but as sports heroes began being shaped more by Madison Avenue than sportswriters, the heroes have shifted from the likes of Hernandez to the clean-shaven, statistically-reliable, relentlessly boring likes of Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez. As Leonardo DiCaprio’s character says in Catch Me If You Can, the Yankees win because everyone’s “looking at the pinstripes,” and that’s never been more true than now, in the ESPN era: Mets fans are still look at Shea, and it doesn’t cut the mustard. It’s not sparkly enough and it doesn’t smell like money. Some day this winter a worker will climb to the top of the 44-year-old building, strip a bolt and Shea will be disassembled, piece by piece. No Florida vacations for this New York retiree,; no sipping a red drink under a cloudless sky, with only the ocean before it and not another piece of concrete for miles. That’s too bad; Shea certainly would have earned it. Goodbye, old friend.

Copyright Last Exit 2008