Mike Celizic

When I think of Shea Stadium, I think of 1986. There’s Bill Buckner bending down not quite far enough for Mookie Wilson’s ground ball, of course, but that’s just part of it. For one boisterous, rollicking, stark-raving-bonkers season, Shea Stadium was the throbbing heart of New York and the center of the baseball universe.

It was Keith "Mex" Hernandez and Dwight "Doc" Gooden and Gary "Kid" Carter and Darryl Strawberry and "El Sid" Fernandez and Lenny "Nails" Dykstra and the aforementioned William Hayward "Mookie" Wilson. They were crazy mad, and it seemed that half of them would end up in rehab over the next few years. But they were also a great baseball team, a team that put on a show that even Yankees fans had to tip their caps to.

Whitey Herzog, manager of the defending National League champion St. Louis Cardinals, conceded the race to the Mets in July of that year. That’s how great that team was. The Mets clinched in early September and finished the season 21.5 games ahead of second-place Philadelphia.

I remember the last play of that clinching game, a ground ball to Wally Backman at second. As Backman fielded the ball, fans, who had been pouring into the lower deck for two innings, poured over the undefended railings and onto the field like pirates boarding a treasure ship. The vanguard of the charge was crossing the foul line in short right field before the ball even settled in first baseman Hernandez's glove.

And then it was chaos. Fans and players and umpires and photographers in one great mosh pit in the infield. And small wonder, the Mets had not been to the playoffs since 1973, and not a lot of good things had happened in the intervening 13 years. Their fans were hungry.

And so they poured onto the field and proceeded to tear it up, hauling off hunks of sod that are growing to this day in lawns from Connecticut to New Jersey.

For fans of the original Mets, that day has to rank in the top three all-time, right after the Miracle Mets winning the 1969 pennant and World Series and that 1986 crew forging the impossible Game 6 comeback against Boston that began with two outs, nobody on and a two-run deficit in the 10th inning and ended with Mookie’s grounder scooting between Buckner’s legs.

But to tell you the truth, there’s not a lot more to remember about the stadium.

I’m sure that somewhere someone is shedding a tear over the last days of Shea Stadium. But let’s be honest about this. Shea, like the other cookie-cutter, multi-purpose stadiums that sprouted up like concrete pustules in cities across America during the 1960s, was the baseball equivalent of a house trailer. If you grew up in one, you may view it with fond nostalgia, but if somebody offers you a new McMansion home — or even a slab ranch in Levittown — you’re out of there in a heartbeat.

So let it be with venerable Shea. It has seen a lot, including one of the most memorable moments in baseball history and the first concert on U.S. soil by the Beatles, but the day of the sterile ballpark-in-the-round is long since over. Even the most ardent of Mets fans are ready to admit, it’s time to move on.

Just the same, fans making their final pilgrimage to Shea before it closes for good on Sept. 28 have their moments to remember, all of them headed by either 1969 or 1986.

They aren’t tsunamis of memories, not like in Yankee Stadium, where Monument Park grows behind the left-field wall and the field swarms with the ghosts of 37 trips to the World Series and 26 championships. At Shea, the memories are more modest.

There were shots by Strawberry off the scoreboard, and there was the World Series team of 2000 that lost to the Yankees and the playoff team of 2006 that gagged in the NLCS against St. Louis.

And there were great players, most of them operating from the stadium mound. Tom Seaver began his career there before management traded him away in a fit of pique. Nolan Ryan began his career there, but he was shipped out of town before he learned where the plate was. Gooden was brilliant on that mound in 1984 when he was Rookie of the Year and 1985, when he won the Cy Young and led the league in victories, strikeouts and earned-run average. Tug McGraw and Jerry Koosman joined Seaver on the '73 team that won the NL but lost the World Series. Al Leiter anchored the 2000 rotation that threw to Mike Piazza.

But I try to think of one great home-grown Met, a player who began and ended his career in Shea and went on to the Hall of Fame. There are none. They all either came from somewhere else or went to another team before they retired. There are no Mickey Mantles, no Lou Gehrigs, not even a Don Mattingly who ever wore a Mets jersey.

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