Baseball

Shea easily forgotten despite Mets' moments

Memories of '69 and '86 are wonderful, but where they happened is not

Stan Grossfeld / ASSOCIATED PRESS

Red Sox first baseman Bill Buckner will go down in Shea Stadium history for his error at first base during the 1986 World Series against the New York Mets.

That cuts into the memory banks. So do years and years of losing, and all memories of the Mets begin with games lost rather than championships won. They were born in 1962 as a replacement for the Dodgers and Giants, who had fled town four years before, and set a record of 120 losses that stands to this day. They did no better in their new home, inaugurated in 1964, losing 417 games in their first four seasons there. In 45 years at Shea, they finished below .500 24 times.

But when they won, it was unforgettable. No one can forget their 1969 season, when they caught lightning in a bottle and went from ninth place the year before in a 10-team league to champions of the world. That remains the greatest year in Shea history. The year before, their co-tenants, the New York Jets, had won the AFL title and had gone on behind Joe Namath to win Super Bowl III. It remains the Jets’ only NFL title.

The Jets left after the 1983 season, their fans commemorating the occasion by tearing up seats and starting fires with them in the stands. The Jets, like the Mets, weren’t very good in those days, and anyone watching the chaos had to admit it was hard to blame the fans.
The stadium was just 20 years old then, but I remember watching the fires and half hoping they’d burn the whole place down. That’s how lacking it was in character, how surpassingly dull a stadium it was.

The Mets tried to dress it up over the years with neon ballplayers and bright blue and orange paint. But other than the big apple that came out of the top hat when a Met hit a home run, there was never anything special about the place. It was built to be efficient, not pretty, and it lived up to that architect’s vision.

Still, there was 1986 and Mookie’s grounder and the fans tearing up the field and an insane group of players celebrating like there was no tomorrow. And for some of them, there wasn’t.

But that has always been the Mets, a team not of sustained brilliance, but of magic moments.
When I replay those moments, the stadium is hardly there. It wasn’t built to be noticed, and that’s how it will die: unnoticed and all but unmourned.

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