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Sunday, September 28, 2008

Not with a bang, but with a whimper
Posted by Jill | 8:40 PM

You sort of knew it would turn out this way. It seemed inevitable that Shea Stadium, the dump in Queens with the worst bathrooms in Major League Baseball, no legroom whatsoever in the upper deck boxes, lousy food, and a history that contains more bad memories than good ones, wouldn't be able to go out in a blaze of glory. Not for Shea any late-inning theatrics, its 2008 denizens managing to live another day and send the aging Happy Warrior, Pedro Martinez, out tomorrow in a one-game, live-or-die playoff against Milwaukee, hoping against hope that Petey had just one more big game in his tired old arm. Because for every Bill Buckner in this stadium, there are a hundred Kirk Gibsons, and you just felt that it wasn't in the cards for Scott Schoenweis to somehow manage to redeem his season by getting guys out today.

Not even when Endy Chavez made that great catch in left field that reminded you of 2006, another game with Ollie Perez on the mound when Endy could make you believe that all wasn't lost, did you think the Mets would pull it out today, because that great catch meant that the Marlins were going deep, and that sooner or later, a ball off a Florida Marlins bat was going to go over that left-field fence.

Even the Monster Man himself, Carlos Delgado, who despite a miserable first half, managed to hit 38 home runs and 115 runs batted in, couldn't find the sweet spot that would allow him to hit the magic 40 home run total and carry this fragile team on his shoulders into the postseason.

It was an ugly loss, made uglier by the fact that it was a guy with a literally ugly name, Dan Uggla, who hammered the final nail into the Mets' coffin today.

And so Shea Stadium, a hideous orange-and-blue monster that has cradled luminaries from Casey Stengel to Willie Mays to the Pope to the Beatles to Ryan, Seaver and Koosman, to Doc, Darryl, Keith, and Ron, to the Subway Series of 2000 and Roger Clemens' 'roid rage at Mike Piezza in its ugly arms, goes to its eternal rest with its last memory being that of yet another Mets choke with seventeen games to go in the regular season.

In 1964, Shea rose next to the site of the 1964-65 World's Fair, an homage to American corporate know-how, in which companies like Ford and General Motors and General Electric and Travelers' Insurance showed us visions of a utopian future, made better by technologies developed by good old American know-how in good old American corporations.



Today little stands but the old New York State pavilion, a Jetsons-like relic fallen into disrepair like the Statue of Liberty at the end of Planet of the Apes, and the Unisphere. Shea Stadium was a relic of that kind of mid-20th century optimism; the kind of optimism embodied by the gonzo philosopher/manager, Casey Stengel, who never failed to talk up his team of misfits and has-beens.

And so, in a few weeks, Shea Stadium will be demolished, its seats and other souvenirs sold off to die-hard fans who will no doubt find that their seats just aren't the same without Jane Jarvis at the Hammond Organ. And next year, in the only piece of good news to come out of today, Jerry Manuel will be back, with the contract he's deserved throughout the second half, because no one would have been able to do anything with this bullpen. And he will manage his team in an ersatz hybrid of the Polo Grounds and Ebbets Field, a ballpark whose name is a South Park joke because the Wilpons would rather have the money from a teetering banking empire than the goodwill of calling the place "Jackie Robinson Field." And the Mets will play 162 games in this showplace where only the wealthy can go.

The rest of us will watch at home...where we can change the channel to spare ourselves the heartbreak of being a Mets fan.

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3 Comments:
Blogger D. said...
Sigh.

It is a mark of fading Mets fanaticism that I just kind of shrugged instead of screaming "Milwaukee?" in incredulous rage. That they blew the NL East champeenship was one thing. But to blow the Wild Card?

That took dedication.

I take it that the new park is not city-owned. Back in '64, the ballpark got named after the guy who was instrumental in bringing an NL team back to New York after the perfidy of Stoneham and He Who Shall Not Be Named, Even Later. It should be named after something or someone with baseball history, but every year, baseball has less and less soul. Maybe it should, as a sport, be allowed to fade away. Pardon the blasphemy.

Sigh.

(Was it too narcissistic of me to admit I was looking for my younger self in that video?)

(And I guess I can get back to reading Metsgrrl now.)
9/28/08, 11:58 PM  
Blogger Bob said...
Then I switch to the Yanks radio broadcast & they're loading the bases & scoring two in the 9th to tie at Fenway. With no motivation other than to piss on Boston at Fenway. I thought Mets management would've done fans a favor by trotting out Joe Willie Namath along with Seaver & Mays.
9/29/08, 12:47 AM  
Blogger D. said...
bob: Perhaps if Joe Willie had played for the Mets, they might have, but he played for the Jets, and they left the building long ago.
9/29/08, 4:05 PM  
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