THE HOME RUN APPLE

      At Shea, every time a Met hits a home run, a big wooden apple, with a lit-
up Mets logo on its breast, rises slowly out of a great big black hat in center
field.  When the logo has flashed a few times, the apple descends back into
the hat.  Mets fans love this.  It’s wonderful.

      Why an apple?  Why a hat?  Well, at some point in the late sixties, for
some reason that isn’t entirely clear to me, the Mayor’s Office or somebody
decided that it was time to start calling New York City the Big Apple.  To the
best of my knowledge no one had ever called it this before.  It was unclear
to me and presumably to many others why New York suddenly needed a
cute nickname, but perhaps they thought it would be helpful to have one,
and a ready-made logo, for a publicity campaign to boost tourism.  I think we
were told at some point that this was actually old jazz musician’s slang for
the city.  Usually, I think, jazz musician’s slang is pretty cool.  In this case,
perhaps, it isn’t.  Calling something an apple conjures images of classrooms
with inkwells and appreciated teachers.  Apples are cute and corny.  They
don’t really work as a symbol of New York City.  And it is too easy to make a
joke about rottenness.  

      But all of these considerations didn’t, in the end, make any difference.  
The apple became a symbol of New York.  And shortly after this happened, I
think it was in the seventies, as baseball teams were inventing all kinds of
mascots and home run celebration ceremonies to try to attract people to the
ballpark, the Mets built a big hat, a big apple, and some sort of primitive
elevation apparatus, and put it out in centerfield to entertain us.

      It was pretty lame.  But as the history of Mets public relations illustrates,
what seems lame when it happens soon becomes fun, and then beloved,
and then indispensable, and finally iconic.  We love the apple.  We love to
see it come out of the hat.  It is so strange and beautiful.  It is better than
fireworks, which are too obvious.  It’s almost as if the apple, with the
glowing logo, is some kind of Cyclops, or Loch Ness monster, that is
awakened when the ball clears the fences and we cheer.  Its silence is so
much of its charm.  It is also big.  And there is nothing like it anywhere else.  
Where else does an apple come out of a hat?  We’ve got the only one.

      We’ve been promised that the apple will cross the parking lot and
assume its place of honor in the new stadium.  It’d better be the old one.  It
better not be updated.  Nobody wants an animatronic computerized new
kind of apple.  We want the old thing the way a kid wants his old Teddy Bear
and not some unsmelly new one.  We will need the old apple to remind us of
old Shea, a place that was happy to be tacky, because baseball games were
once carnivals.  They weren’t media events.  They weren’t slick.  The apple
will be the embarrassing relative who is always threatening to fart in the
living room.  The apple will stand for the last century.  Even the people in
the luxury boxes will want this.  

©Dana Brand 2006


This is a chapter in the recently published book Mets Fan, by Dana Brand.

You can read about the book and read samples from it and even find ordering
information at this site (click on the image):