Yesterday, I stood on the warning track and looked it in the face.
I was with hundreds of people in our Gary, Keith, and Ron t-shirts attending Lynn Cohen’s end-of-the-year Main Event. A year ago, we, the same people, stood on a different warning track at the end of a different season and looked into the face of a different stadium.
I was happy to be in this crowd once again. I was interested to be standing on the ground in a major league baseball stadium. So this is how far it is from deep center to home plate! If the seats were occupied, this is what a crowd would look like from down on the field! This was instructive. But the string was not vibrating. There was no sound. And I was looking into the face of a stranger.
Last year, I was looking at something that had so much dimension, that was so big and colorful and open out to the green tower of Flushing. And it was as big in time as it was in space. I was where so much had happened, to me, and to millions. I was right next to Cleon Jones and Mookie Wilson. I was beside my sisters, between my father and my daughter, wheeling my mother onto the packed dirt track. I was ten and I was fifty. I was there. In my $1.35 green General Admission seat, or my General Admission seat that would turn into a bright orange Loge seat after the second inning, or my $27 Loge seat right behind homeplate, cramped but close to the field, with the most glorious possible sightlines. I was there, all of me was there, with a thousand people in shirts commemorating the greatest TV broadcasting team in history. At the third consecutive miraculous second-to-last game of a Mets season. As time passes, my memory of that game does not dim. I will remember forever Johan Santana’s change-up and what it was like to stand on that field, to be overwhelmed by my own past, by the past I shared with all of these people, standing as if in the center of a beloved building shaped like an embrace.
I am sorry. It was not possible for me not to remember this, as I stood with the same people up against forbidding black walls that were far too high. As I stood out under the darkest possible daytime sky, under a scoreboard buried under vast ads for Arpielle rental equipment, gold merchants, and Fox News. I looked across at the blanket of inaccessible yet empty seats on the field level. I looked at the rows of inaccessible yet empty boxes and lounges behind durable plastic. I looked at where I watched a game last week, at Citifield’s mezzanine, where you could sit in an expensive and undistinguished Excelsior-level seat whose main advantage is that you had the right to visit Caesar’s Club, a lounge that would not have been out of place in Akron, but would have been very much out of place on the Palatine Hill. Yes, along the top of Romanland was my now-familiar Promenade. Yes those seats were fine and reasonably priced. But if you stand on the warning track or sit, as I sat out by the new Home Run Apple on steroids that is getting rusty from lack of use, you looked into the face of what?
You look at what replaced Shea. You looked at a poorly planned party after it ended in disaster. You looked at the seats you wouldn’t have been able to afford to go to very often, that you expected to pay around $100 for every once in a while, that you were able to buy this year for $9.99 to see baseball that wasn’t even worth the price of admission. Next year, I hope that the baseball will be worth what I pay for it. I am hopeful. I am bored and haven’t really cared about the outcome of a Met’s game for a couple of months. But I have had enough time to forgive this season. I forgive. I have forgiven the Mets for half my life. And they have rewarded me in the other half. That is enough.
But how sad I was to stand there and to feel so little love for the home of my Mets.
As I’ve said before, they’re not going to tear Citi Field down and build something new. A big enough new stadium affordable for all, welcoming to all, with reasonable field dimensions, proudly proclaiming itself the home of The New York Mets is not going to rise up out of the vast parking lot on the shore of Flushing Bay. I am going to have to learn to love this small, strange, and still, to me, obnoxious place. I ask for help from the Mets and their owners. Maybe I will get it and maybe I won’t. I have a gut feeling that if I am ever to love this place, it won’t be in spite of or because of its physical being. It may not even be because of the beautiful games that may someday be played here. It will be because of this stream of humanity strung along the high dark walls, the stream of humanity on the line for hot dogs and pretzels and diet Pepsi and autographs from Gary, Ron, and Kevin. It will be because of Lynn and her elves and all of the colorful, happy if grindy New Yorkers in the shirts picknicking down by the real Home Run Apple. It will be because of the bloggers who write their stuff for nothing on the electronic wind that blows out of this strange noisy corner of Flushing by the chop shops and the elevated subway tracks and the airports. It will be because there is something about baseball that has become indispensable to me, that makes me feel part of my family, the human community, and the stream of sights and sounds I am privileged to have for the time I will have it.
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If you care about the Mets and cared about Shea, you’ll love my just-released book, The Last Days of Shea: Delight and Despair in the Life of a Mets Fan
