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The Daily News has come out with a series of articles about Shea Stadium which are very well done. I've copied and pasted the first article here, but I invite everybody to go [url=http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/baseball/mets/2008/09/20/2008-09-20_shea_stadium_mets_first_miracle.html]here[/url] and browse the whole series of articles.
]Shea Stadium: Mets' first miracle
BY ERIC BARROW
DAILY NEWS SPORTS WRITER
Saturday, September 20th 2008, 4:48 PM
Bill Shea was on the phone in his midtown Manhattan law office and didn't like what he was hearing.
"You can't do that," he was saying to the mayor on the other end of the line. "Come up with something else." He was becoming increasingly uncomfortable; it was all too embarrassing.
"We're going to do it," the mayor told him.
What was about to happen was not what Shea had planned. It was not what he'd wanted.
"Wait there," he told Mayor John Wagner, a close friend and a regular on his phone. "I'm coming down there."
Shea left his office on 42nd and Madison Ave. and headed straight for City Hall to try to stop the inevitable. He was too late. Wagner had made his announcement and already fled. He was nowhere to be found. The news hacks on the scene had their story. Flushing Meadows Municipal Stadium, the new ballpark being built in Queens, the future home of the expansion Mets, would be named after him.
It would be called Shea Stadium, a tribute to the man who had returned National League baseball to New York after the departures of the Dodgers and Giants after the 1957 season.
It was a tribute he would soon relish. He would joke that if the stadium's name was ever changed, he knew just which brick to pull that would bring the building down to its foundation. Shea loved telling the story of the two Mets fans making their way to Flushing and sitting beside him on the 7 train who figured Shea Stadium was named after some hero of World War I. He would have been more comfortable with World War II.
And Shea was never shy about dropping one of his favorite one-liners, the one that went, "they'll probably change the name 15 minutes after I'm dead."
Bill Shea died in 1991 but his name remains - at least until Shea is replaced next year by Citi Field.
Shea Stadium is the house the fans built. It was the home of the Miracle, and Ya Gotta Believe and the Year To Remember.
It was where you went to see the Ol Perfessor and Gil, Tom Terrific and Kooz, The Fab Four and Broadway Joe. It's where Doc and Darryl came of age, and where Kid and Mex became ageless.
It's where the K Korner took root and the Curtain Call took off.
It's where the term "Grand Slam Single" makes sense, and where the name Jimmy Qualls makes grown men cringe. It's a place where fans like "Sign Man" Karl Ehrhardt could speak his mind, succinctly and perfectly. It's where a black cat could mean good luck. And where the mere mention of shoe polish brings out a smirk. It's the birthplace of Banner Day and the home of Kiner's Korner.
It's the Happy Recap.
And it's where a groundball trickling could spark bedlam and where a city in mourning could find reason to rejoice.
But now, nearly a half century since its opening, the city-owned Stadium regularly swarmed by La Guardia Airport jets and routinely derided as antiquated and not far removed from the garbage dumps on which it stands, is in its final week of existence. Not long after the Mets play their final game, Shea will be razed and the Mets will move into the new stadium next door.
"My line about Shea is: I know it's a dump," says WFAN's Joe Benigno a lifelong Mets fan. "But it's our dump."
Ready Or Not
On the day of its grand opening, Shea Stadium, Flushing's glistening new state-of-the-art ballpark, was awash in human waste.
Under the stands, raw sewage floated through its tunnels, drifting into the clubhouses, seeping into the carpets. From Day 1, Shea Stadium was built like a brick outhouse.
"We were pushing it off, trying to keep it off the field," says head groundskeeper Pete Flynn, who was an assistant then. "It was a nightmare."
The pumps in the boiler room had failed and the foul-smelling filth of 50,312 fans flooded the building.
"It was not a good way to start off Opening Day," remembers Flynn.
Shea opened on April 17, 1964, and much like its primary tenant, it wasn't quite ready. Flynn and a host of others worked right up until game time getting the field ready and painting the outfield fence.
"The field was like a sponge," says Flynn. "The night before the opener, we were digging holes in right field four feet deep and taking out mud and filling it in with dry stuff. It was a marsh.
"It was unbelievable."
The grounds crew worked past midnight that night, as they had the night before, only to be back at it by 6 the next morning. Shea was under a layer of water from the rain showers that had blown through the day before, its outfield a muddy bog that would become synonymous with the ballpark, a calamity forged the day team president George Weiss had noticed in the structure's plans that the stadium's power alleys were too deep and ordered the fences be brought in. The decision apparently never reached the building's architects, says then-ticket manager Bob Mandt, and some of the field's drains ended up on the wrong side of the outfield wall. The mishap would plague Shea for a decade, rainwater sitting for days, pooling throughout the outfield, creating the world's largest slip-and-slide.
"There were spots in the outfield where when it rained it stayed wet for weeks." says Miracle Met right fielder Ron Swoboda. "The water would bubble up from underneath.
"You ruined a lot of shoes playing out there."
Chasing a Ron Hunt flyall into right-center in the fourth inning, Pirates Hall of Famer Roberto Clemente watched as the ball glanced off the top of his glove, falling onto the field for a double. Clemente came up short as his foot had vanished into the turf. "My foot sank just as I reached for the ball," said Clemente after the opener. "I lost my balance."
The sloppy foundation would sink so much that every few years, Shea's eight-foot walls would become nine-foot walls.
The paint on the wooden seats was still wet. The telephones and telegraphs were not installed due to a strike by the Telephone Co. and Electrical Worker's Union against the World's Fair across the way. Only two phones worked in the building, one of the 59 proposed payphones and a private line leading out of Mandt's office (something the Daily News' Dick Young caught wind of, becoming the only newspaperman to report a story from Shea). The parking lot was unfinished with 1,500 of the planned 5,500 spots unavailable. And traffic around Flushing got so bad fed up drivers abandoned their cars where they were to make the 2:12 p.m. first pitch.
Perhaps the only thing that went off as expected was the outcome. The lovable loser Mets, bettered in 231 games over their first two seasons, lost again, 4-3, to the Pittsburgh Pirates.
New park, same team, fans muttered.
On the eve of that first opener, 1,000 people gathered at the newest $25.5 million building in Flushing for a dedication. Bill Shea, joined by Mets manager Casey Stengel, the Malaprop Maestro of those early Mets, Mayor Wagner, uber-urban planner Robert Moses and host of other politicos, revealed two small champagne bottles. One bottle contained water he'd dredged up from the Harlem River as it ran by the Polo Grounds, signifying the lost Giants; the other contained water from the Gowanus Canal, which lines Brooklyn.
"You couldn't see the Gowanus from Ebbets Field but you could always smell it," Shea joked that afternoon. He then poured out each bottle onto the infield, the Gowanus in his right hand, the Harlem River in his left, the two bodies of water puddling on Shea's surface. The christening was symbolic in more ways than one.
Despite the mess and the mire, Shea Stadium ushered in a new era of dual-use modern facilities that would soon pock the sports landscape for the next 20 years, from Philadelphia to St. Louis.
Jewel Of Flushing
Tucked between three major roadways and shouldering the 7 subway and the Long Island Railroad, Shea was the final jewel in Moses' vision of Flushing Meadows, the site he'd earmarked for the Brooklyn Dodgers years earlier, the site he'd carved out for the city's World's Fair of 1964-65. Moses had been opening Long Island to the masses, and Flushing Meadows, a one-time ash wasteland turned garbage dump with its own subway stop, would be the ideal focal point.
Shea, a four-layer cake of a stadium, each layer decked out in a different color, the top three hanging off the main structure like ledges and an exterior sprinkled with orange and blue steel plates, was accessible, economical and adaptable, seamlessly rising off the edge of the World's Fair grounds as though the two sites were one. It was modern, with 21 escalators, 54 restrooms, a lavish Diamond Club restaurant, intertwining ramps and a giant 60-ton scoreboard rising 86 feet just beyond the right-center field wall. At the scoreboard's apex was a rearview projector that would show a player's headshot. At one time, the open end of Shea was to be filled in with seats to take the capacity from 55,000 to over 80,000. A dome was even discussed. Both plans were later scrapped for financial and structural reasons. It was believed it would sink.
Shea's 5,000 then yellow field-level seats on the first and third-base sides rode on rails its first 20 years, swiveling out toward right and left field, respectively, each side running parallel to the sidelines of a football field for ideal sight lines for Jets games. For football season, the plumbing would have to be taken apart, as would the wiring, and the dugouts would be covered with platforms and top soil.
The first time it rolled - it took 12 minutes to make the trip - everyone from Mayor Wagner to Bill Shea to members of the parks department was on hand. It may be hard to believe today, but Shea Stadium was a spectacle in '64, state-of-the-art meets functionality in Flushing.
It would be the site of four World Series, one AFL Championship, one All-Star Game, one perfect game - thrown by Jim Bunning on Father's Day in '64 - and one "Imperfect Game," Tom Seaver's 1-hit brush with immortality. It would house not only the Mets and Jets but make rock history when the Beatles played there in '65, the first-ever stadium rock concert and the first of many at Shea, including a Fab Four encore in 1966. Notre Dame played Army there, and Pele led his Cosmos out onto the field for a playoff game in 1976. In 1967 an ice rink was set up between second and third base for the Ice Capades. And in October of 1979, Pope John Paul II celebrated Mass in the infield.
"It poured all morning, but the minute his motorcade came into centerfield the clouds disappeared, the sun came out," says Flynn. "It was the most incredible thing I've ever seen."
Shea was home to more than one otherwordly moment. Just ask Bob Mandt.
Mandt's phone would often ring from fans with various requests. Most times it was for tickets, but sometimes, it was to leave the ashes of loved one at Shea. Mandt would usually tell the bereaved to take the ashes to the back of the ballpark, outside the players' parking lot, and pour them over the fence.
He would try to accommodate as many fans as he could, but there were limits.
"I don't want the ballplayers to say the outfield is haunted," says Mandt with a smirk.
But when Steve Gera called hoping to spread some of his wife's ashes, Mandt knew he had to do more. Bernice Gera was a special case.
Bernice Gera died of kidney cancer in September of 1992. She didn't just work in the PR department for the Mets, and she wasn't just a friend, she was also the first woman to umpire a professional baseball game.
Blocked from living her dream, she took her case to court and won after five long years, umpiring a New York-Penn League game in 1972. It would be the only game she would work, walking away from the game, saying the other umpires wouldn't cooperate with her.
Bernice Gera wanted her ashes spread in ballparks that mattered to her, and Shea was one. Bob Mandt couldn't refuse, so one afternoon when the stadium was dripping from a light sun shower, Mandt brought Steve Gera into the Mets' bullpen.
With Mandt holding a disheveled umbrella over their heads, Steve Gera got on his knees and spread a handful of Bernice's ashes on the ground, and the two men said a prayer for the First Lady Umpire.
But no year illustrated Shea's versatility better than 1975 when the Mets, Yankees, Giants and Jets all called Flushing home. Yankee Stadium was in its second year of renovations and Giants Stadium was under construction. Even Grambling played there that year.
"I didn't have a day off for like seven or eight months," says Flynn. Fourteen-hour days became the norm.
And beer sales were never higher than when the Yankees played there.
Fisher Firsts
Bill Shea was given the honor of throwing out the first ball, but the Mets' Jack Fisher threw the first pitch, a strike. "Fat Jack" wanted the ball for himself, but the Hall of Fame snatched it up. An inning later Fisher would go in the books for two more firsts, giving up Shea's first hit and first home run, both on one swing by Willie Stargell. Stargell's blast was the first of 26 at Shea, tying him with Mike Schmidt for most by an opponent.
But Fisher would reserve a few more nooks in Shea history. Before the game, Fisher asked Stengel if he could warm up in the bullpen instead of in front of the dugout - as was the norm throughout baseball - to escape the chaotic scene on the field and so he could get warm off a mound instead of flat ground. Teammates soon followed, and in time, so did the rest of the league.
Says Fisher, "In that respect, I had a lasting impact on baseball."
Fisher can also be credited for having the players' open parking lot moved from in front of the entrance to the Diamond Club to where it is now, fenced off beyond the scoreboard. He asked for the move after a disgruntled fan, miffed that Fisher had stopped signing autographs, stomped on the pitcher's car with both feet, denting his trunk.
"I went after him," remembers Fisher. "But he jumped off and went in through the crowd."
But Fat Jack's greatest contibution to Shea's history was still to come. In December 1967, Fisher became part of a trade with the Chicago White Sox for Miracle Mets Al Weis and Tommie Agee.
Met Life
Bill Shea, a neighborhood kid from Washington Heights, was the ideal candidate to return National League baseball to New York. Like many of his time, he was molded by the Great Depression and saw returning baseball to New York as his gift to the city.
A lifelong sports fan - he owned the semi-pro Long Island Indians football team in the '40s and was even offered a piece of the Giants some time ago - he was a prominent politcal figure in Brooklyn with close ties to Brooklyn's Dodgers. Shea also had a sharp wit, an easy charm, a back-room savvy and plenty of well-heeled souls in his Rolodex to bend opposition to his will. So, when Walter O'Malley announced he was moving Dem Bums to California, bringing Horace Stoneham and his Giants with him, Shea's old friend Mayor Wagner called on him to chair a group to bring National League baseball back to the city. He first set about stealing one, reaching out to Cincinnati, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh but was rebuffed, which was probably just as well, considering New York's guts had just been ripped out in the same manner
Shea then sought NL expansion, something the league's owners were considering, but on their own terms and on their own clock. Bill Shea was left with one last move, bold in every sense: He would create a third league, the Continental League, with former Dodgers GM Branch Rickey, then in his 80s, providing the muscle. The league piqued the interest of Congress - New York wasn't the only city yearning for a major league franchise - and threatened Major League Baseball's anti-trust exemption and its precious reserve clause.
Shea lined up owners across the U.S. and in Canada. And when it came down to who might be interested in owning the New York franchise, one name came to mind: Joan Whitney Payson. Payson, a minority shareholder of the Giants, had cast the only no vote on the team's proposed move to San Francisco. The heiress and philanthropist grew up with the Giants and baseball, once saying Bobby Thomson's "Shot Heard 'Round the World" was one of the highlights of her life. She had tried to buy the Giants to keep them in New York but was denied. She wanted nothing more than to own a baseball team again.
Some accounts say Payson had no interest in joining Shea's fledgling league, but signed up once assured the Continental League was only a ploy to get the National League to expand.
"Sure that could have happened in a conversation, but not as an objection. I won't do it if...," says Bill Shea Jr. "Were it to have played out, they would have gone through with (the third league)."
Bluff or not, Shea's threat worked. In a meeting with owners in Chicago in August of 1960 Shea got what he wanted and expansion was announced - New York, along with Houston, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., would be awarded a franchise and the Continental League would be dissolved. Payson would have her team, at an inital cost of nearly $4 milllion. Shea told everybody he had to race back to New York with the good news and get Flushing Municipal stadium off the ground and ready by 1962. It would take a little longer.
Usher In A New Era
Luke Gasparre, 84, makes everyone smile when he walks into the Met administrative offices. He has a pleasant way about him, same as when he's working the field-level stands at Shea. He has been there since the begining, checking tickets and seating customers. His first day with the Mets was Shea's as well. He expects his last will be at Citi Field.
"If God wants," he says.
He has plenty of pictures and mementos from his time at Shea - 44 years can fill a lot of rooms. And he has a lifetime of memories - the colors of that first opener, his blue Eisenhower Jacket, the yellow field-level seats, the soggy green grass.
He remembers the three young girls that put him on their shoulders after the Mets had clinched in 1986. They took his coat, his hat, anything they could bring home. He'll never forget that or when he assisted owner Joan Whitney Payson onto the field one day. Or when he met president Nixon.
That last game at Shea, even for a war hero like Gasparre, is going to be emotional.
"Oh, I know I'll probably cry," he says.
Gasparre served in World War II and fought in the Battle of the Bulge. He has a Purple Heart from an injury he sustained when a sniper's bullet grazed his right hand. He still feels the pain when he works, but not as much as in that first year of '64.
And he has a bronze star he earned for things he'd rather not talk about.
Once, after being separated from his battalion he heard the sounds of an approaching truck. It was German. Gasparre did the only thing he could. He played dead, masking his life with the death all around him. He never moved untill the sounds of the trucks had left his ears.
It wasn't long before a second convoy of trucks came barreling through, this time they were American.
With guns at his back, Pvt. First Class Luke Gasparre told the voice from behind him who he was and that he lived in Long Island City. They then asked him what his favorite baseball team was.
He never hesitated. "The New York Yankees," he said.
"And where do they play," the voice came back.
"161 St. in the in the Bronx," said Gasparre.
The next four words he heard never sounded better.
"OK, soldier, let's go."
Luke Gasparre has seen and done a lot in his life. He made it out of Germany alive when many of his friends didn't. He killed when he had to. He played dead when he had to. And he'd do it all again if he had to, but with one very big exception.
"Now," he says, "I'm a Mets fan." |
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