I first saw Shea Stadium in the summer it opened,1964, when all the world was still young. My parents were taking me to visit the World’s Fair, which was just across the elevated line in Flushing Meadows. This was appropriate because Shea, like the fair, was supposed to be a showcase for the world of tomorrow. You could tell this because it looked breezy, and fun, and half-finished—all bright, garrish colors and flimsy new materials; unadorned concrete and pipes and steel cables, laid out in that functional, neglected-housing-development style that modern architects used to assure us was the best future we could hope for.

I remember that the fair proved to be vaguely disappointing once we got inside, with endless lines and nothing that really seemed all that amazing. Perhaps the trouble was that, even in 1964, the future was no longer what it had once been.

The same, alas, would prove to be true of Shea. In fairness, no stadium ever started life with more strikes against it: a baseball park without any real bleachers, built in the flight path of an international airport, on the site of a gigantic ash heap. The bad symbolism abounded. Shea is situated amidst a sea of junkyards, and auto chop shops. Subway riders from the No. 7 train, approach it along the curious “Ramp to Nowhere,” a concrete walkway that appears to lead directly from the elevated station into Shea’s green, beckoning, rightfield—only to stop some twenty yards short, dribbling fans out onto a cracked, asphalt sidewalk.

There has always been something about the place that speaks of the tawdry and the second-rate, right down to the battered apple that rises grudgingly out of a gigantic top hat just beyond the centerfield wall, whenever a Met hits a home run. Few would argue that, since the eradication of all those football-friendly, astroturfed excrescences of the 1960s, Shea has been the worst major-league ballpark extant.

But right from the beginning, Shea was fun. I went to my first game there with my Uncle Bruce, in 1967, to see the Mets play the San Francisco Giants, and it felt like a carnival as much as a ballgame. The Mets were in last place, but there was a full house, with many of the fans cavorting merrily in the aisles. There was a poker-faced individual known as “Sign Man,” who held up exclamations after every key play, and for years, everyone was invited to march on the field, showing off their own, homemade signs, on Banner Day. (My all-time favorite: “I’d Bet My Testes On the Metsies.”)

This was something altogether new in New York sports, fans defiantly embracing a team of scrappy, lovable losers. It almost seemed designed to send up the lordly crosstown Yankees, with all their ponderous tradition. Of course, many in the crowd—including my uncle—were rooting for the visitors. In those days, thousands of fans still came out in droves whenever their beloved, West Coast transplants, the Giants and the Dodgers, stopped back in town. But most New Yorkers had moved on. Bad as they were, the Mets had established an identity that jibed perfectly with the city’s as the 1960s wore on—embattled, ragged, but facing the long odds against them with a certain, brave wit, and style. When the team miraculously won the World Series in 1969, behind a fine young pitching staff headed by Tom Seaver, all of New York reveled in vindication. Fun City, indeed.

By the time I got back to Shea, in the late 1970s, the first bloom was clearly off the rose, for both the team and the city, with their seemingly perpetual crises. New Yorkers only enjoy being underdogs for so long. The Mets had sunk to the bottom again, and even Tom Terrific had been banished for insubordination by the decidedly unlovable and un-scrappy club president, M. Donald Grant. In those years, you could buy a ticket to the cheapest seats in the upper deck, and for an extra dollar an usher would take you all the way down to a lower section. At night, Shea had begun to take on a decidedly spectral mood—cavernous and empty, one more patch of blight and squandered chances.

In truth, the best was yet to come—the Mets of Doc Gooden and Darryl Strawberry, Gary Carter and Keith Hernandez, and Mookie Wilson, et al., a wonderfully cocksure squad that would set team record for wins and brawls, on and off the field, and captured the 1986 World Series after playing some of the most astonishing games in post-season history. The fans flocked back, screaming and dancing along between innings to a scoreboard video tribute to the Three Stooges, called “The Curley Shuffle.” That year, I watched from the upper deck as a Dodger relief pitcher with the perfect monicker of Tom Niedenfuer, surrendered a decisive grand-slam home run to George Foster. Having given up more, Niedenfuer proceeded to deck the next batter, Ray Knight, with a pitch—whereupon the pugnacious Knight jumped up and raced for the mound. Within seconds, both teams had poured onto the field, embroiled in a melee very much akin to the Curley Shuffle.

The great Mets teams of the 1980s, and their flawed stars, went into an untimely decline soon after. But another pattern had arisen—one of bust and boom, despair and irrational exuberance, that also reflected the New York of the 1980s and 1990s. And always, one could expect the amazing, the unlikely, the goofy.

During the phenomenal 1999 National League Championship Series against Atlanta, I had the privilege to witness the third longest post-season game ever played—an incredible 15-inning affair that started in the afternoon but went far into the drizzling, October night. The Mets trailed in the series by three games to one now, and a loss would end their season. But a sense of sheer euphoria grew steadily around the park as the game went on, even with Atlanta threatening almost every inning, and two different Braves runners being thrown out at the plate. The organist led the crowd in a second, “seventh-inning stretch” in the middle of the 14th inning, and everywhere you could see the grins on fans happy just to extend the season by another inning.

It was a wholly different sort of feeling than I have experienced during big, close games in Yankee Stadium, where everything is magnified by the burden of history. That is a more raw, visceral sensation, and one that I cherish as well, but here at Shea people seemed like they were actually having fun—like it really was a game. As the game and the rain continued, and the weak of heart departed, my friends and I kept improving our seats, until we actually ended up sitting next to Bud Harrelson, the superb one-time Mets shortstop, coach, and manager. Here was a living link to the legacy of 1969, and 1986, as it might only appear in Shea. We sat next to Bud as if clinging to a lucky icon, and watched the Mets rally to win in the bottom of the fifteenth, on Robin Ventura’s game-winning grand slam. Even here, the quirky interceded. Ventura’s hit was famously reduced to a “grand-slam single” when Todd Pratt, the runner just ahead of him, stopped and embraced him in the basepaths. One could hardly picture Derek Jeter behaving in such a manner.

The Mets would go down to another, plucky defeat in that series anyway, and again the next year, in their one and only Subway Series against the Yankees. Shea has continued its slow rot, and my friends and I joke about the hokey promotions (Greek Night!), or the once infamously small, foul bathrooms that drove the Jets to New Jersey (good riddance), or the themed concession stands such as “Beers of the World,” which might be more aptly titled, “Beers of Your Local Bodega.” Last year, we were unable even to sit in the seats we had purchased because of a steady rain of roof water on a perfectly cloudless night—bilge that seemed to be pouring right down through a hole in a steel supporting beam above us.

Mets management was unruffled by the news, but who can blame them? They will have their new stadium by 2009, and if the recent stadium-building craze around America is any indication it will be a much better (if more expensive) place to watch a game, combining modern comfort with all the trappings of official baseball nostalgia. Until then, I will be happy to indulge my own nostalgia, sipping a Beer of the World and gazing from the airy, open exit ramps of Shea toward the Manhattan skyline, or the silver Unisphere that still remains from the Fair…even if only because my seat is underwater. The worst ballpark in the world is still a very good place to be.

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