NEW YORK—Outside of the obvious newness of the place, the first major difference I noticed on my first visit to Citi Field, current home of the New York Mets, compared to Shea Stadium, the old home of the New York Mets, was that it didn’t feel as if I was being dive-bombed by an invading air force every few seconds.
That was the thing about Shea. It was constructed in a flight path on the descent to LaGuardia Airport and unlike those fancy fly-bys that fans cheer to honor the military at the beginning of some games, you had a fleet of commercial jets coming in for a loud landing throughout the game.
It had been a long time since I had attended a Mets home game, probably since the early 1970s when Shea was fairly new. Attending a game at Citi Field, named for a bank, not a man, as its predecessor was, added another ballpark to my life list.
Any new ballpark these days should have much to recommend it with the care, attention to detail, and money invested in its construction. Besides the lack of frequent auditory interruption, another perk to being a fan at Citi Field as compared to Shea, was the leg room in the 300 level where I sat for a recent game against the Cincinnati Reds.
Maybe because I grew up at Fenway Park in Boston and spent a fair amount of time in recent years at Wrigley Field in Chicago that I am conditioned to thinking that the seating at all ballparks is cramped and that knees abut the row of seats in front of you. Not so here. This was a pleasant discovery. No black-and-blue-marks ensued from cracking into the seats during the game.
Those are personal impressions of the park that became the Mets home field in 2009. It is located a long home run from Shea and from the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, home of the U.S. Open tennis championships each September.
Shea Stadium opened in 1964 as part of New York City’s hosting of the World’s Fair. The new stadium’s capacity is 41,922 following a recent trend to build new parks on a more intimate scale. The old stadium’s capacity was 57,333, space that was happily in demand when the Mets won World Series titles in 1969 and 1986.
Shea Stadium was named for William A. Shea, not because he invested millions of dollars of his own money in the $28.5-million construction cost, but because New Yorkers credited him with being the guy who returned National League baseball to the city.
After the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants relocated to the West Coast, New York Mayor Robert Wagner appointed Shea as chairman of a committee to determine how to make New York a two-team town again. He came through and the Mets began play in 1962.
Cost of building the new home for the Mets, financed by the sale of municipal bonds, was $900 million. Illustrating the different eras of the game, the Mets sold naming rights to the new stadium to Citigroup, Inc., a financial institution for 20 years at $20 million per year.
Since Shea, who by profession was an attorney, died in 1991, he was unavailable for comment on losing his enduring claim to fame.
Although in some ways Citi Field does not truly stand out as a unique ballpark, it has some very neat features. All of the seats are green in homage to the dearly departed Polo Grounds (which was not named for Marco Polo). When fans enter the front of the stadium they walk into an expansive lobby with escalators that is the Jackie Robinson Rotunda. Robinson, the Brooklyn Dodger player who broke baseball’s color barrier in the 20th century, made out better than Shea in the name game.
There is also a New York Mets Hall of Fame and Museum, something that would have consisted mainly of open space when Shea opened since at the time the newcomers to the National League were the worst team in baseball,l had recorded the worst season in baseball history, and had not yet achieved much worth preserving.
While some might consider it shlocky, an additional feature of Citi Field is a very large apple that is shielded by what is essentially a box. When a Mets player strokes a home run, the Big Apple rises from its casing and is on display in celebration. Think Durham Bull.
Kids have got to love it and any fan with a sense of humor should enjoy it, too. The Mets could just use a few more guys who can belt the four-bagger more often.