The experience of going to a baseball park traditionally involves a series of intense emotional responses to things you see, things you’ve seen before, things you never get tired of, things that have become a vital part of what you think you are.
Part of the difficulty of adapting to the novelty of a new baseball stadium is that the visual cues that led directly to your emotions are no longer there. Your spirit is looking for them and your mind has to tell your spirit that they’re not there any more and it needs to look at the new things. The problem is that your spirit was formed by the old things. This doesn’t mean that the spirit can’t learn to love the new things, but it does mean that while it is getting used to the new things, it is also looking for traces of what is gone. It is looking for a connection to what it loved. It is looking for itself.
So as I am driving to the new baseball stadium of the New York Mets I remember how I have felt, for 45 years, as I approached what I once called the “blue bowl wrapped in its web of highways.” It was originally sand-colored, it was always immense and it always seemed to me to dominate the highways that ran towards it and spun out from it. Nothing was like the excitement I felt as a kid coming from New Jersey, coming down off the Triboro, and somewhere around La Guardia seeing the great God Shea, tall, lordly, and lovely, between the heads of my parents, just under the rear view mirror. As a teenager and a young man, I would approach Shea on the “7” train that snaked through Queens. Finally it WAS THERE as the train rattled into the station along the parking lot. In the past two decades, I have approached Shea from the north. On the Whitestone Expressway, it almost looked as if you could drive right into it. Seen from the north, it was an enormous embracing presence welcoming me. As soon as I saw it, I was filled with joy. I never felt anything else. The joy was immediate, the path was direct. I saw Shea and I was happy.
I hope I will someday feel this way about Citi Field. But there is the problem that it is much smaller, and from all directions it looks far less imposing. And coming down from the north, you approach its ad-encrusted backside. It’s lovely as you approach it from the train station, but that’s not the way I’ll be coming in. So the first of my visual cues was missing. I wasn’t lifted to the skies by seeing Citi Field from a distance. This may have been why it was so important to me to find my family’s brick for the first time. I didn’t see what I’ve always known and loved. But in the bricks in front of the entrance to the new, unfamiliar place, I found something of myself.
Then I entered the rotunda. And this experience is the hardest to sort through. Jackie Robinson is one of the greatest sports heroes of all time and he was a New York National League sports hero. By opening a closed door, he prepared the way for the opening of many doors that had been closed in our society for so long. It’s wonderful to commemorate him in the new Mets stadium, although I am more than a little struck by the irony of commemorating Robinson so dramatically in the first Mets stadium that contains extensive areas that are completely off-limits to fans who have not paid an exorbitant amount for their ticket.
The rotunda is the most impressive space in the entire stadium. Yet it cannot be denied that the memorial to Robinson that takes up the entire space pushes the Mets aside exactly where they should be at the center stage. The fact that the stadium reproduces Ebbets Field and memorializes Robinson is in many respects laudable. Ebbets Field was distinguished and Robinson was great. There is even something touching about an owner of a baseball team memorializing the baseball memories of his childhood. But the problem is that the Mets have always had a problem with being treated as if they were secondary. One of the strongest things that binds Mets fans together is our ironic, affectionate sense of our secondariness. We love something that is not the obvious thing to love. The Yankees are the primary New York baseball team. We love the other team. The Mets came because the Dodgers (and the Giants) left. But we love them for themselves, not because they’re the successors to the Brooklyn Dodgers. We make the secondary into the primary with the force of our love. It may therefore be too much to ask that, when we enter our own stadium, we think first of the Dodgers and not of ourselves. Citi Field, in its current form, is too much of a reminder that for many old Dodger fans, the Mets are a consolation prize, a lesser team that could never replace the Boys of Summer just as they can never be the flagship team of New York.
We have been here for almost fifty years. There are millions of us. The Mets have provided some of the greatest moments of the past half century of baseball history. Even some of their not so great moments are as primary to those who cherish them as anything the Brooklyn Dodgers or the New York Yankees have ever accomplished. As baseball sentimentalists, the Wilpons should understand this. Fred Wilpon should honor his own baseball memories and he has the responsibility to honor ours as well. Owning a baseball team is a sacred public trust, and for the most part the Wilpons seem to recognize this. They recognized that they had to get us a better bullpen and they got us one. Now they have to make it so that when Mets fans enter our own stadium, they recognize themselves. Our Mets emotions need to be turned on, and it would probably be wisest to turn them on with the quirky, tacky, goofy, urbane, improvised, self-consciously silly things that have always turned them on. Mr. Met is still here so is our dear sweet familiar old Home Run Apple. Now that we no longer have Shea, and the memories it would immediately bring back for us, we also need a place to take our kids to teach them and show them images and information about all that has come before. Even more than we need a boutique selling the carefully crafted and inspired designs of Alyssa Milano, we need perhaps just a little stall (a storage closet?!) selling some of the excellent books that exist about Mets history and culture, just in case anyone wants to explore the Mets past in some actual detail (sorry to be a broken record about this but it really rankles me). I am glad that above the Left Field entrance there are a few close-up, slightly confusing posters of great Mets. There are also some banners of Mets moments that you can see if you’re walking at the right angle along the left field exterior wall of the stadium. This is a start. But much more is needed. I don’t think the Mets intended to erase the past from the face of the new stadium. If they felt that way about their past, they wouldn’t have offered us the beautiful final ceremonies they had at Shea. Perhaps they were distracted by all that is involved in opening up a new stadium. There is an opportunity now to make amends, to put out a few of the old momentos, to start making the new place feel like our home.
And shouldn’t we, as part of this, have some blue and orange? What was wrong with blue and orange? Why don’t we see it in the new stadium? Some on the radio have criticized the triviality of Mets fans’ concern with “colors.” But the absence of blue and orange gets to the very heart of the matter. It may be nothing more than a color combination, but this is exactly the kind of visual cue our spirit keeps looking for. Ask any Mets fan why they love the Mets and weirdly enough they will often mention the blue and orange. These are our colors. We have cathected them completely. As has often been observed, these are the colors of our blood.
Citi Field has an awful lot going for it but it needs our blood. And I’m not sure it will have our sound until it has our blood. The future of the Mets cannot involve a break with the past. What is baseball fandom if it is not a continuous chain of memory, of inherited affections through generations? Sure there have been a lot of disappointments in that past. But our disappointments are part of what we are. They are in our blood, and they have always seasoned our triumphs. Our future must grow out of our past. If Citi Field is to become our home, it is going to have to connect us with what used to make us so happy to go to Shea, for all of its shortcomings. A winning team will not be enough to make us happy to be Mets fans. Winning teams are always great. But they are never enough. We need more. We need the mysterious intangibles. We need our secret signals. We need what we used to feel when we carried banners along the walkways in front of the stands. We need the loud raucous Mets love that we shared as we bounced down the outer ramps at the end of a winning game. Our walkways are gone, our ramps are gone. Big ugly ads have swallowed up most of the scoreboard. The stupidly expensive and exclusive club area has grown like an evil cancer to push the Mets fans to the heights and periphery of the stadium, where they don’t necessarily see the field very well. Sweet Caroline has come back like a poltergeist. But we still have our team and we still have each other.
We are still the New Breed, the fans of the New York Mets, the illogical, articulate, dedicated fools of legend. Like a resourceful endangered species, we will make Citi Field our own. We will start by convincing the Mets to make it more of a home for us. The recession may even force the opening of more of the stadium to us! We will move down, as we always have, into the seats that no one showed up for. We will storm the club level with our torches, carrying Cow-Bell Man on our shoulders. We will stuff our faces with their artisanal comfort food. We are here. We will not go away. We will cheer champions. We will make new memories. And our blood will be blue and orange until our hearts can no longer pump it.
