Here’s Looking Up Our Old Address
This article was written by Greg W. Prince
This article was published in 1969 New York Mets essays
“Shea Stadium continues to be a fun place, even in triumph.”
From Dick Young’s script for Look Who’s No. 1, the 1969 Mets highlight film that reassured fans unhinged by a world championship that Banner Day and Helmet Day weren’t going anywhere.
You know you’re in Queens when you look up and see that virtually every address in your midst is hyphenated. In a borough full of numbered thoroughfares, it attempts to create order from the chaos you might get when you’re dealing with, for example, a 55th Road in Elmhurst that runs a block south of 55th Avenue not all that many blocks east of 55th Street in Woodside. Better a hyphen than those other punctuation marks cartoonists use to express the frustration of getting lost without a sturdy Queens atlas.
For 45 years, there may have been no more famous hyphenated address in Queens or anywhere than the one memorized by generations of New York Mets fans: 123-01 Roosevelt Avenue, indicating the intersection of Roosevelt and 123rd Street. It’s where, before you could dot-com it, you wrote to the Mets to send away for tickets, to request an 8 x 10 glossy photo, to pledge undying loyalty to your favorite player until he was traded, demoted, or released. Want the all-new revised edition of the official yearbook, the one with the guy who took your previous hero’s place? Write to the New York Mets, 123-01 Roosevelt Avenue, Flushing, New York, 11368.
There are still New York Mets. They still print yearbooks. They don’t revise them much. But that address has left town. There is no longer a 123-01 Roosevelt Avenue in Flushing. There is no longer anything on which to inscribe that house number. There is no house and that number’s been lost.
There is, however, plenty of parking.
Shea Stadium doesn’t live here anymore. The Mets have packed up the plantation and reset it at 120-01 Roosevelt Avenue, a.k.a. Citi Field (until further notice). If you saw a game from Shea Stadium in 2008, you know the two parks were back to back during their brief co-existence and that the Mets didn’t move very far across Flushing. In fact, the street that borders Citi Field, 126th Street, was the same one used to mark the approximate location of Shea. Queens cartography being what it is, there was never really a 123rd Street running through Shea. If there had been, it might have caused havoc right around third base.
But there sure was a Shea. There was never more a Shea than there was 40 years ago when the Mets played at 1969-01 Miracle Place and sanctified every blade of grass, every clump of dirt, every fan who passed through the turnstiles, whether via fully paid admission, membership in the Midget Mets, or dairy carton coupon. It may have been built in 1964, but Shea Stadium was made holy in 1969.
Here’s looking up our old address.
To view Shea Stadium in its 1969 format is to observe a Shea that is recognizable to the 21st century fan, but not a perfect match. The shape remained a horseshoe and, give or take three feet down the foul lines, the dimensions stayed true. The variations lie, as Vincent Vega put it in Pulp Fiction, in the little differences. The Stadium that Shea’d goodbye in 2008 was a Royale with Cheese compared to the comparatively no-frills burger served up in Queens four decades earlier.
Blue fences. DiamondVision. The Home Run Apple. Cow-Bell Man in the stands. Neon men on the exterior. The Pepsi Picnic Area. The scoreboard skyline. The Tommie Agee marker. Plastic orange seats ringing Field Level. Cushy blue chairs behind home plate. A photographer’s well of Nikon-branded stools off of first. Billboard advertising on everything that didn’t move and maybe a few things that did. Italian sausages grilling. T-shirts flying. Everybody clapping their hands on command. Somebody named Mary, said to be Lazy.
Those were touchstones of Shea Stadium in its final seasons. Those are the memories Mets fans could pack away on September 28, 2008 and bring with them to Citi Field come April 13, 2009. The stuff of the late ’00s will be nostalgia for an entire generation. Yet it was way in the future on October 16, 1969.
None of it existed as part of the Shea tableau when Cleon Jones ensured Davey Johnson a lifetime sinecure as a last-out trivia question. Shea Stadium in the 1960s, so often described in real time as a combination carnival and baseball stadium, was staid by comparison to its later incarnation. Real time will do that to a ballpark.
After standing pat on stadium improvements (let alone stadium maintenance) for the balance of the ’70s, Shea attempted to add glitz to its persona over its final three decades, albeit in that Wal-Mart manner that Shea had whenever it attempted to shop for glamour. Each would-be high-end innovation—say the addition of TV monitors for fans squeezing past concession lines—was a victim of its essential Metness. Ever try to actually watch one of those televisions? Ever try to have a conversation over that state-of-the-warped sound system? Ever wonder why you couldn’t get into those left-field bleachers without a hundred friends or, on lucky Wednesdays, a can of Pepsi? Shea never got any glitzier. It just got grittier.
It was still new in 1969. Six seasons young. To watch it in action on DVD now is to see a fairly Spartan setting (that’s William A. Shea Municipal Stadium, thank you very much) whose sense of humanity is one part World’s Fair whimsy and nine parts Mets fans. The blue and orange speckles, the curved scoreboard with its inevitable failure to get all the bulbs to cooperate on CLENDENON, the Plexiglas-covered bullpens not yet sprouting tomatoes…it was as modern as it needed to be. What the old video picks up is that it was windier at Shea then. They fixed that over the years. The diamond dust kicked up a lot quicker back then. They made improvements there. Oh, and don’t forget the puddles you used to see gather on the warning track. Somebody eventually installed drainage that drained.
Yes, in some respects Shea Stadium got better after 1969. In many respects, it grew different. Physically what was fresh in the ’60s was deemed hopelessly outdated as early as 1980, when new owners couldn’t yet paint over the rot of the roster, so they slapped on new seats and such wherever they could. Jane Janus’s organ gave way to constant recorded admonitions (albeit, some of them catchy). When watching nothing between innings seemed passé, a ginormous screen was erected over the left-center field fence to produce a stream of distractions. Color schemes were impermanent. The Sign Man Karl Ehrhardt folded up his running commentary. A stadium built to appeal to Long Islanders by loading it with parking spaces invited its guests more and more to visit via mass transit. A whole bunch of those parking spaces beyond right field were disappearing.
Because that was where 120-01 Roosevelt Avenue was going to be.
The 1969 version of Shea Stadium won’t necessarily be the Shea Stadium that survives in the first row of the collective consciousness. Relatively fewer images survive. The median age of those who remember attending games there then is Old and Getting Older. That championship season sits squarely between the onset of the Great Depression and the impact of a pretty dismal recession. Who in 1969 was thinking of 1929 as anything but the most ancient of history?
That said, when archaeologists come around to excavate the parking lot that lay due west of that fancy pile of red bricks at 120-01 Roosevelt, which season’s soul will they discover embedded below the surface? 1969’s. They have to. It was the signature season of Shea Stadium. There was nothing like it at 123-01 Roosevelt. Nothing.
A few years jump out and scream Mets at you if you’ve followed the franchise forever and a day. Actually there are years that make you scream and want to jump from the nearest Upper Deck/Promenade, but let’s leave that sensible sentiment aside for now. Let’s think of some of the years that truly say Shea.
1964: Opened.
1973: Believed.
1977: Traded.
1986: Dominated.
2000: Frustrated.
2007: Collapsed.
2008: Closed.
If you’re a Mets fan, you get the implications of each of those years on contact. For example, Shea Stadium will forever be linked to 1964, the only 53-109 effort ever pointed to with pride as providing the best record a team ever managed. The ’64 Mets outdid their two predecessors at the Polo Grounds by 13 and two wins, respectively. And while their previous home in Manhattan belonged to a previous generation, the ’64 Mets established Shea as baseball’s premier funhouse: it hosted a doubleheader that went 32 innings, an opposing pitcher who retired 27 consecutive batters, and every All-Star on Earth. And that was just by July.
As important in the telling of Shea was 1973, the Mets’ second pennant season and, from August 30 forward, its most improbable. In rapid-fire succession the Met lexicon was irrevocably altered over approximately six weeks’ time: You Gotta… It Ain’t Over ’Til…The Ball Off The…Willie, Say Goodbye To…Pete [Bleeping]…Mets fans spoke differently from then on out because of what happened at Shea. They could finish each other’s sentences.
All that believing and all that fun screeched into silence in 1977. The best Mets player of any position—a pitcher—was traded in June. The lights went out in July. They stayed out for a very long time after Tom Seaver left the room. For those loyal, unlucky and maybe foolhardy Mets fans who arrived on the scene post-1973, that Shea Stadium became the Shea Stadium they would forever point to as their own (the lovable dopes).
The Shea of 2000 represented the culmination of a ton of Mets frustration that defined two eras: the early and mid-’90s when nothing went right and the late ’90s when something inevitably went wrong. A Subway Series rumbled through that Shea. Partisans can be forgiven for missing their stop.
Someday, perhaps, 2007 will recede in significance. Events have a way of blotting out previous events in a team narrative; 2006’s last-game NLCS failure seemed pretty monumental for about 11 months. By the end of 2007 (seven up, 17 to play you might have tattooed to your frontal lobe), Carlos Beltran standing and staring at strike three seemed like the good old days at Shea. The someday that blots out 2007 has yet to arrive. It didn’t even come in 2008, though that being the year Shea shuttered linked it inextricably to 1964. (And isn’t it funny how the 53-109 from then seemed a lot sunnier than the nice try of 89-73 in ’08 does now?)
Did we leave one of those essential Shea seasons cited on that list earlier out of our analysis? Yes we did. It was not an oversight.
When you get right down to it, you have two contenders for the mythical title of signature season of Shea Stadium, for rights to perform as the hypothetical house band at the address where the postman no longer delivers mail. You have 1969 and its world championship and you have 1986 and its world championship.
The 1986 world champions were more impressive. The 1986 world champions were more talented. The 1986 Mets were the only Mets team to romp through a schedule as the uncontested best team in baseball. And when they were finally contested, they responded magnificently. No team or season unfurled by the Mets in the Shea Stadium era stood taller or proved greater.
But 1969 was better. 1969 was the best. 1969 was everything the Mets had been leading up to from 1964—1962 even. And everything after 1969 would have to live up to 1969—1986 even. At 1986’s moments of October doubt, where was the karmic bench strength? Where was the indispensable precedent? What was the one time that you knew the Mets had gone up the hill and successfully fetched a pail of water, thus giving you some comfort that they could do it again?
It was 1969. That was the Miracle. That was the Amazin’. That was the Magic heralded come 1980 as Back (though how they were measuring magic that spring remains a mystery). There was no Believe in ’73 without that which boggled belief four seasons earlier. 1977 wouldn’t have been so morosely sad had not 1969 been so riotously happy. The frustrations that followed ’86 were leavened by the knowledge that somewhere deep in our inner Mr. Met resided that ’69 DNA. Bill Buckner—even if Mookie was gonna beat it out—was the other guy’s mistake. And we didn’t get that ‘til October 25 (after midnight on the 26th, actually). 1986 was awesome all year. It was only miraculous when it absolutely had to be. Few years anywhere were like our 1986, but they have occurred in other places.
Has anybody else ever had a 1969? No, not really. Often imitated, never fully replicated. Teams can climb from worst to first, but who harks back to the 1991 Minnesota Twins outside of WJM’s broadcast range? When the 2008 Tampa Bay Rays rose from absolutely nothing, with whom were they historically aligned? They were going for a ’69 Mets, just as the ’77 Broncos attempted in Super Bowl XII (“the Mets of the Mountains,” Time called the Broncos in January 1978, and they were talking about the Mets of Gil Hodges, not Ron Hodges). Everybody who doesn’t fancy themselves the ’69 Orioles aspires to be the ’69 Mets.
Yet does any professional team ever really pull it off like the ’69 Mets? Has anybody turned the trick of so decisively morphing from The Biggest Loser to The Immortal Winner? You have to look at Olympic hockey or college basketball for echoes of the 1969 Mets and their Oh, God! success that prompted the line far more memorable than the 1977 movie—or 1977 season: “The last miracle I did was the 1969 Mets. Before that, I think you have to go back to the Red Sea.”
George Burns was onto something about Biblical-style miracles. They don’t come along that often.
The one the Mets pulled off in 1969 happened at Shea…and nowhere else. Seriously, in the common retellings, do the Mets play more than maybe six road games? Al Weis hits a homer at Wrigley; Ron Swoboda foils Steve Carlton in St. Louis; Koosman and Cardwell each drive in the only runs in a doubleheader at Pittsburgh; Don Buford briefly puts Tom Seaver in a hole in Baltimore; maybe there’s a West Coast swing. Otherwise, that whole year is Shea, Shea, Shea. It’s where a cat filled in as a utilityman and Jimmy Qualls served as a rat. It’s where Tommie Agee marked his territory and Karl Ehrhardt recorded every emotion. It’s where the ghosts of the Giants and Dodgers were once and for all buried and hankies were waved at Leo Durocher and Montreal first became part of America’s national pastime. It’s where a left fielder called Cleon was removed for the team’s own good and a phenomenal starter named Seaver became an ace for the ages, it’s where a leader of men named Gil led men to points previously uncharted. It’s where what would surely fall in was caught, where sac bunts wound up sailing down the line, where shoe polish sparkled. It was where everything was clinched and everything was celebrated.
123-01 Roosevelt Avenue has since been plundered, plowed, paved, and parked upon. It’s space for cars now. Yet it’s the spot for miracles always.
GREG W. PRINCE is the author of Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets (Skyhorse Publishing, 2009), a book based on the blog of the same name, which Prince has co-written with Jason Fry since 2005; Faith and Fear is Prince’s first book. He is a regular contributor to the Maple Street Press Mets Annual and SNY’s Mets Weekly, has published baseball essays in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal online edition, and on MLB.com; consulted on the Billy Joel concert film and documentary Last Play at Shea; and is a proud member of the New York Baseball Giants Nostalgia Society. When not following the Mets, Prince works as a communications consultant. He is married to Stephanie Prince and they live on Long Island with their two adorable cats, Hozzie and Avery.