One minute you're imagining what your new home will look like, the next minute somebody tells you.
Bloomberg.com baseball writer Danielle Sessa broke details Friday afternoon of just how inspired by Ebbets Field the Mets' new ballpark will be. (If this link doesn't take you there, there is a summary of the salient points at Gotham Baseball.)
The good news? If you've spent the past 48 or so years bemoaning the kidnapping of your beloved Dodgers the way — I don't know — a certain MLB owner seems to have, you'll be elated.
The bad news? It doesn't sound very Top Hat & Apple-friendly.
It's not right to prejudge something of which we've just now read but a few proposed highlights, but the Sheaness that many Mets fans cherish (judging by the comments we've been receiving on this topic) does not appear to be in evidence. If the Wilpons have their way, which they almost certainly will, Ebbets will live on and Shea will fade away.
To be fair, it's bound to be a very nice place. Seating capacity will be human-scale at 42,500. There are apparently touches of Petco Park with some standing room built into an office building overlooking right field. And, hey, there's an office building overlooking right field. One assumes this edifice and its retail space will be more attractive than the blight that towers over Madison Square Garden. Also, New York's bridges will be paid homage, which seems reasonable since one of them is a Carlos Delgado poke away from the new site.
It sounds spiffy and it may be sweet. But it's not likely to be Shea in any sense of the word.
Take that for what it's worth.
I'm trying hard not to analyze the pathology involved in wanting to honor another club's identity when you've got 44 seasons worth of your own. By the time they play the last game in Shea in 2012…I mean, 2008…of course it will happen on time…it will have seen as many seasons (44) of New York NL baseball as Ebbets did. I'm not saying “let's build another Shea” (heaven forbid)…I'm just saying let's honor the damn Mets.
I know I'm going way out on a limb here, and being really outrageous with my opinions…and I sincerely don't mean to shock or offend anyone or upset any apple carts…but I just think the Mets should go out and build a park that celebrates themselves and their own crazy loveable identity.
Bravo! Enough whining about the damn Dodgers, already! Let's remember, they abandoned NY!
Why don't you hear as much whining from Giants fans? Do they possess more sangfroid about life?
I still say (and I think my first-ever post here was on this topic) that the New Shea (what fan will call it anything else?) should take the '64 World's Fair as its theme. Design it in that 60s-era “futuristic” look, like TomorrowLand in DisneyWorld. Get a monorail. Move the unisphere here (great idea!). Dig the old blue and orange fiberglass panels out of storage.
The new Shea having the old Ebbets facade is about the best baseball news I've heard in ten years. The Mets, who now have an identity all their own, were the national league NY replacement for the beloved Dodgers & Giants and should never entirely separate themselves from that past. They should have forced the Dodgers & Giants to change their names when they left (I'm only 34 years old!) as, what the heck is an L.A. Dodger or a SF Giant?! In any event, I'd like to see the ballpark incorporate the old Ebbets facade and rotunda, and the Shea scoreboard in RF… and absolutely NO ROOF!
Hey, does anyone think the hat-and-apple should go with the team to the new park? I'm divided on it, like I'm retching at the very idea while thinking “Hey, the Hat is so Coney, so working man, so Mets. If you want your nose in the air, by all means go sniff after Steinbrenner's clean-shaven-billionaire-robots. For us it's the Hat with Apple in the role of a rabbit.”… What do you think?
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jg