“Nevertheless, there will always lurk, around the corner in a pocket of our knowledge of the odds, an indefensible hope, and this was one of the times, which you now and then find in sports, when a density of expectation hangs in the air and plucks an event out of the future.”
— John Updike, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu”
Shea Stadium, in the borough of Queens, was often described as a dump. It resembled a toilet bowl, like most of the other big sports facilities built during the cookie-cutter era of American stadiums. What set it apart from the other cookie cutters was its odor; it also smelled like a toilet bowl. It was built on an actual dump—in a place called Flushing no less—and perhaps the stench from that old dump lingered, seeped deep into the soil (if not the soul) of Shea, and wafted as high as the nosebleeds during countless windy innings.
Of course the bad plumbing and drainage didn’t help matters, the murky perks of a venue that had been both overused and underserviced. For its first 20 years, 1964 to 1983, Shea Stadium lacked a proper offseason. Its bleachers sat upon rickety rollers that enabled their clumsy repositioning around the dimensions of either a baseball diamond or a football gridiron, depending on the time of year. Shea hosted the New York Mets during the spring and summer, while the New York Jets took up residence in the fall and winter. This year-round arrangement left no downtime for necessary upkeep, repairs, and cleaning.
Even after 1983, when the Jets departed for New Jersey’s Meadowlands and Shea’s sole remaining resident spruced up the place with fresh blue paint and new features and adornments, the stench persisted. Alas, Shea Stadium was still a dump.
“But it’s our stinkin’ dump,” many a Mets fan would defiantly retort.
Even when the lowly Mets started winning, Shea was still a dump. It was a dump in 1985, when they won 98 games behind the fire-balling phenom Dwight Gooden (whose pitching performance that year still holds up as the best in post-integration baseball). It was a dump the following year, even during game 6 of the World Series, when Mookie Wilson famously hit a routine grounder through the luckless Bill Buckner’s legs and Ray Knight ran home with the irreproachable glee of a little leaguer.
It was a dump all through the ’90s, which was especially befitting of the ’93 Mets who lost 103 games and restored the franchise to its original mantle as the league’s worst team. (Incidentally, on April 27 of that year, a rookie sensation for the visiting Dodgers named Mike Piazza would hit his first home run at Shea Stadium off Dwight Gooden, who was relieved of his lightning-fast fastball by the fickle baseball gods after 1985.)
It was a dump all through the players’ strike and the equally disillusioning Generation K. It was a dump in 1997, even as it served as the incomprehensible venue of the Jackie Robinson tribute, where Commissioner Bud Selig, flanked on Shea’s pitching mound by Rachel Robinson (Jackie’s widow) and President Bill Clinton, officially retired number 42 across the league. That was the year Selig also established interleague play, which meant the Mets would play the Yankees every year, alternating stadiums. This arrangement made the contrast between a dump and a cathedral ever more pronounced.
Shea was a dump in 1998, even though it was a special year for the Mets and, as it turned out, all of Major League Baseball. That was the year of the great home run race. Fans across the country were buying tickets in droves. Mark McGwire of the St. Louis Cardinals hit home runs 3 and 51 at Shea on his way to an historic 70. The powerhouse Yankees won the interleague series two games to three at Shea, logging wins 54 and 55 of their eventual 114, which eclipsed the previous franchise record of 110 set by the Ruth and Gehrig Yankees of ’27. The Mets, for their part, were in the race but collapsed in the final week of the season, losing their last five games and just missing the playoffs.
But 1998 was special for the Mets for another reason. On the afternoon of May 23, two hours before the Mets were set to face the Milwaukee Brewers, a limousine pulled into Shea Stadium amid a gaggle of reporters and fans. The chauffeur opened the rear door and out stepped a man with a clean goatee, slicked back hair, and a pair of Ray-Bans concealing any hint of doubt that may have smoldered in his eyes. That man was Mike Piazza—the Mike Piazza. As eager as he was to win over New York City, even Piazza himself could never have imagined, in just a few years, from the shabby environs of Shea Stadium—which, inexplicably, for this one moment in time, became the luminous but desperate epicenter of a darkening universe—he would lift the city, and the rest of America with it, out of the depths of its unfathomable despair.
***
Fourteen years before that limo ride, Piazza was hitting balls inside a DIY batting cage in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. He was 16 years old. Two men were watching him. One of them was Ed Liberatore, a baseball scout. The other was the greatest hitter that ever lived, Ted Williams, who was stunned by what he was seeing.
“This kid,” Williams said, “hits the ball harder than I ever did at 16.”
Stars have a way of recognizing stars, even in the early stages.
“I guarantee you,” Williams concluded before bidding adieu, “this kid will hit the ball.”
The guarantee was not only upheld; in time, it became an understatement. Indeed, Piazza hit the ball. Since the day he arrived in the big leagues, he hit the ball. He hit the ball like his sole purpose on earth was to hit the ball. He hit the ball as though life itself depended on his hitting the ball, hitting it as hard as humanly possible. During his 1993 rookie season, he tallied 174 hits, 35 of which were home runs, with three of those landing in the Shea Stadium bleachers (the aforementioned April moonshot off Gooden and two others during a second visit in July.) He instantly became the new face of the storied Dodgers franchise. He took home yet another Rookie of the Year award for Los Angeles and placed ninth in the National League MVP race despite being statistically superior to all position players not named Barry Bonds.
By 1998, Piazza’s superstardom was such that chauffeured limousine rides and rabid, admiring crowds may have not been completely out of the ordinary. In his first five seasons, he played in five all-star games, won five Silver Slugger awards, and placed no lower than sixth in the MVP voting every year following his rookie season. In fact, he was the MVP runner-up in both 1996 and 1997, the latter being the year he tallied 201 hits, good for a staggering .362 batting average, a record for catchers that stood until 2009. All told, in those first five years for the Dodgers, he launched 168 home runs, amassed 854 hits, batted in 533 runs, and held a career average of .334. In short, it was the best five-year stretch for a catcher in the history of baseball. You couldn’t really blame the guy for expecting a hefty contract extension.
What followed, though, was a classic pissing contest between a player and his team’s new ownership. It ended how such contests usually end, with ownership flexing its muscle and the star player getting offended, villainized, and ultimately shown the door. The Dodgers traded Piazza, along with third baseman Todd Zeile, to the Florida Marlins for five players, only to have the Marlins, eight days later, flip Piazza to the Mets. Piazza embraced the chance to play under the lights of New York City right away.
“It’s hard to explain to people,” Piazza said on the Howard Stern Show following the trade, “it’s not just the money.”
“Oh yes it is,” said Robin Quivers.
“Sure it is,” Howard agreed.
“It’s actually a better situation because I ended up here, you know? Where else do you say in life that you get to play the prime of your career in Los Angeles and New York?”
The money probably helped a little too. In fact, the Mets would sign Piazza to the biggest contract the sport had ever seen: $91 million over seven years—and he was worth every dime. In his first full season with the Mets, Piazza hit 40 home runs and led the team to the playoffs for the first time since 1988. The next year, 2000, Piazza’s Mets would make it all the way to the World Series against the Yankees. The series would end in five games, with a high flyball off Piazza’s bat landing, crushingly, in Bernie Williams’ glove just shy of the Shea Stadium warning track. (Incidentally, one of my Yankee fan friends rooted for the Mets in game 5. A Mets win would have forced a game 6 at Yankee Stadium, a venue more appropriate than “shitty ass Shea” for his team to celebrate their latest trophy. “But it’s our shitty ass Shea,” I’d mutter.)
Despite the loss, Shea’s faithful left the stadium for the last time that millennium with both heartache and hope, dejection but also pride. The Mets made it to the World Series. That doesn’t happen very often. This team was a special team, and with Piazza in the lineup they seemed to improve every year. If they made the playoffs in 1999 and became World Series contenders in 2000, logic would have it that the Mets would achieve the ultimate triumph in 2001. We, the hope-filled diehards, could practically taste the champagne.
But life, alas, does not proceed according to such logic. Nor does it necessarily sway in the direction of one’s hope.
The Mets floundered in the first half of the 2001 season. In fact, they were struggling to stay out of the cellar in their division. The Shea fans rained down boos on seemingly every player on the home team, reserving their loudest for Piazza. The honeymoon was over. The new-car smell gave way to the fungal mustiness of old seats. The trial period ended and the card on file was charged $49.99.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world, shark attacks were on the rise. Gas prices approached two bucks a gallon. People were so up in arms that some service station attendants feared for their safety. A U.S. Navy spy plane somehow collided with a Chinese fighter jet. Pearl Harbor became the number one movie at the box office. Chandler and Monica got hitched. We were all waiting with bated breath for the GameCube, the iPod, the first Harry Potter film. Shea Stadium was still a dump.
Then, suddenly, September was upon us—and 11 days later, Shea stopped being a dump. People were starting to transform the stadium into a triage center. The circumstances required that it instead become a morgue.
***
They say baseball is a metaphor for life, more so than any other sport. The game is a series of failures interrupted by glimpses of success. The best ballplayers in history have produced way more outs than hits. Ted Williams had 7,706 official at-bats, which yielded “only” 2,654 hits. Pete Rose, far and away the all-time hit leader with 4,256, is also the all-time leader in at-bats with an unapproachable 14,053. Not only is failure inevitable in baseball, it’s necessary. The game itself relies on failure; otherwise, in theory, it would go on forever.
Baseball, to be sure, is a team sport, but the central activity of the game—the at-bat—is a solitary act. No one can help you in the batter’s box. It’s you against the world and everyone is watching. The goal, in essence, is to leave home only to return home, safely. It’s an encapsulated odyssey. This is why strikeouts (especially called strikeouts) look and feel much worse than groundouts or flyouts, even though they’re indistinguishable in the box score. Striking out means failing even to leave home. This is also why, for the exact opposite reason, the home run is so celebrated.
“The visceral response,” Piazza wrote in his autobiography, “is close to euphoria.” He was describing what it feels like to hit a home run, something he did 427 times in the big leagues. “It’s a power hitter’s sense of perfect.”
The collision between the bat and ball lasts a thousandth of a second. At the moment of impact, the kinetic energy from the swinging bat transfers to the ball, which of course brings its own momentum. If there’s enough combined relative velocity between the two objects, and if the bat strikes the ball at such an angle as to give it enough backspin and lift, then the ball should slice through any given night of the American summer and clear the fence. Energy, in the form of near-euphoria, is also transferred instantly from the batter to the fans in the stadium.
“Of course,” Piazza added, “it only lasts for a moment.”
But not all moments are so fleeting. We can feel the foreverness of some moments as they unfold, as if they materialize before us from eccentric specks of eternity.
Shea didn’t become a morgue on September 11. Nor did it become a triage center. While the wounded spirit of New York City was still picking up the pieces of its felled towers, Shea Stadium became what it was always meant to be: a place where people from different walks of life gathered and hoped together. For 10 days, Shea Stadium was an indispensable hub for the city’s recovery efforts. Firefighter crews mobilized there. Donations poured in by the truckload. Cots were set up in the tunnels. New York’s first responders rotated between Ground Zero and Shea for supplies, for rest, for a hot meal—respite from the bewildering disaster in lower Manhattan.
Stadium employees worked around the clock. Volunteers appeared in droves. Relief workers and firefighters from several states away improvised their way to Shea—from Illinois, from Tennessee, from Florida. Paramedics were on standby, manning a fleet of a hundred ambulances that lined Shea’s parking lot. A congregation of nuns made their quiet, candlelit procession to Shea. A large motorcycle group thundered through the stadium’s gates, eager to pitch in. Counselors, nurses, social workers, cooks, construction workers, taxi drivers, ham radio operators, ironworkers, high school students, ordinary citizens holding baskets of spare blankets and bottles of water—everyone, including the Mets themselves, convened at Shea Stadium to help. “Shea Turns Into Hope Diamond,” one headline read.
Our hope diamond.
This fugue lasted 10 days. Everyone blinked and somehow Shea was a baseball stadium again. On September 21, something resembling a baseball game was occurring on the field, and the 41,000 attendees in the seats—first responders, volunteers, people in mourning—were desperately trying to revert themselves back into fans. Was cheering simply improper? They wanted to root for the Mets as much as they wanted to heckle their archnemesis Atlanta Braves, but some force, some pall of uncertainty and apprehension, muted their attempts.
But then, in the bottom of the eighth inning, the intrigue of the baseball game finally began to take hold. Baseball—this beautiful game of baseball—tugged at everyone’s attention. The Mets were down two to one. A runner was on first with one out. A density of expectation was hanging in the air as the entire stadium stood on its feet. Mike Piazza stepped into the batter’s box.
Everyone knows what happened next. But how is it that everyone knew what would happen next? Why were the circumstances so perfect that failure, in a game of failure, could hardly be fathomed. Maybe—just maybe—hope, destiny, and physics conspired to answer the desperate pleas of the living and, in doing so, reminded them that they were still alive.
The crack of Piazza’s bat hitting the ball cued the euphoric eruption of Shea Stadium, and thus the greatest home run in history was launched into the sky. We were all fans again. Just fans cheering in our old dump of a stadium. We laughed, we cried, and we hugged each other so closely that our tears mixed together as they fell. For his part, Piazza—and it could be no one but him—rounded the bases with a stoic expression on his face, as though he understood that greater powers were at work here, and completing the ritual around the bases was the final solemn duty that these powers required of him.
As the team welcomed him back into the dugout, high-fiving him and slapping the top of his helmet, he managed to crack a smile. He stepped out of the dugout, tipped his cap to the fans, and blew a kiss into the Shea Stadium air. Perhaps, at that very moment, he realized that the home run he just hit, a small bright star that traveled through the vast darkness, reassured all of us that we, too—the stadium, the city, the nation—were safe at home, at last.
***
Alvin Malpaya is a lifelong baseball fan and has followed the New York Mets since 1986, when he was five years old. He lives in Ashland, Virginia, with his wife and five children.
