Sponsored by Shea Stadium Remembered

One day after turning 31, and four months removed from a blockbuster deal with Montreal, perennial All-Star catcher Gary Carter debuts in orange and blue racing stripes at Shea Stadium. After their first winning record since 1976, the 90-win Mets went all in with Carter, shipping out three of their top prospects plus fan favorite Hubie Brooks. Carter, whose salary became too big for Montreal, led the NL with 106 RBI and batted a career-best .294 in 1984. With young pitchers like Ron Darling, Sid Fernandez, and Dwight Gooden, making his first Opening Day start in 1985, the Mets needed a stellar signal-caller to guide the young staff; the lineup also needed a solid right-handed bat to help balance lefties Keith Hernandez and Darryl Strawberry. They fill both holes with The Kid.

The Cardinals drill Carter twice in his debut, including in his first Mets plate appearance. The Mets score twice in the first against Joaquin Andujar and still hold a one-run lead going in the ninth. Doug Sisk, coming off 15 saves and a 2.09 ERA in ’84, walks in the tying run with two outs. The game goes extra innings on a frigid afternoon with howling winds.

With one out in the 10th, Carter steps up against former Met Neil Allen, sent to the Cardinals another blockbuster deal (for Hernandez). Carter rips a line drive that clears the fence and Shea is instantly in love with Carter. The feeling is mutual.

Many people would choose the April 8, 1969 opener against the Montreal Expos—for that expansion franchise’s first-ever game and the start of the ’69 Miracle Mets season. But that’s the pick everyone else will make in this 50th anniversary year of the ’69 championship team. If you’re going to pick a game the Mets lost, you might as well pick the final Shea opener. After the humiliating way the 2007 season ended, of course the Mets opened the 2008 home schedule against the Phillies, who rubbed out the Mets’ lead and rubbed their faces in it, too. But the takeaway from the 5-2 defeat at Shea’s last opener was the unveiling of the name “Shea” in left field, next to the retired numbers: 37, 14, 41, and 42. It was a classy way to continue to honor William Shea, the lawyer who coerced the Mets into existence. That name would live on in the new ballpark, which was rising right behind Shea. The final year at Shea would not be easily forgotten.

Tom Seaver walks from the dugout to the mound at Shea Stadium, and the crowd roars as if they have been holding it in for five-and-half years. They have. The ballpark—prematurely aged, though not yet 20 from a rough decade for the city and team roars—hints that its future won’t always be synonymous with bad baseball. Seaver doesn’t get the win—Doug Sisk does—as the Mets scratch out a couple of runs to blank Steve Carlton and the Phillies, 2-0. In all the Opening Days I’ve attended over the years, each one is a little special, but this one was worth all the others put together. And worth skipping high school to see.

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Opening Day at Citi Field in 2019 wound up being a dud on the field, but it was a great time nonetheless. Midway through the game I was thinking about the remote chance that we could see a double no-hitter—like old pals Hippo Vaughn and Fred Toney at pre-Wrigley Weeghman Park in 1917. One hundred and two years later, the duel didn’t end with that kind of drama, but it nonetheless was also a disappointment for the home crowd.

For Opening Day 2019 I sat with The 7 Line and brought my buddy Jim Humiston to his first game in Flushing since the George Bamberger regime. Never a dull moment with T7L and—with 7 Line founder Darren Meehan’s blessing—I handed out a couple of hundred bookmarks to the hard-core crew and even tantalized several people with the trivia question to win a book: Who was the first Met to get a hit at Shea in its first game in 1964. I received a lot of very educated guesses—Ron Hunt was the most popular wrong answer. The correct answer: Tim Harkness, who singled an inning after Pirates legend Willie Stargell christened Shea with a home run. If none of the veteran diehards I met could come up with it, the question must’ve been too difficult. When my new supply of Shea Stadium Remembered comes in next week, I will do a contest via Social Media and we’ll give out a copy to the right answer of another Shea-related question.

Based on the exponential way that Shea Stadium Remembered rocketed through the Amazon ratings since Opening Day, I’ll credit the people who took the bookmark and said they were buying the book. If every person who said they would buy a book actually bought a new copy, we’d crack Amazon’s top 100.

Drew Bly, the photographer I met at the New York Public Library Grand Central branch event was in front of me in the line for pizza. He and his girlfriend recognized me and we even had a photo shoot on Shea Bridge amid the madness of fans crammed on every inch of it.

Celebrity sighting: Jim Breuer, Mets fan and comedian extraordinaire, rode a couple of escalators with us underground as we made our way back to Grand Central after the game. We had a great talk about the Mets and I even still had one more pitch in me to hand him a bookmark and the promise to send him books for his travels, if he desires. As usual, I didn’t think to have him stop and take a photo while holding the book. I let him dash back into the wilds of New York, disappearing into the subway canopy.

David Cone wins his first game as a Met in 11 years on this date in 2003. Coney, stolen from the Royals and later sent wandering the American League—winning a Cy Young for the Royals and a world championship for the Yankees (maybe there were more, it’s late). Coney, at 40 and with many road miles, throws the kitchen sink at the Montreal Expos and records five shutout innings and a 4-0 win on a windswept night at Shea. It is his 194th and final major league win. He’ll exit the mound at Shea a few weeks later for the last time as a pitcher.

This year I am trying something different. My literary agent suggested I find an additional outlet for my writing and expand my reach. So this year I am writing for Rising Apple. Here is a link to my first piece about Mets pitching over the past dozen years. You knew the Mets had done a good job with the homegrown pitchers, but did you know they do it better than almost anybody—at least as far as appearances, innings, and the number of homegrown hurlers?

I have been writing professionally since high school, mostly about sports. And even though I have had this website for more than decade—and even sold media for another publication for a couple of years—a lot of the technical stuff and jargon is new to me as a user. It’s different and it’s interesting getting input from editorial staff without waiting weeks, as is often the case in book publishing.

I’ll still post at metsilverman.com. I love hearing from people who like the books and enjoy talking about the Mets. I also plan to continue This Day at Shea this season on metsilverman.com, as the Mets—and my schedule—warrant. (Look for one tomorrow.)

As recently as 2017 I wasn’t sure I was continue with the writing or the site or any of it. But Lyons Press asked me to do the Shea book and I remembered how much I liked writing. I’ve been doing it too long to just give it up cold turkey. I’m back to my pack a day Mets habit. Looks like I picked the wrong week to give up sniffing glue.  

The 1996 Mets were going to have the best young pitching in the game, they were going to have a reliable bullpen, they were going to have a clutch lineup, they were going to have spectacular fielding, they were going to win back New York. The 1996 Mets had all of these things. For one day.

The Mets had played as well as anyone the last two months of ’95, but a brutal first three months in the strike-shortened season kept the club from contending. And in 1996 Generation K was going to light up Shea!

Yet it was veteran Bobby Jones who took the hill for the opener against the Cardinals at Shea. He was pummeled. As the rain came down, so did the Cardinals hits. Old pal Willie McGee’s three-run homer sent Jones to the showers in the fourth trailing, 6-0.

But those 1996 Mets could hit. Home runs by Todd Hundley and new guy Bernard Gilkey cut the lead in half. When the Cardinals threatened to blow it open in the seventh, rookie shortstop Rey Ordenez took a relay throw in short left and threw from his knees on the soggy grass to get Royce Clayton at the plate. I was sitting about 50 feet awayin left field, my first opener with tickets down low. It was the most remarkable play I saw an infielder make at Shea, and I saw a lot of magic moments from Rey Rey—with his glove.

In the bottom of the inning Chris Jones singled in a run, and Lance Johnson had the first of a club-record 227 hits to make it a one-run game. Gilkey’s singled tied the game and a short fly scored the speedy Johnson to give the Mets the lead. It was a thrilling day at the park and seemed to portend great things to come for Dallas Green’s Mets. But that was the highlight. The pitching fell apart—young starters and the bullpen—while the field was rotten. Rookie Rey Rey was raw raw with 27 errors. Though the ’96 team hit like few Mets clubs before it, they were incapable of stopping the opponent;s offense. But what a day in the rain at Shea. It was an April Fool on all of us—it wound up being the Yankees’ year under former Mets skipper Joe Torre. The Mets would have to wait for a manager who could assemble a club from spare parts.