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.