Two in one week from Scott Turner of Red Hook's Rocky's Sullivan's. This week I feel like OTBKB has a cool sports reporter: A-Rod yesterday, Shea today. Love it.

Greetings Pub Quiz Movie Snack Concealers…

Today  went out to Shea Stadium to see her last remaining structure come down — the ramps leading up to what was Section 5.  I got there too late…two hours too late.

That's okay.  Unlike most old stadiums in this country, the city's Department of Buildings
prohibition on massive implosions meant there'd be no
dead-stadium-walking ritual, no last sunset, no last moon, no last
dawn.  They'd bring it down one piece at a time.

Then, this last little bit was left standing for one more night.

The last night that wasn't supposed to be.

In his early days, Elvis Presley had a trick.  He'd file his
low E-string — the heaviest on a six-string guitar — down to within a
moment of breaking.  Then, it would go like this:

"LADIES AND GENTLEMEN…ELVIS PRESLEY!!!"…Elvis and his band (Scotty Moore, Bill Black and D.J. Fontana)
walk out on stage…the first number kicks in, the lights come up full
blast, and Elvis pounds away at his guitar…THWACK!!!  The low
E-string breaks, flies up into the spotlight, and looks like a killer's
scimitar dancing wildly to the first song's fury.

That's what the Shea demolition team did with the Section 5 ramps. 
They cut through 90 percent of the support beams and stepped aside.  A
last little tug sent the old gal's final piece slowly tilting toward
the new ballpark.  THWACK!!!  It hit the ground where the field level
seats used to be and, like any good implosion, kicked up a cloud of
dust that briefly obscured its still, lifeless hulk.

Except
there were no bright lights, no explosion of change in the air, none of
a new era's earthshaking adrenaline.  Back in 1964, Shea was bright
lights/big city.  Now, 45 years later, she's left us like an elderly
aunt forced to fade away in an old folks home.

When I got there, four excavators, looking like rusty yellow
dinosaurs, were sorting through the wreckage — blue beams over here,
concrete chunks over there.  You could see that through the winter
gloom as the 7 train pulled into the Willets Point/No Longer Shea Stadium
station.  We stepped off the train and were hit with a weird, spectral
snow squall.  I walked through the snow's horizontal assault until I
reached the closest point on the construction zone perimeter.  The snow
turned to a nasty, spitting rain.  You couldn't ask for more funereal
weather.

In that snow-turned-to-rain, I recounted all the reasons I
loved Shea — all of which I've told you about before.  A new one
formed as I took a few photos through the perimeter's chain-link
fence:  Shea was one of the last major-league ballparks to offer
freedom to watch a game the way we wanted to.

All the new fake-nostaliga ballparks — Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Colorado, San Diego, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Seattle, Houston, Arlington TX, Washington DC, Atlanta, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Arizona, Baltimore, and by everything their respective hype machines have disgorged, the stadiums for the Yankees and the Mets —
have comodified every moment, every angle, every bite to eat and
thought to cheer.  Mallparks, they are — a carefully-sequenced
progression of consultant-crafted contrivances.

Shea was a big ugly lug who mostly just let you watch the game.  In her last years, the Wilpons, having done for baseball owners what Ashlee Simpson did for rock'n'roll singers, began
a regimen of insufferable music, inane promotions, increasingly
blinding billboards and scoreboards and travesties like the Pepsi Party Patrol. 
Their message was clear — "well, yeah, there's a baseball game going
on — but don't let it distract you from the other stuff."

But for most of her life, Shea was big and open and mellow enough
to let us cheer wildly when the Mets did well, shake our heads when
they didn't (a far more common occurrence), and sit and enjoy a game on
our own terms.

This new place with its cheap-plastic stim-package-aided name won't
leave us a moment on our own.  It'll be like Epcot Center, where
"picture spots" tell you where to take a photo.

To enhance your Citi Field baseball experience, cheer when we tell you to.

Baseball
will survive, of course.  In the Spring of 2009, baseball fans examine
the state of the game in their hands: steroids, soulless pod-people
players, blood-from-stone owners, reporters terrified at losing their
clubhouse credentials (the Daily News' Michael O'Keeffe
is one of the few brave exceptions), tone-deafness of the baseball
establishment, hundred-dollar tickets and ten-dollar beers, and
contrived new venues ("a five-star hotel with a ballfield in the
middle" is how the Yankees see their new stadium).

Now would be a good time to watch the game elsewhere.  Prospect Park, minor-league parks far from the nation's big cities, hell, church picnics even.

Spring is coming.  The first sure sign isn't even baseball or the weather, but this Sunday's Academy Awards.  Easter, baseball and those first consistent 60 degree days.

Spring this year leaves New Yorkers just a smidgen less free
to ply their own emotions.  At least those who spend a few hours every
so often at Mets and Yankees.games.  We're all fighting our way through
this new Great Depression.  On that count, we're left to our own devices.

But out at the ballpark, a place where we've earned the occasional carefree summer afternoon or evening, that's where we we've lost the chance to go our own way.

For our own good, so say the Wilpons and the Steinbrenners.