The Mets are announcing plans today for their new-and-improved Shea Stadium. What they eventually call the place could be determined by who writes the biggest check.
Anyway, I remember my first game at Shea … it was new then, so it looked pretty good. The Mets, believe it or not, lit up Sandy Koufax. It was the only time I saw him pitch in person.
My most other memorable Shea moments were seeing the Rolling Stones twice and the 2000 World Series.
What are yours? I need your help on this, so if you would be kind enough to send me your favorite Shea moments, I’ll run them.
They don’t have to be the Mets, either. It could be the Jets, or Stones, or the Beatles _ I can’t believe they played for 20 minutes _ or maybe it was seeing Seinfeld in the stands.
Let me know. Thanks. John
3 Comments
In the mid 1980’s my teenaged niece Hilary and I went to several Mets games a year. We saw them all – Gooden, Strawberry, Darling, Hernandez, Mookie et.al. on the Davey Johnson-coached Mets. The most memorable moment for us was when Dwight Gooden hit his first major league home-run. I don’t remember the date, but I do remember that we could see the big grin on his face from our third tier ‘cheap seats’and the applause from the sell-out crowd was deafening.
Hi Joan …
You, like a lot of people, were lucky to see Gooden in his prime and that team. For a few years, that group was a powerhouse.
John
I was too young to really appreciate the Mets of the 1980s. I can look at the boxscores on retrosheet and recall some games. So I’d have to go with the late 1990s under Bobby Valentine. One game was 9/13/97 a Saturday afternoon game against the Expos. The Mets were down 6-0 after getting nothing off Dustan Hermanson. But they scored six in the ninth as Carl Everett hit a grand slam and then won it in the 13th on Bernard Gilkey’s three-run home run. Of course, you can’t discuss memorable games of the Valentine years without mentioning the clincher in the 1999 NLDS vs. Arizona. When Todd Pratt hit that home run, I intially thought Steve Finley was going to get it. But when it went out, you could feel the stadium shaking. I wasn’t at the Robin Ventura grand slam single game later that year but that would certainly qualify.
Larry