Shea Stadium Arcanium, and Other Topics

Hey team, sorry for the lack of posts this week, but the Glass Man came down with something fierce over the weekend and I've been out of commission the past few days.

Sick days are usually ripe opportunities for blog posts. You don't have work so there's plenty of time to find inspiration, and there's all the time in the world to write. That's usually how it works.

This time it was something else entirely. The flu that's been ravaging my group finally came calling, and I've been reeling ever since.

As I write this on Wednesday afternoon, my condition is much improved. In the preceding days I haven't written, but it's not been for want of good material. Here are quick hits on some of hte major recent stories.

They called Shea Stadium the ballpark of dreams... and it was.

Watching that video of the two people inside the cadaver that is Shea Stadium was like watching the first 30 minutes of "Titanic", when the deep sea diving crew is explored the crumbled, rotting old hallways and rooms of the once proud ship.

Its stairways, seats, and caverns now all but a heaping mass of gray rubble, its Mets logos reduced to competing for attention with spray painted tags, Shea is a ghostly shadow of its former self.

In those first 30 minutes of the movie, as the camera zooms through the sunken ship, the scenes are interspersed with footage from those same areas in their vibrant heyday. I half expected such a juxtaposition in the video the other day, but in the end my mind's eye had to suffice.

They said Shea was at best outdated, at worst a flat-out dump. The appeal of the place was always a bit arcane; the more conversations you had with non-Mets fans, the more it became clear that Shea-bashing wasn't just a media conspiracy.

Either way, as someone who loved the old place, it was sad to see its gutted remains. Lot of happy memories in that place. Hell, even the not-so-happy memories are happy. Game 7 in 2006? Game 162 in 2008? Game [insert number here] in 2002-2004? As depressing as those games were, there's nowhere else I'd have rather been.

The good news, if I'm realistic about it, is that the same thing that made those games great at Shea -- the team on the field, the family, the friends -- all that will carry over across the street.

A-Roid

It would be very Y2K of me to bash the shit out of A-Rod, but you know what, when it comes to steroids, I'm spent.

Steroids were a fact of baseball for a really long time, and chances are that any of the big money, big number guys in that era used steroids. We now know the list of names includes Alex Rodriguez, but he's not going to be the last big star we hear about.

Someday when he's the home run king or RBI leader or whatever else he might achieve, we will need to look at his numbers through the prism of steroids. But for now, what does this revelation mean for us? We were booing the shit out of the guy to begin with. Did any of us really need another reason to hate A-Rod?

I sure didn't. To me, A-Rod's single greatest baseball sanctity-defying decision wasn't when he chose to use steroids. To me it was when he decided not to play for the team he rooted for growing up because they wouldn't give him a private jet or another ivory back scratcher.

That's right, all these years later I'm still taking Steve Phillips' word for it.

Roberto Alomar... hello!

Dude... what!?! Full blown AIDS? Raped by two Mexican men? Sandy Alomar doesn't know shit about it? Is this life or a Larry Clark movie?

Curiouser and curiouser.

- A.F.O.M.G.