The neighborhood in the Citi

Beyond the obvious reasons of the on-field product producing soul-crushing five-game losing streaks, three-strikeout performances by their franchise third baseman, and expensive tickets made more expensive by surcharges and fees, I wonder if the problem of declining attendance at Citi Field is ingrained in some sort of original sin that was masked by lovable Shea Stadium, but has been laid bare by the not-quite-yet-beloved new Mets park.

Shea was indeed lovable, in some ways in spite of itself. Author and professor Dana Brand wrote a book that fondly remembered The Last Days of Shea. But as most Mets fans would admit, and as even Dr. Brand put it: “The line you often hear from Mets fans is ‘It’s a dump, but it’s our dump.’” It’s one of the many things I genuinely love about Mets fans over Yankee fans. Mets fans lost their oft-derided stadium (even oft-derided among themselves), and they still mourn it. It was built on land that inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s forsaken Valley of Ashes in The Great Gatsby. Yankee fans, meanwhile, lost a palace with an unmatched history of championships (albeit one with a ’70s disco make-over) and replaced it with a gray gaudy mall — and Yankee fans hardly shed a tear for the old place (except when bidding up pieces of it at Steiner’s Sports). There’s no similar poetry devoted to the final days of old Yankee Stadium, not in the same vein as in the book by Brand, who obviously speaks for a lot of Mets fans. It’s like the Yankees brass (with the help of The City) plowed over a community park to drop an exclusive baseball version of the Palisades Center into the South Bronx, and Yankee fans loved them for it, even if that mall hardly loves them back.

That said, could the Mets’ attendance problem lie in the real estate agent’s refrain of Location, Location, Location?

Michael Shapiro touched on Flushing in the epilogue of his 2003 book about the last days of the Dodgers era in Brooklyn, The Last Good Season. Shapiro’s book was cited recently in a New York Times-led discussion about Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs in response to a question about Moses and the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn.

Shapiro writes:

“There is talk about tearing the place (Shea) down and building a replacement in the parking lot. The new park would be called Jackie Robinson Stadium. It would, if it is ever built, have a retractable roof but otherwise look like a replica of Ebbets Field.”

OK, so prescience isn’t perfect for authors — A roof? Um, no (thank God). And Jackie Robinson got the rotunda, but not the naming rights to the entire place. But Shapiro was close enough (the book was published three years before they broke ground on the new field). He continues:

“The stadium, however, would sit at the confluence of highways, not city streets, which runs contrary to the idea of what Ebbets Field represented. It is an idea that other planners have incorporated in the new parks in Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Seattle, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, San Francisco, and other cities that had built and then torn down parks like Shea. It is the reason Chicagoans fill Wrigley Field even when the Cubs are dreadful. Ebbets Field was a city ballpark, a ballpark to which people could walk. They could pass it on their way to work, and hear the noise from inside when they were heading someplace else. It sat in the middle of a place where many people lived.”

RIP Paul Newman — ‘Let ‘em know you’re there!’

The Baby is not nearly old enough to watch Slap Shot — not even a cleaned-up-for-commercial-TV version — but when he is, we’ll enjoy it together, especially the memorable performance of the incomparable Paul Newman, who died yesterday.

For several years I skated on a beer-league hockey team, and quoting Reg Dunlop and the Hansons was practically required, maybe even more so than having a decent shot. In fact, I was practically the worst player on the team — I had a shit shot and my skating was subpar — but I could more than hold my own in quoting the best sports movie of all time in the locker room or (mostly) on the bench. Ironically, about four days ago, I couldn’t get “They brought their fucking toys with them!” out of my head.

Newman could skate for real, and he made Reg seem believable enough to be a hockey player that could wear a fur coat and still rip up the arena organist’s sheet music and rail, “Don’t ever play ‘Lady of Spain’ again!”

So here’s to you, Mr. Newman, and to Reg Dunlop and Cool Hand Luke and Fast Eddie and all your other memorable roles. Read Terry Frei’s tribute, and also Deadspin’s (which rightly tags him “racing enthusiast, actor, badass”), and Joe Posnanski’s, too (who says he “might have been the best sports actor in the history of Hollywood”), then raise a glass of Canadian Club and water and say a toast to old-time hockey, “like when I got started, you know?”