Stadium Opened: 1964
Team: New York Mets
1st Visit: 4/24/05
Last Visit: 5/31/08
# Games: 2
Food: 5/10
Stadium: 3/10
It's hard to overstate how awful Shea Stadium was. I often wondered why, when I was a kid, my grandfather ran bus trips to the other 2 close-by MLB stadiums (Phils and Yankees), but never to the Mets' home. In 2005, I finally found out why. Shea Stadium was a non-descript concrete multi-use stadium, like many parks of the 1970's, but somehow it was worse than the others I saw in Philly and DC.
The saving grace, of course, was going to New York City. Our first trip was a spur-of-the-moment trip after a wedding in New Jersey. It can also be considered Staci's and my first baseball road trip- and the seeds of what would become a big part of our travel and relationship. But that's where the good feelings end- there was zero personality, and if you weren't lucky enough to sit in the expensive seats, you were probably going to have some of your view obstructed. We sat in the lower level and couldn't see any of left field. The scoreboard was severely outdated. The food was okay, but certainly not worth the price. I can say that the parking, while expensive, was close by the stadium, which is not always the case in the inner city ballparks.
The horror finally ended in 2009 when the Mets moved into Citi Field, a state of the art facility built right next door to Shea (more on that later). The irony was that Citi Field was built to resemble and honor the Brooklyn Dodgers' Ebbets Field. If the Dodgers had stayed in New York, there would have been no Mets, and Brooklyn would have moved to Queens, and into..Shea Stadium.
