What Mets fans talk about when not talking about the actual games.
Here’s a fun story for a slow day….Strawberry says ’86 Mets  beat ’09 Yankees.
Doc would’ve destroyed them.
Doc was never really lights out in the post-season, but I think it’s fairly obvious to any rational human that the ’86ers would’ve have won the series.
Regular readers know this, but for Mets Police newbies – I don’t hate the Yankees. Â Sorry. Â There are 6 games a year and one World Series every half-century but other than that they don’t affect the Mets’s season. Â It’s New York and I like baseball…I also like old baseball stadiums, so the below make me sad.
There’s a website Demolition of Yankee Stadium that has lots of photos.
The Daily News has an article today about the demolition.
WCBS880.com regularly updates their photo galleries.
In case you’re wondering, when I reviewed New Fake Yankee Stadium I compared it to The Phantom Menace (that’s the awful Star Wars movie with the kid.) Â They did get some things right, like the Yankees museum, but overall it’s a tale of two stadiums. Â If you are rich and can sit down low you can pretend you’re in the old place. Â If you’re normal like us and sit upstairs, it’s a windy unfinished cement pond.
Wow. 26,212 at the Yankees home opener at….wait for it…Shea! Â 1975 must have been a miserable time for Yankee fans…at the end of one of the longest droughts in team history, playing in the home of the Mets. Â Things would change drastically in ’76. Â Here’s SI from April 1975.
Both Bonds and Hunter were generously received by the crowd of 26,212 that paid to attend the home opener in Shea Stadium on a crisp afternoon. New York Governor Hugh Carey was there, and so were Mayor Abe Beame and former Mayor John Lindsay, as well as Toots Shor, Robert Merrill, Roy Cohn, some antiwar protesters and a white chicken that appeared on the screen behind home plate in the eighth inning, provoking an outbreak of bad gags and labored symbolism in the press box. Bonds was cheered by the fans as he emerged from the dugout, and Hunter received a standing ovation as he jogged in from the right-field bullpen.
Read the full article here:
With Catfish Hunter and Bobby Bonds, New York had a – 04.21.75 – SI Vault
A preview of the 1970 season….look how down in the dumps the Yankees were. Amazin’
In 1969 the Yankees drew 1,067,996 spectators, the smallest number since World War II, and more than a million fewer than the Mets. Even in their last “pennant-winning year, 1964, the Yanks were outdrawn by the Mets, and since their descent into the second division they have hardly been noticed. With the departure of Mickey Mantle a year ago, the club of Ruth, Gehrig and DiMaggio was left with only one outstanding player. Pitcher Mel Stottlemyre, who has won 20 games in three of the last five seasons but who has about as much glamour as Harold Stassen.
Poor performance and the absence of shiny names has badly eroded fan appeal. The so-called “limousine” crowd, the New York businessmen who sit in corporation boxes and cheer as if they are afraid of dripping mustard on their $20 ties, was once a basic reason why the Yankees were considered a cold, distant plutocracy by many average fans, but they bought tickets. Not so long ago the Yankees used to be inundated each year with requests for season boxes. Now the demand has gone down drastically as the limousines head for Shea Stadium. Something similar has happened with tourists in New York. Fewer out-of-towners are coming to cheer for the visiting team against the hated Yankees. “It used to sound as though there were more people cheering against us than for us,” says Yankee Vice-President Bob Fishel. “That doesn’t happen anymore.”
The decline of the Yankees has not been solely a result of the Mets’ presence, even though there is a lingering feeling that New York is essentially a National League city. Fishel, who has been the Yankees’ public-relations director since 1954, blames it on a lack of aggressiveness. “We missed the boat between 1958 and 1961 when we had the city to ourselves,” he says. “We did not try hard enough to attract the kids who had been fans of the teams that had left New York.
The Yanks Are Coming, Or So They Hope – 04.06.70 – SI Vault
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July 1973, the Yankees are the talk of the town! How do you think things will turn out for the ’73 Yanks?
It was like old times. The Yankees were in first place, seemingly out from beneath the large rock that had obscured them since 1964. In the bars and supermarkets, on the trains and subways of the nation’s largest city, people were talking more about the Yankees than about the Mets. That hadn’t happened in â€well, it had almost never happened. Pitching Coach Jim Turner, who has spent 51 consecutive years in a pro baseball uniform, more than any man in history, said, “It’s so good to walk out there before a game and see so many people with notebooks, microphones and cameras interested in us again.”
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The Yankees have a new pride in themselves this season, a sense of no longer being the No. 2 team in a city that in recent years endured them primarily by stifling yawns. For a long time during their dark ages the biggest news they made was when they fired an announcer, but not now. The Yankees of 1973 are interesting in themselves. Playing in poor or threatening weather over much of last week, they drew 148,084 people to a Stadium that has received reams of bad publicityâ€muggings, poor parking, etc.â€and is about to be renovated.
Imagine that, a fun Mets club and the Yankees playing in a crappy ballpark. The Mets outdrawing the Yanks by a million fans. That could never happen, could it?
After years of drab mediocrity, the once lordly Yankees – 07.02.73 – SI Vault
