I definitely miss the old rivalry with Pond Scum. In 1987... my parents bought us tickets for a game at Busch on the last Saturday of the regular season. It was set to be a classic tilt for a spot in the playoffs... until the Cards clinched earlier. We were then treated to a Mets pasting of Cards minor leaguers. It was still sweet to see the looks on the Mets faces as they realized they wouldn't win back to back titles.
Part of the fun back then was rooting against Cardinal killers like Ho Jo and Keith Hernandez. Now I can't think of one Met that I actually dislike.

Just found your site. Quality. I'm going to add a link to you on my blogroll.

As a Met fan who fondly remembers the rivarly born in the '80s, I too miss it. I was at a bar in NYC on Sunday afternoon trying to explain to the other patrons that realignment and interleague play had destroyed one of the better rivalries in the National League. No one else seemed to remember it so just for a second I thought I was nuts...nice to see you guys hated us too :)

It's a shame we only get six games a year.

I've always had a soft spot for Shea, I spent many an afternoon there when cutting class junior and senior year of high school.

When my brother was 10, the Little League team he was assigned to was the Mets -- complete with blue pinstripe uniforms. He (and my father) were horrified. I remember it feeling very surreal to watch them play the "Cardinals" and yell "Let's Go Mets!"

At least he wasn't on the Cubs. I think he might have refused to play.

We may be pond scum, but at least we went all the way. *ahem*1985*ahem*

Oh, and thanks for Vince Coleman guys. That was swell.

About Shea:

When they were scouting locations in 1960, they visited flushing meadows during the winter and the flight patterns out of LaGuardia are actually 45 degrees off from what they are in the summer months. So when they made the decision to build in that spot, there actually were no planes overhead. I don't think that mitigates the blunder much, but it at least makes sense of it.

What is inexcusable, is facing the stadium East both away from the water of Huntington bay, and more importantly, away from the skyline; yes the very same skyline that makes up the logo, you can't see. Now when you look out from the stands, you see... the parking lot and the projects. Terrific. Ill conceived and poorly executed.

This orientation also means the prevalent winds, coming in off the water from the north, come straight in from left field. That coupled with the open design, you get a windshear accross the deep outfield that causes fly balls to just die over the warning track... thus making Shea the pitcher's park it is today.

Be all that as it may - i've been to Fenway, Yankee, Veteran's, Citizen's Bank, Oakland, Candlestick and RFK ballparks... and i've concluded something very important. Yankee fans are obnoxious everywhere.

I'd always heard announcers on TV mention the proximity of the planes, but you have to be there to experience it fully. At times, it completely drowned out the crowd and game noise. I didn't think it was a terrible aspect in the whole scheme of things.

When Busch and RFK go down, Shea will be pretty unique -- the last (sort of) of the '60s or '70s era parks that hasn't been drastically changed (i.e. Anaheim).

A friend of mine and I were recently comparing our lists of Top Ten Most-Hated Baseball Players. The list quickly became clogged with '86 Mets, so we agreed to lump the entire team together as a single line item, thereby freeing up the other nine spots for guys like George Brett and Don Denkinger and Carlos Zambrano.

It's funny though -- I still hate the Mets, but it's more of an philosphical thing now. I hate the Mets organization more than any specific Met player. That '86 team though ... yeah, I hated the players. A lot.

As a scrawny HS kid, I attended many, many Cards-Mets games in the mid-80's at Shea, including (probably) September 1987. I always came in my Cards hat and shirt. Contrary to what you hear, though, I almost never had a problem with any Mets fans. Oh, they'd trash talk sure, but it was always in a good-natured way... I'd trash talk back, we'd all have some laughs. I found the fans there to be mostly very knowledgable and somewhat eccentric. Maybe once or twice I sat near a drunk frat-boy type who was acting like an ass, making me mildly nervous. But the atmosphere was mostly very positive. Don't get me wrong, though, I hated the Mets like all good Cardinals fans... Backman/Dykstra/Carter/Foster/Santana/Strawman/Teufel etc etc... couldn't stand 'em.

Now, the place that really made me nervous during that time was Yankee Stadium. Anyone not rooting for the yanks was in serious trouble--I saw fistfights, nasty verbal exchanges, beer dousings, people thrown out of the stadium...yikes.

As a Met fan I completely agree that the biggest disaster out of realignment was the destruction of the Mets-Cardinals rivalry. I remember being at my cousin's wedding in 1987 when the Cardinals were at Shea leading by, I believe, 1 1/2 games in the standings - this was the series where Terry Pendleton homered off of Roger McDowell in extra innings to more or less seal the deal.

Anyway, the one memory I have of my cousin's wedding was having the kids run back and forth to the car to check the score on the radio, at which point the bandleader would give an update.

Boiler, obviously we have different ideas about Shea, but our differences are most extreme when it comes to the airplanes. I've seen baseball games in 50 parks, and my experience with the airplanes at Shea was so awful that Shea is easily my least favorite. Maybe that will change when I visit Fenway.

Thanks for the explanation, Mets Fan. Sounds a lot like the Candlestick story (the folks who decided on the SF Giants stadium only saw the place during the day).

I hated the hell out of those Mets teams of the 80's, but I'll give the devil his due. They did put together a badass group of thugs, cheats, prima donnas, assholes and several great ball players. I do miss the heated rivalry with the dreaded Pond Scum, better than any back yard brawl with the always under achieving Cubbies that we have nowadays.

Regarding the planes, I certainly didn't think it was a great thing to have, since like I said, it would completely drown everything out every once in a while -- but most of the time, if I was focused on the game, I didn't have a problem tuning it out. That, and the fact that it's not exactly a problem with any kind of solution, made me a little more tolerant of it than perhaps others are. Maybe I was there on good days for the flight patterns, too. Who knows.