Trouble Sprouts For The Yankees

This winter, to drum up interest in the team, the Yankee brass made a series of one-day stands throughout New York state and New England. Berra was along, and so were Houk, Whitey Ford, Elston Howard and Clete Boyer. Everywhere the Yankees went their concern over the Mets stood out like a black eye. At one banquet in Connecticut, Toastmaster Howard Cosell, who was formerly associated with the Mets, said: "I have been authorized to say it's great to be back in the big leagues." Introducing Jimmy Piersall, a former Met, Cosell said: "I want you to meet the real No. 37 [ Stengel's number]. Jimmy," Cosell added, "knows how the other half lives."

Such dull darts have only made more friends for the Mets. "It's curious," said Actor Horace McMahon recently. "When you talk about the Mets the laughter that comes back from an audience is something like the warm kind of laughter that comes after you tell stories about little children. It's a nice sound."

However frantically the Yankees work at creating that same warm image, it is doubtful if they can stem the flow of New York fans to the Mets. At least not this year. For this year the Mets will be playing not in the Polo Grounds but in Shea Stadium, their brand-new $21 million jewel in Flushing, Queens. New stadiums mean increased attendance, as proved in recent years by the Dodgers, Angels, Giants and Senators. People are as curious to see a new stadium as they are a friend's new house.

By moving to Queens, the Mets have landed smack in the eye of a population hurricane. Queens itself is the fastest-growing of New York's five boroughs, yet it is just a subway ride away from Manhattan. Nassau County (pop. 1,394,000) is only a short drive in the other direction.

Already signs of warmth for the Mets have sprung up around Queens. One Charlie Rivolta, manager of a small hotel five minutes from Shea Stadium, stands ready to tape every Met radio broadcast and then eliminate the losses. "The Mets will never lose in my place," Charlie says. "If a guy feels low after they lose he can come in my place and say, 'Hey, Charlie, lemme hear 'em win one,' and I'll put them on winning."

Shea Stadium has 55,000 seats, and each one of them has an unobstructed view of the field, in sharp contrast to Yankee Stadium, with its broad girders and peculiar angles that in some places eliminate from sight wide areas of the playing field. The five levels of the new stadium are colored green, blue, orange, yellow and white. Tickets and escalators—yes, escalators—will be colored to correspond with the proper levels, so that no fan should lose his way.

Like most new stadiums, Shea has a special club for season box holders, equipped with a pair of fancy bars and a restaurant. There is also an extra-special hangout called the Combo Room with its own bar and escalator. But of more interest to the average Met fan will be the series of attractive concession stands serving decent food instead of the tired fare that New York sports crowds have been held captive by for so long.

Big, expensive scoreboards are nothing new these days, but Shea Stadium's is something else again. On top of it is an 18-by-24-foot screen that could show movies when rain delays a game. It could also replay on video tape the home run that was hit just seconds before, plus a closeup view of the man who hit it.

If the new stadium does not lure people out to watch the Mets play, the little place on the other side of the tracks will. The tracks in this case belong to the Long Island Railroad, and right on the other side is the New York World's Fair. Both the fair and the baseball season are scheduled to open in April, a happy coincidence. Say what you will about the fair—it has been called "the most horrendous hodgepodge of jukebox architecture ever assembled"—it will draw people, about 70 million of them in two years. On some days there will be as many as 500,000 at the fair, all of them looking for a place to sit down. And there, just across the railroad tracks, will be Shea Stadium, with its 55,000 seats and a major league ball game starting in just an hour. (Statistics will probably not be kept on how many people wander into the stadium thinking it is a part of the General Motors exhibit.)

Of course, the World's Fair could turn out to be a Frankenstein for the Mets. People mean traffic and, although $125 million has been spent to improve roads close to the fair, Traffic Commissioner Henry Barnes has already made this cheery prediction: "I suspect the first man to start home from the fair in 1964 may well pass the last man on his way to the fair in 1965." The fear of getting caught up in a world champion traffic jam may discourage some potential Met fans from attending attractive games. Memorial Day 1964 will be a good test case. It should be a 500,000-tourist day at the fair, and Aqueduct racetrack just down the street will draw another 70,000. There will be the usual Memorial Day rush to the beaches, plus normal amusement-park, golf-course and airport traffic. That afternoon, in the midst of what may well be the greatest automotive logjam in history, the Mets will play the San Francisco Giants.