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But why Shea? What is wrong with it?

For one thing (and I was a Shea lifer until I moved to California), a lot of the seating above the middle mezzanine level (my favourite seats there were always in the mezzanine either behind the plate or the dugouts) is very tenuous visibility around the sides of the outfield, and the upper deck beyond the dugouts leaves a lot of either right or left field obscured. For another thing, it is too cookie cutter with little subtle nuance. And, for a third, the lighting is horrid for a night game, to where even the pitchers - who usually thrive in the park (Shea was never really a hitter's park) - aren't always overjoyed by it. I don't want taxpayers footing the bill, but the Mets should have a better all-around ballpark, built strictly for baseball, to play in.

One of the great underexplored issues of the past three decades has been just how badly the cookie-cutter stadiums cut into baseball's attendances and ambiences - among other things, it was the cookie cutter RFK Stadium as well as the odious and incompetent Bob Short's ownership which sank the second edition of the Washington Senators in D.C. There was a market for that team. (The original Senators collapsed and moved to Minnesota because they learned too late how valuable building a farm system was, too late to recover their attendance, though the 1959 team began bringing people back to old Griffith Stadium.) And the Cincinnati Reds, once the classic Big Red Machine teams were shells of what they once were, practically had to pay people to come to Riverfront even when Pete Rose was the manager and the 1990 Reds, with the "Nasty Boys" bullpen, ran for the roses and took them. Believe it or not, baseball fans want the real ballpark atmosphere as it formerly was, not stadiums built predominantly for football where baseball fields got shoehorned in somehow. (Was it any accident that the Los Angeles Dodgers' attendance jumped when they moved out of the stopgap Los Angeles Coliseum, a.k.a. the world's largest outdoor insane asylum, and into Dodger Stadium?) Baseball fans want baseball parks. Not paid for by taxpayers, of course, but it was no accident that Camden Yards prompted a wave of retroparks. It sure took baseball's baronage a long enough time to wake up on that score.