The Stadium Watch Never Stops: Today, Back to Queens
Clyde Haberman gets some prime Page One real estate in today's Times to consider a weighty question heretofore unexamined amid New York's recent stadiapalooza: Whither the name "Shea"?
"I don't think there has been any discussion on this," said a team spokesman, Owen Bochner.
Actually, City Hall says, there have been preliminary talks. The team has an option to sell or lease naming rights to the new stadium, said Edward Skyler, Mr. Bloomberg's communications director. "We don't know if the Mets will sell the naming rights," Mr. Skyler said, "but we assume they will."
Selling out Shea? No! New York can't lose its tribute to, um — well, OK, who was Shea, anyway?
Haberman reminds us that William A. Shea was a prominent New York lawyer and power broker, instrumental in bringing National League ball back to the city after the departures of the Dodgers and the Giants, and he checks in with the late Shea's descendents, who, shockingly, don't think the stadium's name should change.
Would they want things to stay as they are? "Of course we would," said F. Scott Shea, a transplanted New Yorker practicing law in Los Angeles. "My grandfather worked very hard to get baseball back to New York."
We can't say we particularly care in either direction on this one — we hate change, on the one hand, but it's not like Shea is such a memorable or historically signicant stadium name — we just hope to God Haberman will spare us further punny jokes on this.
The idea now is to build a new home in Queens for the Mets, reconfigure it for the 2012 Olympics and pray that the International Olympic Committee buys into the deal. Perhaps fervent America haters on the committee can be wooed by convincing them that the place is really known as Che Stadium. ...
Paris is the presumed favorite for 2012. But there may still be time to beat the French at their own game. Forget Che Stadium. Perhaps it would be best to let the international types think that the Queens site is this marvelously sophisticated place, known to everyone in New York as Chez Stadium.
He'll be here all week. Alas.
