What's in a Name?

So the Wilpon's sold the naming rights to the new Mets Stadium to Citigroup. The new place will be named "Citi Field". There will be more bathrooms (finally, says Leon Hess from beyond the grave), fewer seats (by 12,000), a larger team store, more concession stands, and of course more luxury suites. It was also announced that the "rotunda" entry way will contain a statue of Jackie Robinson, the rotunda will be named for him, and the team will contribute towards the building of a museum in Lower Manhattan as well as towards more scholarships.

The last is a bone thrown to the NY Post and the NY Times, who for the first time agreed on something (a sure sign of the apocolypse), that the new stadium should be named after the great Jackie Robinson. If this had happened, given the parties behind the media blitz in favor, I have no doubt the place would have been cursed.

Now, I respect everything Jackie went through, and the example he set. He opened the doors to african american ballplayers, who until then had been relegated to their own league. However, he was not a Met. Now, I know, the Dodgers are the ancestors of the Mets. Well, tell me something, since the team played in the Polo Grounds before Shea opened, wouldn't that make the Giants their ancestors too? Should everything they do be based on the past of the Dodgers and Giants? Do they next have to take into account the numbers those two teams have retired before giving numbers to players? The Mets have a hard enough time competing with the Yankees, much less two more teams.

What really burns me about this is the condescension from the Times. "Some people could not get past the fact that Robinson did not play for the Mets". Well, of course not. That's the point. Why should they be singled out to honor Robinson? Why not the actual Dodgers? Why not the Yankees, who have not even retired Robinson's number unlike every other team in the Major Leagues (yeah, I know, the great Mariano wears the number, they could still hang it up.) The Mets do more than any other team to honor Robinson. Enough is enough. This team needs its own identity, the time to tie it to the past is over.

Frankly, I'm a little more sad that the name "Shea" is gone. I'll long remember going to Shea with my dad as a youngster, seeing the field as we walked out of the tunnel, taking our seats. Filling out the scorecards with names like Flynn, Staub, Kingman, Kranepool, and not caring that they were losing, only caring that dad and I were at the game, and having fun. Later it would be Carter, Hernandez, Gooden and Straw, and now the team was winning, and we were still having fun, my brother, sister and mother joining us from time to time. "Let's go to Shea" was the phrase, and it made me happy.

Now, it will be "Let's go to the Citi", which sounds like we are going to be tourists walking around Times Square. But you know what, I'll get over it, Times have changed, and at least the company who bought the rights is stable, and not likely to go under any time soon, unlike many other companies that bought naming rights. Plus, $20 million buys a nice pitcher or two.

A lot of fans will probably still call the place Shea. It is going to take time to get used to the new name. We still have a couple of years before the change (and this is NY after all, so the 2009 date is probably going to be blown pretty easily, I mean, they're still working on parts of the LIE after 10 years).

In my mind, I don't care what the name is, Shea, Citi Field, Mets Park, so long as I hear this many times over the next 20 or so years:

"Welcome to Citi Field, the Home of the World Champion New York Mets"