Shea Stadium: The Mets' Home from 1964 to 2008

By 4Baseball Staff · November 5, 2026 · 10 min read

The story of Shea Stadium in Queens, home of the New York Mets for 45 seasons: the 1964 opening, the jets overhead, the Beatles, the 1969 and 1986 champions and the final game in 2008.

Shea Stadium was never a beautiful ballpark, and it did not pretend to be. It sat beside the Flushing Meadows World's Fair grounds in Queens, held a baseball team and a football team, was loud with airplanes passing over from the nearby airport and never acquired a reputation as a place of charm. It was also the setting for the Beatles' concert of 1965, for two World Series championships, and for 45 seasons of a franchise whose fans have been called loyal, long-suffering and loud, usually in the same sentence.

The Mets played at Shea from 1964 through 2008, and the historical team records show how much happened in between: a first season of 1962 that produced 120 losses at the old Polo Grounds, a miracle in 1969, a second title in 1986 and a run of postseason years that ended with a loss on the last day of the final season. This article tells the stadium's story through that record, and then through the details that made it distinctive.

Why Queens, and who was Shea

New York lost two National League teams after the 1957 season, when the Dodgers moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles and the Giants moved from Manhattan to San Francisco. The city was left with the Yankees and no National League club, and a committee led by an attorney named William A. Shea worked to bring the league back. The result was an expansion franchise, the New York Mets, who started play in 1962 and borrowed the Polo Grounds, the Giants' old park in Manhattan, for two seasons while a new stadium was built.

The new stadium was named for Shea, in recognition of his role in bringing the National League back to the city. It was built in Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, in the borough of Queens, on land that was also the site of the 1964 New York World's Fair. The site was in Queens, far from the old neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Manhattan where National League baseball had been played before.

Shea opened in April 1964. It was part of a generation of new, round or oval, multipurpose stadiums built in American cities in the 1960s, the same family as the buildings described in the cookie-cutter stadiums of the 1970s, and just a year before the sport's most radical new park, covered in the Astrodome article. Shea was designed with sections of lower seating that could be moved, so that the grandstand could be adjusted to suit baseball or football.

A stadium for two sports

The football team was the New York Jets, who played at Shea from 1964 until 1983. The stadium was designed to serve them as well as the Mets, and the same movable seats that changed its shape also meant that the field was used for far more events than most baseball parks. Football wore on the field in the fall, and two tenants sharing one playing surface is a recurring complaint about stadiums of that era.

The multipurpose design had costs. Multipurpose stadiums of the period are generally criticized for sightlines that suit neither sport as well as a dedicated park, and fans in the upper decks sat far from the action. The same trade-off led, a generation later, to the retro-park movement that Camden Yards and the retro ballpark era describes, in which clubs asked for smaller parks designed for baseball alone.

The setting itself was distinctive. Shea stood close to the flight path of LaGuardia Airport, and aircraft passed low enough overhead that the noise became part of the experience. It is one of the few features of the building that nearly every account mentions.

The early years: from the Polo Grounds to a new home

The Mets arrived with a record that is the worst in the modern era. The historical record lists the 1962 club at 40-120, and the following seasons as 51-111 in 1963, 53-109 in 1964 and 50-112 in 1965, all in tenth and last place in the ten-team league. Casey Stengel managed the club through its first four seasons and finished with 175 wins and 404 losses in 582 games. The attendance at the Polo Grounds in the first two years was 1,080,108 at its best, enough to show that New York wanted a National League team even if it did not yet have a good one.

The opening of Shea in 1964 brought a new home and, in the same summer, a major event. The All-Star Game was played at the new park in July 1964, and the National League won it on a home run by Johnny Callison in the bottom of the ninth. The stadium was in the spotlight from its first season.

The Mets themselves improved slowly. Until 1969 the club never finished higher than ninth, and the progress was marked by the arrival of the young pitchers who would change the team. Tom Seaver, the 1967 Rookie of the Year, and Jerry Koosman, who joined him in the rotation, became the foundation of a franchise that has always been defined by pitching. The Mets' all-time leader in wins is Seaver, with 198, and he is also the club's career strikeout leader with 2,541, ahead of Dwight Gooden, Koosman and Jacob deGrom.

August 1965: the Beatles at Shea

On August 15, 1965, the Beatles played Shea Stadium in a concert that is widely described as the first major rock concert held in a baseball stadium. The audience was enormous by the standards of the time, the group played through the stadium's public-address system, and the crowd's screaming drowned out much of the music. The event changed how promoters thought about stadiums, because it showed that a ballpark could hold a concert audience far larger than any theater or arena.

The Beatles returned the following year, and the stadium hosted other concerts in later decades. The concerts do not appear in any baseball record, but they are part of why Shea occupies a bigger place in American cultural history than its architecture would suggest.

1969: the Miracle Mets

The decade ended with the most famous season in the club's history. Under manager Gil Hodges, the 1969 Mets went 100-62 and won the first National League East title, then swept the Atlanta Braves in the first National League Championship Series, three games to none. In the World Series they beat the Baltimore Orioles four games to one. Seaver won the Cy Young Award that year, and fans poured onto the field at Shea after the clinching game.

The same franchise had lost 120 games seven years earlier, and the team that won the title in 1969 included many of the young players who had been developed after the early disasters. The 1969 season is also a reminder that the Mets' rise was a surprise because the rest of the division, including the Chicago Cubs, who held first place for most of the summer, looked like the stronger team. The Cubs' side of that story is told in the best Chicago Cubs seasons.

The Mets reached the World Series again in 1973, beating the Cincinnati Reds three games to two in the National League Championship Series, a series remembered for a brawl between Pete Rose and Mets shortstop Bud Harrelson at second base in a game at Shea. They lost the World Series to the Oakland Athletics, four games to three.

1986: the second championship

The 1986 Mets are the other defining team of the Shea years. They won 108 games, losing 54, which is the best record in the franchise's history, and finished the season as National League East champions. They beat the Houston Astros four games to two in the Championship Series and the Boston Red Sox four games to three in the World Series.

The Series is remembered for Game 6, played at Shea on October 25, 1986. The Red Sox led in the tenth inning and were one strike from the title when the Mets rallied, and the winning run scored when a ground ball by Mookie Wilson went through the legs of first baseman Bill Buckner. The Mets won that game and then won Game 7. Wilson, who finished with 1,112 hits as a Met, is one of the club's most beloved players.

The roster was built on a mix of young stars and veterans, including Darryl Strawberry, whose 252 home runs with the club rank second behind Pete Alonso's total through 2025, and Dwight Gooden, who won the Rookie of the Year award in 1984 and the Cy Young Award in 1985. The manager was Davey Johnson, whose record with the club was 595-417 over 1,012 games.

Shea in October: a record of the postseason years

The table below lists the postseason series in the historical data for the Mets' years at Shea. Not every game was played at Shea, since each series was split between the two parks, but the series show how often the stadium hosted October baseball.

The most unusual of those series is the 2000 World Series, the so-called Subway Series against the Yankees, the first World Series between the Yankees and the Mets and the first all-New York Series since 1956. The Yankees won four games to one. There was a twist in the stadium's own history: the Yankees were Shea's tenants in 1974 and 1975, while Yankee Stadium was being rebuilt, and the historical park records show them drawing 1,288,048 fans in their better year there.

The planes, the apple and the details

A few details made Shea recognizable. The planes were the most famous, but there was also the home-run apple, a large apple in the outfield that rose out of a top hat when a Mets player hit a home run, a fixture of the Mets' later years that was moved to the new park. The crowd's noise, combined with the planes, gave the stadium an intensity that its plain design did not promise.

The condition of the stadium was a constant topic. By the 1990s the park was old, the concrete was weathered, the concourses were narrow and the Mets, like many clubs, wanted a new building. The same story applies across the league, and it is told in other ballpark pieces such as Candlestick Park, another stadium of its generation that was loved and criticized in equal measure. The stadium's age should not obscure what it did well: it gave the Mets a home in New York at a time when the city had none, and it made it possible for a generation of fans to see their team win.

The final seasons and the last game

The Mets finished first in the National League East in 2006, and then missed the postseason on the last day of the regular season in both 2007 and 2008. The 2008 season was the last at Shea. The club drew 4,042,045 fans, the largest season attendance in the stadium's history and the franchise's best to date in the historical record, a figure that probably reflects the farewell season as well as the team on the field.

The last game was played on September 28, 2008, against the Florida Marlins. The Mets lost, which ended their playoff hopes on the final day, and the stadium closed with a ceremony in which Tom Seaver threw a pitch to Mike Piazza. Citi Field opened next door in 2009, and the old stadium was demolished soon afterward. The new park's attendance peaked at 3,184,570 in the historical records, which is lower than the final Shea season, though a comparison of the two buildings by gate alone ignores the different capacities. For the new ballpark era, see Camden Yards and the retro ballpark era.

What the records say, and what they cannot

The historical data identify Shea Stadium as the Mets' park for the 1964 to 2008 seasons, and give the best-attended season, but they contain no park dimensions, no home and road splits and no record of how the building played. Anyone who wants to measure how the park affected scoring must use a separate source. The old box scores that survive from Shea's first decades also have limits, which are discussed in what old box scores tell us and what they do not and in how to read a baseball box score.

One conclusion can be drawn from the club leaderboards, though. The Mets' career leaders in ERA among pitchers with 1,000 innings are Jacob deGrom at 2.52 and Tom Seaver at 2.57, and their best hitters, such as David Wright with 1,777 hits, are modest by the standards of some franchises. That pattern is consistent with a team whose identity was built on pitching, and with a park that was not known for generous scoring, although the data alone cannot prove the connection.

Common questions

When did Shea Stadium open and close? It opened in April 1964 and closed after the 2008 season, with the last game on September 28, 2008.

Who else played at Shea? The New York Jets of the National Football League played there until 1983, and the New York Yankees used it as their home in 1974 and 1975.

Why is it called Shea? It was named for William A. Shea, the attorney who led the effort to bring National League baseball back to New York.

What replaced it? Citi Field, which opened next door in 2009 and is the Mets' current home.

What was the best Mets season at Shea? By record, 1986, at 108-54. By surprise, 1969, at 100-62.

Where to go next

The Mets' own story is on the Mets team page, the standings are at the standings page, and the broader history of New York's ballparks is covered by the ballparks and fans topic page. To see how a night game changed baseball, read Crosley Field and the birth of night baseball in 1935.