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9 1 the roots of Free agency Integration and Expansion in the Baseball World opening day is always a special occasion, containing all the hope and possibility of a new season for players and fans alike. The start of the 1964 National League campaign had a particular significance in New York City, marking the debut of a state-of-the-art home for the local club. On April 17, over fifty thousand New Yorkers made their way to Shea Stadium in Queens to see the Mets christen their diamond with a 4–3 loss to the Pittsburgh Pirates. The Mets had been born two years earlier, playing in the Polo Grounds in upper Manhattan, where the New York Giants had labored for years before departing for San Francisco following the 1957 season . The team’s new facility, with its expansive parking lots, movable stands, and twenty-one escalators, stood in sharp contrast to the Polo Grounds and Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field, cozy neighborhood ballparks built along streetcar and subway lines and abandoned with the rise of the interstates. Shea Stadium was designed for the age of the highway, but the facility ’s debut quickly became a story about the limits of urban automobility. Leonard Koppett’s account of the game in the next day’s New York Times, appearing under the headline “Shea Stadium Opens with Big Traffic Jam,” noted that the roads were so choked that city traffic commissioner Henry A. Barnes took to the skies in a helicopter to help “unscramble post-game jams” spreading out past Flushing Meadow on the Van Wyck Expressway. Still, many observers celebrated Shea’s gleaming modernity, even as the finishing touches were still being applied on opening day. “Certain items connected with the ball park are incomplete—including the Mets,” wrote Arthur Daley of the Times. “But it has to be rated as close to perfection in all of its glittering modern appurtenances.”1 Chapter One 10 Shea was part of a larger landscape taking shape in Flushing Meadow in the spring of 1964. The home of the Mets stood directly adjacent to the site of the New York World’s Fair, which itself opened to the public just days later. Both the fair and the stadium were the work of New York City’s “master builder,” Robert Moses, and together marked the latest articulation of his enormous imprint on the postwar metropolis.2 The stadium, while technically a distinct construction project, was in practice a central element of the exhibition experience, as fairgoers were encouraged to make time for the Mets in between viewing marvels like the U.S. Steel Unisphere and Ford Motor Company’s Magic Skyway. Fair designers implemented a system of ultraviolet hand stamps at the exit gates, making it possible to return free of charge after a few hours spent taking in a ballgame.3 Shea Stadium thus established Major League Baseball’s place within the larger cultural vision that the fair projected, one that championed the United States as an engine of capitalist democracy in an age of unprecedented affluence— “Man’s Achievement on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe,” as the event’s theme declared. At the official dedication on April 22, President Lyndon Johnson proclaimed : “This fair represents the most promising of our hopes. It gathers together, from 80 countries, the achievements of industry, the health of nations, the creations of man.” Not missing the opportunity to make a campaign speech with the 1964 election season under way, Johnson went on to outline his vision for what he would soon brand the Great Society, a nation “unwilling to accept public deprivation in the midst of private satisfaction .” Like the larger political moment that the fair represented, the exhibition presented an opportunity for movements to voice claims for social justice. The day of Johnson’s dedication, activists from the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized an automobile “stall-in” to draw fairgoers ’ attention to the racialized inequality on display every day in the city, outside the utopian confines of the fair.4 The baseball world of 1964, like the expanse of cultural marvels that spread out beyond Shea Stadium, exhibited its own processes of contradictory global change. In the two decades following World War II, baseball saw transformations that rank among the most celebrated and analyzed in the history of sport, the two best known of which were the racial integration of formerly segregated major and minor league teams, and the expansion of Major...

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