Gone in Sixty Seconds. Closer to Six, Actually.

It took almost as long as a single Aaron Heilman windup for the biggest and most tangible piece of Shea Stadium history to come crashing to the ground. 

Literally.

For 45 summers, that scoreboard kept track of every R, H and E and, for years, even tracked the now-elusive 1Gs. (Ask your father.) It was never as retro-cool as the hand-signed scoreboard-houses of Wrigley or Fenway, but it quickly reached obsolescence in both design and function.

Yet it never changed its basic layout and functions. All the other scores from all the other games, always displayed in virtually unchanged AMERICAN and NATIONAL columns. For the first decade or so, the Payson clan used these functions as scorecard-sellers; they numbered the pitchers with the stadium's own proprietary code, so you wouldn't Just Know that #32 for the Phillies was Steve Carlton or #30 for the Angels was He Who Must Not Be Traded. You needed the codebook- included in your 25-cent scorecard, such as this cheat sheet from '71:



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One column in from the There and Thens, the Thems and Usses of that game's lineups took their places, as they did to the very end. Only the red dot seems to have disappeared from the recent updatings; in the old days, those were the only scoreboarded signals of who was up. No theme song. No big picture on the Diamondvision. Below these columns, the hated umpires on the right side and THROWING OF OBJECTS PROHIBITED on the left.

But the biggest part of the biggest board was the message section, which offered stats, promos, and dozens of THE METS WELCOMEs to tens of thousands of scout troops, little leagues and bowling buddies over its all-too-short life. Not a dozen years into that existence, its functionality was already being eclipsed by the dancing scoreboard of the Vet and the waterfalls of the Royals, and the best we could do was to honor our heroes with the hugest of one-letter words:



(thanks, I think, to Forgotten NY for that tribute to You Da Millan)

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By the I ended my mid-70sish Wandering in the Desert and returned to Shea in late 1984, Felix was no longer part of the board's magic bag. The first of many beer ads had covered it up, the fancy new Diamond above the diamond over to the left now serving its functions. Eventually, even the lower section would be replaced with something more flexible, but the tributes to TOM and TUG (and even, famously on an off-day, POPE) still burn within my own memory of that perfect corner of the universe.

In time, other parks came along and used ribbons and software and the Jumbo-est of Trons to get their points across. Others went the other way and put Fenway-looking out-of-town boards in their outfields. This one, until its very last day of useful life, went about it in the way it always had, saying things like:

This is who we are.

These are who we're chasing (or, in rare cases, who we're being chased by).

Hitting a home run off me is damned impressive. That dimension never changed a foot, up or out.

SS always belongs in the leadoff slot. Still in many heads, it's #3, but #7 will do nicely for now.

What the fuck is a DH? (Oh, yeah, those two years I was polluted with having to disclose THOSE.)

Catch me now. I'm falling.

And can't get up.