In May I took my nephew to a Phillies game and a tour of Citizen’s Bank Park for his 8th birthday. Having practically grown up at “The Vet”, it was a pretty unsettling experience, unleashing a wave of characteristically overly complicated ponderings. The paradoxical equilibrium between past and present, the slowly unfolding reality of the passage of time, the perilous impact of nostalgia…then came the confusion, anger, resentment, accusations, recriminations, tears, (why me??), the meditation on the loss of childhood’s expectations, and the struggle to let go of the sentimental attachments to failure that seek to enslave us forever. What is the meaning of a nostalgia to a particular place that has been emotionally significant but which I hate? Or the painful feeling over a return to a place, that de-links the physical place from nostalgia, or as Kant said “a romantic middle-class preoccupation with the passing of youth itself”. There is no return home to The Vet; any real return would be a crushing disappointment over the physical site being transformed, or in the case of The Vet, gone. And there was no disappointment. No nostalgia. There was nothing.
So my hometown team finally has a respectable home, even if it comes 30 years too late for me. Through the process of acceptance, I realized something about myself. Why I was one of them: the Philadelphia Sports Fan; bitter jerk, inflicting my emotional rage on others, at Dodger Stadium, at my office. Because I never really knew what it was all about until now. Roaming through CBP, one thing became clear: It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t me, The Phillies, The Eagles or even other Philly sports fans. I, like my fellow fans coming of age in the late 20th century, carried the deep and odious scars of our stadium. It wasn’t us. It was The Vet. It was The Vet all along. And now it is over. The dead baseball stadium era had come to a close. The Vet was actually gone. It was gone and it was never coming back.
Whoever said that history is full of ruse and cunning probably grew up in Philadelphia in the 1970’s. In 1971, supplanting the glorious Shibe Park – part of the firmament of classic ballparks – came a cavernous hulk from the ashes of a 74-acre patch of marshland at the NE corner of Broad and Pattison. The Penn Station of ballparks. The concrete behemoth, considered state of the art multi-purpose stadium. Veteran’s Stadium was a National embarrassment. A malfeasance of imagination built around the idea of a “rounded rectangle” – or “octorad”. The circular configuration had the majority of fans so far removed from the action on the field, the game was actually unfollowable. If you were in the upper deck like we were, infield popups and home runs to dead center were indistinguishable. Even by multi-purpose stadium standards, the upper deck was ludicrously high. 70 percent of the seats were in the massive foul territory so the stadium had the intimacy of a cave. Like everything in Philadelphia at the time, The Vet was maddeningly unpretentious (because what could it possibly have pretenses toward?)
The Vet was a bunker of unending sameness: no matter how much you walked around the park, you never ever saw anything different. Only the numbers changed. 200, 300, 400, 500, 600, 700. It was like in The Flintstones, where the same background was used over and over again and Fred was constantly running past the same plant or lamp.
As a kid I thought the brown, burnt orange and yellow color palette was cool. It wasn’t. The 7 color-coded levels, set against the lime green artificial turf formed a garish synthetic rainbow. The majestic fountains between the scoreboards dribbled randomly and there were always burned-out lightbulbs on the scoreboards – which incidentally were out of the sight line of almost everyone on the lower level anyway (good thing we were never in them). The restroom to fan ratio was 319 to one. You had to walk up ramps or take invariably out-of service elevators to get to the upper decks and vendors never came up there so you had to stand in concession lines for eons. The muffled warblings of the PA system and the Roland AT-7 organ’s limited arsenal (“Charge”, “Tarantella” “Halvah Negila”), were all crap.
Me and my Dad, at The Vet. You get the picture.
Unlike Shibe Park and Franklin Field, The Vet was puzzlingly cold and generic. But then intimacy and personality were never it’s priorities, functionality was. The city-owned Vet needed to house both football and baseball and be easily accessible from the suburbs. Ludicrously exiled to a multi-turnpike-accessible hood amongst abandoned lots and warehouses, The Vet had all the disadvantages of a city location, none of the advantages. It was one of the era’s many humungous, round, elliptical, or horseshoe-shaped stadiums, but with no hills or houses against fences, only 9 or 10 foot foam, padded plywood walls that were identical in Right and Left, slammed up against warehouses. Malformed and far from the historic city center, the completely encircled stadium had no plunging urban vistas of Philadelphia’s glorious Center City over the outfield backdrop, no river vistas with silvery shimmerings of boathouses, no view of William Penn’s hat, no twinkling skyline during night games. Circular is as circular does.
Fern Rock Station, 1975.
There never seemed to be any security at The Vet, except when the players needed protection from their own fans. And then they hauled out the brigade – the Philadelphia police (Rizzo’s guys), on horseback or with actual attack dogs on tight leash, inspiring more fear than security. Consequently, The Vet’s parking lot was a primordial ooze of tailgaters, pre-game brawlers and drunks. The probability of having your car vandalized or even torched, was high. After our car was vandalized for the tenth time, my dad decided it was a “good idea” to start taking the “subway”. We would we drive to Fern Rock station in Upper North Philly, where we could park for free in – an inarguably more dangerous lot – and take the R5 – with our lunchbags (rather than enjoying Vet concessions, misplaced thrift inspired my dad to bring our own hoagies in a bag) to the park.
During this “golden” era, The Eagles and Phillies were mired in mediocrity and the fans adopted the miserable personality of its location. The mythology of the shitty Philly fan gained traction as a deep cynicism set in and we fell into a dreary epoch that lasted through the final year of the sports mustache and pre-steroidal stomach era. The fans took collective solace in their horrible reputation, gleefully displaying their trademarked cruelty on the national stage. My dad often recounted the ’64 “Phold”, when the Phils squandered a 6 ½-game division lead with 12 games left in the season, only to collapse in a horrific 10-game losing streak. Philadelphia phathers and grandphathers passed down their own disappointment to the next generation of bitter sore losers, unleashing the angriest, most unsympathetic fans in all of sports. The infamous Philly “boo-birds” that were hatched in September of 1964, never left the roost.
Yes, Virginia: They did boo Santa Claus – now the Mendoza curve for poor fan behavior – but that’s hardly the worst of it. They would boo their own big stars! Mike Schmidt was booed every time he popped up or struck out. They booed a 12 year old girl from “Annie” singing the National Anthem. They booed the only person to have received a hand transplant after he threw the ceremonial first pitch – a weak dribbler – from his transplanted hand. At an Eagles game in 1999, the fans booed and jeered as Michael Irvin lay motionless on the field, suffering from a cervical spinal injury that would end his career. While medical staff attended to the Hall-of-famer, the cheers simply got louder. Fans cheered when they realized Irvin was hurt, and louder when paramedics wheeled a stretcher onto the field.
When the fans needed to make more of a statement than just booing could convey, they threw batteries. They threw D batteries at the Cardinal’s J.D. Drew, as retribution for opting out of signing with the Phillies. They threw batteries at Dick Allen – the team’s first prominent black player and ’64 rookie of the year – and he took to wearing his batting helmet on the field, giving rise to a nickname, “Crash Helmet”. Allen, who made a comeback with the Phillies in the 70s, was one of our favorite players and my dad and I would do drive-bys of his house. My favorite Richie Allen story was the one where he was late to a game because – in my dad’s words: “he wanted to play with his horses” (he was late from returning from a day at the track in New Jersey). He loved the track, we loved the track. He loved horses, I loved horses. He famously said about Astroturf: “If a horse won’t eat it, I don’t want to play on it.”
To counter the Phils mediocre play, the fans monstrous behavior and The Vet, Phillies management coughed up one outlandish promotional event after another and Veterans Stadium became a national embarrassment on a whole new level. There were “cash scrambles” where fans ran shamelessly around the field scooping up money, a trapeze suspended from a helicopter, Karl Wallenda walking a tightrope, and Benny (The Human Bomb) Koske in an exploding coffin. When”Parachute Man” was to deliver the ball by diving out of a Cessna at 3,500 feet, he free-fell another 1000 feet and then crashed into the stands. Richie Ashburn and Harry Kalas rode ostriches – like jockeys – in a race around the perimeter of the field only to flee their mounts when the enraged beasts leapt into the stands. When wrangled, the birds were taken away to a chorus of boos. An Easter Sunday event had a hot-air balloon that was to carry a guy in a bunny suit “somewhere over New Jersey”. When the guy chickened out, he was booed. There was a “duck race,” where 20 ducks were supposed to race each other around the bases by the usherettes coaxing them around the bases with little crumbs. Alas, as soon as the ducks were released in the infield, they all ran directly into the dugout, and were resoundly booed.
In 1977, “Acme Mascots” (no lie) was hired to create a creature specifically to help create a more family friendly atmosphere at the miserable park. It worked. Sort of. The AstroTurf green, nozzle snooted “Phanatic” came out of the box colossally annoying; harassing and taunting the visiting team, dancing provocatively in front of their dugout, mocking the actions of their players, stomping on their 
batting helmets, and creepily silently following them around the field. The Phanatic’s favorite umpire was the late Eric Gregg – “the plump ump”- who would dance with the Phanatic, Snicker wrappers falling out of his pockets. The Phanatic was relentless in his idiocy, shooting hot dogs into the stands using a pneumatic gun attached to his ATV, and was universally reviled outside of Philadelphia. No one openly despised the Phanatic more than Tommy Lasorda. In 1998, Lasorda went beserk while watching the Acme Mascot fling around, humiliate and pummel Lasorda’s effigy to the accompaniement of the Darth Vadar theme, blaring over the sound system. Lasorda charged the mascot, physically assaulting him.
But all the shenanigans in the world couldn’t make up for the shitiness of the Vet, which was as dangerous as it was depressing, in a constant state of disrepair and premature deterioration. On a school outing to a game I fell through a broken seat and had to go to first aid (imagine what the nurses station at The Vet was like). During the 1998 Army Navy Game, a support rail collapsed, sending eight West Point cadets to the ER.
But it was the “Field of Seams” that was the biggest hazard.Once the futuristic Astrodome dragged out their plasticized replacement for their sunless dead grass in a ground-breaking act of idiocy, it was all over. Nary has there been an opportunity for a ground-breaking act of idiocy that Philadelphia was not first in line for. The Vet opted for horrible quality (redundant), AstroTurf that was fraught with visible gaps and seams. Infielders suffered the “Sunday hops”, when the blistering afternoon sun baked the plastic turf into a rock and the ball would take bad bounces off the molten carpet. The shock of running on the turf was brutal on players knees and backs, shortening the careers of Lenny Dykstra (+ meth), Darren Daulton (+ coke), and Mike Schmidt, who ended his career prematurely with ruined knees. Perennially drawing the ranking of “worst field” by the NFL, visiting NFL players took the brunt of it, often suffering horrific injuries. In 1993, Bears receiver Wendell Davis caught his cleat in a seam while running a simple pass route, tearing both of his patella tendons, ending his career.
The Vet kept that shitty AstroTurf until 2001 when they succumbed to threats, boycotts and law suits by replacing it – not with grass but with the “good quality” astroturf (oxymoron), “NexTurf”. Naturally, the city crew fucked up the install and the very first Eagles game to be played on the new turf had to be abruptly cancelled when coaches discovered a trench around third base that was covered up by a NexTurf cutout. The team president called the stadium “an embarrassment to the city of Philadelphia” and refused to play on it. The problem was solved by spreading hot asphalt to create level playing surface, but required a jackhammer for removal every time the stadium was converted from football back to baseball.
Another product of my dad’s thriftiness – which was applied to random things, apropos of nothing – was his insistence that a general admission ticket should never cost more than $4. We always bought the worst tickets. Often, the tickets said “700-something”. I was scared of the 700 level. The 700 level smelled like beer, pot, vomit and urine. The 700 level was full of drunken hooligans, brawling, sexually harassing women, spitting, puking, heckling, teasing children, spewing profanities, publicly urinating, and debris projecting. I heard my first profanities there, witnessed my first fistfights and public urinations there, stepped in my first puddle of puke there. In the 700 level, no one was exempt from abuse, not even a 9 year old girl whose father didn’t have the good sense to tell her not to wear a Dallas Cowboys t-shirt to the game, and who would leave his seat whenever his “beeper” went off, at least every 2 or 3 innings. Still, the worst part of the 700 level was that you couldn’t see the game. From certain spots it seemed the meeting of the warning track and outfield wall was an optical illusion. I couldn’t tell where one ended and one began. We brought binoculars but you’d have needed the Hubble telescope.
i have no idea what is going on here
During the darkest days of fan lunacy at The Vet, the Eagles fans made Raider Nation look like a tea party. The Die-hards turned the 700 level into a public showcase for the Philadelphia fan base. Games were named: “The Body Bag Game,” and the “Bounty Bowl” when – after rumors that Buddy Ryan had put a “bounty” out on a Dallas kicker – fans lay in wait to mercilessly shower the enemy with a seeming unending arsenal of snowballs. The fans were punished by having beer sales banned for 2 games.
Things continued to devolve until it all came apart on a Monday night in 1997, when during a nationally televised Eagles game against the 49ers, there were more than 60 fights, and a fan shot a flare gun into the seats. The next day, the city erected – in a detention area in the rat infested bowels of the stadium – the first ever stadium court, presided over by an actual judge, to prosecute and incarcerate out-of-control fans. The guilty thrown in the stadium jail until the end of the game.
A veteran NFL player said: “This place is like a knife fight in a dark alley. You look around and you’re not sure you’re going to make it out of here in one piece.” My father was quoted as saying the same thing he said about Shibe Park after it’s closure; “They left the place to the animals”. In Philadelphia, we just call it home field advantage.
There were good times at The Vet – but never because of it, always in spite of it. Every year the whole family would go to the Fourth of July game, where we were allowed to sit on the field during the fireworks. And on Tuesday, October 14, 1980, my dad and I attended game 1 of the World Series against the Kansas City Royals. We got tickets through the lottery – we drove to the main post office for the 12:01 am postmark. My dad wore a suit jacket and we drove in a car, no Fern Rock and no bagged hoagies. That night, we ate at the fancy and expensive Holiday Inn adjacent to the Park. The 1980 world championship was the prize for all those years of misery at The Vet.
So, whenever I get the old “Philly fan” platitudes and the “did you really throw batteries at Santa Claus”? I say: You don’t know what it was like. You try growing up in Philadelphia in the 1970’s. You try sitting through a game at Veterans Stadium without wanting to blow your brains out, for being heckled and humiliated or for waiting in a bathroom line for 45 minutes. You try rooting for four hometown teams that are the embodiment of unfulfilled potential. Because, what else was there? What else were you supposed to identify with? Cheesesteaks? We were post-independence, pre-Rocky Philadelphia. We had nothing. We suffered from the founding fathers of all identity crisis’, never grasping our historical specialness like Boston, and too close geographically to NYC for it not to matter. What does a city like this cling to? What puts it on the national stage? We fucked up the bicentennial! What else is there that generation can pass down to generation?
The baseball paradigm began to shift in 2004, after that dreary final decade at The Vet, and the city planned for new parks for The Phillies and The Eagles. On a miserable March morning in 2004, Veteran Stadium was imploded in a record-setting and unceremonious 62 seconds. Because it would not be true to The Vet without some form of asininity, Greg Luzinski and the Phanatic simultaneously pressed an imaginary plunger while someone played “taps” on a trumpet (The 700 level mentality reared it’s ugly head one last time when hoards of fans trying to catch a glimpse of the implosion, crossed a barrier on the closed Walt Whitman Expressway, in defiance of personal safety and police orders).
And just like that, The Vet was history.
Flash Forward, to Summer of 2010. We went to a night game against the Pirates and in a rare exploitation of my position, got a backstage tour of the park – and a special meeting with Noah’s favorite Phillie – which began and ended at the CBP sunny administrative offices Monday afternoon,
Rizzo? Mustached white racist cops? Attack dogs? How about lovable old coots and cootesses in red and white striped windbreakers?!!
There is not an inch of this place that is depressing. Even the nether regions of the park are adorable and 100% vermin free! We tunneled through the ratless bowels and to the field where we saw our hometown heroes warming up before the big game.
I waited 30+ years to stand on the same turf as the Phillies. And it’s real!
Looking for The Big Guy (Matt Stairs).
Noah offered Ryan a very important batting tip which resulted in 8 rbis. Said batting tip will remain between Ryan and the Vallows.
Copy-catting Camden Yards now time-worn retro-style, CBP has red brick and green roofs, and four corner squares which reference William Penn’s city plan. It has bowl-style seating with the playing field scooped out below street level, inspired by the classic plans of Baker Bowl and Connie Mack Stadium, former homes of the Phillies.
The walk-around, open-air concourses have a festive, down-the-shore, boardwalk atmosphere and offer a continuous, uninterrupted view of the field. Unlike The Vet’s unending cement vista, you could buy the cheapest ticket and spend the entire game walking laps around the park without ever losing view of the field minus for the 30 seconds it would take you to walk behind the scoreboard. And even sitting in the nosebleeds, you have a great view of the game. The most remarkable thing about the ballpark, however, is the fans. They were different. They weren’t angry. They didn’t look spiny and hopped up and ready for a fight.
The 21st century Phillies fans looked happy, if not altogether healthy (they looked well fed). They weren’t starving and drunk. There were fewer needle nosed, Northeast High schoolers and more families, lesbians and old coots. There are oldsey timesy rooftop bleachers and bi-level, exposed bullpens where fans can get close to and heckle the opposing pitchers. But weirdly, given a stage to do so and the absence of a court system, there is no profanity, heckling, no throwing of snowballs or batteries. Why would there be? This place just doesn’t inspire bitterness or antagonism towards the players or each other the way The Vet did. What would there be to be angry about anyway? We are World Champions.
Well, this guy looked pissed.
We sat in the “Hall of Fame Club Level”, a 2,500-seat area with bars, big TVs and snacks. There’s a hall of Phillies history with models of Shibe and The Vet (the only way I want to see it is in the form of a dollhouse miniature), and a fine oil painting of Michael Jack Schmidt. It also houses the A/V crew that controls the scoreboard, monitors, press box, tv, and radio booths. Where The Vet had one generic concession stand repeated over and over around the park, CBP has the “Cobblestone Grill,” and “Old City Creamery!”. So, Philadelphia finally figured out – 250+ years after the Founding Fathers put quill to parchment – how to commodify itself.
Families and straight shooting young folks and old coots all hang out and eat (boy do they eat). Those people didn’t come to the Vet because it was dangerous and gross. Here there are airy concourses, drink rails, chest-
high cheesesteak shelves, and tables for standees designed to protect folks in the back rows from spillages that would have resulted in a fist fight at The Vet. You can go back and eat some snacks at tables and still follow the game, rather than balancing your shitty nachos and wieners on your laps.
Everywhere is coated with memories, like Greg Luzinski’s BBQ shack and “Ashburn Alley”: a festive outdoor area with shops and more snacks. CBP were named Best Ballpark Food in the first annual Food Network Awards, as well as – contrary to the spirit of Philadelphia – the most vegetarian-friendly ballpark. CBP is the “greenest” stadium in MLB, holding the record in pro sports for the largest purchase of 100% renewable energy. And righting the most egregious wrong performed by The Vet, Citizen’s Bank Park offers an unfettered view of the Philadelphia city skyline.
My dad took my brother to one of the final games at Shibe Park. Little Erik was so deeply bored, that our dad had to buy him a toy to occupy him during the 9 innings (it was a souvenir bank with little Louisville Sluggers representing all the teams in the NL. I remember that bank. It was the coolest thing I’d ever seen). Unmitigated crap like The Phanatic Phun Zone and the Phanatic Giant Shoe Slide address that attention span problem. Sure I miss a time when the time-worn experience that baseball provides was enough, when all you needed was a scorecard, a tiny pencil and a bag of peanuts. No wine and tapas bars, just bazookas shooting hotdogs into stands and the overextended sense of excitement over some super crappy give-aways. Until the earth explodes and rebuilds itself from ash, those times aren’t coming back.
When one of the Phillies hits a homer, a gigantic Liberty Bell’s clapper swings side-to-side and its neon edges light up and pulsate. The bell tolled that night -Thanks to Noah – when Ryan Howard hit a late inning grand slam and the Phillies shellacked the Pirates 12 to 2.
So I wax idiotic over a fake vintage ballpark and don’t shed a single tear of nostalgia for Philly’s lovable old eyesore. True, the retro stadium is just a derivative of decor of something that was… like 50’s diners, where we have the ability to reinvent and customize our original capital, rebuild utopias of the most idiotic kind. I mean, we weren’t around in the 50’s to know what these places seek to recapture but we love the 50s anyway! The fake retro stadiums and diners help us sustain a “feeling” – that The Vet sorely lacked – vis-a-vis things that once were and that we think maybe could come around again. As America gets weirder, there’s a feeling that history has ceased, that we’re living in a void, and that’s when we need our nostalgic symbols to cling to the most, not because we actually believe in them, but simply to restore a time when at least there was history. The Vet had no history. Who knows, maybe in 50 years folks are going to be nostalgic for the concrete bunkers and start erecting them in the middle of ghettos again.
Living in LA, I have Dodger Stadium, nestled in a picturesque ravine a few miles from my house, one of the last vestiges of the golden era, standing tall as a beacon of dilapidated tradition amid a sea of shiny retro-modernity (and it still has those cool onion churners. If the new retro-style stadiums wanted to be authentic, they would have those). It has become untenably violent to see games there. Even for me, a Vet vet.
But for all the childish passion I feel for the team, that hasn’t abated much in 30 years, that bounds me to other Philadelphians everywhere, for all the outsized nostalgia I feel for every piece of crap I ever bought at The Vet, every tawdry giveaway like the flop sweat producing plastic Eagles rain poncho that became my sole raincoat til college, every autograph I humiliated myself to get, and the awesome bank my dad bought my brother when he took him and not me to that game at Shibe Park, I feel nothing for the Vet. The actual space was an assault on my childhood.
So, dear diary, my scars are healed and I can look back on my days at The Vet as just once of many of childhood’s atrocities. And I can take solace in knowing that even though my nephew may not always get to to meet the big guy, he will never have to sit in a 700 level either.
And nothing will make me miss The Vet.
Nothing.