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Keyspan Park / Brooklyn
Cyclones
Most people link the histories of Brooklyn and baseball with the heyday of the beloved Trolley Dodgers and their days in Ebbets Field. But Brooklyn's baseball history goes back to very beginnings of the sport, to the 19th century, before the borough of Brooklyn was part of New York City. Brooklyn's other famous contribution to baseball is the hot dog, invented (according to the locals anyway) at Coney Island on Brooklyn's south shore. So how then do you honor the contributions of Brooklyn to baseball history after the borough went without professional baseball for the better part of 50 years? If you're Fred Wilpon and you own the New York Mets, and you're a Brooklyn-born baseball lover with the money and power to place a minor-league team right in Coney Island where the history of baseball and hot dogs intersect with the Atlantic Ocean and famous boardwalk attractions, you build Keyspan Park.
The home of the Brooklyn Cyclones honors Brooklyn's baseball past by displaying the retired numbers of Jackie Robinson and Gil Hodges. There's a statue out front of Pee Wee Reese famously putting his arm around Robinson during the latter's historic rookie season. The Brooklyn Dodger and New York Mets logos share a spot on the side on the aisle seats of every row. With Ebbets Field long ago turned into apartments, Coney Island seemed the logical choice to put a ballpark into a ready-made atmosphere. Visitors will immediately recognize that a minor-league ballpark in the middle of a metropolis makes for a unique experience. Putting one into the middle of Coney Island is almost overwhelming.
The parachute jump (no longer used) sits down the right field line of Keyspan Park (shown in the top photo); just beyond that is the Atlantic Ocean (shown in the photo above). Over the left-field wall reside the Cyclone roller coaster and team namesake, the Coney Island Ferris wheel and the Astroland Park amusement park (shown below). This is New York after all, and what's a ballgame without a skyline?
The sights and sounds of Coney Island are visible from every point in Keyspan Park, which offers the clear sightlines and fan intimacy you'd expect from a 21st-century ballpark. That's not to say they plopped a cookie cutter on Coney Island. Like many of the urban ballpark that came before it, Keyspan Park was dropped into a square city lot and has the odd dimensions you'd expect. Center field stretches out to 412 feet -- two feet deeper than at Shea Stadium -- and features a 20-foot-high wall. Combine the dimensions with the wind coming off the ocean in right field, and fans of the long ball will be very disappointed with most Cyclones home games. That's not to say you need home runs for entertainment. In fine minor-league fashion, the Cyclones have enough sponsored gimmicks and frivolities taking place that the game itself can get lost. On the night of our visit, the Cyclones were celebrating the 26-inning game they played against Oneonta earlier in the 2006 season, which meant among other things, the 26th person to enter the bathroom won 26 rolls of toilet paper, some poor soul took home 26 cans of spam, and the crowd sang the alphabet between innings at one point to pay homage to its 26 letters. There are also tricycle races and a hot-dog race (shown below) where fans root for the dogs topped with mustard, ketchup or relish, testing the loyalties of those of us who like mustard and relish.
For an urban ballpark (and compared to Shea), Keyspan Park is incredibly clean and offers the modern amenities Mets fans expect to see when their new ballpark is completed in 2009. The concourse is wide and offers views of the field wherever you are. Once the crowd settles in and has their food, you can watch several innings standing not far behind home plate without being bothered. The seats are equipped with cupholders that not only hold beverages, but make a nice home for the cup that holds Keyspan curly fries. Keyspan features a party deck for groups, skyboxes (such as they are), and a two-story Cyclones team store. Given the wind coming off the water and the possibility of rain on the night we visited, the lack of an area to find shelter from the elements was somewhat surprising. The main concourse is covered in the home-plate area, but there's really no place to hide if the weather turns cool or wet. If you're prone to the cold, bring a sweatshirt to night games.
Not everything at Keyspan is a modern amenity. The lineups and New York Penn League leader board are posted on the concourse near home plate on whiteboards with a marker, a refreshingly minor-league touch amongst the atmosphere of a sponsored carnival. On the field the Cyclones have been known to draw the ire of NY-Penn League opponents and Mets fans because legend has it Wilpon is more interested in having a winning, marketable product on the field at Keyspan than player development. It may or may not be true. If selling seats to watch baseball was the only goal, he could have built a bandbox for a ballpark, and he probably could have had more seats period. If the Cyclones and Mets are guilty of tinkering with player development, they're not alone. The Yankees have a NY-Penn League team on Staten Island, and the two share a rivalry neither organization seems ready to surrender.
Concessions Where to Stay
For the Kids Before the Game
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