BigLeagueTours

The Bronx Bombers are back in full force.

The Yankees have been hitting home runs at a record-setting pace at their new ballpark … and they'd have been on pace for more if they hadn't run up against Craig Stammen and the upstart Nationals during their most recent homestand. Through 35 games at the new Yankee Stadium, the Yankees have swatted 66 homers, putting them on pace for 153, four more than the record 149 hit by the 1996 Rockies at Coors Field. The Yankees and their opponents, meanwhile, have combined for 119 homers at Yankee Stadium, putting the park on pace for 250, the sixth-most hit at one ballpark in a single season in baseball history.

To think, if not for the Yankees and Nationals hitting a mere four home runs in their June 16-18 series, that full-season pace would swell to 291, only 12 behind the single-season record of 303 hit at Coors Field in 1999.

No wonder they call it "Coors Field East."

Maybe you were in New York that summer and fall, rooting for the Mets, the lovable (cue team jingle here) M-E-T-S Mets. You've been an optimist ever since. Of course you are. The club was a baseball comedy act from the year of its premature birth, 1962, right through 1968, losing an average of 105 games a season. And then came the surprise of '69. Elsewhere it was a horrible year, but New York witnessed a miracle: the Mets winning 100 games in the regular season, then beating the Baltimore Goliaths in the World Series. The miracle of Flushing Meadows, Queens.

Art Shamsky had no idea how lousy a year it had been. Not then. Shamsky, sharing duty with Ron Swoboda, patrolled Shea Stadium's rightfield, the first swath of green you'd see coming off the number 7 train. Shamsky was in his own little world that baseball season, 40 years ago, when Tom Seaver was a rising pitching god and Nolan Ryan a wild-armed reliever and spot starter and Jerry Grote, Texas badass, caught them both. Shamsky was a Jewish kid from suburban St. Louis, living in Manhattan, hearing kids (you?) scream Art Shamsky! as his big old Lincoln Continental entered the Shea Stadium players' lot, then going out after the game with the brothers—Cleon Jones, Tommie Agee—listening to jazz, wearing shades and long sideburns and striped pants, sipping house reds. It was many years later that he started making regular trips to the New York Public Library, in midtown, researching a book, twirling microfilm, making lists, catching up.

Good News, 1969: Man on the moon.

Bad News, 1969: Vietnam War, Manson murders, Hurricane Camille, the Chicago Seven trial, Chappaquiddick, inflation....

Shamsky is the unofficial class secretary of the '69 Mets, a regular when his teammates come together for parties, reunions, fantasy camps, golf tournaments, barbecues, card signings. Weddings. Funerals.

They gathered to bury Agee, centerfielder and leadoff hitter, in 2001. Agee—who'd almost single-handedly won Game 3 of the Series with a first-inning homer and for-the-ages catches on drives by Elrod Hendricks and Paul Blair—died of a heart attack, age 58, in his office on Second Avenue in midtown Manhattan, where he worked in the title search business. Shamsky was best man at Tommie's second wedding, in 1985, when he married Maxcine Green, a New York schoolteacher. O.K., not precisely best man. Best-man-on-deck, ready to pinch-hit if Cleon didn't show, and for the longest time that day it looked as if Cleon wouldn't show. But then he slipped in, cool as ever, saying, "Told you I'd get here." Rest in peace, Tommie.

Glenn Dunlap grew up a Cincinnati Reds fan in Summitville, Ind., but when the marketing consultant looked for baseball vacation packages to visit all 30 Major League Baseball stadiums, all he found were of the overcrowded "bus and ticket" variety. By the start of the 2006 season, Big League Tours was booking deluxe trips to famous ballparks, including meet-and-greets with former players (like those with Ron Kittle pictured to the left), close-in seats, as well as private-bus travel, meals, and four-star lodging.