Mets Won't Live With Yankees

[G-Fafif]

So said a headline over an AP story in the Miami News, September 1, 1971 (stumbled across while confirming the 40-year-old Hackensack Giants meme).

Guess who threatened to move?

M. Donald Grant, chairman of the board of the New York Mets, said yesterday he would recommend moving the baseball team to New Jersey if New York City succeeds in forcing the Mets to accept the Yankees as co-tenants at Shea Stadium.

Around the same time, Robert Lipsyte, in the Times (a future MFY apologist), pretty much nailed what the football Giants were up against when they announced their move from MFYS I to what would become the Meadowlands:

[T]hey are now tenants in a second-rate ballpark unsuited to football in an unpleasant neighborhood with inadequate parking and few of the other facilities -- restaurants, bars, parks, movies, hotels, malls -- that could make a ball game a family holiday.

Of course nowadays they just build the mall inside the ballpark.