Sunday School: Forgotten Faces of Flushing #47 :When Shea Stadium Went Full Nickelodeon: The Wildest Mets Attraction Ever Built

Welcome back to Sunday School: Forgotten Faces of Flushing, our weekly rummage through the Mets’ attic, where we dust off the bubble-gum cards and game-used jerseys of the guys who made you squint and go, “Wait… didn’t he play for us?”

Last week, we spotlighted Kevin Baez — the smooth-handed Brooklyn shortstop who carved out a life in baseball that’s been more meaningful than many players with ten times the headlines. A grinder, a teacher, a championship manager, and a guy who somehow manages to run a Fantasy Camp drill like it’s the seventh game of a hostage situation. Baez reminded us that some Mets don’t show up big in the box score — but they show up big in the heart.

This week, though?

We’re not profiling a player, a coach, an announcer, or even a mascot.

No, this week, we’re steering our time machine away from the clubhouse and straight into the strangest, slimiest, most neon-tinted corner of Mets lore — a chapter so bizarre you’d swear it was cooked up by a focus group of hyperactive 10-year-olds hopped up on Surge, Pixy Stix, Warheads, and whatever unregulated neon sugar dust they were pumping into kids in the ’90s. Because in 1994 and 1995, Shea Stadium wasn’t just home to the Mets. It was the epicenter of Nickelodeon Extreme Baseball. Yes. This actually happened.

It’s 1994, Nickelodeon is the cultural sun around which all tween life orbits. And into this world steps Mets co-owner Fred Wilpon , a man not exactly known for risk-taking unless you count “inventing the Bobby Bonilla deferred-payments plan” — who looked at Shea Stadium and essentially said, “You know what this place needs? Less baseball and more green goo.”

So, in partnership with Nickelodeon, the Mets built a 25,000-square-foot mini-theme park behind the right-field scoreboard. Cost: $1.5 million. Or, as Mets fans now measure things, roughly half a Bobby Bonilla. The concept was simple but brilliant: mix baseball with Nickelodeon’s signature brand of organized chaos and hope the kids dragged their parents to the ballpark. And honestly? It absolutely ruled.

The centerpiece was the GUTS Extreme Baseball Diamond, a three-story obstacle-course-meets-ballfield fever dream pulled straight from Nickelodeon GUTS. There were cargo nets, elastic jungles, wall climbs, slides, and a giant pit full of green plastic balls that looked suspiciously like surplus slime pellets. Periodically, hosts would burst onto the field to run a GUTS-style obstacle course featuring kids, adults, and whatever unsuspecting soul got roped in. Somewhere, Mike O’Malley was spiritually shouting, “DO YOU HAVE IT?!” And kids were responding, “I THINK I LEFT IT IN THE BALL PIT!”

Nearby stood the Green Slime Station, because of course there was a Green Slime Station. This was the Shea Stadium version of Nickelodeon’s Game Lab, starring “Dr. Booger,” a character name that could only have been approved in the early ’90s. The show featured musical pies, sundae-making disasters, hairball tosses, and someone always getting slimed. It was the first time many Mets fans realized slime could, in fact, be classified as a performance art medium.

Scattered throughout the park were carnival games like Fowl Ball (where you launched rubber chickens with mallets), Stimpy’s Hairball Toss (finally, socially acceptable hairball-throwing), and Legends of Baseball (which was as loosely inspired by Legends of the Hidden Temple as possible without being sued). There was also Weinerville Playland Stadium, where fans stuck their heads through a wall and operated puppets with spray guns. These attractions cost extra, of course — teaching kids a valuable economic lesson: even inside a theme park inside a baseball stadium, capitalism wins in extra innings.

Character appearances were everywhere. One moment you’d see Ren & Stimpy or Rocko. The next, you might bump into Mookie Wilson or Buddy Harrelson. This was also the triumphant return of Mr. Met, who reappeared after a mysterious 20-year absence like a baseball-headed Lazarus. And when the Mets were on the road, admission included a full Shea Stadium tour — the dugouts, the tunnels, the field level, even the broadcast booths. Some kids went from eating slime-filled sundaes to standing in Gary Cohen’s future office within minutes. That’s what we call Queens versatility.

But nothing — nothing — was more surreal than the Nickelodeon Mitts, a line of dancers in massive, cartoonish baseball-glove costumes. Picture a kickline of oversized Rawlings gloves performing in 95-degree July heat, sweating harder than Turk Wendell during a full moon. The Mitts were absurd and magnificent all at once. And here’s the kicker: they are the direct ancestors of today’s Queens Crew. Yes, the shirt-launching, pom-pom-waving hype squad at Citi Field draws its lineage from a troupe of dancers dressed as sentient baseball gloves. If Darwin were alive today, he’d walk into Flushing, look around, and throw his notebook into the nearest sewer grate.

Looking back, Nickelodeon Extreme Baseball sounds like a fever dream someone had after a 48-hour Nicktoons marathon. But here’s the twist: the Mets were ahead of their time. Today, every modern ballpark features attractions designed to keep fans entertained beyond the game itself. Truist Park’s Kids Zone opened in 2017. Fenway’s expanded Green Monster concourse became a hangout destination in the 2000s. Citizens Bank Park debuted its outfield carnival in 2004. The Mariners added their Kids Playfield in 2013. Petco Park opened its mini-field in 2004. Milwaukee’s beer garden concourse and Denver’s The Rooftop both opened in 2014. Globe Life Field debuted its massive entertainment district in 2020. All of these came years after the Mets built a fully functional theme park behind the right-field fence in 1994. Who knew Fred Wilpon was such a ballpark-experience pioneer? (Well, there’s also that deferred-payment thing he came up with… so maybe we should have.)

Nickelodeon Extreme Baseball lasted only the 1994 and 1995 seasons, undone by the strike, shifting priorities, and the general “What are we even doing?” energy of mid-’90s Mets baseball. But for the kids who ricocheted off its cargo nets, the parents who survived its slime blasts, the Nickelodeon Mitts who danced inside 40 pounds of foam, and the Mets fans who briefly lived in a world where baseball coexisted with rubber chickens, it left a neon-green, slime-splattered mark on Mets history.

It was weird. It was wonderful. It was Queens. And if you watch Citi Field’s between-innings shenanigans today — the Queens Crew tossing T-shirts, the kids dancing on the dugouts, the mascots sprinting through the crowd — and you squint just a little? You can still see the ghost of Dr. Booger smiling somewhere in the distance, slime bucket in hand.