ONE OF THE GREAT PLEASURES OF MET FANDOM:

Recalling the Time of the Signs at Shea (VINCENT M. MALLOZZI, 6/18/06, NY Times)

One recent morning in Queens, Karl Ehrhardt walked over to his bedroom closet and unlocked the door to a dozen memories, every one of them in black and white.

Ehrhardt, 81, better known to fans of a certain vintage as the Sign Man of Shea, looked down at a pile of placards he once flashed in Flushing, bits of commentary designed to praise and inspire, or tease and rattle, the Mets and their opponents.

From 1964 to 1981, the Sign Man, dressed in a blue shirt and a black derby emblazoned with a Mets logo, responded on cue to much of the drama played out between the white lines. One summer day in 1979, the Sign Man followed a bouncing ball into and out of the glove of Mets shortstop Frank Taveras. The Sign Man showed no mercy:

"Look Ma, No Hands."

And whenever the journeyman Jose Cardenal struck out for the Mets, the Sign Man never failed to hoist:

"Jose, Can You See?"

"I just called them the way I saw them," Ehrhardt said.

A commercial artist from Queens who grew up in Brooklyn rooting for the Dodgers, Ehrhardt said he "adopted the Mets" in 1962, the year the franchise was born, five years after the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles.

When Shea Stadium opened in 1964, the Sign Man set up shop, running his business of baseball barbs from a box seat behind the third-base dugout. Long before television coverage and giant scoreboards became littered with never-ending distractions, the Sign Man was the only sideshow in town.