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It was hours before the first pitch of last Wednesday’s game between the New York Mets and the Oakland Athletics, but the dozens of people who maintain Citi Field had already been on the go for days making sure the field was ready and the lights were working.
The grounds crew replaced sod in the outfield torn up during a recent Def Leppard, Journey and Steve Miller Band concert. Maintenance staffers cleaned the bathrooms. Electricians checked the scoreboard and giant screen.
And they’re all overseen by Sue Lucchi, the senior vice president of ballpark operations, who’s been taking meetings since the morning — and will stay until the last out.
“The electricians, plumbers, engineers, maintenance, grounds crew, landscaping… we have a contractor for cleaning, but it falls under me,” she says, rattling off the list of those who work for her.
(“Oh I have the painters too, I forgot to tell you,” she recalls later.)
She’s worked her way up through two baseball stadiums since starting, adjusting to changes and different owners.
“I have a lot more people under me now that manage things that I would have done,” she said.
But Lucchi is still a doer. She rides around the perimeter of the ballpark in a golf cart hours before the game starts to inspect the premises. At least a dozen workers say “Hi Sue!” as they make their way inside. Lucchi takes in the fresh sod and picks up some garbage she spots on a flower bed.
Through an entrance from center field, right at the 370 feet sign, she points out how much the maintenance and groundskeeper crew’s equipment has increased in her more than 30 years with the team. That view of the field is her favorite, even though most prefer the view from behind home plate.
“When we worked at Shea Stadium, I had one mower like that and one golf cart,” she said. “Now we have so much equipment, it doesn’t fit in here.”
A Grassroots Love of the Game
Lucchi, 52, grew up in nearby Whitestone in a house her grandfather built and would often drive by the old Shea Stadium to get to her dad’s tile shop in Astoria. Her parents weren’t big into sports, she said, but as the youngest of three children, she spent a lot of time with her grandmother, who was a devoted Mets fan. She later went to games with her nun aunt, Sister Lucian Lucchi, who would get field level tickets through Catholic Charities.
As a teen, Lucchi played softball at St. Agnes High School, formerly in College Point, before attending St. John’s University to study sports medicine — the first in her family to attend college, she said.
When the university dropped the program, Lucchi stuck around and switched to athletic administration, which was how she landed at Shea as an unpaid intern in 1993.
The Mets would go on to lose 100 games that season and manager Jeff Torborg was fired soon after Lucchi was brought on. She watched every game through a small window in the Diamond Vision scoreboard control room, keeping score, noting changes, and spell-checking whatever was entered in for the scoreboard, she said. When she wasn’t at school or at Shea, she worked at Herman’s World of Sporting Goods in the Douglaston Mall.
A year later she was laid off when the players went on strike but was officially hired when baseball returned in April, 1995, making $80 a day.
“I thought I won [the] Lotto,” she said, although she kept her job at Herman’s for a few years.
Her parents were initially skeptical — especially after that 1994 layoff — but they grew to be her biggest supporters, she said.
At one Thanksgiving dinner in the early 2000s, a relative asked her, “‘So what do you do at the Mets, you cook the hot dogs?’” she recalled.
“I thought my father was gonna go over the table and kill this man,” she said. He replied: “‘She don’t cook food, she runs that ballpark!’”
Swinging for the Fences
In the decades since she’s worked her way up and through the organization, at times going beyond the job description. After the Sept. 11 attacks she worked with the team and the players to help set up a relief and distribution center in the parking lot.
And once baseball returned weeks later, she knew they had to do something about the Twin Towers on the neon skyline atop the Shea Stadium scoreboard.
“You can’t just leave that, you have to acknowledge it,” she said. She and Kevin McCarthy, who was then the director of stadium operations, came up with the idea of a plywood “ribbon,” painted yellow by the man who used to do the logos on the field. It’s still her favorite thing in the new stadium, she said, now on top of Citi Field’s Shake Shack.
She was also the last one out of Shea Stadium, overseeing the sale of seats and memorabilia before it was torn down in 2009, she said.
Even with new owners, she says her colleagues at the Mets are like a family. Her colleagues think that, too.
Anne Marie Breyer, the ballpark’s horticulturist, has been with the team for 11 years. She beautifies the stadium and the areas around it, planting flowers by the Tom Seaver statue and the replica home-run apple; she prefers peonies.
“I’ve worked for Sue for the whole time I’ve been here and she’s a wonderful boss, she’s a wonderful friend, she’s a leader, and she listens and she takes care of her staff,” Breyer told THE CITY.
“It’s just made my job here so much more rewarding knowing that you have someone behind you like Sue.”
