• by Douglas Quenqua , May 20, 2008

Given the Mets' underwhelming performance during the first few weeks of the season, Shea Stadium had been the scene of some pretty heinous booing. But the worst of it came without a single player on the field, and had nothing to do with baseball.

At the home opener on April 8, Rick Astley's 1987 hit "Never Gonna Give You Up" came pouring out of the stadium speakers in the middle of the eighth inning. The reaction, documented by many a YouTube video, was a sustained chorus of 50,000-plus boos. You'd have thought Aaron Heilman was on the mound.

But what the crowd was booing was much more insidious than a lousy pitching performance. The fans had just been very publicly rickrolled - en masse, and in reality.

As the entire Web-surfing universe knows by now, rickrolling is the act of e-mailing someone a "must-see" or "awesome!" link that, in fact, leads to the video for Astley's ghastly tune. The prank reached its virtual high-water mark on April Fools' Day, when every link on YouTube's home page led to the video.

But rather than die a graceful digital death 'a la the mid-90s "I kiss you!" guy, this joke has continued to evolve. As the Shea faithful can now tell you, rickrolling is finding new life in the real world.

Flashback to late March, when the Mets launched an online poll to determine what "Sing-A-Long Song" should be played during the eighth inning. The team's fatal flaw was including a space for write-in votes. Rogue news site fark.com caught wind of the contest and instructed its millions of readers to write in "Never Gonna Give You Up." The song won in a landslide with more than 5 million votes.

Luckily, the Mets aren't above usurping the democratic process in the name of good taste. They announced a run-off: The top six songs would be played live, and fan reaction would determine the winner. "We knew something was going on, so we had fun with it," says team spokesman Jay Horwitz, who received calls from CNN, the BBC and others about fark.com's prank. "Unfortunately, Rick didn't make the cut."

Next came the Pittsburgh Pirates, who were RickRolled by a group of fans performing the song during an American Idol-type competition that was shown to fans between innings. And the The New York Times got the worst of it: The paper was tricked into running an item saying that fans had interrupted a March 8 basketball game at Eastern Washington University with the song, only to later run a correction saying it had been duped by a cleverly edited video.

Still, Fark founder Drew Curtis sees the end in sight. "Rickrolling has probably just about run its course," he says. "Once it's been covered on cnn and Fox News, I don't know that anyone thinks it's cool anymore."

There is, of course, one person who might disagree: Astley himself. According to Billboard magazine, digital sales of the song have been averaging about 1,000 per week since the phenomenon took off in December, peaking at 2,500 the week of March 9.