Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?:

The Improbable Saga of the New York Mets’ First Year

by Jimmy Breslin

Introduction by Bill Veeck

Dedication

To the 922,530 brave souls who paid their way into the Polo Grounds in 1962. Never has so much misery loved so much company.

Contents

Introduction by Bill Veeck

1. “Just Like the WPA”

2. A Bad Report to the Sponsor

3. 119 or Bust

4. The Nickel Line

5. “They’re Afraid To Come Out”

6. Wait Till Next Year? We’re Fine Now!

7. Appendix I Around the Diamond with the Mets in 1962

8. Appendix II Mets’ Records, 1962

A Biography of Jimmy Breslin

Acknowledgments

Introduction

FROM THE DIMNESS OF the past to our highly illuminated present, each troubadour, jongleur, and soothsayer, whether from the glittering court of Fernando and Isabella or the glass and mortar confines of Madison Avenue, has sung his paean of praise to record for a breathless posterity—or a quick buck— the wondrous and daring deeds of the mighty. Few are the voices raised in defense of peasant, peon, or .179 hitter, and these few are soon stilled by the pitchman’s glowing accounts of another “winner.”

At long last the flood of excellence is dammed. The trend reversed. The losers have their day. Jimmy Breslin has written a history of the Mets, preserving for all time a remarkable tale of ineptitude, mediocrity, and abject failure.

It’s stories like his that are important. They spur the losers of the world to take heart—to rise and lose again. Without losers, where would the winners be? So who, in the final analysis, is most entitled to historic memory?

I feel eminently qualified to write the introduction to a history of the Mets. I operated the St. Louis Browns. It was our image that was toppled from its niche in the darkest recess of Cooperstown. It was from us that the Mets, with pitiful ease, wrested the title of The Worst Club in Baseball History.” It was, in truth, the Brownies who made possible the Mets’ only victory.

I must admit, in fairness, that the Mets deserve the title. They won it fair and square. They achieved total incompetence in a single year, while the Browns worked industriously for almost a decade to gain equal proficiency. We employed Patkin and Price, both professional clowns. They beat us again; they had Marv Throneberry. We had the help of the American League, they the wholehearted cooperation of the National, plus the assistance of the league’s expansion committee, of inestimable advantage in any drive for the bottom. Here, in clear focus, is the rock being thrown to the sinking swimmer.

Here’s Mrs. Payson, who justifiably emerges as a lady of courage and class, if not acumen; Casey Stengel, whose reputation needs no burnishing from this writer; and New York baseball fans, who unquestionably deserved a far better shake. But the philosophy of baseball, like that of the late Texas Guinan, precludes fair shakes. In this game when they’re down you tromp ’em—good—lest they someday get up to annoy the winners. Competition is for professional football and amateurs. Furthermore, according to Walter O’Malley, it’s socialistic.

So the Mets started with the worst pitching, backed by the most deplorable infield and outfield, ever assembled on a single diamond. While “selecting” their players they didn’t (as the expansion committee professed so loudly to fear) dilute the talent pool of the major leagues, but dealt almost a death blow to the Sally.

The caliber of the Mets’ play could easily have earned for them other honors. That of “Games Played Most Often in Secret,” for instance. In this, as in almost all else, they failed dismally, ending the season with well over 900,000 paying customers—a tribute to Casey Stengel’s sure knowledge of public relations and the enduring fanaticism of Giant and Dodger fans. It is unrecorded how many paid more than once to see baseball—Met style. It is, however, quite possible that more different individuals saw the National League teams than wandered from Coogan’s Bluff to watch the more skillful exhibitions in Yankee Stadium.

It is my understanding that Mrs. Payson, the club’s principal angel, has both money and real staying power. I hope so. I hope too that both of these equal Mr. Weiss’s prospective tenure in office. Now, lest the reader feel I am picking unfairly on the Met general manager, let me explain. I am. Intentionally. Mr. Weiss took the bows during a long and successful career with the Yankees. I would be the last to deprive him of equal rights with the Mets. He helped to conceive them. Why shouldn’t he nurse them along? Boy! What a picture that makes.

Bill Veeck

The Mets is a very good thing. They give everybody a job. Just like the WPA.

—BILLY LOES, the only pitcher in the history of baseball to be defeated in a World Series game because he lost a ground ball in the sun

1

“Just Like the WPA”

THE JOB PROGRESS SHEET in the office says the weather is clear, with a high for the day of 54 and a low of 40, which is fine to keep work moving along on this $19,100,000 stadium New York City is having built alongside its World’s Fair grounds.

Outside, a pale sun washes what is now a latticework of steel, but which will be, hopefully by summer, a horseshoe-shaped ballpark seating 55,000 people. And crawling over the steel beams on this day is the flower of New York’s construction trades, a group of 483 tin-hatted workers.

As you watch, you are struck with the immenseness of a construction job such as this one. Take that guy way up on the top, the one moving along a solitary white-painted beam that seems to be held up by nothing. His name is Tommy McLaughlin, and he has a wife and six kids at home. He is over five hundred feet in the air, without even a rope to hold onto. One strong gust of wind or one slippery spot on the beam, and that will do it. You’d be surprised how many times this happens on a construction job. But here he is, walking like a guy going over to play the jukebox in the neighborhood saloon. And all around the place there are workers just as high up and taking just as many chances. It makes you nervous to look at them.

It also would frighten hell out of you to pay them. McLaughlin is on the clock as an iron worker. At $5.25 an hour. There are steamfitters up there, too, and they come in at $5.37 an hour. Then there are electricians ($7.63), laborers ($4.94), wire lathers ($5.72), and operating engineers ($5.43). The payroll for this one day is going to run $15,585.72 by quitting time.

This is only part of the story. The planning and political wrangling that went on earlier were incredible. Why, once they argued for two days about how many toilets the new stadium should have. Plans called for 329, but somebody insisted that he would not be associated with a stadium that did not have at least 600 johns. Finally a Parks Commissioner named Newbold Morris put his foot down when he found an architect busily penciling in a spot to hook up Unit No. 526 of American Sanitary’s best.

“What are we building, a ballpark or a place to go to the toilet?” Morris said.

You think of all these things as you stand and watch this big job. And then, just for a minute, everything changes. The ground, piled with dirt and covered with empty beer cans and crushed coffee containers, turns into cropped Merion blue. The turf surrounds an infield that doesn’t have a pebble on it. The bare steel beams turn into gleaming stands, and they are filled. You can hear the crowd making noise.

And now it hits you. Now you realize, for the first time, what this is all about. All of it, all of the workers risking their lives, and all of the huge payrolls and all of the political wrangling. There is a reason for it all:

They are building a brand-new stadium for Marvin Throneberry.

Marvin Throneberry, who is known as Marvelous Marv to his admirers, plays first base for the New York Mets, the team which is going to play its home games in this new stadium. In fact, Marvelous Marv does more than just play first base for the Mets. He is the Mets.

The New York Mets are a team that was formed at the start of last season. They lost 120 games, which made them, on paper, the poorest team in modern baseball history. On the field they were even worse. The Mets did not lose games merely because they played badly. Never. The Mets lost because they played a brand of baseball which has not been seen in the Big Leagues in over twenty-five years. And in doing this they warmed the hearts of baseball fans everywhere. They became, in their first year of existence, almost a national symbol. Name one loyal American who can say that he does not love a team which loses 120 games in one season.

As far as all of sport is concerned, the Mets are the most delightful occurrence in a long time. For this is the era of the businessman in sports, and it has become as dry and agonizing a time as you would want to see. In golf, for example, all they talk about is how much money Arnold Palmer makes and how he uses top corporation thoroughness in running his career. This is fine for Palmer, but who ever wanted a sports guy to be like a business executive? Once the big thing in that sport was whether the bartender would close up in time for Walter Hagen to get out to the first tee on schedule. Things have gone like this every place else in sports too. And it is even worse in baseball. Today you hear of pension funds and endorsements, and the players all seem to know what to say and what not to say, and after a while, as you go around, everything seems to come down to this kind of conversation:

REPORTER: Did you know it was going to be a home run?

PLAYER: Sure.

REPORTER: How could you tell?

PLAYER: Because I seen it go into the stands.

The Mets have changed all this. In one season they stepped out and gave sports, and the people who like sports, the first team worthy of being a legend in several decades. And they are a true legend. This is rare. You see, most of the stories which have been handed down over the years about ballplayers or teams are either vastly embellished or simply not true at all. The stories dealing with Babe Herman of the old Brooklyn Dodgers are a good example. He was the worst outfielder ever to live, they tell you, and fly balls fell on his head and nearly killed him as a matter of course. Well, two or three guys we know who watched the old Dodgers for twenty years or more never saw Herman get hit any place by a baseball. And one of them, the respected Tommy Holmes of the New York Herald-Tribune, will go so far as to tell you that Herman was a good fielder. He had good hands and could move, Tommy insists. Once in a while he would misjudge a fly badly. But only once in a while. Day in and day out, he was as good as they ever came, Tommy says.

In fact, in eighteen years of being able to look at things and remember what I have seen, the only sports legend I ever saw who completely lived up to advance billing was Babe Ruth.

It was a hot summer afternoon, and the Babe, sweat dripping from his jowls and his shirt stuck to him, came off the eighteenth green at the old Bayside Golf Club in the borough of Queens and stormed into the huge barroom of the club.

“Gimme one of them heavens to Betsy drinks you always make for me,” the Babe said in his gravelly voice.

The bartender put a couple of fistfuls of ice chunks into a big, thick mixing glass and then proceeded to make a Tom Collins that had so much gin in it that the other people at the bar started to laugh. He served the drink to the Babe just as it was made, right in the mixing glass.

Ruth said something about how heavens to Betsy hot he was, and then he picked up the glass and opened his mouth, and there went everything. In one shot he swallowed the drink, the orange slice and the rest of the garbage, and the ice chunks too. He stopped for nothing. There is not a single man I have ever seen in a saloon who does not bring his teeth together a little bit and stop those ice chunks from going in. A man has to have a pipe the size of a trombone to take ice in one shot. But I saw Ruth do it, and whenever somebody tells me about how the Babe used to drink and eat when he was playing ball, I believe every word of it.

Otherwise, most legends should be regarded with suspicion. Although, if one is to have any fun out of life, one should proceed with the understanding that reminiscences are to be enjoyed, not authenticated. But with the Mets you do not need any of this. They made it on their own and required no help from imaginative bystanders. This team was, simply, a great, colorful spectacle, and they are held here in the highest affection. The way they played baseball made them the sports story of our time. This was not another group of methodical athletes making a living at baseball. Not the Mets. They did things.

Which brings us back to Marvelous Marvin Throneberry. On a hot Sunday last summer at old Busch Stadium in St. Louis. The Mets were in the field. Marvelous Marv was holding down first base. This is like saying Willie Sutton works at your bank.

It was the eighth inning of the first game of a doubleheader, and the Cardinals had Ken Boyer on first and Stanley Musial at third. Two were out. Boyer took a lead, then broke for second on the pitch. The throw to second from the Mets’ catcher was, by some sort of miracle, perfect. It had Boyer beat a mile, and the Cardinal runner, only halfway down, turned and tried to go back to first. The Mets’ second baseman, Rod Kanehl, threw to Throneberry. Boyer was trapped.

Standard operating procedure in a situation of this kind is for the man with the ball to chase the runner, but with one eye firmly fixed on the man on third. If he breaks for home, you’re supposed to go after him and forget the other guy.

So Boyer turned and started to run away from Throneberry. This seemed to incense Marv. Nobody runs away from Marvin Throneberry. He took after Boyer with purpose. He did not even wink at Musial. Marvelous Marv lowered his head a little and produced wonderful running action with his legs. This amazed the old manager, Casey Stengel, who was standing on the top step of the Mets’ dugout. It also amazed Mr. Musial, who was relaxing on third. Stanley’s mouth opened. Then he broke for the plate and ran across it and into the dugout with the run that cost the Mets the game. Out on the basepaths, Throneberry, despite all his intentions and heroic efforts, never did get Boyer. He finally had to flip to his shortstop, Charley Neal, who made the tag near second.

It was an incredible play. But a man does not become an institution on one play.

Therefore. There was a doubleheader against the Chicago Cubs at the Polo Grounds, the Mets’ home until their new park is ready. In the first inning of the first game Don Landrum of Chicago was caught in a rundown between first and second. Rundowns are not Throneberry’s strong point. In the middle of the posse of Mets chasing the runner, Throneberry found himself face to face with Landrum. The only trouble was that Marvin did not have the ball. Now during a rundown the cardinal rule is to get out of the way if you do not have the ball. If you stand around, the runner will deliberately bang into you and claim interference, and the umpire will call it for him, too.

Which is exactly what happened. Landrum jumped into Throneberry’s arms, and the umpire waved him safely to first. So, instead of an out, the Cubs still had a runner at first—and the Mets were so upset the Cubs jumped them for a four-run rally.

When the Mets came to bat, Throneberry strode to the plate, intent on making up for the whole thing. With two runners on, Marv drove a long shot to the bullpen in right center field. It went between the outfielders and was a certain triple. As usual, Marv had that wonderful running action. He lowered his head and flew past first. Well past it. He didn’t come within two steps of touching the bag. Then he raced to second, turned the corner grandly, and careened toward third. The stands roared for Marvin Throneberry.

While all this violent action and excitement were going on, Ernie Banks, the Cubs’ first baseman, casually strolled over to Umpire Dusty Boggess.

“Didn’t touch the bag, you know, Dusty,” Banks said. Boggess nodded. Banks then called for the ball. The relay came, and he stepped on first base. Across the infield Throneberry was standing on third. He was taking a deep breath and was proudly hitching up his belt, the roar of the crowd in his ears, when he saw the umpire calling him out at first.

“Things just sort of keep on happening to me,” Marvin observed at one point during the season.

Which they did. All season long. And at the end, here was this balding twenty-eight-year-old from Collierville, Tennessee, standing at home plate with a big smile on his face as he proudly accepted a boat which he had won as the result of a clothing-store contest. Throneberry was not too certain what he would do with the boat. The most water he had seen in several years was a filled-up bathtub on Saturday night back in Collierville. The nearest lake to his house is 150 miles away, and 150 miles as the coon dog runs, Marv cautioned. “Take the road, it’s a little further,” he said.

But this was all right. If he had been living in Johnstown, they would have given him a well pump. Things just go like this for Throneberry. It was all right with him. It was, that is, until two days later, when Marvin found out just how rough the season really was.

The whole incredible thing started in the agile brain of a Madison Avenue public-relations man whose accounts include a large chain clothing company. He also represents a book publisher, but the clothing store does not hold that against him. The clothes client had made a ticket sales tie-in with the Mets. Just before the season started, the P.R. man barged into the clothing company’s offices with an idea that was so hot he was dizzy from it.

“We’ll put up a sign on the outfield fence,” he said. “The player who hits it the most over the season gets a boat. Where do we get the boat? We work a tie-in with another client of mine who makes them. It’ll be terrific.”

The first sign certainly was. Out on the left-field fence, it spelled out the client’s name, and inside a circle was a picture of the boat. Anybody who hit the circle on the fly got five points. Anybody who hit any other part of the sign on the fly received three points. If the ball hit it on the bounce it was worth two points. Whoever had the most points at the end of the season was to win the boat. An official point-keeper was assigned to watch every Met game and keep a tally on the points. Before half the season was over, the scorer wanted to go to the needle trades union over the matter.

The sign was a beauty. It also was remindful of the famous New Yorker cartoon which showed the outfield wall of a ballpark and a sign on it stating, “Hit the sign and Abe Feldman will give you a suit absolutely free.” In front of the sign, hands on knees, was the outfielder, waiting for the next pitch. And right behind him, at the ready, was Abe Feldman. Abe was bald and he wore a vest. He had a catcher’s mitt on his right hand and a first baseman’s mitt on the other.

The clothing sign disturbed Casey Stengel, however. Upon seeing it for the first time, Stengel squawked.

“We get to the end of the season, and I might need a couple of games to finish higher [optimism was rampant at this time] and what am I going to get? Everybody will be standing up there and going, whoom! Just trying to win theirselves a nice boat while I’m sittin’ here hopin’ they’ll butcher boy the ball onto the ground and get me a run or two. I don’t like it at all.”

George Weiss, the Mets’ general manager, moved quickly to satisfy Stengel. In a lifetime of baseball, Weiss has learned many things, one of which is that when a man like Stengel has a complaint of this type, it is to be acted upon promptly. The sign, Weiss decreed, had to go.

He was telling this to the wrong guy. This P.R. man leaves in the middle of a job for only one reason: the client isn’t coming up with the money.

“Casey is worried about his left-handed hitters deliberately trying to hit the left-field fence?” The P.R. man inquired in wonderment. Told that this was the case, he had an antidote. “My client is buying the same sign on the right-field fence,” he announced. This cost the client another chunk of dough. So the contest was still on.

Over the year, Throneberry hit the sign in right field exactly four times. But twice his line drive landed inside the circle for five points, and on the last day of the home season at the Polo Grounds he found himself the proud owner of a $6000 luxury cabin cruiser.

The clothing company awarded another boat on the same day. It went to the Met who was named the team’s most valuable player in a poll of sports writers. Richie Ashburn was the winner. Ashburn is from Nebraska.

“We’ll both sail our boats all over the bathtub,” Throneberry told the boat people. Marvelous Marv was in high humor.

A day later, Judge Robert Cannon, who handles legal matters for the Major League Baseball Players Association, told Marvelous Marv something about the boat. Humor fled as the judge spoke.

“Just don’t forget to declare the full value,” Cannon said.

“Declare it? Who to, the Coast Guard?” Throneberry asked.

“Taxes,” Cannon said. “Ashburn’s boat was a gift. He was voted it. Yours came the hard way. You hit the sign. You earned it. The boat is earnings. You pay income tax on it.”

Last winter, at a very late date in the tax year, Throneberry sat in his living room in Collierville and he still was not quite over his conversation with Cannon.

“In my whole life I never believed they’d be as rough a year as there was last season,” he said. “And here I am, I’m still not out of it. I got a boat in a warehouse someplace and the man tells me I got to pay taxes on it and all we got around here is, like I say, filled-up bathtubs and maybe a crick or two. I think maybe I’ll be able to sell it off someplace. I think you could say prospects is all right. But I still don’t know what to do about that tax thing.”

The whole season went this way for the Mets. Take any day, any town, any inning. With the Mets nothing changed, only the pages on the calendar. It was all one wonderful mistake.

There was the Fourth of July, which certainly has some significance, and the Mets were at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. Jim Davenport, the Giants’ third baseman, swung at a pitch and lifted it high into the air. Rod Kanehl, the Met stationed at shortstop this time around, turned and raced into left field. Sunglasses flipping, glove up in the air, feet moving, Kanehl went for the ball.

The Mets’ third baseman, Felix Mantilla, came in and made the catch right at the pitcher’s mound.

There was even something about this team before it ever played a game. Go to the summer of 1961, before it was even formed, and you find that, at this time, the club hired the fabled Rogers Hornsby to prepare a scouting report on every player in the major leagues. The Mets of 1962 were to be formed with baseball players given to them by the other teams. As we are going to see, this little matter is, by itself, a saga of American charity rivaling that of United States Steel. Hornsby operated out of his home city of Chicago. He watched National League teams at Wrigley Field, which he did not like so much because only day games are played there and this interfered badly with his attendance at the horse races. He watched American League teams at Comiskey Park, which was a bit better because most of the games were played at night—although not so much, because he still had to look at baseball players.

“They say we’re going to get players out of a grab bag,” Hornsby said one afternoon at Wrigley Field. “From what I see, it’s going to be a garbage bag. Ain’t nobody got fat off eating out of the garbage, and that’s just what the Mets is going to have to be doing. This is terrible. I mean, this is really going to be bad.”

Rogers did not take his job lightly. On this day, for example, he slipped his hand into a pocket of his checked sports jacket and came out with a pair of contact lenses which he put on so he could study closely what was on the field, in front of him. And what was on the field gagged the Rajah. In his time, Hornsby was an unbelievable hitter who three times finished with an average of over .400, reaching .424 in 1924, a record still standing. This background has not made him exactly tolerant of the ability of baseball players. To illustrate, we reprint herewith the most glowing report on an individual which Hornsby handed in all season:

LOOKS LIKE A MAJOR-LEAGUE PLAYER

The name at the top of the sheet said the report was about Mickey Mantle.

It did not take long for the Mets to have an adverse effect on Hornsby’s luck. There was one day, when he had no game to attend, that Rajah got into his yellow Cadillac at a little before ten o’clock and headed for Arlington Heights, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago where Arlington Park Race Track happens to be located. En route to the track, Hornsby stopped for gas, or to have the windshield wiped, or just to stop, period, and each time he would jam himself into a phone booth and make phone calls dealing with situations at such places as Rockingham Park and Aqueduct.

He arrived at Arlington Park at 11:15. Post time for the first race was 2:30. This gave Rogers just enough time to get a seat in the grandstand—he feels the clubhouse is a place for suckers—and begin the tedious job of handicapping a nine-race card. He also had invested in two fifty-cent tout cards sold at the track entrance. One of them, in which Rogers placed great stock, had a horse named Frisky Phil, 15-1 in the morning line, on top in the sixth race.

Frisky Phil was trained by a Kentucky gentleman named Henry Forrest, and the Rajah caught up with Forrest before the race.

“This is a horse that’s been out with leg trouble for seven months now,” Forrest said. “As a rule now, only one horse in a hundred that’s been away for six months or more can win first time out. The price should be 50-1 to begin with. Here you’re takin’ 15-1 on a horse that just don’t seem to figure at all. Don’t bet.”

“Well, then you pick me a winner here in the race,” Rajah said.

“I don’t do that,” Forrest said. “Every time I give out a horse, it loses, and a man don’t make many friends like that.”

“Never mind that, you just give me the horse you like in this race,” Hornsby insisted.

Forrest relented and mentioned a horse, the name of which is forgotten. Hornsby bet $200 on him. The name of the horse is forgotten because of what happened in the race. Frisky Phil got out of the gate on top, and his legs folded and unfolded beautifully, and he never took a bad step. They are still trying to get him. He paid $33.60.

Hornsby went home. He did not forget.

Last season, as things got rougher and rougher with the Mets, Rogers Hornsby could be found at the Polo Grounds, or in Chicago and on his way to a scouting trip in Decatur, and he summed up his feelings in one bitter quote:

“You can’t trust them Kentucky bastard trainers.”

The Mets’ run of luck held to the end. They finished their first season on September 30, a dull afternoon in Chicago. They were at Wrigley Field, playing the Cubs. Losing, 5-1, in the eighth inning, the Mets went to work on Bob Buhl. Solly Drake opened with a single, then Richie Ashburn singled. Nobody out, runners on first and second, and Joe Pignatano, the catcher, up. Buhl gave him a fast ball, and Pignatano, a right-hander swinging late, hit a looper into right field. Drake, on second, thought the ball would drop in. He took off for third. Ashburn, on first, was certain the ball would drop in. He went for second.

Ken Hubbs, the Chicago second baseman, was absolutely positive he could catch the ball. He went out into right field and proved he was correct. Then he threw to Ernie Banks at first base. Ashburn was all the way to second. This made it a double play. It also gave Solly Drake, who was somewhere around third base, the idea that he was in trouble. He was. Banks threw to Andre Rodgers, who covered second, and it was a triple play.

It was things like this which made it a memorable summer for the manager of the team, Casey Stengel. But the season was no more memorable than Stengel was. At seventy-three, and coming from a run of ten pennants and eight world championships in twelve years of managing the New York Yankees, Stengel last year gave what must be the finest performance of his life. He came to the Mets expecting it to be tough. He never expected it to be as tough as it turned out to be. But it made no difference. He gave one of the finest performances under bad circumstances that can be seen in any walk of life.

Casey Stengel last season was simply the stand-up guy. He went through 120 losses with a smile, a try, and a few badly needed drinks. He tried to teach his players. They simply could not learn. When he realized this, he would sit back and smile and take the heat off the poor player.

“I can’t change a man’s life,” Stengel would say softly. When he put it that way, nobody was going to go out and make a point of how bad the player in question was.

Now there is supposed to be nothing new anybody can tell you about Casey Stengel. In his twelve years with the Yankees he was the most written-of and spoken-about figure in sports. When he was fired from the Yankees, he was given a huge check by The Saturday Evening Post to tell of his life in baseball. For free, Casey Stengel talks for hours. For the big check he sat down and wrecked tape recorders, and by now he is supposed to be an old story.

But if you had seen Stengel manage the New York Mets last season, you would know that he was anything but an old story.

You see, the notion here is that Stengel never quite was what he always was purported to be in the newspapers. The double-talk, for example. The man is not a double-talker. As colorful a conversationalist as we’ve ever had, yes. But a mysterious double-talker, never. Except when he was putting on a show. The newspaper sports writers, as a rule fairly horrible at writing quotes even from a plain talker, went overboard on Casey’s double-talk gag. In doing so, they succeeded in losing much of his humor. And they also gave the reader the impression that Stengel was a man only Communists did not truly love.

Well, Stengel is a human being. And with the Yankees he had his human habits. One of which was to be awfully rough and impatient with young ballplayers at times. Once he called an outfielder named Norman Siebern into his office and gave him a going-over that was so rough there are baseball people today who insist it was the thing that ruined Siebern, who once was a tremendous prospect. And players like Clete Boyer and Bobby Richardson, both the real goods, were anything but relaxed under Stengel. Richardson came this close to quitting baseball—and this is a fellow who acts, not talks—over Stengel’s gruffness.

But last season Stengel was everything they ever wrote or said about him. He came with humor, compassion, and, above all, class. He also came onto some awfully tough days and nights, and, no matter how nice he was about it, you knew he really wasn’t used to it.

There was one afternoon in training at St. Petersburg, Florida, when the exact quality of this ball club started to show itself to Casey. When he came into the clubhouse he did not seem to be completely filled with confidence.

And that night old Rogers Hornsby sat in his double-breasted suit in a chair a few strides from the bar of the Colonial Inn and expounded in the subtle, couched tones that have cost Rogers fifty jobs in baseball.

“Casey come back today like a ghost,” he said. “I mean, those players out there frighten him. Like a ghost, I tell you. Don’t you know, that man is used to good teams. These fellas here, I tell you they frighten you.”

Throughout the year Stengel insisted he never was frightened. “Shocked” was the word he kept using. Back in the old days, as manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers and Boston Braves, he had had some bad players under him. But this was so long ago it was hard to recall. The problems Stengel were used to when he came to the Mets consisted mainly of nagging Mickey Mantle to chop down at a high pitch so that, in between his five-hundred-foot home runs, Mickey would not hit a fly ball or two that would be caught. With the Mets, Stengel was confronted with some rather strange things. His third baseman of record, Felix Mantilla, had a funny habit. If a ball was hit to the shortstop side of third, Mantilla broke toward the foul line. If the ball was hit down the foul line, Mantilla threw himself toward short. It was surprising how often balls went right past Mantilla because of this.

One memorable night in St. Louis, on the occasion of his seventy-third birthday, although he produced a doctored Kansas City certificate to show he was only seventy-two, Casey came into a private party room at the Chase Hotel with his gray hair slicked down, and he sat in a leather arm chair in front of a small cocktail table, accepted a Manhattan, and talked about his team.

“I’ve seen these do a lot of things to people,” he said of the Manhattan. Then he began to puff on cigarettes and talk. He went from Brooklyn to Oakland to Kansas City and then to the Yankees and the old Newark Bears of the International League, and then he leaned forward and came to the Mets.

“We’re going into Los Angeles the first time,” he was saying, “and, well, I don’t want to go in there to that big new ballpark in front of all them people and have to see the other fellas running around those bases the way they figured to on my pitchers and my catchers, too. Wills [Maury] and those fellows, they start running in circles and they don’t stop and so forth and it could be embarrassing, which I don’t want to be.

“Well, we have this Canzoneri [catcher Chris Cannizzaro] at Syracuse, and he catches good and throws real good and he should be able to stop them. I don’t want to be embarrassed. So we bring him and he is going to throw out these runners.”

Stengel took a big drag on the cigarette. Then he leaned forward and shook his head.

“We come in there and you never seen anything like it in your life. I find I got a defensive catcher, only who can’t catch the ball. The pitcher throws. Wild pitch. Throws again. Passed ball. Throws again. Oops! The ball drops out of the glove. And all the time I am dizzy on account of these runners running around in circles on me and so forth.

“Makes a man think. You look up and down the bench and you have to say to yourself, ‘Can’t anybody here play this game?’”

Later, long after midnight and well after the birthday celebration was over, the bartender was falling asleep and the only sound in the hotel was the whine of a vacuum cleaner in the lobby. Stengel banged his empty glass on the red-tiled bar top and then walked out of the room.

In the lobby, the guy working the vacuum cleaner was on his big job, the rug leading into a ballroom, when Mr. Stengel stopped to light a cigarette and reflect on life.

“I’m shell-shocked,” Casey addressed the cleaner. “I’m not used to gettin’ any of these shocks at all, and now they come every three innings. How do you like that?” The cleaner had no answer. “This is a disaster,” Stengel continued. “Do you know who my player of the year is? My player of the year is Choo Choo Coleman, and I have him for only two days. He runs very good.”

Casey then went to bed.

This, then, is the way the first year of the New York Mets went. It was a team that featured three twenty-game losers, an opening day outfield that held the all-time major-league record for fathering children (nineteen), a defensive catcher who couldn’t catch, and an over-all collection of strange players who performed strange feats. Yet it was absolutely wonderful. People loved it. The Mets gathered about them a breed of baseball fans who quite possibly will make you forget the characters who once made Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field a part of this country’s folklore. The Mets’ fans are made of the same things. Brooklyn fans, observed Garry Schumacher, once a great baseball writer and now part of the San Francisco Giants management, never would have appreciated Joe DiMaggio on their club.

“Too perfect,” Garry said.

It is that way with those who follow the Mets.

“They are without a doubt the worst team in the history of baseball,” Bill Veeck was saying one day last summer. “I speak with authority. I had the St. Louis Browns. I also speak with longing. I’d love to spend the rest of the summer around the team. If you couldn’t have any fun with the Mets, you couldn’t have any fun any place.”

2

A Bad Report to the Sponsor

THE NEW YORK METS are in existence for a simple reason: New York City needed them. This team was created as more of a civic enterprise than a product of baseball’s expansion. This is not as bad a rap on the City of New York as you think. New York always has trouble starting anything. Once, for example, it took a couple of years to get a statue of Simón Bolívar or some such hero on a horse placed in Central Park. Fifteen city agencies, plus the State Department and a couple of South American governments, were involved in a terrible fight over the statue. It all was over the sculptor, who happened to be a perfectionist. When he chiseled out Bolívar’s horse, he made a whole horse, and no art commission was going to make him put Simón Bolívar on some old gelding. Central Park with its women and children or no Central Park.

Because of this civic need for another baseball team in town, many people from many areas of endeavor became involved. In fact, so many people got into the picture that when you look back on it, you do not know who to blame first. Go to any day of any year since the Dodgers and Giants left New York in 1957 and you find that somebody was doing something which eventually led to the Mets. This team was no accident. It was put together on purpose.

And in re-creating all this effort to start a team, everything seems to fall into the pattern of the bright afternoon in January of 1962 when Wid Matthews, the scout, walked into a car agency in Zanesville, Ohio, for a talk with the manager of the place, one R. G. Miller. R. G. once had spent a couple of years in the major leagues disguised as a left-handed pitcher. He retired at the age of twenty-seven, breaking the hearts of most American League batters by doing so. Now, at twenty-nine, R. G. had much to look forward to. He ran the agency competently, and had a chance to get a piece of the business someday. It was going to take a lot to talk Miller into doing anything but sell cars.

Unfortunately, Matthews had all that was needed. In his hand was a sheet which showed that Miller needed only eighteen days in a major-league uniform to qualify as a five-year man under the baseball players’ pension.

“Just eighteen days,” Matthews said. “If you can do anything you can be up for that long. Then, when you reach age fifty, you’ll get a check for $125 every month until you’re dead. How can you let a thing like that go by? If you’ll start the season with Syracuse and show us enough, you’ll come up to the Mets and make that pension. You can’t turn your back on this one. It’s too good.”

It was, Miller’s boss told him to take it; the job would stay open. So with great resolve R. G. Miller reported to spring training with the Syracuse team of the International League and he got in shape.

And on July 24 at County Stadium, Milwaukee, with his team locked in a desperate 4—4 game with the Braves that was now in the twelfth inning, Manager Casey Stengel waved grandly to his bullpen for a new pitcher. It was the same wave that in other years had brought forth a Joe Page or an Allie Reynolds. This time it produced R. G. Miller. He was wearing a spanking new Mets uniform. And he was now only seventeen days from a pension of $125 a month upon reaching age fifty.

But sordid business was forgotten as Miller took the mound. R. G. was a pitcher now, not a man looking for a pension. He meant it. He took his eight warm-up pitches, then put the ball in his hand, looked down for the sign, and glared at Del Crandall, the Milwaukee batter. Miller had put everything he had into getting into shape at Syracuse. It had been a big gamble. But it was all worth it, because here was R. G. Miller picking up his leg and coming down with his first pitch as a New York Met.

The pitch was a slider. Crandall hit it over the left-field fence for a home run. With his first pitch of the season, Miller had lost the game, 5-4.

“This is our kind of guy,” everybody on the Mets was saying. “He makes the club forever.”

Now this, of course, can be misinterpreted as a blot on the record of Wid Matthews, the scout, George Weiss, the Mets’ general manager, and Manager Stengel. Well, it is meant as anything but. If there have been, in the history of baseball, three men operating at one time who had more baseball knowledge and success, it has been kept a secret. It is simply that everything about the Mets seems to run in a pattern, no matter what anybody tries to do.

Last winter, for example, Weiss went to the trading markets in as big a way as he could. He sent Felix Mantilla to the Boston Red Sox in exchange for two players. One was Tracy Stallard, a right-handed pitcher, who is in the record books forever. Roger Maris hit his sixty-first home run off Stallard. The other player acquired was a Negro second baseman named Elijah (Pumpsie) Green. This one you have to love.

You see, last September, at the end of a wearying day at Yankee Stadium, the Red Sox boarded a bus which was to take them over the George Washington Bridge and thence to Newark Airport, where they would catch a plane for Washington and the next set of games on the schedule. Pumpsie Green stepped on the bus, just like the rest of the players. The only trouble was, he happened to pick a seat next to Gene Conley, the six-foot-eight pitcher. Conley is not very good at sitting in buses.

The bus pulled away from the park at 4:20. At 4:45 it was stuck in the middle of a whopping traffic jam at the entrance to the bridge. For five blocks nothing was moving. Nothing, that is, except Gene Conley. He strode up the aisle of the bus and told the driver to open the door.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” he said.

“I’m coming,” Pumpsie Green said. He was not quite certain why he was tagging along. But he sure was coming.

Conley and Pumpsie hopped off the bus, wove their way through cars, and walked into a garage. Apparently they were overtaken by inspiration inside the garage. Anyway, a couple of days later Pumpsie and Conley, through hard, tedious travel, had made their way from the George Washington Bridge all the way down to a friendly inn on Lexington Avenue. They stayed there for some time, discussing New York’s traffic problems.

After a while Conley decided on drastic action. He had money in his pocket and he said he was going to Israel.

“Uh-huh,” Pumpsie said.

Then he looked around. The fellow next to him at the bar had an afternoon newspaper, and the headline on the sports page said Gene Conley and Pumpsie Green had jumped the Red Sox and were liable to be finished in baseball. Pumpsie happened to glance at the headline. It shook him up a little. Now he wasn’t so sure about Israel.

“What about it?” Conley was demanding.

“I think we should be in Washington about now,” Pumpsie said.

This offended Conley.

“Pumpsie, you gotta make up your mind. Are you going to Washington or are you going to Jerusalem?”

“I believe I’m going to Washington, Gene.”

Conley went out and stepped into a taxicab which took him to Idlewild Airport. El Al Airlines, however, had the nerve to turn him down for passage because he didn’t have a passport.

Somehow, Pumpsie got to Washington. He arrived at the hotel and flopped into bed.

“Why didn’t you go to Israel?” somebody asked him.

“I’m not Jewish,” Pumpsie said. Then he fell asleep.

When he woke up he found he had been slapped with a heavy fine. The Red Sox, of course, had a still better way to reward Pumpsie for his wanderings. They sent him to the Mets.

And this season, when Pumpsie Green takes the field for the Mets, anybody who does not stand up and root for him, and root hard, simply has no taste for the good life.

As noted earlier, it took more than baseball people to create the Mets. One of the biggest culprits, for example, is a beer company called Rheingold. This company, based in Brooklyn, put up, on the advice of an advertising agency, $1,200,000 per year on a five-year contract to sponsor the Mets on television and radio. The bid was made and accepted in the fall of 1961. The Mets had not yet signed a player. By December, the Mets had signed players and the Rheingold account was taken away from the ad agency and placed with another organization, J. Walter Thompson. This was a blow to the original agency. One day last winter, in investigating this, we found why the account was shifted.

“We didn’t like losing the account at all,” one of the admen said over a martini.

“How come you lost it?”

“Somebody gave the client a bad report.”

“What was it?”

“They told the sponsor who was going to play third base for the Mets.”

At J. Walter Thompson, the Rheingold account was placed in the hands of a real specialist. He is an adman who can give you the whole bit. Spot commercials, billboard ads, jingles, Miss Rheingold contests, you name it and this guy really knows the game. He also comes with guts. The first time the Mets played at night in Los Angeles, with that three-hour time difference from New York, the team, as if operating from a script, let the Dodgers score thirteen runs. They also took four hours to let this happen. So, long after midnight, the Mets’ radio and television outlets in the huge metropolitan New York area proudly presented, between innings, “The Rheingold Jingle” to an audience consisting at that hour mainly of professional housebreakers. But our man never took back. From the start this is a man who has been guilty of gross enthusiasm.

“The ratings were terrific all year,” he insists. “We were slightly behind Ballantine on television, but only by .03 or so. And we were ahead on radio. Now if you call Ballantine, they’ll probably tell you they whomped us. But they didn’t. We know they didn’t and they know they didn’t.”

By Ballantine, the adman means the New York Yankees. The Yankees are sponsored on radio and TV by Ballantine beer. When news of the Rheingold man’s claim reached the Ballantine headquarters in Newark, it caused an explosion.

“Rheingold claims they topped us?” a Ballantine man shouted. “How could Rheingold top Ballantine when Ballantine had Mickey Mantle in center field? I mean, really. Even in Schaefer’s best days, when they had Duke Snider, they weren’t anywhere near us in the ratings. Please. Don’t mention Rheingold around here.”

Now the story of how New York lost two teams and left things open for the Mets—and situations such as these—to replace them is a bit of recent baseball history that must be recounted here.

Everything started, as far as we are concerned, on a dark afternoon in February of 1957 when Walter O’Malley sat behind his desk in the office of the president of the Brooklyn Dodgers, 215 Montague Street, Brooklyn. O’Malley had a cigar in one hand and a copy of an ancient Spalding Guide in another. And all of a sudden, as he talked, you found yourself shocked. What had been, for months, only vague rumors were being confirmed. This guy with the glasses and the smile and the good-fellow way of talking was going to move baseball’s most popular franchise so he could make money for himself.

“It’s funny,” O’Malley said. “Here everybody seems concerned because we have scheduled a few games in Jersey City this year.” (Everybody was upset. Not about nearby Jersey City. They were upset because the move was an outright O’Malley threat: give me a free ballpark or I’ll move my team.) O’Malley held up the guide. “But right here in this book I read that in 1899 the Brooklyn baseball team had a fire in its ballpark and as a result some of the home games were shifted to a site in Ridgewood, right over in Brooklyn. Now why are people excited over moving a few games to Jersey City?”

“But what about moving to Los Angeles?” he was asked.

“Well,” he said with a smile, “let’s not say anything about that. We—ah—we wouldn’t like to hurt anybody’s feelings out in Los Angeles. They are nice people and—ah—it really wouldn’t be nice to have something in print on the situation appear.” He waved his hand. “You understand what I mean by that, of course.”

We understood very well. He had found an old guide which gave him another precedent that he could mull over. Not that it was that important. But he is a lawyer, and these guys want everything they can get their hands on, including hot stoves, to help a case. And the main thing here was that he was taking the Dodgers to Los Angeles.

In June you found out about the Giants. On a Friday night at the Polo Grounds, Horace Stoneham stood at the windows in the center-field clubhouse and watched the game with the late Bill Corum, the sports columnist. They must have discussed more than the ballgame in progress, for Corum’s paper on Sunday morning reported the fact that the Giants were leaving New York for Minneapolis.

Stoneham had to call a press conference before the games on Sunday. “I don’t want to be put in the position of calling Corum a liar,” he said. “I just said something to him the other night, and it had ifs to it, and Bill jumped at it and that was that.”

For some reason everybody went away satisfied, and the seven Monday sports sections in New York came out a memorial to the general incompetency of the modern working sports writer. Barely a mention was carried of Stoneham’s remarks. What he actually had done was stand up and admit he was going to move his team. It turned out to be San Francisco, as things went. And the move has been as successful as you could want. Almost as successful as the one made by O’Malley.

These moves accomplished two fine things. For one, it gave two big cities major-league baseball, something they should have had several years before somebody decided to bring it in. And, more important, it exposed most of the people on the business side of baseball for exactly what they are—arrogant, money-hungry people with a sense of loyalty only to a bank account.

You see, the moves of the Giants and Dodgers were part of a broad plan set up by baseball owners. The plan was, of course, to have only one team to a city. One team in one city, with a monopoly on its people, its news space, and its television markets. And with the monopoly would come the kind of money nobody in sports ever knew existed.

Happily, the people in New York who wanted another team in their town loused this up. It took a lot of doing, because the last thing in the world Walter O’Malley dreamed of when he moved to Los Angeles was that he would wake up some day and find another team in the same town with him. He has the Los Angeles Angels now. Similarly, Del Webb, co-owner of the Yankees, thought he was getting all of New York when O’Malley was given Los Angeles as a territory. Webb didn’t want to hear of any New York Mets. They were not part of the deal. It turned out they were, like it or not. And, like the guy at Rheingold says, they are giving Ballantine one hell of a battle.

Anyway, the Giants and Dodgers left town, and millions of fans found themselves with only memories of National League baseball. Ebbets Field, the famous old wreck of a ballpark on Bedford Avenue, came into the hands of Marvin Kratter, a real-estate man. Mr. Kratter turned the place into a middle-income housing development which features seven lobbies—almost as many as they have at a resort hotel. Each lobby is decorated with a “murial,” as Brooklyn people used to call them, of a stirring event in the property’s past. The Polo Grounds, home of the Giants, was sold for another housing development. Nothing has been done to it yet, and in the period from 1957 until the Mets arrived it was a place where stock-car races and a foreign game called soccer were held. For one who saw Bobby Thomson hit Ralph Branca’s second pitch into the left-field stands in 1951, it seemed a sacrilege to have small-time events on the same field.

Thomson’s home run is not the only great event that should be recalled. There are a couple of memories of baseball as it was when the Giants and Dodgers were in town which are unforgettable. Since baseball is primarily a sport where stories of the past are most important, no recent history of baseball in New York is complete without them.

One is of a great Sunday game between the Giants and Dodgers that was played at Ebbets Field in June of 1949. Actually, much of the action centers on the night before in a place called the Red Parrot, which was a saloon, not a very nice one, either, on Myrtle Avenue in the Glendale section of Queens, a fifteen-minute drive from Ebbets Field.

Among many people there during the evening was a right-handed pitcher who had started his career with the Dodgers but who was, at this moment, a member of the New York Giants. That is, he was a member of the Giants as far as the Giants’ roster was concerned. By 2:30 in the morning at the Red Parrot, he thought he was Prince Valiant.

Sunday morning came a bit too quickly. In the pitcher’s case, it constituted a surprise attack, for in the first inning of the first game of the day’s doubleheader, Leo Durocher, the Giants’ manager, walked to the mound and, with the bases loaded, signaled for our hero to come in from the bullpen. This destroyed forever the myth of Durocher’s peerless command talents.

The right-hander warmed up uneasily, then threw his first pitch eight feet over the catcher’s head. A run came in. He put his next pitch up deliberately, and it went between the outfielders and against the wall for a triple. Three runs were in, and Prince Valiant was out. Way out. The next time anybody heard anything from him was last winter when a saloon in Ridgewood announced it was taking up a collection to send him down to the Mets’ camp for a tryout.

“He can pitch good enough to make the club,” the saloon announced. The ex-pitcher, unfortunately, decided to remain ex; he never did arrive at St. Petersburg.

The other stirring memory of National League baseball at its greatest revolves about Billy Loes and the 1952 World Series. Loes was magnificent in this one. He set four all-time World Series records. He committed the only balk in Series history, became the only pitcher ever to lose a grounder in the sun, and was the first pitcher since Dizzy Dean to steal a base. This he did against all instructions. And finally, Loes made history before the Series opened by confiding to about forty-seven people that he was certain the Yankees would beat his Dodgers.

His predictions ultimately reached the public print. Loes, the papers said, picked the Yankees to win in six games.

Charley Dressen, the Brooklyn manager, became very angry at this. Not as angry as Loes, however.

“How do you like this?” Billy said. “I told the guy that the Yankees would win in seven and he goes and screws it up and puts it in the paper that I said they would win in six. Stupid bastard.”

Billy then went out and committed the first balk in the history of the World Series. He was starting his wind-up when the ball dropped from his hand like a bar of soap.

“Too much spit on it,” he explained later.

New York City found, however, that memories of this sort were anything but what the town needed. When the Giants and Dodgers left, many smart people began to realize that the city was hurting. Here was New York, with a daily population of something like fourteen million, and with a need for every valid entertainment attraction there is, and it had only one baseball team. This was all right for places like Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. It was bad for New York. Merchants like Bernard Gimbel pointed this out. So did politicians. The whole town seemed to be affected. The best way to show what was happening, and why another team was inevitable for New York, is to go to the fall afternoon in 1958 when Kenneth Keating, Republican Congressman from Rochester who was running for United States Senator, rolled across the Brooklyn Bridge and brought his political campaign to the heart of the great area the voting-tally sheets call Kings County.

Keating brought with him all the attributes of the great campaigner. An excellent right hand, for one thing. This is a man who can shake hands with a polar bear and the bear is going to let out the first yelp. His eating ability, for another. If votes are involved, this is the world’s champion eater. He is particularly rough on Polish food. Put 75 Poles who are registered voters in the same dining hall with Keating, and he touches bottom five minutes ahead of the field.

But all this priceless ability was going to waste on this day in Brooklyn. The town was dead. Nothing Keating could do, talking or mingling or grabbing hands, was enough to get a reaction, any sort of a reaction, from people. Keating shook his head. He was not going to get anything done here, he told his staff. Furthermore, he knew the reason.

“Baseball,” he said. “All these people seem to be interested in is the fact the Dodgers have gone to Los Angeles. They have no civic enthusiasm. This is our problem. There is only one team in New York City now. Well, I know New York. It is not used to having a single loyalty to a single team. This is a city which must have divided interests. All this apathy we are seeing is because of the baseball situation.”

Keating was elected Senator by a wide margin. But he lost Brooklyn by over two hundred thousand votes, and a great campaigner like this one does not like to lose anything, much less lose by that much. He tied it all to baseball. A year later, as a United States Senator, and an effective Senator at that, Keating sat on a committee which did much to make certain that New York would have another team in town.

In any analysis of the Mets and how they came about, however, you must always start with one man, an attorney named William A. Shea, who has offices on East 42nd Street.

Shea has dark hair, blue eyes, and the square jaw of a guy who would know how to punch back. Which he certainly does. He was an end and a basketball player at Georgetown in the late twenties and today, at 6 feet and 195 pounds, he is still in shape.

His business is law, and his business is not small. The firm of Manning, Hollinger, and Shea takes up the entire twenty-first floor of their building on 42nd Street, and as you sit in his carpeted office and wait to talk to him, he is taking calls from City Hall, then from a Florida fruit-juice company he represents, then from a man in Nashville, Tennessee. On this one he brings up the mysteries of high financing. He is all big business. But Shea is anything but one of those stuffy, pipe-smoking corporation attorneys. This is a guy who knows. He is married to the former Maynora Shaw, whose father, Tom Shaw, was the biggest bookmaker on the New York race tracks back in the twenties. Bookmaking was legal then. Shea himself operated a minor-league football team for a couple of years in the forties and was associated with Ted Collins in a National Football League franchise in Boston.

Shea is one of those people you find, but not too often, who is willing to do something for his own and knows how to do it. His own in this case is people who live and work in New York. It is Shea’s town, and nobody fits into the town better than he does.

So, one afternoon in November of 1957, his secretary buzzed him and said the Mayor of New York, Mr. Robert Wagner, was calling. Shea picked up the phone and, whether anybody knew it or not, the New York Mets were now on their way.

“I want to get a National League team into the city as quickly as possible,” Wagner told him. “I want to start by getting a New York sports committee formed, and I’d like you to take it over.”

Shea said of course he would. There would be no problem to it at all, he said. “We’ll just have to steal a team from another city, the same way Los Angeles and San Francisco moved in on us,” he said. “Either that, or get some sort of expansion in which we would figure. I don’t think it will be hard.”

He certainly did not. If Shea had had any idea of what he was getting into, he might have thought twice. For before he was through it would mean three and a half years of traveling, phoning, working, and selling, and all of it at his own personal expense. None of this is very important to Shea now. The big thing, as far as he is concerned, is that he got the job done.

“I’d feel a lot better about the whole thing if the Mets can get a decent relief pitcher,” he was saying one day last December. “People claim the club is my responsibility. They’re getting nasty about it, too.”

Shea was wearing the kind of snap-brim brown hat that is quite popular with older New York City detectives, and a big camel’s-hair coat. He was sitting with his wife in a box seat at Yankee Stadium, watching a football game. As the game went on, he talked about how the Mets began.

“I started out to get a team,” he was saying, “and it looked easy. We made up a presentation for Powel Crosley at Cincinnati, and it looked like we were going to have the Reds in here. We could offer him rental on the new stadium which we were going to build at Flushing Meadows. We showed him that tax-wise it would be an advantageous move for him. But, in the end, he turned us down.

“Then we went to John Galbreath in Pittsburgh, but he said he was going to stay where he was. Finally I sat down with Bob Carpenter in Philadelphia. He is stuck in an old stadium with no parking. We had the perfect offer for him. But in talking to Carpenter, I began to realize one thing. This fellow is just like me. He doesn’t want to move. Philadelphia is his town and he is going to stay there. He’s not going to pick up and leave the place just for money. There are other things which are more important to him. Civic pride? Sure, you can call it that. And when I’m talking to him, I begin to see that I am placing myself in the position of asking him to do the very thing I would never do. Pull out of your own town. That cured me. From then on, I stopped bothering other teams. I was not going to be a party to moving any club, so long as that city had people willing to support it.

“We then decided to concentrate on the National League. To expand, they needed ten teams. We would be number nine. Fine. But who was going to be the tenth? I thought that could be handled. So I’m going ahead with these baseball people and dealing in good faith on expansion. At this stage, my problem is that I am silly enough to think that the National League owed New York something. Here we supported two teams for all those years. Well, the National League didn’t feel that way at all. They didn’t feel anything. They couldn’t have cared less.

“Now I know I’m in trouble. I have to go to work.” He went to work in big-league fashion. In the fall of 1958 Shea walked into Toots Shor’s restaurant and announced that he was going to start a third major league. It was going to be called the Continental League and for help he was bringing in old Branch Rickey. The Continental League was a 100-1 shot, and most people in baseball laughed. They regarded it as a wedge to force them to bring a team into New York, and nothing more. Besides, baseball had something going for it which could keep out the Continental League, or any other league or any other team that would be in New York. It was an item known in Washington as HR10378 and S4070. It was a bill which, if passed by the House and Senate, would exempt baseball from the anti-trust laws and would, in the bill’s terms, give absolute authority to the major-league teams to do whatever they wanted. The main point in this was, of course, to proceed with their grand plan of having only one team in a city.

Now this is about the business side of baseball, and there is no place for business when you are dealing mainly with the fact that Marvin Throneberry’s teammates would have given him a cake for his birthday except they were afraid he would drop it. But it is necessary to explain some of the moves baseball made. Because when you examine them you find that the people who run the sport have no regard for the Marvin Throneberrys and the part of American life they represent.

When Bill Shea and Branch Rickey began maneuvering for their Continental League, they found wealthy people in eight cities who would back teams. They also found that the antitrust exemptions baseball was asking for would knock them out.

So, in the fall of 1959, into the Senate Office Building in Washington came old Branch Rickey. He was eighty, and his bow tie flopped over, and age showed in his walk and in his face. But under those bushy eyebrows was a determined look. And with him was Shea. And Shea had a briefcase full of documents to prove the case against baseball’s legal move. In three weeks the two of them spoke to every member of the Senate committees conducting anti-monopoly hearings. They did so well that Senator Estes Kefauver, chairman of the subcommittee holding hearings, introduced a bill that would nullify the bill baseball owners were rooting for.

In the end, both bills wound up dead. But Shea had done his work. The field was wide open for a Continental League, and now baseball had to take action. It did. In meetings in Chicago in 1960, New York and Houston were added to the National League, Los Angeles and Minneapolis were opened up in the American League.

Shea’s third league promptly was forgotten. But he had what he wanted anyway: a team for New York. He also had the person to put up the money for it. From out of Shea’s old Continental League lineup came the owner of the New York National League team. Her name: Mrs. Charles Shipman Payson. She is Bill Shea’s style. A lot of other people’s, too, because this is one helluva lady.

3

119 or Bust

SOME YEARS AGO, AT a night club in New York called the Versailles, Mr. Joe E. Lewis came onto the floor under the strangest of conditions to give his first show of the evening. To begin with, Mr. Lewis had been drinking coffee in the dressing room. That was news. Furthermore, his routine consisted of a series of remarkably clean gags and stories. There was a reason for all this. In the audience was a close friend from Chicago, George Levy, who was throwing a birthday dinner party for his son, Alan, sixteen. In deference to Alan, Mr. Lewis racked his brain for every nice story he had ever heard. He then told them for the first—and last—time. The Levys loved the show.

As did a fine society matron in the audience named Mrs. Charles Shipman Payson. She is from Manhasset, Long Island; Hobe Sound, Florida; Bar Harbor, Maine; and wherever else she feels like living this month. Mrs. Payson thought Joe E. was terribly funny. She also thought his fine, wholesome routine would be splendid fare for her two nephews, aged fourteen and fifteen.

Two nights later she returned to the Versailles with the nephews in tow. They settled at a table and awaited Mr. Lewis’s entrance. Mr. Lewis was back to normal on this night. He was in his dressing room in the company of a bottle of Scotch, and when it was time to go on, he brought the bottle out with him. Then, with a little sophisticated smirk on his lips, and with no Alan Levy birthday party out front, he launched his normal routine:

“Show me a Hungarian with good penmanship and I’ll show you a bum check.”

Then:

“Show me a man with a cool head and I’ll show you a chilly bathroom.”

Mrs. Payson stirred a little. This was a somewhat different beginning to Mr. Lewis’s show from what she recalled.

Which it was. For Mr. Lewis now announced, as he has always announced, and as he always will announce:

“Show me a broad …”

So it went. While Mrs. Payson tried to hide behind a glass and figure out a way to get the nephews out of this place alive, Joe E. was telling the audience about life in general and young broads in particular.

“That was the last time I brought any children to see Joe E. Lewis,” she was saying one afternoon. “But it most certainly wasn’t my last time at a show of his. He’s my favorite entertainer. If I only could keep him from playing those terrible long shots he likes so much. I doubt he ever cashes a bet.”

Recently Mrs. Payson was talking about this while sitting on a couch in the parlor portion of her personal Pullman car, Adios II. It was hooked to the rear end of the Florida East Coast Champion, which was swaying through the icy weed stalks of the Jersey marshes as it came out of New York en route to Florida. Mrs. Payson was heading for her annual two-month stay at Hobe Sound. Two dachshunds slept on the couch next to her. A brass spittoon was off to one side on the carpeted floor. It is for decorative purposes; the lady does not chew tobacco. She rested her feet on a huge felt turtle which bore a New York Mets’ insignia.

“I just received him today as a present,” she said. “So I had them sew a Mets’ insignia on him right away. The tortoise and the hare. That’s the Mets. I’ve given him a name. Marvelous Marv, of course.”

She had a glass of No-Cal ginger ale in her hand, but she saw to it that a Scotch and water, a stiff one, too, was produced for her visitor.

She is a large, pleasant woman with light hair. She had on a green blouse and gray skirt and only one bit of jewelry. Which was enough. It was a ring big enough to shake up the Van Cleefs. Her first name is Joan and she is a Whitney. She is of the world of the Social Register and charity drives and art museums and chauffeured Rolls-Royces. Her husband, Charles Payson, is Wall Street. International Wall Street. But this soft-talking fifty-nine-year-old dowager sat and talked of heavyweights and horses and night clubs and first basemen. She could be the best person to come into baseball in our time. This is one who does not come to get contracts to build a ballpark or to maneuver for capital gains. This is a lady who comes for the sport of it. And it says here that she knows more about how to lose with a laugh than anybody working for her except Mr. Stengel.

“Just before last season opened,” she was saying, “this wonderful writer from the Daily News, Dick Young, told me not to expect anything good at all. I said, oh, couldn’t we beat out the Cubs and Phillies? They weren’t particularly good clubs, you know. He said absolutely not. So I said to him, ‘Well, can’t we please expect to finish ahead of the other new team, Houston?’ He said, ‘No, I told you to expect nothing.’ So I said, ‘All right then, I’ll settle for tenth place.’ I certainly was not disappointed.”

“If you had to do it all over again, would you go in with all that money to buy the team again?”

“Oh, of course,” she said. “How else in the world could we have gotten Marvelous Marv into New York? I think the whole thing was just wonderful.”

Then she talked about how things went in Greece last summer. A few days after the Mets opened the season, Mrs. Payson and her daughter and son-in-law left for the Greek islands. She asked to be informed of the Mets’ doings by telegraph. The telegrams came as requested, one right after the other, with the score always spelled out so there would be no error, and finally the lady couldn’t take any more of them. She wired back:

PLEASE TELL US ONLY WHEN METS WIN.

“That was about the last word I heard from America,” she recalled.

Mrs. Payson and her party finally established a pool on what day a wire would arrive saying the Mets had won a game. After some time, the fun went out of that.

“The pot became too enormous,” she said.

“You know,” she said, “you can’t tell when this thing will end. It should be better this year. Dear, let’s hope so. But you have no idea when there will be success. I felt so badly for some of those players. Charley Neal with that bad hand. And Gil Hodges having such bad luck. It must have bothered them terribly. It’s a shame about Ashburn leaving us, isn’t it? He was our only .300 hitter.”

It was explained to her that Richie Ashburn, at thirty-five, had decided that the Mets would have to go with young players this year, his .300 average or not, so he accepted an announcing job for Philadelphia Phillies games. He preferred that to sitting on the bench.

“Oh, I don’t think he would have been on the bench,” Mrs. Payson said.

“They would have had to put him there. The problem here is to break in players for the future.”

“Well, perhaps. But he wouldn’t have been on the bench for the whole season.”

“Yes, only the guy said he sat on the bench for a while with another team once and it bothered him badly. And he said that if he ever had to be a benchwarmer for the New York Mets he’d commit suicide.”

She broke up. The lady, you see, understands.

Now all of this is not to say that the lady is going to be sitting down and laughing about the Mets for the next fifteen years. No, the Whitneys do not come that way. The first thing they lost at hasn’t been discovered yet. Just for openers, her brother Jock—John Hay Whitney—once decided to go into producing movies as a sideline. In 1938 he boarded a plane in New York that was taking him to California. Under his arm were the galley proofs of a book by a woman named Margaret Mitchell. It was about the South in the Civil War. It already had been turned down by Samuel Goldwyn, who sniffed, “Who needs a movie about the Civil War? And the losers in it already?” Jock Whitney read the galleys. When the plane stopped for fueling at St. Louis, he was out on the telephone telling somebody in his office to send this Mitchell girl $50,000 to hold the rights to this book of hers. Gone With the Wind was the most successful American movie ever made. They started showing it in 1940, and they’ll still be reissuing the thing, and making a bundle with it, thirty years from now.

Mrs. Payson and her brother also are in racing. They own the Greentree Stable, and under those colors they have trotted out a few things like Tom Fool, who was about as big a runner as anybody ever threw a saddle on. It is the same with art. When Mrs. Payson starts swinging with a museum she wants the place to wind up with the finest collection this side of an easel, and it always comes out that way.

So this is not a woman who came to be a nice happy loser. At the same time, she’s not about to cry. This one knows the game. She is not somebody who merely sits off with her cash and looks at life from the window of a private Pullman car. She has been around. A little bit.

In 1944 her firstborn son, Daniel Carroll Payson, eighteen, entered the Army as a private and was put into an infantry line company. He asked for no help. Nobody in the family forced any on him. He was still eighteen and a private when he was killed in the Battle of the Bulge.

The mother just says, “He did things that way.”

And there was one recent night when Ruth Arcaro, whose husband was the greatest rider of race horses in history, sat in the den of her house in Garden City, Long Island, and talked about the lady.

“When Eddie was set down that time for a whole year, we had to try and make it on his salary for exercising Greentree Stable horses. Well, every once in a while I’d get a nice little note from Mrs. Payson asking how the baby was doing. And she’d send a nice little check with the note. She knew.”

On another afternoon, a huge ex-heavyweight fighter named Abe Simon spoke of her. In 1936 Simon was signed to a contract by an outfit called White Hope, Inc. This was a group including Jock Whitney, Pete Bostwick, Tommy Hitchcock, and Bernard Gimbel. Their object was to find a heavyweight who could lick Joe Louis. In 1936 only the Lord could handle Joe Louis. But White Hope, Inc., selected Simon, 6 foot 5 and 265 pounds, as their standard-bearer. Presently, here was Abe, banging the light bag in the gymnasium of the Whitney Estate at Manhasset.

“I went there for heat treatments for my left arm and for calisthenics and some bag-punching,” Simon recalls. “Every day, just as I was finishing, somebody would come and ask me to stop by at the main house and see Mrs. Whitney. That was Mrs. Payne Whitney. Mrs. Payson is her daughter. So I’d come up and sit down with them and all they wanted to do was talk with a prizefighter for an hour or so. Those were probably the nicest people I ever met in boxing. Hell, I love them. Later on, the White Hope thing broke up. Things happened good for me, and I wound up boxing Louis twice for the title. But sitting with those people is something I’ll always remember. I’ll tell you. Baseball got some break when Mrs. Payson decided to get into the business.”

When you look at it, the only surprising thing about Joan Payson’s being in baseball is that she didn’t own a team long before this. She was brought up on the game. Her mother once had a breakfast cereal called Wheaties brought in by the caseloads, and the boxtops were ripped off as quickly as possible and sent in so that Joe DiMaggio would be named the most popular player in the cereal company’s contest.

Her team always the Giants. Her heroes were Mel Ott and Bill Terry, and her thrill was something that began on a Sunday in September of 1951.

The Giants were in Boston and they had just won their last game of the season, the one that clinched a tie for the National League pennant. Down in Philadelphia, the Dodgers were playing their last game. If they won, it would mean a playoff with the Giants. A loss would give the Giants the pennant. Don Newcombe, in the finest day of his career, was pitching relief for Brooklyn, even though he had shut out the Phillies the night before. The game was in extra innings because Jackie Robinson of the Dodgers had made plays baseball people still talk of.

Joan Payson sat in a loge seat at Madison Square Garden with her husband. Out on the sawdust floor, the opening acts of the rodeo were coming on, but her only interest was in the portable radio she kept jammed against her ear. She was listening to the Dodger game in Philadelphia and hoping for all she was worth that somebody on the Phillies would hit a home run. The portable radio conked out as the game went into the tenth inning. That was the end of the rodeo for her. She tapped her husband on the shoulder, said good-by, then left him to calf-roping and hustled upstairs to the bar of the Madison Square Garden Club, where she could hear the end of the game.

The Dodgers won it, 9-8, when Robinson hit a home run in the fourteenth inning. In the eleventh, he had knocked himself unconscious in a dive for a low line drive hit by Del Ennis. If he had not made the catch, the game would have been over. It was one of the matchless individual performances baseball has seen.

Three days after this, it was a dark, miserable day at the Polo Grounds, and Mrs. Payson, in her box seat behind first, was ill. Out on the field a player named Billy Cox of the Dodgers had done things with a glove that baseball players, even the best ones, simply cannot do. Because of him, the Dodgers had the deciding game of the playoffs won. Then, all of a sudden, it was the ninth inning and runners were on base and here was a Brooklyn relief pitcher, Ralph Branca, throwing a pitch a little high and a little inside to Bobby Thomson. He, of course, hit it into the lower left-field seats for a home run nobody in New York will ever forget.

Joan Payson figures it was probably the happiest day of her life. She closed her eyes as she sat in this railroad car and talked of it.

“I was brought up on the Giants,” she was saying. “But nothing ever was as magnificent as this. Frankly, I still can’t get over the Giants. Last year when they had that playoff with the Dodgers on the Coast we all were at Idlewild Airport and we leaned on the counter and listened to the final game, waiting to see whether we would fly to Los Angeles or San Francisco for the World Series. We were all dying. I found myself rooting for the Giants as if they were back here in New York.”

Then she clasped her hands behind her neck and leaned back. This is the way Jack White and all those people sunned themselves during a game. And at night, if the Giants lost, they put up a big sign, ‘No Game Today,’ in front of the bandstand at the 18 Club.”

She was talking about the late Jack White, a comedian who subsisted on brandy and ran a saloon called the 18 Club. White was considered the town’s Number 1 Giant fan. It was natural that he considered Joan Payson a pal. The 18 Club is no more, and the only reminders of it left are Pat Harrington, the great old comic, and Jackie Gleason, who was a third-stringer in the 18 Club lineup. When the 18 was operating, waiters would spit ice cubes at customers and White either was loaded or was out on the floor telling unprintable stories. A line score of the day’s Giant game always hung in front of the bandstand. But only if they won. The “No Game” sign went out after a loss. It was Mrs. Payson’s idea of a helluva night joint.

Every afternoon when the Giants were at home, the mob from the 18 Club, White, Harrington, bartenders, waiters, a big singer named Hazel McNulty, and the inevitable group of loan sharks, would sit in the upper tier in left field, open shirt collars, lean back, and get the sun. About the eighth inning, they would walk around to home plate, say hello to the likes of George M. Cohan and Joan Payson, watch the finish, and then head for the exit.

White was a particularly voluble fan. One afternoon in 1939, with the Giants trailing the Cubs 4-1 in the ninth, he was in agony as Mel Ott stepped in with two on. Ottie lifted his foot and hit the first pitch into the right field stands to tie the game. White jumped, then started running. He raced down the ramp to the lower tier, skipped down the steps, then broke through a gate and tore onto the field, arms out, to hug Ott at home plate.

White then turned around and trotted through the lower tier, up the ramp, and back to his seat in the upper tier. He got there just in time to see Hank Lieber, the next Giant hitter, hit one six miles to win the game. The ball was just about to reach the seats when White, in ecstasy, took off again. Down the ramp, through the lower tier, and onto the field he came. This time he was staggering as he reached home plate. White went three steps up the line to greet Lieber, then fell on his face. The ballplayer stopped, picked him up, and crossed home plate with White in his arms. Then he turned and, still carrying White, he went to the center-field dressing room.

“It took two bottles of brandy to straighten White out,” Harrington recalls. “One for Jack and one for his personal Shy-lock. I think the Shylock looked the worst when Jack collapsed.”

“Mrs. Payson,” Harrington says, “was always around in those days. We liked her so much we insulted her worse than anybody in the joint. That was the mark of somebody who made it big in our joint.”

With this kind of background, Joan Payson was one of the first names anybody thought of when the Continental League was about to be founded. Dwight Davis, a New York financier, had been speaking to Bill Shea about ownership of the New York team. Davis went to Florida and spoke to Mrs. Payson. At first she said no. Then Branch Rickey went down to see her, and she changed her mind.

“I wasn’t too enthused about a team in the third league,” she says. “But later when I found we could have a New York team in the National League I became excited.”

She put up the money. Her checks, needless to report, stood up.

Donald Grant, a New York stockbroker, then took over active work on the project for Mrs. Payson. In 1942 he had purchased one share of stock in the New York Giants for Mrs. Payson, and eventually the lady owned 10 per cent of the team and was represented on the board of directors by Grant.

Now Mrs. Payson had three things in mind about her new team. She wanted to call it the Meadowlarks—and she still doesn’t think it’s a bad name—and she wanted George Weiss and Casey Stengel to run it for her.

So, in February of 1961, Weiss answered the phone in his house at Greenwich, Connecticut, and heard the caller identify himself as Grant. Weiss and Grant knew each other only vaguely. Grant wasted no time.

“I could talk to you all day and it still would come down to one simple question,” Grant said. “If we wanted somebody to run our organization, would you be available and would you be interested?”

That night the two men were having dinner at New York’s Savoy-Hilton Hotel. By March 1 Weiss was sitting in Mrs. Payson’s mansion in Florida and terms were being ironed out. When it was over, he was happy. Almost as happy as his wife, Hazel.

Since the preceding October, when Weiss was let go by the New York Yankees because of his age (sixty-six), this pale-eyed, stumpy man had thrashed around the house in Greenwich until his wife was about to pack it in.

“I married George for richer or poorer, for better or for worse,” Hazel Weiss said. “But for heaven’s sakes, I didn’t marry him for lunch.”

So on March 1, 1961, Mrs. Payson had her general manager. George Weiss is a heavy man, and he has been in sports all his life, but he talks so softly it is almost a whisper, and he seems shy. For results, there is not a baseball executive within ten miles of him. Weiss is never going to win any awards for most whisky consumed while being a good fellow with baseball writers. But at the same time he is not going to be associated with a loser for any longer than is humanly necessary. This is an autocratic old guy who works eighteen hours a day at the job of operating a baseball team, and until last year he never was associated with a team that finished out of the first division.

“Once, when I ran the New Haven team in the Eastern League, we tied for fourth place,” George recalls. ‘That was the lowest I ever went with a team. This, this is a strange feeling.”

It is hard to put a finger on any single thing Weiss does and say this is why he is so good at running a baseball team. There are so many things attached to the business in this age that no one thing is paramount. But if you had to tell somebody what it is like when Weiss is in charge of a team, you would have to go to the afternoon a few years back when Yogi Berra sat in the dugout at Yankee Stadium before a game and fooled around with some new catching equipment that had just been brought in.

“Look at this,” Berra said. He held out the chest protector. The reversible side of it was a shocking orange. The front side was black. Berra put on the protector with the orange side out.

“I’ll work the game like this,” he said. He pointed to the field, where the Cleveland Indians were taking batting practice. “I’ll have them guys so crazy trying to think up things to say to me that we’ll have a no-hitter.”

When he began to buckle everything on to start the game, Berra had the black side of the protector showing. “Are you kiddin’?” he said. “If I ever went out that other way, Weiss up there would be on the phone to the dugout in thirty seconds and there’d be hell to pay.”

“You’re afraid.”

“I ain’t afraid. I just know Weiss. Listen, a ticket-seller don’t look good, Weiss sees him and raises hell.”

At this time Berra was the most valuable player in the American League, and he was billed as a bit of a character, so you would think he could do about as he pleased as long as the batting average held up. But the threat of one telephone call from Weiss was the biggest thing on his mind.

Which is Weiss, start to finish. He is a finicky perfectionist. Through the 1961 season, Weiss operated out of an office in New York, while Rogers Hornsby, Cookie Lavagetto, and Wid Matthews looked at ballplayers for him. The first big job was, of course, to get a manager. Mrs. Payson wanted only one man. So did Weiss.

So, just before the World Series, the Stengel residence in Glendale, California, was hit with many phone calls from New York. Casey told Weiss at first that he didn’t feel like coming back. Then Mrs. Payson made a call. She did not talk to Casey. She spoke to Edna Stengel, and when she was through she was certain she was going to get a little inside help with the project.

Finally one morning Stengel was around his bank in Glendale, and he was telling everybody he was going to manage this new team in New York. “The Knickerbockers,” he called them.

Now from this point on there is available an exceptional look at the business of baseball and what type of men, and thinking, go into the running of it.

In order to stock the two new teams, Houston and the Mets, a special player draft was set up by the National League. They had a precedent to guide them. The year before, the American League had expanded. That league did it in a simple manner. In October all team rosters were frozen at forty men. No changes were allowed until the special draft of players was held for the new teams. There is an annual regular draft of players in baseball. This one takes in minor-league players. The parent team, to protect valued minor-leaguers from this draft, transfers the minor-leaguer to the major-league roster. This special American League expansion draft was conducted after the minor-leaguers had been brought up. Because of this, when each team was asked to supply a list of players eligible for the special draft, the managers writhed. They couldn’t let go of their top veteran players. So they had to assign the young players, some of them with tremendous promise, to the list.

As a result, Fred Haney, general manager of the new Los Angeles Angels, sat down and picked a team which consisted of Deane Chance, a young pitcher you would give an arm for, Bob Rodgers, a catcher you can make a living with, and Jim Fregosi, now one of the best shortstops in the business. Last year, in their second year of existence, the Angels held the league lead for a time, were in the race until the last three weeks, and finished a fine third.

“It was no freak,” Haney tells you. “This is a club which is going to be causing trouble for a long time.”

The National League expanded a year after the American. This gave the general managers and owners of National League teams time to think. Their brain waves set off burglar alarms all over the nation.

These businessmen in baseball devised a scheme which ruled out all chances of the new teams getting anything but bad baseball players. National League President Warren Giles showed what was to happen when he announced that the special draft of players for the two new teams would be held a day after the 1961 World Series ended. Or before October 16. The latter date was, of course, the day on which all minor-league prospects who were draftable had to be brought up to the roster. On paper, it read like any other league announcement. But it really was robbery in the daytime. It meant that every National League club could look over the roster, select players they were going to release for nothing or send back to the minors anyway, and place them on the list of players available to the two new teams. For exorbitant prices, of course. Under the rules, the Mets and Houston each had to take sixteen players, at $75,000 apiece, and four premium players at $125,000 each. Almost none of the players on the list were young. They were mostly old guys who, in a week or so, would be around with free agents’ papers in hand, looking to catch on with some club in a utility role. But here, under this great scheme, was a way to get money for them. Big money. And at the same time it could be made certain that Houston and the Mets would be in the second division for years to come.

It was Stengel who summed it up best.

“I want to thank all those generous owners for giving us those great players they did not want,” he says. “Those lovely, generous owners.”

It was an outright disgrace. On October 10, at a cost of $1,800,000, the Mets stocked their roster. The first player picked was Catcher Hobie Landrith. He was thirty-one, a lifetime .260 hitter, and had a record of being able to catch only two-thirds of a season at the most. For the small sum of $125,000 each, the Mets got Pitcher Bob Miller from the Cards, Pitcher Jay Hook from the Reds, Infielder Don Zimmer from the Cubs’ bench, and Infielder Lee Walls from the Phillies’ bench. Subsequently Walls was sent to the Los Angeles Dodgers for Charley Neal. It took Walls, plus a certified check for $125,000, to get Neal. This makes Neal a quarter-of-a-million-dollar baseball player. Charley showed up with a right hand that made it nearly impossible for him to pull a ball. Charley, everybody says, is the guy who caused the stock crash in May.

It was the kind of a scheme only some sneak businessman could come up with. Baseball has plenty of these. What makes it worse is that the scheme was obviously designed to harpoon money away from Joan Payson. She was coming in with millions, and everybody thought it would be smart to grab some of it. Here was a lady coming into baseball for sport. More important, she was coming to stay. She would be an important addition to the game. So what do they do? Why, rob her.

The excuse offered is, of course, the fact that in this country you’ve got to make it on your own. We don’t have socialism, so in business, expect help from nobody.

“The league held meetings on the matter, and this was the plan which was voted on,” Warren Giles, an insufferable book man who is National League president, said one day.

“You and all your people ought to feel proud,” he was told.

He looked askance. In the lordly sport of baseball one is not supposed to say that owners could be shady or that league presidents or commissioners, such as Ford Frick, are gray-haired jellyfish. But if you have been around other sports, this is the only way you can think. Take, for openers, the afternoon in the living room of the late Bert Bell’s summer home at Margate Beach, New Jersey, when Bert was talking about the shape of his National Football League.

“I think we have Philadelphia, so it is going to be all right now,” he said. “The problem is Green Bay. Hell, they haven’t won a thing in so long it’s pathetic. Their management is in a mess out there. I got to do something about it. Am I going to interfere in their business? You’re damn right I am. Look, this is sports. It’s a business of people. We’re dead without people. So do you think I’m going to let people sit in the stands and year after year have to watch a bad team like Green Bay? We’ll lose those people if we do that. No, I don’t believe in letting things take their course. I do something about it.”

Then he dragged on a cigarette the doctor said he wasn’t supposed to have. “And I know just what to do with Green Bay.” He smiled. “The Giants got a guy working for them. He’s just what Green Bay needs.”

“Who?”

“Lombardi.”

He took Vincent Lombardi and shipped him to Green Bay, and the first year the Packers were at .500. The next season they just did lose the championship game. Since then they have been called the greatest football team ever assembled. Bert Bell died before he could see it happen. He dropped dead in the stands at Franklin Field in Philadelphia in 1960. But I remember enough about the guy to tell you what he would have done if anybody ever brought a Joan Payson around to him. Bert would have had the lady walking on a red carpet the likes of which even the Whitneys don’t often see. The guy, unlike baseball people, had brains.

Finally, with all the business, good and bad, out of the way, here was February 24, at Miller Huggins Field, St. Petersburg, Florida, and here were the New York Mets standing in their locker room—no spikes on because of the new carpet, Stengel decreed—and they listen as their manager made his first speech of the season.

Out on the field, Joan Payson strolled. She held a parasol to protect her from the sun, and she was happy because Gil Hodges was on the team. As the dowager walked, Stengel’s pep talk echoed through the dressing room.

“We got rich owners,” he yelled. “They got plenty of money. If anybody does any good around here, I’ll see to it that we get money off the owners. There’s a lot of money around here. You got to go and get it.”

Thus started the greatest season in the history of baseball.

The Mets never even got their signals straight for her. Back from Greece on July 5, she made plans to go to the Polo Grounds the next day. There was, on the newsstands this day, a disturbing column by Dick Young.

The Mets, too many of them, have grown accustomed to losing,” he wrote. “They have given sickening evidence of taking it for granted. The present philosophy seems to be that this is no time to get hurt. Most of the boys are playing as if their Blue Cross has lapsed. Those of the Mets who still hustle resent the quitting attitude of others, but they are helpless to do anything about it.”

Many people, however, took violent issue with Young on the matter. They said the trouble was not that the Mets were not hustling. The trouble was that the Mets were just a lousy team.

With all this, Mrs. Payson walked into the Polo Grounds on July 6 to see the Mets play the St. Louis Cardinals.

“What is all this nasty talk about?” she was saying for the rest of the day.

The Mets, on a grand slam home run by Rod Kanehl, were on their way to a 10-3 victory over the Cardinals. Not an error, not a missed base, not a man in sight asleep. Roger Craig went all the way.

A day later she again sat in her box seat. This time she saw Throneberry for the first time. He came up as a pinch-hitter in the ninth inning. The Mets were trailing, 4-3. Throneberry hit one a mile, and the Mets won the game, 5-4.

“Isn’t that marvelous?” Mrs. Payson cheered as Throneberry trotted around the bases.

“That’s what everybody has been saying,” she was told.

Now, sitting here in her railroad car, Mrs. Payson thought about the season.

“Nothing went right, did it?” she said. “Well, let’s hope it is better this year. It has to be. I simply cannot stand 120 losses this year. If we can’t get anything, we are going to cut those losses down.

“At least to 119.”

4

The Nickel Line

THE METS OPENED THEIR season on April 11 and closed it on September 30. In this time, the players did enough things wrong to convince even casual observers that there has never been a team like them. From the start, the trouble with the Mets was the fact they were not too good at playing baseball. They lost an awful lot of games by one run, which is the mark of a bad team. They also lost innumerable games by fourteen runs or so. This is the mark of a terrible team. Actually, all the Mets did was lose. They lost at home and they lost away, they lost at night and they lost in the daytime. And they lost with maneuvers that shake the imagination.

It is because of this that you do not simply use figures to say that the Mets of 1962, with 120 losses and only 40 wins, are the worst team in modern times. Instead, you investigate the matter thoroughly. Then you can say, with full authority, that the Mets are the worst team.

It was Barney Kremenko of the New York Journal-American who put it best. Kremenko last season saw every one of the Mets’ games. By August, he was shell-shocked.

“I have covered losing clubs before,” he announced. “But for me to be with a non-winner!”

What follows herewith is more or less a recapitulation of the Mets and all that surrounded them last season. Unfortunately, there is reason to feel this material can also be used as a preview for the 1963 season. Most people do not expect the Mets to be improved this year. Most people don’t want them to be improved. It was too much fun as it was.

“You look back on it,” one of their players noted last winter, “and you have to say forty games is about all we could win. After all, we were playing against teams that had all major-leaguers on them.”

In the interests of preserving a man’s paycheck, the player’s name is omitted here. However, Marvelous Marvin Throneberry’s expansive views on this subject have been unclassified for some time.

“You know,” he said, “they’s teams been playing together forty years and they’s still finishin’ down in last place or something. Just because you have a team, that don’t mean it got to finish on top.”

The season, and all that went with it, went along something like this:

Opening day was to be the tenth, a night game in St. Louis. It rained, and Mrs. Payson had her two private cars hooked onto a New York-bound train and she and her party left town. Back in New York, you could watch the “Rain-Out Theatre” on television. It was presented by Rheingold. The picture was about a World War II destroyer and it starred Edward G. Robinson, Glenn Ford, and a despicable Japanese admiral. The admiral must be shipping us transistor radios today, but he sure was rough in the picture.

It came up clear the next night, and the Mets took the field against the St. Louis Cardinals. The team was dressed just as good as the Yankees. The Mets’ players wore new gray flannel road uniforms which were made by MacGregor and wholesale at $31.50. Their spikes were shined, and their sweatshirts were laundry-clean. The only difference one could see was that the Mets’ jackets were blue nylon, while the Yankees wear heavier cloth jackets.

Roger Craig was the starting pitcher. In the first inning, Bill White of the Cardinals reached third base. Craig eyed him carefully. Then he started his motion to the plate. The ball dropped out of Craig’s hand. The umpire ruled it a balk and waved White across the plate. The Cards led, 1-0. The Mets’ season now was officially shot.

Before the night ended, the Cardinals got eleven runs. The Mets committed three errors, and the Cardinals stole three bases. Stan Musial of the Cards got three hits. This was about what he expected to do. At forty-one, Musial had spent the winter thinking of retirement. But every time he came close to calling it a career, he thought of the Mets. A man could have a pretty good year in the big leagues just by playing against the Mets alone, Musial figured. So he stayed. He was right. He damn near won the National League batting title because of the Mets’ pitching.

Two days later the Mets had their home opener at the Polo Grounds. Pittsburgh was the opposition. In was a dark, wet day, but anybody who meant anything in New York was at the Polo Grounds. There were Mayor Wagner and Jim Farley, there were Bill Shea and the late Mrs. John J. McGraw, Mrs. Payson was in her box seat. Edna Stengel was on hand too. So was a man named Jack Semel. He had an umbrella and he moved over from his box seat to hold it over the heads of George Weiss and National League President Warren Giles. Jack Semel was to make history before the season ended. But right now he was just one of 12,447 spectators at the Polo Grounds. Like we said, everybody who meant anything showed up.

Unfortunately, so did the Mets.

In the second inning, Don Hoak of the Pirates was on third and Bill Mazeroski was up with two out. Mazeroski hit a high fly into right center field. That was the third out. The moment Hoak saw the ball go harmlessly into the air, he put his head down and trotted from third to the plate. He wanted to get his glove out of the dugout. Mazeroski trotted to first. He was hoping somebody would bring his glove out of the dugout so he could go straight to his position at second base. Out in the outfield, Richie Ashburn and Gus Bell of the Mets were trotting too. Ashburn is the father of six children. Bell has seven children. They were doing this for a living. Ashburn called. He said he would make the catch. Bell did not answer. He kept waving Ashburn aside. Richie, an adult, did not argue. He stepped aside. Bell then waved himself aside. The ball hit the ground, took a bounce past them, and by the time they got it back to the infield Mazeroski was on third and Hoak was in the dugout. He had scored a run, but he did not really believe it.

The Mets fought back and by the eighth inning they had the game tied, 3-3. They also had Ray Daviault pitching. Daviault started the inning by walking Dick Groat. This is a very bad thing to do in a tight game. Never, never walk the first man up. But at least Groat was not in scoring position. Daviault took care of this. He threw a pitch that went back to the stands, and Groat moved to second. An infield out allowed Groat to reach third. Daviault then took a full windup and threw his second wild pitch. Groat scored, and the Mets lost by 4-3.

The team then lost two more games and was scheduled to play Houston in the fifth game of the season when Stengel, who said a light dew was going to turn into a hurricane, had the game postponed.

“If I was winning, I’d play five games a day because you tend to keep winning when you are winning,” he explained. “But I had a chance to call this game, so I did. You tend to keep losing when you are losing, you know.”

He was right. The Mets lost nine games before they finally got their first win of the season. During the losing streak, Stengel became a bit edgy. He sat at his desk in his office in the center-field clubhouse one night, looked down at the knots which stick out all over his old legs, and voiced a fear which he and everybody else in New York now carried in their hearts.

“The trouble is, we are in a losing streak at the wrong time,” he said. “If we was losing like this in the middle of the season, nobody would notice. But we are losing at the beginning of the season and this sets up the possibility of losing 162 games, which would probably be a new record, in the National League at least.”

By moving along at a fine clip, the Mets, on the fifth day of the month of May, had a record of sixteen losses and three victories. Their pitching staff was allowing close to seven runs a game. They had seven players hitting .300 or better, but the team batting average was .236. This was because they had many players hitting under .200.

At this stage, Stengel said he was getting mad. The anger did not last long, because the Mets then went out and shocked everybody by winning nine of their next twelve games. The highlight of this streak was the display of brute power the team put on in taking a doubleheader from the Milwaukee Braves at the Polo Grounds on May 12.

In the first game, Warren Spahn was pitching for the Braves. He had the game won, 2-1, with two out in the ninth inning. A runner was on first. At bat was Hobie Landrith, the Mets’ catcher for this game. Spahn came down with the same curve ball that has made him one of the seven pitchers in modern times to win three hundred games. Landrith did not take back. Heroically, he went for the long ball. But the pitch fooled him, and the best he could produce was a soft fly ball that went 255 feet into right field.

Part of the charm of the Polo Grounds, however, is the fact that a man pitching a game can, without turning his head, listen to fans in the right-field stands ask each other for matches. They are exactly 254 feet away. This meant Landrith’s drive had gone a full foot farther than necessary. As the ball went into the stands to give the Mets a 3-2 victory, the crowd of 19,748 came up with a roar. If a thing like this could happen, they were saying, then there is a chance for everybody.

Landrith headed for first base. He took one look at Cookie Lavagetto, coaching at first, and the two of them broke into laughter.

Spahn took the defeat with the typical shrug-it-off of the real-life professional. When he got to the dressing room he said he wanted to kill himself.

Four hours and some minutes later, in the second game, Gil Hodges came to bat in the ninth inning of a 7-7 tie. There was one out and nobody on. Bob Fisher was pitching for the Braves. Hodges, swinging late, got a piece of the ball and hit it toward right field. This ball of his, smart observers insist, went farther than Landrith’s. By more than five feet. This time the crowd was beside itself. The Mets won the game, 8-7, for their first sweep of a doubleheader. They did it with two home runs that only a Little Leaguer would own up to. And there are smart people today who insist it never happened.

It was in the middle of this winning streak that George Weiss swung into action. He made a deal with the Baltimore Orioles. Weiss is very good at making deals. During his career he traded the Kansas City Athletics a couple of players whose names are forgotten, in exchange for Roger Maris. He traded Joe Gordon to the Cleveland Indians for Allie Reynolds. Gordon lasted a season or so. Reynolds had a whole career as the Yankees’ top pitcher. George also bought Johnny Mize from the Giants, Johnny Sain from the Braves, and Enos Slaughter from the Cardinals, and they delivered in the clutch for the Yankees so often that it seemed absurd. But last season, on the afternoon of May 8, Weiss concluded his greatest deal. He bought Marvin Throneberry from the Orioles.

At this time a bad situation seemed to be developing. The Mets, by winning nine out of twelve, had climbed to eighth place. Everybody around the Mets was starting to talk about the club’s being able to finish as high as seventh place. The Cubs were a weak team, they pointed out. So were the Phillies and the other new team in the league, the Houston Colt 45s.

“With luck we can be seventh,” Weiss announced.

This was hoping for boring mediocrity. Who would have cared about the Mets if they became a seventh-place club? Happily, the team would have none of this. They proceeded to stand up and lose the next seventeen games they played.

And now there was absolutely no question about it. This was not a mediocre ball club playing baseball. This was a terrible ball club. And they were starting to play fantastic baseball. Like on May 27, when they lost a doubleheader at San Francisco.

In the seventh inning of the first game, with Willie Mays on first, Roger Craig threw a pitch that hit Orlando Cepeda. Cepeda was awarded first base. What Orlando really wanted was the privilege of punching Craig in the nose. When he reached first base, Cepeda walked off the bag and announced this. On the mound, Craig nodded. This was fine with him. He had the guy mad. He made ready to pitch, then quickly wheeled and threw to first. Craig probably has the finest pick-off motion to a base of any right-handed major-league pitcher now active. His throw this time was a beauty. Cepeda, off the bag, never knew it was coming. Neither did Ed Bouchee, who was holding down first base for the Mets. Bouchee dropped the ball, and Cepeda was safe.

On the next pitch Willie Mays of the Giants and Elio Chacon of the Mets got into a fight at second base. Cepeda promptly charged Craig, throwing punches. For baseball players, who can’t fight even a little bit, it turned into a pretty good show. Much throwing of batting helmets and charging from the bench and the like. Stengel, who knows that baseball players look like girls when they try to fight, remained on the bench. It was bad enough people called him an old man. He sure as hell wasn’t going to go out and let people say he looked like an old lady.

When the matter was cleared up, Cepeda, still hot, stood some five yards off first base, clamoring for more action. Craig loved this. He stretched, then swung his left foot around and threw the ball to first. Cepeda didn’t have a chance. He was caught with all his weight leaning toward second. Here was baseball at its best. It was classic sports thinking. Get the other guy upset, then take advantage of him.

Bouchee dropped the ball again.

Craig, in a testimonial to his incredible inner strength, did not even say he was going to kill Bouchee. This is in keeping with the way he thinks. From the start, Craig is the player who seems to have had the Mets figured out.

Roger, a 6-foot-2 190-pounder who now is thirty-two, wound up losing exactly twenty-four games. He won only ten. But he never was surprised.

“You can’t win the game,” Roger was saying one night during the season. “You go out there knowing that. So you try harder. Try too hard, it usually turns out. You’re out there concentrating so hard that the first thing you do is make a mistake. Anyway, I’ll tell you one thing. I want a raise next year. I’m going to pitch over 220 innings for this team before the season is over, and I want to get paid for it.”

At it turned out, Craig was on the mound for 233 innings.

“He pitched all that time with a team like that behind him?” James Riddle Hoffa said one day last winter. “Well, he sure as hell deserves a lot more than a raise. He ought to bargain for a piece of the ballpark.”

By Memorial Day weekend, the Mets were a solid tenth. The Dodgers came into town for a league game for the first time since O’Malley took them West. The Giants were to follow next. The two teams came in for a total of seven games. A staggering 191,675 fans came out to see the games. The Mets lost all seven. But this seemed to be important only to the players and to the standings. It certainly was not important to the fans. For at this time a phenomenal thing was happening. With each loss the team seemed to draw more people around it. The people came to the Polo Grounds to see the Dodgers and Giants on this particular weekend. But they were just watching their old favorites. They were rooting for the Mets. And before the season ended, the team drew 922,000 into an old, poorly located ballpark. This season, if they get into their new home, the Mets figure to have one of the most profitable years any club has ever had.

The newspapers call the Mets fans “The New Breed.” This is a good name, but there is more to it than this. It goes deeper. As the Mets lost game after game last season, for example, you heard one line repeated in place after place all over town. It probably started in a gin mill someplace with a guy looking down at his drink and listening to somebody talk about this new team and how they lost so much. Then it got repeated, and before long you were even hearing it in places on Madison Avenue.

“I’ve been a Mets fan all my life.”

Nearly everybody was saying it by mid-June. And nearly everybody had a good reason for saying it. You see, the Mets are losers, just like nearly everybody else in life. This is a team for the cab driver who gets held up and the guy who loses out on a promotion because he didn’t maneuver himself to lunch with the boss enough. It is the team for every guy who has to get out of bed in the morning and go to work for short money on a job he does not like. And it is the team for every woman who looks up ten years later and sees her husband eating dinner in a T-shirt and wonders how the hell she ever let this guy talk her into getting married. The Yankees? Who does well enough to root for them, Laurence Rockefeller?

Take the thing about Elio Chacon. One day the Mets proudly announced that Chacon had handled 95 chances at shortstop without an error. As a rule, errorless streaks for infielders are not mentioned until the man has made 225 plays or so. But the Mets’ publicity department did not have this kind of time. When the Chacon announcement was made, the club had just struck out thirty-four times in three games, which is some sort of an all-time record. More important, Chacon was playing every day. The plug had to be gotten in right away, or else. The Mets’ release was just under the wire. For the next day Chacon moved in on a ground ball that was his ninety-sixth chance. Rather, the ball moved in on Chacon. It was touch and go. Chacon reached, the ball touched his shins, then kicked off half a mile, and two runners took off and scored.

The next day’s mail in the Mets’ offices produced a letter written on a saloon’s stationery and signed by twenty people. It was addressed to Lindsey Nelson, the Mets’ radio and TV broadcaster.

“We the undersigned feel that Elio Chacon is the greatest, flashiest, finest, most magnificent baseball player we ever seen. We want to adopt Elio Chacon as our hero. Could you please see to it that we get an autographed picture of Elio Chacon so that we can hang it up on the wall?

“We have watched Chacon play all year. He is our idol. We used to think Pee Wee Reese was pretty good. That was until Elio Chacon came along. He is our kind of guy. He fought Willie Mays in San Francisco. And he plays every day. He must have some guts to play every day.

“Please send the picture.

“TYRONE GOLDBERG, Secretary, Gilmore’s Tavern.”

The other nineteen names were listed underneath.

All the mail and all the phone calls and all the conversations in town ran along these lines. Typical was this letter:

“Even though the Mets aren’t in first place to me there the greatest team in the history of baseball. Please send me an autographed picture. Yours truely, MICHAEL HOROWITZ.”

And at the games the clientele came early, stayed to the last out, and roared if the Mets so much as had a man reach second base. People simply were carried away by this team. It seemed rather silly, but on one bright afternoon—the Mets were playing at night—it was clearly explained during a visit to my psychiatrist. He practices on Park Avenue, he is known all over the world, and he is not a man to be taken in by fads like sanity.

“I like the Mets,” I complained to him. “I’m starting to die every time they play. What’s the matter, am I getting silly?”

“It is pity,” the doctor explained. “Pity is kin to love.”

“But I like to be a winner. Why can’t I root for the Yankees? I hate the Yankees.”

“You can’t pity the Yankees.”

“I go deeper than that, though. I hate General Motors too.”

“Let’s remain concerned with the Mets,” he said. “Don’t you think Casey Stengel should stop using that fellow Christopher in the outfield? How can we win with a guy like him around?”

I also presented the situation to a great expert on the whims and actions of human beings, chairman of the Sociology Department at an important university in New York and a scholar known wherever scholars meet.

This scholar, austere, reeking of massive intellect, was found in a study lined with great books in his home overlooking the Hudson. He listened intently as I described the situation to him.

“Why are all these jerks rooting for the Mets?” I finally asked.

He gazed out the window in deep thought.

“You know,” he said, “this Cannizzaro. If somebody would teach him to control his throwing, we might have one of the finest defensive catchers I’ve ever seen.”

People simply loved the Mets. On June 17, when Marvelous Marvin Throneberry made his unforgettable maneuvers, messing up that rundown against the Cubs, then failing to touch first base, the fans were beside themselves when, right after Throneberry was called out, Charley Neal stepped in and hit a home run. Before Neal reached first, Casey Stengel stormed out of the dugout and held out his arm and pointed to first. Neal stepped on the bag. Then Stengel pointed to second. Neal stepped on the bag. Casey also pointed to third and to home plate and after Neal was across with the run, the old man nodded and went back to the dugout. The crowd roared.

Throughout the entire town, however, nobody came up quite as bad as Jack Semel, who started the season holding his umbrella over George Weiss’s head and ended it by claiming he was going to break it over Weiss’s head.

Jack Semel is a short, husky man of sixty-one with brown eyes, close-cropped graying hair, a powerful larynx, and an incredible record.

“You think I’m crazy, don’t you?” Jack Semel keeps saying. “Go ahead. Tell the truth. You think I’m crazy.”

The answer is obvious. Jack Semel last season saw every pitch of every inning of every home game the Mets played.

“I had sixteen season box seats,” he says proudly. “And I had thrills you couldn’t count. It was the greatest summer of my life.”

Jack was sitting in the office of the paper box company he owns on the West Side of New York. “A better fan you don’t have than Jack Semel,” he says.

Which is right. In all the history of any sport, there never has been a guy like Jack Semel. Night after night last season he sat through the Mets games, and it usually was after midnight when he left the Polo Grounds. He would drive to his home in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, flop into bed for a couple of hours, then get up and grope his way over to his plant so he could be around to supervise shipping when the trucks pulled up at four-thirty A.M. At four in the afternoon Jack would leave his office and drive straight to the Polo Grounds. He’d snatch dinner, then get to his seat in time to watch batting practice.

“I’ve got to be at a ballpark two hours before a game,” he says. “If they start bat practice without Jack Semel, believe me, it’s no game. I went with people, or I went and sat alone. Sometimes when the club got real bad nobody would come sit with me. So I sat alone. I didn’t care. Going to baseball games is my life.

“And listen, I’m no hanger-onner. I have my own personal opinion. Once I pay for tickets I can say what I want. Now you take George Weiss. He sat near me many times. Do you know something? Mr. George Weiss has shown me nothing, and he knows that’s how I feel. The same with Stengel. Every time he went out to take out a pitcher he heard from Jack Semel. I leaned across the dugout and I told him good. Why don’t you take yourself out?’ I asked him all year. Casey Stengel knew how I felt. The trouble with this team was that they were disorganized. They needed a younger manager. And Weiss, he should retire.

“I’m going to tell you something now that I really believe,” Jack said. He leaned forward and gripped his desk. “I believe personally—and this is something that might be a comment on me—that the Mets were a good team. A very good team. But they was disorganized. If they was better organized they would be a good team. What do you think?”

“Just like you say, you’re crazy.”

“Well, anyway, I’m looking forward to next year,” Jack said. “I can hardly wait.”

He certainly can’t. Once a week during the winter Jack drove over to Flushing Meadows to see how the new ballpark was coming along. He has his box seats—sixteen of them—already staked out. He likes to see how work is coming on them.

“I go home and tell my wife Clara how it’s coming. She says ‘Good.’ She never liked the Polo Grounds. And you could tell Casey Stengel for me that I’ll be right behind the Mets’ dugout this year and he’ll be hearing from me. I want a Charley Dressen or a Leo Durocher to run this club. I want they should have a doghouse for the players who do bad. Organization, that’s what we need. We need Leo Durocher’s doghouse. A player doesn’t put out, shoo him off. Put him on the end of the bench and don’t talk to him or play him for a couple of weeks. In the doghouse. That straightens them out.”

“Does Semel yell loud?” Jim Thompson, the Mets’ business manager, was asked recently.

“Mr. Semel can do anything he wants,” Thompson said. “Mr. Semel, between himself and his friends, sold about $30,000 worth of tickets last season. If Mr. Semel doesn’t like me, I’ll let him announce it over the public-address system.”

Of all the people who were attracted to the Mets last season, none had a better reason than Mr. Patrick Hastings of Philadelphia.

In mid-June, Mr. Hastings took off the apron with a purpose one day in his Brown Jug Bar on South 45th Street. After making an appropriate pass at the day’s receipts (a move which was to cause some friction in his marriage some days later), Pat walked out of the place and went crosstown to 30th Street Station and got a train to New York. He was coming to see the Mets for himself.

Some days before, it seems, he had read that the Mets were the worst team of all time. This upset Pat. For some years now he has publicly claimed that he has sat through more bad baseball than any man alive. For consistency, Philadelphia baseball, among other things in the town, always has been the worst. On nine occasions during Pat’s tenure at old Baker Bowl and Shibe Park, both the A’s and Phillies finished in last place. Pat contends that only winter was worse than watching the old Phillies. But in June he was at the Polo Grounds, a beer in his hand, and he did not believe what he was seeing.

In front of him, Charley Neal wandered off first, then casually ran for second as Frank Thomas hit a soft fly to right field. The scoreboard showed only one out. The Cubs outfielder caught the ball and threw to first for a double play. Neal thought there were two out when he took off.

This was the night that Stengel announced, “I intend to trade anybody on this ball club. And we intend to start trying to make deals with other clubs right now.”

“The hell you will,” said the other nineteen teams in baseball.

“Buzz Arlett,” Hastings mumbled. “I am going to go home and write him a letter of apology. He played right field for the Phillies in 1931. People used to go out and get stiff whenever he caught a fly ball. We always made jokes about him. But he done more fielding standing still than most of these fellows here can do at full speed.

“You know, the Athletics in 1916 were unbelievable. But they had Stuffy McInnis. And some of them Phillies teams, no matter how bad they were, they could hurt you with the bat pretty good. There was fellows like Chuck Klein, Virgil Davis, Don Hurst. It hurts me to say it, but I never saw anything real bad until I got here today.”

It was at this time, too, that the Mets became a problem for the American gambling industry. Now, on the off chance that somebody will regard gambling as a side issue to all of this, let it be stated that betting on baseball is the true national pastime. Bookmakers handle far more money on baseball than they do on horses. And if the day ever arrives when they put mutuel windows in a baseball park and make the whole thing legal, you’ll see Carry Back working for $4 an hour on the bridle path in Central Park. Race tracks will be a thing of the past.

The Mets’ trouble, as far as gambling was concerned, was fundamental. In order to have gambling, three elements must be present. One is money. Cash money, because people in this business seem to have something against personal checks. The other two elements needed are the chance that a team can win, and the chance that a team can lose. Obviously the Mets lacked one of these elements. So, gamblers agreed, something had to be done about them.

In offices in New Orleans and Minneapolis, where professional handicappers issue daily odds on major-league baseball games, listings on the Mets changed. In drawing odds, a handicapper always works with the starting pitchers for a game. He keeps a record of how each pitcher on a club does against every other team in the league. When starting pitchers are announced for a game, he looks up the pitching records, weighs in all other factors, and then decrees that, say, the Yankees, with Ford pitching, are 8-6 favorites over the Red Sox and their starter, Monbouquette. This means that you can take the Yankees, but you must give 8-5 odds. If you take the Red Sox, you get only 6-5 odds. There is a missing number here, of course. In this case it is seven. Without going into undue intricacies, let it be said that the missing number is why bookmakers live well.

With the Mets, a different betting line was quickly sent out. Instead of odds, the handicappers drew up a run system. The Mets became, almost invariably, a 2-to-2 ½ underdog. To bet the Mets, you took 2 runs. If the Mets lost the game by only 1 run, you won your bet under this system. If you bet against the Mets, you gave 2 ½ runs. To win your bet, the Mets had to lose by at least three runs.

This system went over big with a girl who started out the year with blond hair and a big good-looking guy from the garment center who took her to Hialeah for a couple of weeks in February. By the end of June she had red hair, a boy friend who never wears a tie, and a reputation among most bookmakers of being the smartest bettor of Mets games in New York. Her gambling allowed her to buy a sizable piece of a going beauty parlor in Brooklyn. It was a big year.

“Muh-ther,” she was saying one night. “How did anybody ever live without this team?”

She was standing at the bar of the nicest place her new boy friend had taken her to thus far in their romance. The place was in Brooklyn and it was smoky and small. Its patrons had made history some months before when a double gangland killing occurred on the dance floor during a crowded Saturday night. When the police arrived, every one of the 150 patrons insisted he had seen nothing. The saxophonist was most vehement. He had been so close to one of the .38s that he had powder burns on one cuff. But he demanded of a detective:

“What shooting?”

Now, on this night in late June, the redhead, her hair in a big pony-tail, was with her man on the tiny dance floor of the joint. They made a striking couple. In spike-heeled shoes, she was about a head and a half taller than her guy. He clutched her with his left hand. He kept his other hand flat against his right ear. If you moved close enough, you could see Dave didn’t have an earache. He was holding a leather-covered transistor radio to his ear.

“He is always working, that guy,” one of the bartenders said. “He is listening to the Mets game. He picks the games, she bets.”

The band was playing something called “Where Are You?” but on the dance floor Lindsey Nelson, the Mets’ broadcaster, was putting something important into the boy friend’s right ear. He stopped, let go of his girl, and plugged a finger into his left ear so he wouldn’t hear the music. Then he took the finger out of his ear and started dancing again.

“We’re in the game again,” he said. “Two runs in. We got a chance to win out.”

“This is the greatest,” the redhead said dreamily.

The music ended, and they came back to the bar. He kept the radio pressed to his ear. The redhead swallowed Scotch.

“The Mets are in Houston,” she said. “They’re down five runs a few minutes ago. Now they got it to three. I took two runs. If they get us two more runs, it’s Christmas.

“You ought to hear the bookmakers. Every time I call, I say, ‘Hello, mother, give me the nickel line on the Mets.’ This fellow who deals to me, he says, ‘Why don’t you go someplace else?’

“You know what I tell him? I tell him, ‘I’m going to have you driving a taxicab by August.’”

In the next twenty minutes the Mets got another run in the eighth, then a big one in the ninth. And the boy friend slapped the bar. “We’re in,” he said. “We cash a bet.”

“That’s the greatest comeback of my time,” she said. “That team fights. Imagine. They lose the game by only one run.

“Baby, you’re beautiful,” she told her guy.

He needed a shave.

By September the redhead had seven subscriptions to True Confessions magazine for her beauty parlor, and things were humming.

“I’m here to stay,” she said. The subscriptions are for three years. I want to name my joint ‘Mets’ Hairdressers’ but I don’t think any of the customers would understand.

“Dopes. They spend their time reading about Elizabeth Taylor. Give me the Sporting News and the line on the Mets. That’s all I want out of life, mother.”

5

“They’re Afraid to Come Out”

THE SECOND HALF OF the season for the New York Mets was, generally speaking, a catastrophe. The second half of the season consisted of the months of July, August, and September, although some of the more responsible players on the team insisted it never really happened. Whatever it was, it left an indelible impression on many of those connected with the club.

In Rochester, New York, during the winter, Casey Stengel sat in the lobby of the Sheraton Hotel and, in the middle of one of his highly specialized lobby seminars, he stopped and shook his head.

“Everybody here keeps saying how good I’m looking,” he said. “Well, maybe I do. But they should see me inside. I look terrible inside.”

And in Tilden, Nebraska, one afternoon, Richie Ashburn called a Philadelphia advertising agency to tell them that he would certainly like to retire from baseball and take their offer to announce the Philadelphia Phillies games.

“Weren’t you making more with the Mets?” he was asked.

“Yes, quite a bit more.”

“Why did you quit, then?”

“Well,” he said.

He meant he was taking a big cut in pay for the privilege of not having to go through another year with the Mets.

From a non-Met viewpoint, however, the last part of the 1962 season was something else. It was not rough. It was, instead, the finest thing to happen to the sport of baseball since Abe Attell helped save the game by deciding that, seeing as long as it made people so mad, he was not going to become involved with anyone who was trying to fix World Series games.

You see, in the last fifteen years baseball has needed help. This is becoming a tired, predictable game. It is overexposed on television. It is played too slowly to maintain a hold on this fast-moving era. And, probably worst of all, it has become so commercialized, and the people in it loaded with so many gimmicks, that it all reminds you of the front window of a cheap department store. For money, a baseball player will go to the end of the world to embarrass himself. One word from Madison Avenue, the world center for poor taste, and a ballplayer will rub some hog-suet compound into his hair and say it isn’t greaseless. Or he will make a toy-company commercial that should be jammed by the FCC. Or, most sickening of all, for a check of $500 or so he will show up at any dinner of any organization this side of the Murder, Inc., Old Timers Association and sign autographs for the kids, mutter some sort of speech, then disappear out the side door with the waitress from the cocktail lounge. All of it is demeaning at best, and in the long run harmful to the game. Other athletes from other sports go in for this too, and they have the same quick-buck air about them, but since baseball is the biggest sport it is the one in which this sort of thing is most prevalent. And most sickening. The idea of a ballplayer taking money to go out and promote his own business is, at best, disgraceful.

And, in the playing of the game itself, baseball acts as if we are still in a depression and nobody has any place to go. There is the manager’s strategy. With nominal maneuvering, a major-league manager can halt a game for ten minutes while changing pitchers. Baseball still thinks this is 1934. Only this is 1963 and people are working and have money and move around and spend it. The entire character of leisure time has changed drastically. Since 1945 everything has changed with it except baseball, and that is baseball’s trouble right now.

But last season the New York Mets came to the rescue. Dressed in their striped uniforms, with blue lettering and orange piping, they put fun into life. It was hell to play for them, but for anybody who watched them it was great. This was what you wanted out of life. This was Bert Lahr in The Wizard of Oz or the Marx Brothers in Room Service. The Mets tried to play baseball, and the players trying to do it were serious. But the whole thing came out as great comedy, and it was the tonic the sport needed. People did not follow the Mets. They loved the Mets.

Absolutely anything the Mets did last season, from a viewer’s position, was great. They were great during the season. And even in the long winter layoff they didn’t let anybody down. In January, for example, the Mets called up their three best pitchers from the minor leagues. They were Larry Bearnath, who won 2 and lost 13 at Syracuse; Tom Belcher, 1-12 at Syracuse; and Grover Powell, who was 4-12 between Syracuse and the Auburn, New York, club. The three had a combined record of thirty-seven losses and only seven wins.

“I saw all their old pitchers,” cab driver Martin Goldstein, hack license 437-265, assured us one afternoon. “But I can’t wait to see Stengel bring one of these new ones out of the bullpen.”

It will be hard to top the final half of last season, however. All of it went along the lines of the night game the Mets played against the Reds at Crosley Field on August 10, although dates are of no consequence here because things were substantially the same each day or night the team took the field.

In the third inning of this particular contest, Frank Robinson of the Reds led off with a double down the left-field line off Al Jackson, the Mets’ pitcher. Wally Post then grounded out, Robinson holding second. Robinson then stole third. The batter, Don Pavletich, walked. There was now one out, men on first and third. The Mets’ infield came up a step or so. The hope was for a sharply hit ground ball which could be converted into a double play or a play at home plate to prevent the run from scoring.

Jackson pitched to Hank Foiles, the Reds’ catcher. Pitched beautifully, too. Al’s curve was coming in low, the kind of pitch that winds up being hit on the ground. Which is exactly what Foiles did. He hit a sharp one-hopper toward first. Throneberry made a great stop. Then he straightened up and looked around. He found that the ball had been hit so sharply that it gave him all the time he needed to make an inning-ending double play any way he wanted.

Here was Pavletich running toward second. He wasn’t halfway there. Throneberry could throw to second for one out, then take the return throw and get the batter. That would be easy. Foiles was still scrambling away from the batter’s box. There was another play Marv could make too. He could step on first and then throw to second. Only then they would have to tag Pavletich out at second. That could be dangerous, for Robinson might score in the meantime. But you still had plenty of time. When you have time you rarely make errors. Marvin stood alongside first base, the ball firmly held in his glove, and thought it out. Then he made his decision.

He threw to the plate. His throw arrived just after Robinson slid across with a run.

There were now runners on first and second with one out. Pitcher Jackson seemed to sway a little on the mound. Then he threw four balls to Vada Pinson, and that loaded the bases.

Don Blasingame stepped in to hit. By now, Jackson had talked himself into trying again. He stretched, then came in with that good low curve once more. Blasingame slapped a hard ground ball straight at Rod Kanehl at second base. It was a certain double-play ball. Kanehl, in his exuberance, neglected to field the ball. It kicked off his leg, and another run scored. The bases were still loaded.

Jackson now has forced the Reds to hit into two certain double plays. For his efforts, he has two runs against him on the scoreboard, still only one man out, the bases loaded, and a wonderful little touch of Southern vernacular dripping from his lips.

Jim Maloney, the Cincinnati pitcher, stepped in. The count ran to three and two on him. Then, for some reason, the Cincinnati baserunners broke with the pitch. With two out, this is normal. But there was only one out here, and there is a slight suspicion somebody on the Reds was so mixed up by now he thought there were two out and he had the runners going. At any rate, Jackson came right back with that low curve, and Maloney went for it and here came another grounder straight at Kanehl. This time Rod wasn’t going to make any mistakes. He kept his head down, scooped up the ball, and flipped it to second with the same motion. It was a fine move for starting a double play. Except Blasingame, running from first with the pitch, was now standing on second. He was safe. So was everybody else. During the maneuvering, the third Red run of the inning came across.

Jackson held out his glove for the ball, scuffed the dirt, then looked down for the sign so he could pitch to the next hitter. Don’t ever say Al Jackson is not a well-trained pitcher. People come out of West Point and go on to become big generals and they don’t have this kind of discipline. And when Leo Cardenas got in to hit, Jackson came right back with that curve ball and he got Cardenas to go for it and hit into the dirt.

The ball went right at Charley Neal at shortstop. The temptation was to go for the inning-ending double play, short-to-second-to-first. It looked easy. But you were not going to get Charley Neal into a sucker game like this. No, sir. Charley straightened up and fired the ball to first base to get one out. The fourth run of the inning came across.

When this happened, Richie Ashburn, out in right field, turned around and looked up at one of the light towers. In his time Ashburn had seen many things. Granny Hamner in a clutch: he always moved the runner up a base. Joe DiMaggio going after a fly ball: he covered half an outfield and never seemed to do anything hard enough to work up a sweat. Jackie Robinson bothering a pitcher: he would brazen the guy into a mistake. He had, Richie felt, seen just about everything. Except this.

“I don’t know what’s going on, but I know I’ve never seen it before,” Ashburn mumbled.

Then he turned around and watched as Jackson finally got the third out and headed for the bench with the all-time record for making batters hit into consecutive double plays that did not work. As he got to the dugout, Stengel thought kind things about him.

“If I let this man go out there again, he may never be the same,” Casey said. He ordered Ray Daviault to come in and pitch the fourth inning. This he neglected to tell Jackson. So when the Mets made their third out Al picked up his glove and went out to the mound. He was in the middle of a warm-up pitch when the public-address announcer proclaimed, “Now pitching for New York, Number 35, Ray Daviault.”

Jackson stopped dead.

“Everybody here crazy,” he announced.

It went pretty much like this from the first day of July until the last day of the season, in September. Only a true hero could win a game for the Mets. Jackson, who was to wind up losing twenty, began to trust nobody. When he won a game, he won it by pitching a shutout. Even then, he was never too sure until he was back in the dressing room.

There was a night game in St. Louis that showed this. Jackson had a 1-0 lead as the ninth inning began. Ken Boyer was the first Cardinal hitter. Boyer hit sharply down the third-base line. Felix Mantilla went the wrong way for the ball, and it went through into left field. The Mets’ left fielder was Joe Christopher. Casey Stengel had put him into the game for defensive purposes. Christopher advanced on the ball, then touched it several times before finally holding onto it. Boyer had pulled up at second by the time Christopher was able to make the throw.

With one pitch the Mets had not only allowed the first man up to reach base, but they also had allowed him to advance into scoring position. Jackson, however, did not fold. He bent his back a little more and got the next two hitters. Then Red Schoendienst came up to pinch-hit. He is old, this Schoendienst, and maybe he has never been the same since being hit with tuberculosis a couple of years ago. But he is still Red Schoendienst, and in a spot like this he is dangerous. Jackson worked carefully on him. He got Red to go for an outside curve. Red hit a high pop foul alongside first. It was an easy third out. The fans started moving toward the exits. The Mets’ outfielders started to come in for their showers. The bullpen crews reached for their gloves. Everybody moved but Jackson. He had been around too long. He was staying where he was until the result was official.

Throneberry circled under the pop fly. First he moved in a little circle. Then he began to move in a bigger circle. With a great last-moment stab, Marvelous Marv got his glove on the ball. The ball hit the thumb part of Marv’s glove and bounded away. Jackson then walked Schoendienst.

The next hitter was Bob Whitfield. He slammed a pitch right back at the mound. Now pitchers are not out there to make heroes of themselves. In self-defense they’ll stop a batted ball. But only for that reason. Generally they like it much better if the ball goes past them and is handled by an infielder. That’s what infielders are for. But this case was different. Jackson knew all about his infielders. He knew all about his outfielders too. He caught one glimpse of the ball as it buzzed toward his shoetops. Then Al Jackson went down for it. The thing could have hopped up and broken his jaw just as easily as not. It didn’t matter to Jackson. He knew the only way he could win was to risk his life. With a loud slap, Jackson stopped the ball. Then he came up and threw to Throneberry at first. Marvin held onto the throw. The game, for a wonder, was over.

It was things like this that made an indelible impression upon a nineteen-year-old boy from Stockton, California, named Robert Garibaldi. Last July, Garibaldi, a sophomore at Santa Clara, was the most sought-after pitching prospect to come along in many years. He was a left-hander, and the bidding was up to $125,000 for his signature on a contract.

The Mets had sent Red Ruffing, the old Yankee pitching ace, to look over the kid for them. Ruffing’s report was short and impressive: “Has big-league speed. Has big-league control. Ready right now.”

On July 3 the Mets were in San Francisco. By the end of the fourth inning they were trailing by a tidy 10-1. Out of the dugout came Stengel. He ran up the right-field line and disappeared through a door leading to the clubhouse. Many people were speculating that Casey had decided he couldn’t take any more. They were wrong. Stengel most certainly could take more. In fact, Casey Stengel at this point thought he could do anything. He had just heard that the Giants were going to sign Garibaldi the next day. So he had made a hurried date with George Weiss to drive to Stockton, sixty miles away, and try to charm Garibaldi into going for a Mets contract.

Charm the lad he did.

“He was wonderful,” Garibaldi says. “It was great meeting him. I’d read about him all my life.”

Stengel and Weiss sat down in the boy’s living room and talked for two hours with him. They got down to money. The Giants reportedly had offered $130,000. The Mets certainly would top that, Weiss assured the boy. The boy said thank you, but there was no money in the world that could make it worth his while to pitch for the Mets. He signed with the Giants the next day.

This statement seemed borne out a week or so later when the Mets were in Milwaukee. The ace of their bullpen, Craig Anderson, who was in the midst of losing sixteen games in a row, needed a rest. For a relief pitcher Stengel called upon Wilmer (Vinegar Bend) Mizell. This one came on to walk the first three batters to face him in the seventh. Then he decided to effect pin-point control and he served up a pitch that Joe Adcock hit six miles for a grand slam home run. Out came Vinegar Bend. Stengel waved to the bullpen for somebody else. Nobody came.

“They’re afraid to come out,” everybody said.

For a Mets pitcher there were only two possibilities every time he took the mound. Either he was going to be hit for some of the longest home runs in baseball history, or he was going to have to stand around and watch his teammates make those astonishing plays.

Sometimes it was a combination of everything. There was one bright Sunday in July in Cincinnati when the Mets lost two games. Not easily, either. It all began the day before, when Roger Craig, with the class of a real professional, had walked over to Stengel and volunteered for relief pitching in the doubleheader. Stengel nodded. It touches an old guy like this when a pitcher volunteers to work between starts. So in the ninth inning of the first game, with the score tied 3-3, Casey took Craig up on his offer. Roger came in from the bullpen, and immediately Cincinnati sent up Marty Keogh as a pinch-hitter. Craig threw him one pitch. Keogh did not swing. Craig threw another pitch. Keogh swung. He hit the ball eight miles and the Reds won, 4-3.

“They get beat on favors now,” everybody said.

Craig, however, was only part of the day’s show. During the course of the eighteen innings the Mets managed to set some sort of an all-time record by getting four runners thrown out at home plate. In the first game Choo Choo Coleman was out trying to score from second on a single to left. In the second game Stengel jauntily ordered a double steal in the second inning. Cannizzaro was on first and Kanehl on third. Cannizzaro broke for second and drew a throw. Kanehl raced for the plate. The Cincinnati shortstop, Cardenas, cut off the throw, fired home, and that took care of Kanehl. In the fourth inning Elio Chacon, on first, put his head down and tried to go all the way around when Jerry Lynch, the Reds’ left fielder, messed up a single. Chacon never saw Vada Pinson, the fine center fielder, come over for the ball. He should have, because Pinson, as he demonstrated here, throws quite well. He cut down Chacon at home by six yards. Finally, in the fifth inning, with Jim Hickman on third and breaking for the plate with the swing, Kanehl hit the ball hard. And squarely at third. Hickman was out by a mile at the plate.

In pitching for the Mets, then, it was best to take no chances. Don’t volunteer, don’t rely on getting any runs, no matter how many teammates get on base. The password was: beware. And the one who seemed to know this better than anyone was Ralph Branca. He had nothing to do with the team officially. His job was talking on a pre- and post-game program for a radio station. But by being around the Mets he understood that anything could happen. So on July 14, when the Mets held an Old Timers’ Day and Branca was out in the bullpen, he did not merely sit on a bench and look at the crowd. He stayed loose. He also stayed determined.

The moment Bobby Thomson came up to bat, here was showman Leo Durocher waving to the bullpen for Branca to come in and pitch. Ralph walked in, just as he had come in that day in 1951. Thomson greeted him with a smile. Everybody else out on the field lolled around and made jokes about the situation.

Branca did not say any jokes. And a small thought crossed his mind: Stick the first pitch right in his ear. He dismissed it.

He then wound up and nearly broke his arm off throwing his best curve at Thomson. He threw a couple more of them, and Bobby, fooled by one, barely lifted an easy fly to center field.

Following this, the Mets took the field to play the Dodgers. In the stands to watch them were such as Zack Wheat and Carl Hubbell and Frank Frisch. At the end of five and a half innings the Mets were slightly behind. They were behind by 17-0, and that night Frankie Frisch sat in his house in New Rochelle and he told the neighbors, “I don’t have to go out of this house again as long as I live. I’ve seen everything.”

This view was being echoed on 52nd Street in New York, where the man named Toots Shor runs his restaurant and bar. He is generally considered to be the town’s Number 1 sports fan, and around his circular bar he is known, simply, as The Best Customer.

“I have a son,” Toots announced over brandy, “and I make him watch the Mets. I want him to know life. You watch the Mets, you think of being busted out with the guy from the Morris Plan calling you up every ten minutes. It’s a history lesson. He’ll understand the depression when they teach it to him in school.”

He shook his head. “That Frank Thomas is one helluva guy, you know. But he makes a throw against the Cardinals. He’s on third base and he makes a throw to first. He makes the wildest wild throw in baseball history. It goes 125 feet over the first baseman’s head. Nobody ever done a thing like that. Well, what the hell, there never was a club like this.”

Anderson is a case in point here. His sixteenth loss was memorable. It left him two short of the all-time National League record, and only a step or two short of asking to be farmed out to an institution. The date was September 8, and the Mets were in Houston for a day-night doubleheader. They were leading, 3-2, in the ninth inning of the day game when Bob Lillis of Houston singled. Johnny Temple bunted down the first-base line. Marvin Throneberry approached the ball thoughtfully. Marvelous Marv’s estimate was that the ball would roll foul. He was wrong. He then picked it up and threw to first, too late to get the runner. Stengel waved to the bullpen for help. Here came Anderson. Craig was in great form. He worked on Joe Amalfitano and got him to hit into a double play. Then he walked Norman Larker. This brought up Bob Aspromonte. He hit a sinking liner to left field. Frank Thomas broke for the ball. Then he charged the ball. Then he dove for the ball. He did not make the catch. Temple rounded third and scored the tying run. Larker, the runner from first, rounded second and began to go for third. Thomas grabbed the ball, stood up, and looked at Larker. It was going to be a close play at third. But Thomas was taking no chances. He was not going to let anybody reach second base. So he fired to second. There was nobody there. Aspromonte, the hitter, had remained at first. Kanehl and Neal, the Mets’ keystone combination, as the announcers call it, were widely scattered over the area. Thomas’s throw roared past second untouched by human hands. Larker reached third, made the turn, and headed for home.

Throneberry made a remarkable save on the throw. He knew exactly what was going on. Larker was heading home with the winning run. A good throw would cut Larker down. Throneberry wanted to make that good throw. So he took aim at the plate. He took aim as if his life depended on this throw. He also took so much time aiming his throw that Larker simply slid across the plate with the winning run.

Jay Hook was another pitcher who found the Mets trying. On August 6, a hot Monday night at Los Angeles, Jay allowed the Dodgers five hits. He did not walk a man. But in the sixth inning of a 1-1 game Maury Wills of the Dodgers dragged a bunt past the mound and beat it out. He then stole second. This infuriated Chris Cannizzaro, who was catching Hook. Chris crouched down and looked out at second. Wills was taking his usual long lead off the base. Chris planted his feet and got ready to make a comeback. He was going to pick Wills off. On the first pitch, Chris threw to second. Threw hard. If there is one thing he can do, it is throw a baseball hard. He threw this one so hard that the only reason Wills had to hold at third and not score was that Jim Hickman, the Mets center fielder, caught the ball on the fly. Willie Davis then hit a ground ball, and Wills came across with what was to be the winning run.

Hook also had the privilege of pitching when the Mets lost their hundredth game of the year. This was late in August at Philadelphia. Jay went ten innings before losing to the Phillies, 3-2. He lost the game primarily on a ground ball to Charley Neal at short. Don Demeter hit the ball. Neal picked it up and made a bad throw to first. It pulled Throneberry off the bag. Marv had to come up the line and into foul territory to stay with the throw. He grabbed it. Then he went to tag Demeter. His feet slipped and he fell on his face.

This was Throneberry’s best kind of play. And because of this, people sitting behind first base at the Polo Grounds soon began to show up with T-shirts which read VRAM (MARV spelled backwards) on them. And they took up a great chant: “Cranberry, strawberry, we love Throneberry.”

This was the Marvin Throneberry Fan Club. At the peak of the season over a hundred letters a day were arriving at Marvin’s locker at the Polo Grounds.

“The hell of it all is, I’m really a good fielder,” Throneberry kept insisting.

This was something Ralph Houk gladly backed up one evening during the summer, in Washington. Houk, who manages the Yankees, sat in the bus taking his team to the ballpark and he chewed on a cigar and talked about Marvelous Marv.

“I can’t understand what’s happening to that Throneberry,” he said. “I had him three years at Denver. He’s not that bad a ballplayer at all. Why, he opened the season with the Yankees one year there [1958]. Skowron was hurt, I guess. Marv never made plays like they say he makes now. I guarantee you he never did. If he ever played that way for me, I’d of killed him with my bare hands.”

The year Marvelous Marv had in 1962 just happened, then. Nobody had any indication he knew how to play baseball this way. He just arrived from Baltimore one day in May and replaced an ailing Gil Hodges at first. After that, things began to happen. They kept happening too, and by August 18 he was an institution.

On that night the Mets’ management held a special day in honor of Stan Musial. But the fans, proudly wearing their VRAM T-shirts and shouting their cheer, showed much more affection for Throneberry. Musial? He was fine. Great guy, magnificent baseball player. A perfectionist. Only who the hell needed him? The mob yelled for Marvelous Marv.

“I hated to take the play away from Stan on his big day here,” Marv apologized after the game.

Throneberry is a balding, likable fellow who has been known to buy a writer a drink, something unheard of in a ballplayer. He is anything but a clown. He simply came into the 1962 season accident-prone, and he barely got out alive. Nothing went right at any time. There was even one night, late in the season, when there was supposed to be some sort of a small party in his honor at a little Italian restaurant called the Grotto on the West Side. Somebody mixed things up, and 125 people showed up instead of an expected 30. The lone chef, hired to work this small party on a usually dead Sunday night, took one look at the mob and pulled off his hat.

“Small-a party, huh?” he said. “Well, you take this small-a party to the Automat. ’Cause that’s where I’m going to have my dinner on the way home.”

The place got so jammed that there was no room for Marvelous Marv when he arrived. After trying to get in, he finally gave up and went across the street from his party and had dinner in another place.

The strange thing about the Mets is that, for all their great comedy onfield, they had no real characters off the field. This was a team of twenty-five nice young men who came to the big leagues to play baseball. The fact they played it rather strangely was, obviously, out of their control. The only player on the club who might be counted as unusual is Frank Thomas. His only quirk is that he wants to be an airline hostess. Yet here again you are dealing with a basically serious matter, because Thomas is a damn good airline stewardess.

“He’s awful neat,” Miss Barbara Mueller of United Airlines noted one day. “He does everything the way the regulations say you should. Outside of this girl Jane, who handles first class on our New York to San Francisco champagne flight, I think that Frank Thomas is the best stewardess on United Airlines.”

Once the Mets are airborne, going to or from a game, Thomas jumps out of his seat, strides up the aisle to the kitchenette, and takes over the running of the plane. Trays slide in and out, coffee is poured, and he starts moving rapidly up and down the aisle, serving meals. He is very particular about it too. One night, en route to Houston by plane, Thomas started serving the back of the plane first. He thrust a tray under the nose of Barney Kremenko, the sports writer, and a couple of partners he had gotten into a pinochle game. The partners were not good at pinochle. Thus Mr. Kremenko preferred to have nothing break up his game.

“We’re not ready now,” Barney said. “We’ll eat later.”

“All right,” Thomas announced. “But that means you eat last, and I don’t want to hear any squawks about it.”

Offended, Thomas stormed off. Any housewife can understand how he felt. Here he had a whole meal prepared, and it was being turned down.

Presently Kremenko’s game broke up. He hailed the regular stewardess and asked her to bring a tray, which she did. Thomas found out about this some minutes later. His eyes flashed.

“You cheated,” he told Kremenko. “I told you to wait your turn, and you cheated. That’s the last time you’re going to pull that.”

Otherwise, to travel or live with this club was to be with a normal group of young men in the major leagues. In fact, as Ashburn observes, the Mets were the only losing club he can recall on which there was no dissension.

“Any losing team I’ve ever been on,” Richie says, “had several things going on. One, the players gave up. Or they hated the manager. Or they had no team spirit. Or the fans turned into wolves. But there was none of this with the Mets. Nobody stopped trying. The manager was absolutely great, nobody grumbled about being with the club, and the fans we had, well, there haven’t been fans like this in baseball history. So we lose 120 games and there isn’t a gripe on the club. It was remarkable. You know, I can remember guys being mad even on a big winner.”

By this he meant a rather famous episode in more recent baseball history. On the last day of the 1950 season Ashburn’s Phillies held a one-game lead over the Brooklyn Dodgers. At Ebbets Field, in the ninth inning, the score was tied, 1-1, with none out and Dodgers on first and second. The highly dangerous Duke Snider was at bat against Robin Roberts of the Phillies. Ashburn was in center field. If anything happened and the runner on second, Cal Abrams, scored, the Dodgers would tie for the pennant and go into a playoff heavily favored.

At shortstop for the Phillies was Granny Hamner. When they played it with money on the table, Hamner was one of the real big ones. It has been a while since he has been around, and maybe some people forget him, but when they talk about big men in the clutch Granny Hamner should always be mentioned. On this afternoon, with Abrams edging off second, Hamner flashed the pick-off sign to Stan Lopata, the Phillies’ catcher. With Snider, a left-handed batter, up, Hamner was playing over toward second. For the pick-off throw, he would duck in behind Abrams and take the throw. Oh, they wouldn’t get Abrams. That would be too much to ask for. The idea was to keep him as close to the bag as possible. If Snider bunted, they could try for Abrams at third. If he hit away and the ball went into the outfield, there still would be a chance to get Abrams at the plate.

Lopata called for a pitch-out. In center, Ashburn moved in. He would back up second in case of a bad throw. Hamner began to edge toward second. Abrams had not picked up the action yet. On the mound, Roberts nodded he had the sign. He started to go into his stretch. Then he threw. He threw a fast ball right down the pipe. Hamner’s mouth fell open. Snider rapped it on a line up the middle, over second, and into center field. Abrams started running. Dirt flew from his spikes as he tore around third. From the stands came one great roar:

“ABIE, YOU SHOULD RUN FAST.”

But in the middle of this huge mistake, here was Ashburn. He had raced in to back up second base. And as he came in, the ball landed right at his feet. By now, Richie was only a short distance on the outfield grass behind second. He picked up the ball and threw to the plate. And suddenly all of Brooklyn realized what was happening. Halfway down the line, Abrams was beaten. A wail rang out over Brooklyn as Lopata tagged out Abrams. Roberts, whose bacon had been saved, proceeded to get out of the inning unscathed.

In the tenth inning Dick Sisler hit a home run into the left-field seats and the Phillies won the pennant. But after the game Hamner didn’t want to talk to anybody. Particularly Roberts. He wanted to kill Roberts.

“I need a drink,” he kept saying. “Alone.”

The Mets never had even a faint tinge of this. This was a nice, placid, thoughtful team. There was one Sunday night, coming back to New York from Chicago, when Solly Hemus, the coach, and a couple of the players sat in the lounge part of the plane, and the talk was the same as you would hear any place around the major leagues. Except they soon got to talking about throwing knockdown pitches at Willie Mays.

“The pitch right after you throw at him, that’s the time to watch him,” Joe Pignatano, one of the catchers, said. “He’s ready then. He’s mad.”

“Knock him down twice in a row, then,” a tall kid said.

“Do you mean knockdown pitches bother Mays?” they were asked.

“Bother him?” one of the players said. “He’s scared to death. If he wasn’t so scared of being hit with a ball, he’d hit .600.”

“You go up to him before the game,” one of them said, “and you tell him, ‘Willie, sometime today. Sometime today I’m going to stick it right in your ear.’ He’ll be standing around the batting cage and he gives you this, ‘Go ahead, man, throw at me all you want. It don’t bother me, man.’ But that’s talk. I know it bothers him.”

They sat and discussed handling Mays with these pitches. It was excellent talk, and it would have made a great impression on the listener except for one thing. It was a red-covered scorebook, and a flip through the pages showed little items like this:

May 26: Mays hits two home runs against the Mets. May 27: Willie gets four hits against the Mets. June 1: A home run. June 2: Another homer. June 3: Still another homer. July 4: Willie hits two homers and has seven runs batted in.

I closed the book. “You’re right,” I told one of the players. “Mays is a yellow dog.”

Why a discussion of this type should come up at all is a question. If there is one matter which irked Stengel over the season it was the refusal of his pitchers to throw tight pitches and move the batter back. Against the Mets, all hitters practically stepped on the plate and remained there until they had either hit the ball out of sight or reached base through an error.

Stengel, in one of the finest talks on baseball anybody has ever heard, made much of this one night.

“All these pitchers we have,” he said, “I see them with their lovely wives and their lovely children. Oh, grand children. So they go out there to pitch, and here is the batter. Ohhh, he digs right in there and he swings that bat and he has a wonderful toehold. And our pitchers, they say they won’t throw at him. They say you have to think of the lovely wife and children the batter has. Well, some of these pitchers of mine ought to think about their own children. That batter up there doesn’t care about them. He’s in there to take the food right off the table from the pitcher’s children. These fellows of mine, they better start thinking of their own lovely children and move that batter back off of the plate a little.”

It was excellent thinking. However, every time you bring it up you also think of the game against the Reds on August 12, and it shows, as well as anything, the way the Mets, advice or no advice, played baseball all year.

Before the game a home-run-hitting contest was held. Wally Post of the Reds had five pitches thrown to him. He pulled four of them over the left-field wall to win the contest. Now in a contest such as this the batter tells the man pitching to him just where to put the ball. Then it is thrown at three-quarter speed. In Post’s case he wanted it a little bit over belt high and a little bit on the outside.

As each contestant comes up, opposing pitchers normally watch closely from the dugout. Whatever pitch the home-run hitter calls for is the one never to give him in a game.

Later in the day, in the eighth inning with two on and the Reds ahead, 5-4, Post was sent up as a pinch-hitter. On the mound for the Mets was Kenneth MacKenzie, who is a graduate of Yale University. Don’t ever let anybody tell you that a guy can get into Yale just because he has money behind him. It takes more than that. Those kids that go to Yale have to be very good spellers. So MacKenzie is no dunce. This is a bright boy.

He threw a pitch a little bit over belt high and a little bit outside to Post. Wally hit it exactly three miles over the left-field fence.

6

Wait Till Next Year? We’re Fine Now!

LONG ISLAND, WHICH IS considered part of New York and the new home of the Mets, is the perfect place for them. Nothing particularly good has happened on Long Island for over fifty years, so nobody is going to get unduly concerned if the Mets take more than a little while to pull themselves together.

Long Island is a sandspit 150 miles long. It originally was the great outwash plain of a glacier, and history shows even the Indians didn’t want much to do with it. They moved out without a fight and without asking for a dime when the whites arrived. Later the redcoat General Howe engaged Washington’s Colonials in something called the Battle of Long Island, and Howe succeeded in driving Washington off Long Island and up the Hudson to someplace like Dobbs Ferry. Anybody who knows anything about Dobbs Ferry as opposed to Long Island can never accept a history book which says this was a defeat for Washington. In fact, there are many people who still wonder why we did not insist that the English, as part of the Yorktown surrender, be forced to retain Long Island.

Before it gained the Mets, Long Island’s more recent highlights consisted mainly of the defeat of Whirlaway by Market Wise in 1943 at Belmont Park, and the muggy Saturday in June 1958 when Tim Tam was 3-20 in the Belmont Stakes and only a broken leg could keep him from winning. This was a theory held by many young bank tellers as they stood in the mutuel-window lines with Friday’s deposits in their hands. Tim Tam, as could be expected, broke the leg. He was moving toward the eighth pole, and moving well, when the leg splintered. The horse faltered and was out of it thereafter. The skies promptly were split by the loudest mass wail ever heard at an American sporting event.

In the last fifteen years Long Island has become crowded with people who have moved out from Brooklyn. This is excellent, for real Brooklyn people know how to wait for a baseball victory. And the wait for the Mets could be a hard one. This is something Casey Stengel continually recognizes. He always worries about the people who go to see the Mets play. The question is, of course, how many more seasons this situation will have to go on. A major-league baseball team is built with a combination of patience and luck. Money alone is never going to do it. Mrs. Payson can take out her checkbook and start scribbling until her hand hurts, but that still is not going to bring a winning Mets team to us.

The good ballplayer has to be found, not bought. This is something rich men have found out over long years in the sport. Tom Yawkey, who owns the Boston Red Sox, has a ton of money and he has spent a lot of it on the club. It has gotten him exactly nowhere. By and large, the high-priced bonus players simply do not make it. It is the guy who comes out of nowhere who seems to make it best. This is something Stengel, in particular, knows all about.

There was one unforgettable late afternoon in August of 1950 when Casey, then managing the Yankees, sat in his office after a day game and started muttering. He had his shoes off and he was in an undershirt and he kept puffing on a cigarette. Then the muttering turned to words and he was telling his last two guests of the day about this kid he knew of and how well he could play baseball.

“They say, oh no, you can’t have him,” he said. “They say I’d be rushin’ him. Old Casey don’t know what he’s doing any more, you know. I’m going to ruin a boy like that. How do you like that?”

“Who is he?”

“Come here. I’ll show you who he is. Huh! You want to know who he is, I’ll show you.”

He got up and walked out of the room, went down the tunnel and up the steps to the dugout. Then, in his stocking feet and undershirt, Casey started waving his arms at the empty rows of green seats in the silent, now shaded stadium.

“See out there?” he said, pointing to the upper left-field stands. ‘That’s pretty good, isn’t it? DiMaggio hits it there. Once in a while. Foxx used to. Up there, right? Yeah, but only once in a while.”

Stengel raised his voice.

“I’ll show you a guy hits it over. Over the whole place.”

Then he turned and pointed to right field. “Lower tier, Henrich, Berra, pretty good, right?” he said. “Now upstairs. Pretty good shot, isn’t it? Williams upstairs once in a while. Tremendous, right? Well, I’ll show you a guy who hits it the hell over the roof. I tell you, he hits it over the roof.” He waved his arm violently.

Then he shook his head. “But they tell me I’m crazy. They tell me he ain’t ready yet and I’d ruin him.”

“Who is he?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Stengel said. “Some kid in Joplin.”

He was talking, of course, about a young outfielder-shortstop named Charles (Mickey) Mantle, who was signed for exactly $300 by the Yankees.

All the big ones seem to come like that. Stan Musial signed a Cardinal contract for small change at best. Phil Rizzuto, who was the heart of the Yankee infield for so long, cost the club exactly nothing. Whitey Ford of the Yankees is another illustration. For the one game you have to win, this might be the best pitcher ever to live. Or close to it. He cost the Yankees all of $3500. His real value, as long as you are paying out money to prospects, would be something like $200,000. He was spotted one afternoon in a workout at Yankee Stadium, and with a little of that luck and patience the Yankees kept looking at him for weeks, and finally Paul Krichell, the head scout, made up his mind and pulled out a contract.

This is the problem facing the Mets. Everybody in the country always knows the name of the big prospect, the $150,000 bonus pitcher. But more often than not this kind simply does not work out. You could put your hand in the till and buy up every bonus player in the country for two years hand-running, and the chances are that you’d have nothing when it came time to bring them to the major leagues. It usually is some guy in Joplin who costs $300 that makes it big in this business.

This is why the Mets are going to have it tough for some time to come. Players must be seasoned in the minors and then not pressed too much when they first come up to the big club. All of which takes time. And as for improving the players on hand through special teaching or what have you, forget it. Once a player reaches the major leagues he is set as a ballplayer. Certain things can be done for him here and there. But on the whole you are stuck with him as he is.

One night last summer Marty Marion chewed on a cigar and talked about this. Marion, tall, soft-spoken, was about the best shortstop to play the game for a couple of decades. The St. Louis Cardinals billed him as Mr. Shortstop, and, if you like to watch baseball, you’ve never really seen it played unless you saw Marion move on a ball that was already past the third baseman. Huge strides, an octopus reach, then in the same motion here came the throw to first. He now helps the Cardinals with their minor-league system and nobody ever had better training, or knows more about building a club than he does.

“When I came to the Cardinals in 1940, I’d had three good years in the minor leagues,” he was saying. “I played under Burt Shotton and then Eddie Dyer. Both these fellows won pennants in the big leagues later on. Anything you didn’t know about the game you learned under them. If you didn’t, there was no way in the world to learn it. This was the old Rickey farm system at its best. When I came up here to St. Louis, Billy Southworth was managing and I was ready to play baseball, I’ll tell you that. If I wasn’t, I was going to be gone. That’s how it was and that’s how it should be. There’s no time to teach up here.

“Oh, maybe down in spring training you can do some things. I get out and work a little with the shortstops and the like. Maybe I can get them to change one thing they’re doing. The way they make a double play. But I say, maybe. I’m not sure of getting anything done. You can’t teach a man this game except very early in his career.

“So how is a club like the Mets going to be able to do anything right off? The answer is they can’t. They just have to pull in and get ready for the long haul. I was associated with the Houston team when it was starting, and that’s exactly how they figured down there. A long haul. Hire the scouts. Build up the farms with young ballplayers. Then you hope. Nothing is going to happen overnight.”

The future, then, is still a few years off for the Mets. And it probably is going to consist of a couple of kids nobody has heard of yet and maybe nobody has seen. One thing is certain. The prospects for 1963 are settled. The Mets are going to have to make it this season just as they made it last year. Which means another large, unadulterated dose of Casey Stengel for anybody who looks at the team too closely.

Stengel started working along these lines as far back as January. At a little after seven o’clock on a Monday night Stengel, a white carnation sticking out of his lapel, strode into a place called the Garden City Hotel, which is on Long Island, and he proceeded to take on a crowd of over 500. By the end of the night they couldn’t wait for the season to start. Win or lose, they wanted to see the Mets play.

“The public that has survived one full season of this team got to be congratulated,” Stengel said.

After that, it really didn’t matter what he said.

He did not have much to talk about as far as the Mets went, and he could only look to the future in stirring generalities, because the new players the club has moved up are best forgotten. People are going to find out about them soon enough. So he simply sold the people on the idea of paying money to see the Mets play in 1963. And while he was at it, he also made it quite clear what could be coming this year.

“We have this big new scoreboard that is going to be just magnificent,” he said. He waved his arm. “Oh, it’s huge. Grand. Nothing ever like it before. But it’s not going to be so useful to us if you don’t get the man to home plate.”

Following this, the party broke up. Stengel headed for New York. One of the guests on the dais, Mr. M. Throneberry, stayed on for a short while in the bar of the hotel. He had a glass in front of him and people around him. He then gave them a true preview of the Mets. A little to the side of him was another glass, filled with stirrers. Throneberry put his drink down so he could talk. Then he reached for the glass to take another sip. He came up with the glass with the stirrers in it, and by the time he noticed it, he already was holding the glass of stirrers up in a Man of Distinction pose, and three guys down at the end of the bar bent in half.

So the immediate future for the Mets is Casey Stengel. Someday, when George Weiss’s cold, automatic methods of running an organization turn the team into just another boring winner, everything happening now probably will be forgotten. But right now, the Mets serve as more than just some comic relief while we’re waiting for the ballplayers to show. The Mets are vastly important. For one who has been raised on sports in New York, the team put continuity back into life.

The only way to explain this is to tell you about the picture they had hanging on the wall of this gin mill one day last winter. It was a good picture. It was a big, clear color photo mounted on wood. The picture was of Gil Hodges. He had on a Brooklyn uniform and he was standing alongside the batting cage at Ebbets Field. His big, thick arms were bare and he was leaning on a bat. The picture was taken in 1954, and maybe nobody ever played first base much better than Hodges did that year. He hit 42 home runs, batted in 130 runs, and had an average of .304. He was a bull of a guy who came out of a little town in Indiana, but he had the kind of quickness, foot and hand, that made him different around first base. He became one of the biggest heroes Brooklyn had. Now, he is the first baseman for the New York Mets. That is, when he can play. Last year he keeled over with a kidney attack in July. Then his knee caved in and he had it operated on, and that finished him for the season. He is back for another whirl this season, but he was still limping when spring training started, so you can’t count on him. The Mets probably will use him as a coach. Which is what was so hard to figure out when you looked at this picture. Here is Hodges, and all of a sudden he is old and a coach. And you have to sit down and wonder where all the years went.

You see, I always keep track of time by matching it to something that happens in sports. Take Hodges. The first time I ever read about him was in a story in the Journal-American early in 1947. The late Mike Gaven said something about how big this rookie Hodges’ hands were, and that he was supposed to be the third-string catcher, but he could fit in at third or first too. I read the story while I was sitting in an Eighth Avenue subway train going to Madison Avenue and 53rd Street to see some man who was supposed to give me a job in his advertising agency. The girl at the reception desk in the ad agency wrote backhand on purpose and had a breathless little telephone voice, and the whole joint seemed so nice and orderly and deadly that when I finally did get in to see the guy I told him thanks, but I got this connection in the bricklayer’s union and I can make more doing that. Then I walked out of the ad agency and I told myself I’d never take a job in any office that didn’t let you throw cigarette butts on the floor. So far, I’ve made it stick. And now, if you bring up Gil Hodges, I tell you that he first came around when I made up my mind how I was going to make my living.

There is nothing strange about keeping time in this way. Some guys do it by music. You let a guy hear Tommy Dorsey’s “I’ll Never Smile Again” and he’ll tell you what he was doing to the minute when the record was popular. Or ask a woman the first time she saw Myrna Loy in a movie. It will be the same. No difference at all. I just happen to use sports. There was a horse named Cosmic Bomb who ran out in the 1947 Kentucky Derby and cost me $10. To me, it means the first week I ever held a job for a living. The job was on a newspaper in Jamaica, Long Island, and the city room was on the first floor then, and a big man in the place was making $85 a week. But when I think of the place I always come up with Cosmic Bomb. Look him up. He ran number five in Louisville.

Two years later on Derby Day there was this old telegrapher named Frankie Dewey and he was standing at the bar of a joint called the Crossroads, up the corner from the newspaper office, and he had a straw hat tilted down over one eye and he was slapping the bar and yelling like hell. Up on the television screen, way in one corner of it, a horse called Ponder was starting to run in the stretch. Oh, did he run. Nobody ever came on like this one did. He ran past everything. “I told you,” Frankie Dewey kept saying. “I told you, sonny.” I had a slip from the bookmaker which said “PONDER 5-0-0” and I had put the bet down because of Frankie Dewey’s tout. Ponder paid $24.80. I met a girl two nights later and had enough money to buy her a dinner because of Ponder. I wound up marrying her, and every time somebody says, “How did you two meet?” I start off by telling them about Ponder. “Steve Brooks was up,” I begin.

It is like that with a lot of things in sports. But Hodges is causing me to match up with time the most. All of a sudden, from nowhere, you find he is old and shot. And you wonder where it all went. They took Hodges out of this town in 1957, and that left only the Yankees around here. Like I say, nobody ever really got close with them. So I never matched up time with baseball players for five whole years. Then the Mets come back and Hodges came with them, and I began to think again. Hodges too old to be a full-time player? Where the hell did the time go? I told that man in the advertising agency I didn’t want his job, and that was only a couple of years ago. Hodges was breaking in. Yet here he is old and limping, and where did everything go? It must be a lot of years.

Those lost years changed a whole way of life for people in New York. Once you had everything. The Dodgers were in Brooklyn and the Giants were at the Polo Grounds. Madison Square Garden had fights on Friday night. Not the kind you see on television now. They had real fights. Like the night they had 18,000 in the place and in the first fight of the night, a four-rounder, a skinny kid from Brooklyn named Oliver White walked out and dropped in a right hand and put a boy named Sugar Ray Robinson on his back. Robinson got up, and you never saw anything like him. He got to White with a great left hook in the fourth. And it was only the four-round show-opener. The Ridgewood Grove operated on Saturday night, and there was a pro football team in Brooklyn, and they played sandlot baseball everywhere. People used to go out and watch events. Even sandlot games. There was one game of baseball, in a league called the Queens Alliance, that drew a crowd of 3500 to a field in Floral Park, and when the lead-off batter for a team called the Glendale Cardinals stepped in, everybody laughed. He looked like he was under five foot, and everybody thought it was a take-off on Thurber and his “You Could Look It Up.”

But the little kid stayed in the batter’s box, and finally the manager of the Floral Park team complained to Nick Miranda, who managed the team with the kid on it.

“A joke is a joke,” he said. “But we’re passing the hat for good money here. Let’s not chase this crowd. Put a ballplayer in there.”

“Don’t you worry about this kid,” Miranda said. “You just tell your third baseman look out he don’t get killed.”

So they pitched to this little kid. He reached up over his head for one and slammed it down the left-field line and he went into second standing up. It was the last time anybody questioned what Phil Rizzuto could do on a baseball field.

There were many things like this. Then television turned everything upside down. It produced the age of the money-hungry in sports and a whole way of life went out. People stopped going to events. Only the big games made it. Everything else died. And pretty soon normal big money was not enough for a fellow like O’Malley. He wanted more. Take a cab ride through Brooklyn and turn off Eastern Parkway at Bedford Avenue and go down the hill four blocks. Then you see what time and money-hungry people did to a way of life.

The big silver letters alongside the entrance to the apartment building said: 1700 BEDFORD AVENUE. The letters were stuck onto the red brick of the building. It is twenty-two stories high. Under the window of each apartment is a neat plaque saying that the place has been air-conditioned by General Electric.

On the sidewalk, two women stand and talk.

“I don’t like that supermarket,” one, in a gray coat, was saying.

“You know, you’re right. I feel kind of uncomfortable in the place myself,” her friend, who had blond hair and wore a kerchief, said.

“I know,” the gray coat said. “I go in this place and they don’t even have Purina Dog Chow. What kind of a supermarket is that?”

It was enough to make you sick. Once this was a national institution. Mention Ebbets Field and everybody in the audience would laugh. Danny Kaye did it for years. It was a standard with Fred Allen. Now it is just another address for a post office. It is twenty-two stories of apartments, and all of them are the same, and all of the people in them get to be the same after a while. Once we had Ebbets Field and a way of life. People went to games and drank beer and argued. When the Giants played the Dodgers it was nerve-racking. How a grown adult could sit in a seat and say, from the bottom of his heart, that he absolutely hated Duke Snider, whom he never met, is something for analysts. But that’s what Giant fans used to do. Brooklyn fans hated right back. It was wonderful. Then we turned everything over to the moneychangers, and we wind up with twenty-two stories of red brick and plate glass and plaques by GE.

This is why the New York Mets come out as something more than a baseball team as far as an awful lot of people are concerned. The Mets are a part of life. You can start keeping track of time with them. They are not going to move for money. The owner’s name is Payson, not O’Malley, and Payson stays with her own.

You ought to take a look at this picture of Hodges. It will remind you of all the years we lost because of these hustlers who came into the business. Only don’t talk to Hodges about the years. He doesn’t want to know anything about it.

“All I know,” he was saying later this day, “is that I’m old. Nobody has to tell me that. I came into baseball yesterday. Today they throw the fast ball at me and you’d be surprised how fast it comes on top of me. A lot faster than it ever did.”

Hodges was wearing an olive-drab sweater and gray slacks. He was sitting at the restaurant counter of the huge bowling establishment he owns in Brooklyn.

“Once,” he was saying, “I’d be on first base and look out and we’d have Pee Wee [Reese] at short, Billy [Cox] at third, and Jackie [Robinson] at second. What an infield to look at. The games were great. No matter how far behind we fell, you knew you were never out of it. We had seven guys who could hit home runs and put us right back in it.

“Last year with the Mets was strange. The Polo Grounds always was the enemy park. I felt strange in it. I guess it sounds funny to you. We’re supposed to be playing this game for money. This ‘enemy park’ business sounds like something out of high school. But if you played for the Dodgers against the Giants, then the Polo Grounds will be the enemy park forever. Those games, they came down to more than a matter of money. I mean it. So it was strange to be in the Polo Grounds.”

He got up from his coffee and walked across to see a repairman who was in to look at the dishwasher.

The record books say Hodges is the all-time right-handed home-run hitter in the National League. Around the dugouts he was always known as the first baseman with the fastest feet alive. A lot of times Hodges would be well off the bag when he took the throw from an infielder, but the umpire would always blink and call an automatic out. That would do it. Nobody ever called Hodges for not touching the bag, and in the confusion he became known as one of the great fielding first basemen of all time. Hodges had his own ideas about this, however.

“I’m going to do a story about my career when I retire,” he said in the Brooklyn dressing room one day.

“What are you going to call it?” Pee Wee Reese asked him.

“‘I Never Touched First Base.’”

Hodges came back and sat down at the counter. He talked about all the trouble he had over his career, trying to hit outside pitches.

“I just never could see too well when they threw an outside curve that broke away from me,” he was saying. “It was a flaw I had. Everybody knew it. But it was up to the pitcher to put the ball out there, and that’s not as easy as it sounds. So I had a fairly successful career.”

Then he got up and walked over to the information desk. He limped a little. He’ll probably be limping for a long time. But that’s all right. As long as he can get back into a uniform and be around, even as a coach, he’ll be familiar. I match him up with the day I made up my mind what kind of a job I wanted. He is the only one in the world I can do it with. Hell, I need the guy.

So the Mets are a bad ball club. All right, they’re the worst ball club you ever saw. So what? The important thing is they are in the National League and they are familiar. The National League, to a lot of people around New York, is something hard to describe, but important. Like the chip in the table in the living room when you were growing up. It was always there. Sometimes you can buy ten new tables over a lifetime. But the one with the chip is the one that would make you feel the best. People are that way about the National League. They are more at home looking at the box score of a game between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Philadelphia Phillies than they ever could be going over one between the Cleveland Indians and the Detroit Tigers. If they came out of Cleveland it would be different. But they are from New York, and this is National League. Now we have the Mets, and that’s the way it should be. We’re with familiar things again.

The Mets lose an awful lot?

Listen, mister. Think a little bit.

When was the last time you won anything out of life?

Appendixes

Appendix II

Mets’ Records, 1962

During last season the Mets, collectively and individually, set a number of records, some of them quite bizarre. We offer here a collection of them which, if it is not complete, is at least impressive.

Major League Records Broken

Most games lost in a season—120

Most home runs allowed in a season—192

Major League Records Tied

Most pinch-hitters struck out by one pitcher in one game—Galen Cisco, 4

Most home runs by pinch-hitters in one inning—2

Most home runs by one batter in three consecutive games—Frank Thomas, 6

Most assists by outfielder in one inning—Gus Bell, 2

Batter hit most times by pitcher in one inning—Frank Thomas, 2

National League Records Broken

Most home runs by first baseman in lifetime—Gil Hodges, 355

Most home runs by right-handed batter in lifetime—Gil Hodges, 355

Most wild pitches by staff in season—71

National League Records Tied

Most strike-outs by team in two consecutive games—26

Most double plays hit into in one game—6

Most consecutive losses at start of season—9

League Leaders in 1962

Worst earned-run average for pitching staff—5.04

Most earned runs scored against individual pitcher—Jay Hook, 137

Most earned runs given up by pitching staff—801

Most total runs given up by team—948

Most hits given up by pitching staff—577

Most batters hit by pitching staff—52

Most errors committed by team—210

Near Misses and Other Oddments

Craig Anderson lost 16 games in a row. His streak was still intact when the 1963 season opened, so he still had a crack at the record of 18 consecutive losses.

R. L. Miller had a record of 0-12 going into the next to last day of the season. This would have tied a major-league record. Miller then blew his chance at immortality by beating the Cubs.

The Mets were the first team since the 1936 Phillies to have two 20-game losers—Al Jackson and Roger Craig.

The Mets were the only team in major-league history ever to have two players with identical first and last names, Bob Miller and Bob Miller.

Attendance

HIGHEST HOME ATTENDANCE BY LAST-PLACE CLUB—922,530

A Biography of Jimmy Breslin

Jimmy Breslin (b. 1928) is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who has, for more than fifty years, been among the most prominent columnists in the United States. Known for his straightforward reporting style that relates major news to the common man, Breslin has published more than a dozen books of fiction and nonfiction, in addition to writing columns for newspapers such as the New York Daily News and Newsday.

Born in Queens, New York, Breslin began his long newsroom career in the 1940s, lying about his age to get a job as a copyboy at the Long Island Press. He got his first column in 1963, at the New York Herald Tribune, where he won national attention by covering John F. Kennedy’s assassination from the emergency room in the Dallas Hospital and, later, from the point of view of the President’s gravedigger at Arlington Cemetery. He also provided significant coverage of the civil rights turmoil raging in the South, and was an early opponent of the Vietnam War.

In 1969, Breslin ran for city council president on Norman Mailer’s mayoral ticket. The two campaigned on a platform arguing for statehood for New York City and for banning private cars in Manhattan, among other issues. Breslin placed fifth in the primary election, garnering eleven percent of the vote. He later quipped that he was “mortified to have taken part in a process that required bars to be closed,” referring to a law in place at the time that prohibited the sale of liquor on election days.

In the early 1970s, Breslin retired from newspaper journalism to write books, beginning with The Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight (1970), a national bestseller that was adapted into a 1971 film starring Robert De Niro and Jerry Orbach. By this time Breslin had also published Sunny Jim (1962), about legendary racehorse trainer Jim Fitzsimmons, and Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? (1963), about the disastrous first season of the New York Mets baseball team. He also wrote How the Good Guys Finally Won (1976), about the Watergate Scandal and Nixon’s subsequent impeachment, a prevalent topic for him in the early 1970s.

Breslin returned to column-writing later in the decade, taking jobs first at the New York Daily News, then at Newsday. As always, he covered the city by focusing on ordinary people as well as larger-than-life personalities. His intimate knowledge of cops, Mafia dons, and petty thieves provided fodder for his columns. In the late 1970s, his profile was so high that Son of Sam killer David Berkowitz sent him letters, to boast about and publicize his crimes.

Known for being one of the best-informed journalists in the city, Breslin’s years of insightful reporting won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1986, awarded for “columns which consistently champion ordinary citizens.” Among the work cited when he received the Pulitzer were his early columns on the victims of AIDS and his exposé on the stun-gun torture of a suspected drug dealer by police in Queens. Although he stopped writing his weekly column for Newsday in 2004, Breslin has continued writing books, having produced nearly two dozen to date. These include collections of his best columns titled The World of Jimmy Breslin (1969) and The World According to Jimmy Breslin (1988). He lives in Manhattan and continues to write.

Breslin as a young man with his sister Diedre.

Breslin writing at home in Forest Hills, Queens.

Breslin chats with Robert F. Kennedy, who was campaigning in Los Angeles during the 1968 presidential race.

Breslin (right) and columnist Red Smith both writing for the New York Herald Tribune during the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968.

Breslin in Ireland in 1971, while writing World Without End, Amen.

Breslin with Bella Abzug, a New York congresswoman and social activist.

Letters from David Berkowitz, a.k.a. Son of Sam, delivered to Breslin at the New York Daily News offices. Son of Sam sent letters to Breslin during his killing spree in New York City in the summer of 1977. These letters were later used in the Spike Lee film Summer of Sam (2008).

Breslin with grandson Dillon Breslin in June 1980.

Breslin in the New York Daily News offices with publisher Jim Hogue (left) and editor Gil Spencer (right) after the announcement of the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1986.

Breslin (far left) with the crew of his television show, Jimmy Breslin’s People, and Speaker of the House of Representatives Tip O'Neill (fourth from right) in 1986.

The Breslin family in 1989.

Breslin with columnists David Anderson (left) and Murray Kempton (right) at a book party for Damon Runyon: A Life in New York City, 1991.

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to express his thanks to Lew King, George Bannon, Barney Kremenko, Jack Lang, and Bob Allen.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

copyright © 1963 by James Breslin.

Introduction copyright © 1963 by Bill Veeck

cover design by Mimi Bark

978-1-4532-4532-3

This edition published in 2011 by

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Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Contents

Introduction by Bill Veeck

Epigraph

1. "Just Like the WPA"

2. A Bad Report to the Sponsor

3. 119 or Bust

4. The Nickel Line

5. "They're Afraid To Come Out"

6. Wait Till Next Year? We're Fine Now!

7. Appendix I Around the Diamond with the Mets in 1962

8. Appendix II Mets' Records, 1962

A Biography of Jimmy Breslin

Acknowledgments

Copyright