Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?

by Jimmy Breslin

  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 an
d 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.”

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