Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?

by Jimmy Breslin

  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 foun
d 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 conc
erned. 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.