Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?

by Jimmy Breslin

  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 t
he 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 2
7, 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.