Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?

by Jimmy Breslin

  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 ba
llplayers. 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 eve
nts. 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.