Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?

  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.