Can't Anybody Here Play This Game? Read online

  In pitching for the Mets, then, it was best to take no chances. Don’t volunteer, don’t rely on getting any runs, no matter how many teammates get on base. The password was: beware. And the one who seemed to know this better than anyone was Ralph Branca. He had nothing to do with the team officially. His job was talking on a pre- and post-game program for a radio station. But by being around the Mets he understood that anything could happen. So on July 14, when the Mets held an Old Timers’ Day and Branca was out in the bullpen, he did not merely sit on a bench and look at the crowd. He stayed loose. He also stayed determined.

  The moment Bobby Thomson came up to bat, here was showman Leo Durocher waving to the bullpen for Branca to come in and pitch. Ralph walked in, just as he had come in that day in 1951. Thomson greeted him with a smile. Everybody else out on the field lolled around and made jokes about the situation.

  Branca did not say any jokes. And a small thought crossed his mind: Stick the first pitch right in his ear. He dismissed it.

  He then wound up and nearly broke his arm off throwing his best curve at Thomson. He threw a couple more of them, and Bobby, fooled by one, barely lifted an easy fly to center field.

  Following this, the Mets took the field to play the Dodgers. In the stands to watch them were such as Zack Wheat and Carl Hubbell and Frank Frisch. At the end of five and a half innings the Mets were slightly behind. They were behind by 17-0, and that night Frankie Frisch sat in his house in New Rochelle and he told the neighbors, “I don’t have to go out of this house again as long as I live. I’ve seen everything.”

  This view was being echoed on 52nd Street in New York, where the man named Toots Shor runs his restaurant and bar. He is generally considered to be the town’s Number 1 sports fan, and around his circular bar he is known, simply, as The Best Customer.

  “I have a son,” Toots announced over brandy, “and I make him watch the Mets. I want him to know life. You watch the Mets, you think of being busted out with the guy from the Morris Plan calling you up every ten minutes. It’s a history lesson. He’ll understand the depression when they teach it to him in school.”

  He shook his head. “That Frank Thomas is one helluva guy, you know. But he makes a throw against the Cardinals. He’s on third base and he makes a throw to first. He makes the wildest wild throw in baseball history. It goes 125 feet over the first baseman’s head. Nobody ever done a thing like that. Well, what the hell, there never was a club like this.”

  Anderson is a case in point here. His sixteenth loss was memorable. It left him two short of the all-time National League record, and only a step or two short of asking to be farmed out to an institution. The date was September 8, and the Mets were in Houston for a day-night doubleheader. They were leading, 3-2, in the ninth inning of the day game when Bob Lillis of Houston singled. Johnny Temple bunted down the first-base line. Marvin Throneberry approached the ball thoughtfully. Marvelous Marv’s estimate was that the ball would roll foul. He was wrong. He then picked it up and threw to first, too late to get the runner. Stengel waved to the bullpen for help. Here came Anderson. Craig was in great form. He worked on Joe Amalfitano and got him to hit into a double play. Then he walked Norman Larker. This brought up Bob Aspromonte. He hit a sinking liner to left field. Frank Thomas broke for the ball. Then he charged the ball. Then he dove for the ball. He did not make the catch. Temple rounded third and scored the tying run. Larker, the runner from first, rounded second and began to go for third. Thomas grabbed the ball, stood up, and looked at Larker. It was going to be a close play at third. But Thomas was taking no chances. He was not going to let anybody reach second base. So he fired to second. There was nobody there. Aspromonte, the hitter, had remained at first. Kanehl and Neal, the Mets’ keystone combination, as the announcers call it, were widely scattered over the area. Thomas’s throw roared past second untouched by human hands. Larker reached third, made the turn, and headed for home.

  Throneberry made a remarkable save on the throw. He knew exactly what was going on. Larker was heading home with the winning run. A good throw would cut Larker down. Throneberry wanted to make that good throw. So he took aim at the plate. He took aim as if his life depended on this throw. He also took so much time aiming his throw that Larker simply slid across the plate with the winning run.

  Jay Hook was another pitcher who found the Mets trying. On August 6, a hot Monday night at Los Angeles, Jay allowed the Dodgers five hits. He did not walk a man. But in the sixth inning of a 1-1 game Maury Wills of the Dodgers dragged a bunt past the mound and beat it out. He then stole second. This infuriated Chris Cannizzaro, who was catching Hook. Chris crouched down and looked out at second. Wills was taking his usual long lead off the base. Chris planted his feet and got ready to make a comeback. He was going to pick Wills off. On the first pitch, Chris threw to second. Threw hard. If there is one thing he can do, it is throw a baseball hard. He threw this one so hard that the only reason Wills had to hold at third and not score was that Jim Hickman, the Mets center fielder, caught the ball on the fly. Willie Davis then hit a ground ball, and Wills came across with what was to be the winning run.

  Hook also had the privilege of pitching when the Mets lost their hundredth game of the year. This was late in August at Philadelphia. Jay went ten innings before losing to the Phillies, 3-2. He lost the game primarily on a ground ball to Charley Neal at short. Don Demeter hit the ball. Neal picked it up and made a bad throw to first. It pulled Throneberry off the bag. Marv had to come up the line and into foul territory to stay with the throw. He grabbed it. Then he went to tag Demeter. His feet slipped and he fell on his face.

  This was Throneberry’s best kind of play. And because of this, people sitting behind first base at the Polo Grounds soon began to show up with T-shirts which read VRAM (MARV spelled backwards) on them. And they took up a great chant: “Cranberry, strawberry, we love Throneberry.”

  This was the Marvin Throneberry Fan Club. At the peak of the season over a hundred letters a day were arriving at Marvin’s locker at the Polo Grounds.

  “The hell of it all is, I’m really a good fielder,” Throneberry kept insisting.

  This was something Ralph Houk gladly backed up one evening during the summer, in Washington. Houk, who manages the Yankees, sat in the bus taking his team to the ballpark and he chewed on a cigar and talked about Marvelous Marv.

  “I can’t understand what’s happening to that Throneberry,” he said. “I had him three years at Denver. He’s not that bad a ballplayer at all. Why, he opened the season with the Yankees one year there [1958]. Skowron was hurt, I guess. Marv never made plays like they say he makes now. I guarantee you he never did. If he ever played that way for me, I’d of killed him with my bare hands.”

  The year Marvelous Marv had in 1962 just happened, then. Nobody had any indication he knew how to play baseball this way. He just arrived from Baltimore one day in May and replaced an ailing Gil Hodges at first. After that, things began to happen. They kept happening too, and by August 18 he was an institution.

  On that night the Mets’ management held a special day in honor of Stan Musial. But the fans, proudly wearing their VRAM T-shirts and shouting their cheer, showed much more affection for Throneberry. Musial? He was fine. Great guy, magnificent baseball player. A perfectionist. Only who the hell needed him? The mob yelled for Marvelous Marv.

  “I hated to take the play away from Stan on his big day here,” Marv apologized after the game.

  Throneberry is a balding, likable fellow who has been known to buy a writer a drink, something unheard of in a ballplayer. He is anything but a clown. He simply came into the 1962 season accident-prone, and he barely got out alive. Nothing went right at any time. There was even one night, late in the season, when there was supposed to be some sort of a small party in his honor at a little Italian restaurant called the Grotto on the West Side. Somebody mixed things up, and 125 people showed up instead of an expected 30. The lone chef, hired to work this small party on a usually dead Sunday n
ight, took one look at the mob and pulled off his hat.

  “Small-a party, huh?” he said. “Well, you take this small-a party to the Automat. ’Cause that’s where I’m going to have my dinner on the way home.”

  The place got so jammed that there was no room for Marvelous Marv when he arrived. After trying to get in, he finally gave up and went across the street from his party and had dinner in another place.

  The strange thing about the Mets is that, for all their great comedy onfield, they had no real characters off the field. This was a team of twenty-five nice young men who came to the big leagues to play baseball. The fact they played it rather strangely was, obviously, out of their control. The only player on the club who might be counted as unusual is Frank Thomas. His only quirk is that he wants to be an airline hostess. Yet here again you are dealing with a basically serious matter, because Thomas is a damn good airline stewardess.

  “He’s awful neat,” Miss Barbara Mueller of United Airlines noted one day. “He does everything the way the regulations say you should. Outside of this girl Jane, who handles first class on our New York to San Francisco champagne flight, I think that Frank Thomas is the best stewardess on United Airlines.”

  Once the Mets are airborne, going to or from a game, Thomas jumps out of his seat, strides up the aisle to the kitchenette, and takes over the running of the plane. Trays slide in and out, coffee is poured, and he starts moving rapidly up and down the aisle, serving meals. He is very particular about it too. One night, en route to Houston by plane, Thomas started serving the back of the plane first. He thrust a tray under the nose of Barney Kremenko, the sports writer, and a couple of partners he had gotten into a pinochle game. The partners were not good at pinochle. Thus Mr. Kremenko preferred to have nothing break up his game.

  “We’re not ready now,” Barney said. “We’ll eat later.”

  “All right,” Thomas announced. “But that means you eat last, and I don’t want to hear any squawks about it.”

  Offended, Thomas stormed off. Any housewife can understand how he felt. Here he had a whole meal prepared, and it was being turned down.

  Presently Kremenko’s game broke up. He hailed the regular stewardess and asked her to bring a tray, which she did. Thomas found out about this some minutes later. His eyes flashed.

  “You cheated,” he told Kremenko. “I told you to wait your turn, and you cheated. That’s the last time you’re going to pull that.”

  Otherwise, to travel or live with this club was to be with a normal group of young men in the major leagues. In fact, as Ashburn observes, the Mets were the only losing club he can recall on which there was no dissension.

  “Any losing team I’ve ever been on,” Richie says, “had several things going on. One, the players gave up. Or they hated the manager. Or they had no team spirit. Or the fans turned into wolves. But there was none of this with the Mets. Nobody stopped trying. The manager was absolutely great, nobody grumbled about being with the club, and the fans we had, well, there haven’t been fans like this in baseball history. So we lose 120 games and there isn’t a gripe on the club. It was remarkable. You know, I can remember guys being mad even on a big winner.”

  By this he meant a rather famous episode in more recent baseball history. On the last day of the 1950 season Ashburn’s Phillies held a one-game lead over the Brooklyn Dodgers. At Ebbets Field, in the ninth inning, the score was tied, 1-1, with none out and Dodgers on first and second. The highly dangerous Duke Snider was at bat against Robin Roberts of the Phillies. Ashburn was in center field. If anything happened and the runner on second, Cal Abrams, scored, the Dodgers would tie for the pennant and go into a playoff heavily favored.

  At shortstop for the Phillies was Granny Hamner. When they played it with money on the table, Hamner was one of the real big ones. It has been a while since he has been around, and maybe some people forget him, but when they talk about big men in the clutch Granny Hamner should always be mentioned. On this afternoon, with Abrams edging off second, Hamner flashed the pick-off sign to Stan Lopata, the Phillies’ catcher. With Snider, a left-handed batter, up, Hamner was playing over toward second. For the pick-off throw, he would duck in behind Abrams and take the throw. Oh, they wouldn’t get Abrams. That would be too much to ask for. The idea was to keep him as close to the bag as possible. If Snider bunted, they could try for Abrams at third. If he hit away and the ball went into the outfield, there still would be a chance to get Abrams at the plate.

  Lopata called for a pitch-out. In center, Ashburn moved in. He would back up second in case of a bad throw. Hamner began to edge toward second. Abrams had not picked up the action yet. On the mound, Roberts nodded he had the sign. He started to go into his stretch. Then he threw. He threw a fast ball right down the pipe. Hamner’s mouth fell open. Snider rapped it on a line up the middle, over second, and into center field. Abrams started running. Dirt flew from his spikes as he tore around third. From the stands came one great roar:

  “ABIE, YOU SHOULD RUN FAST.”

  But in the middle of this huge mistake, here was Ashburn. He had raced in to back up second base. And as he came in, the ball landed right at his feet. By now, Richie was only a short distance on the outfield grass behind second. He picked up the ball and threw to the plate. And suddenly all of Brooklyn realized what was happening. Halfway down the line, Abrams was beaten. A wail rang out over Brooklyn as Lopata tagged out Abrams. Roberts, whose bacon had been saved, proceeded to get out of the inning unscathed.

  In the tenth inning Dick Sisler hit a home run into the left-field seats and the Phillies won the pennant. But after the game Hamner didn’t want to talk to anybody. Particularly Roberts. He wanted to kill Roberts.

  “I need a drink,” he kept saying. “Alone.”

  The Mets never had even a faint tinge of this. This was a nice, placid, thoughtful team. There was one Sunday night, coming back to New York from Chicago, when Solly Hemus, the coach, and a couple of the players sat in the lounge part of the plane, and the talk was the same as you would hear any place around the major leagues. Except they soon got to talking about throwing knockdown pitches at Willie Mays.

  “The pitch right after you throw at him, that’s the time to watch him,” Joe Pignatano, one of the catchers, said. “He’s ready then. He’s mad.”

  “Knock him down twice in a row, then,” a tall kid said.

  “Do you mean knockdown pitches bother Mays?” they were asked.

  “Bother him?” one of the players said. “He’s scared to death. If he wasn’t so scared of being hit with a ball, he’d hit .600.”

  “You go up to him before the game,” one of them said, “and you tell him, ‘Willie, sometime today. Sometime today I’m going to stick it right in your ear.’ He’ll be standing around the batting cage and he gives you this, ‘Go ahead, man, throw at me all you want. It don’t bother me, man.’ But that’s talk. I know it bothers him.”

  They sat and discussed handling Mays with these pitches. It was excellent talk, and it would have made a great impression on the listener except for one thing. It was a red-covered scorebook, and a flip through the pages showed little items like this:

  May 26: Mays hits two home runs against the Mets. May 27: Willie gets four hits against the Mets. June 1: A home run. June 2: Another homer. June 3: Still another homer. July 4: Willie hits two homers and has seven runs batted in.

  I closed the book. “You’re right,” I told one of the players. “Mays is a yellow dog.”

  Why a discussion of this type should come up at all is a question. If there is one matter which irked Stengel over the season it was the refusal of his pitchers to throw tight pitches and move the batter back. Against the Mets, all hitters practically stepped on the plate and remained there until they had either hit the ball out of sight or reached base through an error.

  Stengel, in one of the finest talks on baseball anybody has ever heard, made much of this one night.

  “All these pitchers we have,” he said, “I
see them with their lovely wives and their lovely children. Oh, grand children. So they go out there to pitch, and here is the batter. Ohhh, he digs right in there and he swings that bat and he has a wonderful toehold. And our pitchers, they say they won’t throw at him. They say you have to think of the lovely wife and children the batter has. Well, some of these pitchers of mine ought to think about their own children. That batter up there doesn’t care about them. He’s in there to take the food right off the table from the pitcher’s children. These fellows of mine, they better start thinking of their own lovely children and move that batter back off of the plate a little.”

  It was excellent thinking. However, every time you bring it up you also think of the game against the Reds on August 12, and it shows, as well as anything, the way the Mets, advice or no advice, played baseball all year.

  Before the game a home-run-hitting contest was held. Wally Post of the Reds had five pitches thrown to him. He pulled four of them over the left-field wall to win the contest. Now in a contest such as this the batter tells the man pitching to him just where to put the ball. Then it is thrown at three-quarter speed. In Post’s case he wanted it a little bit over belt high and a little bit on the outside.

  As each contestant comes up, opposing pitchers normally watch closely from the dugout. Whatever pitch the home-run hitter calls for is the one never to give him in a game.

  Later in the day, in the eighth inning with two on and the Reds ahead, 5-4, Post was sent up as a pinch-hitter. On the mound for the Mets was Kenneth MacKenzie, who is a graduate of Yale University. Don’t ever let anybody tell you that a guy can get into Yale just because he has money behind him. It takes more than that. Those kids that go to Yale have to be very good spellers. So MacKenzie is no dunce. This is a bright boy.

  He threw a pitch a little bit over belt high and a little bit outside to Post. Wally hit it exactly three miles over the left-field fence.