The Amazing Mets – Jerry Mitchell, 1964 ★★★

How to Succeed in Baseball without Ever Winning

For very few lucky people, greatness is something that comes easy. Is it possible to say the same rule applies with ineptitude?

In the realm of professional sports, few have ever done so much with so little result, and been so celebrated in the process, as were the early New York Mets.

The story of the 1962 Mets, Major League Baseball’s losingest team, has been told many times, most notably in Jimmy Breslin’s Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? In 1964 came this work by New York Post sportswriter Jerry Mitchell, which incorporates both the inaugural season as well as that of the following year, 1963.

For Mitchell, as for many seasoned observers, it was an amazing phenomenon: A team being embraced not for winning, but for losing:

It was suggested that the Mets might lose their following if they should by some chance become winners.

There was no danger of this during 1962, their maiden season, for they lost a record 120 games while winning only 40 and never won more than three in a row.

The Mets fared just a little better in 1963, winning 51 games and losing 111, but even the occasional threat of mediocrity wasn’t enough to keep fans away. At the time of the book’s publication, the Mets had enough of a fan base to justify the cost of getting their own new stadium after two years of occupying Manhattan’s crumbling Polo Grounds.

As Mitchell explains it, the Mets were beset by more than just the fate of a typical expansion team. Unlike the other new team in the National League in 1962, the Houston Colt .45s, the Mets opted for known talent, often over-the-hill; rather than young, untried athletes.

The Colt .45s, eventually renamed the Astros, had a predictably poor first season, finishing in eighth place (out of ten teams) and going 64-96. Through the 1960s, the Astros proved perennial losers, yet never lost more than 97 games a season. The Mets, by comparison, lost over 100 games every season but one (1966) until 1968.

Yet Mets attendance from the start outpaced that of other, more successful clubs, drawing 922,530 fans to the Polo Grounds in 1962 alone.

During the first two seasons of the Club’s existence veteran people-watchers sought to establish the Met fan in some special classification, like wrestling, horror film, cock-fighting or Indianapolis Speedway zealots…

They were called masochists, joiners, professional wake-goers, adult and juvenile delinquents and people who wanted to join the Foreign Legion but didn’t want to go all that distance.

However much Mitchell asks the question why the Mets were such a draw, he always returns to the same person for help answering: Casey Stengel, the manager of that inaugural team and de facto spokesman.

New York Mets manager Casey Stengel holds court at the dugout steps of the Polo Grounds, home field for the Mets during their first two seasons. If he looks like he's pleading with God, he might have had cause. Image from http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/1397133-remembering-casey-stengel-you-could-look-him-up-2/

Stengel recounts his days as a young rookie, memories of legendary managers he played for, and even his attempt at becoming a left-handed dentist. “I forgot to lower the chair an’ then pulled instead of twistin’ first an’ the fella come leapin’ outa the chair. After that I practiced on my relatives.”

Stengel was the team’s designated flak-catcher, except as Mitchell tells it he wasn’t called upon to take much flak. Instead, questions often centered on why Mets fans were so enthusiastic.

“Some of these people are maybe a little nutsy, but you gotta like the tremendous support they give you,” Stengel replied. “They sure jazz you up.”

At times, Stengel threatens to turn Amazing Mets into a one-man show, the same way he does Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game. Mitchell, like Breslin, clearly enjoyed his time around the loquacious leader, the gold-standard for managerial success when he skippered the cross-town New York Yankees and prized by media for his endless, circuitous banter.

Unlike Breslin, Mitchell, who died in 1972, doesn’t register contempt when discussing the players themselves. In his telling, the players are doughty, likable, and rather luckless.

Two pitchers on the 1962 team, Roger Craig and Al Jackson, would lose 20 or more games apiece that year, often close losses attributable to error: “[Craig] got to accept the fact the fact that life with the Mets meant he would have to pitch a shutout to get a tie.”

Another pitcher, Craig Anderson, would lose 16 straight, his last due in part to a grounder misplayed by Mets first baseman Marv Throneberry.

If Stengel is the King Lear of this little drama, Throneberry serves as a kind of jester, unintentionally making mock of all laid plans. He did hit some game-winning homers, but for the most part “Marvelous Marv” earned his nicknames for his errors both in fielding and baserunning. Mets fans loved him for it – Mitchell notes a Throneberry fan club boasted 5,400 members.

When outfielder Frank Thomas had problems one day playing third base, botching two throws, Throneberry confronted him: “Hey, what are you tryin’ to do, steal my fans?”

Many times reading The Amazing Mets, I came to wonder how much Mitchell was gilding the lily, so to speak. A lot of his anecdotes of team misfortune come with jewel-cut zingers. Did Stengel really start his first-ever team meeting by pulling something out of his pocket and saying: “This is a baseball” as he held it before the players?

There’s a risk about the early Mets, to try and tell too much of a good story for easy laughs. I felt Mitchell at times pushed the envelope a wee bit hard in the cause of entertainment.

Speaking of entertainment, The Amazing Mets comes with illustrations by the legendary cartoonist Willard Mullin, then of the New York World-Telegram & Sun. The illustrations don’t appear to have been custom-made for this book; rather they seem contemporaneous drawings highlighting specific series of games against National League rivals. The Mets are represented as a kind of little boy playing against men, at one point with his pants pulled down in mid-spanking.

In an Amazing Mets illustration, Willard Mullin compares fan enthusiasm for two New York sports franchises that got their starts at the same time, and in the same location (the Polo Grounds). Mullin, the pre-eminent sports cartoonist of his day, would earn his eighth National Cartoonist Society Sports Cartoon Award in 1964, the year this book was published.

Two other things I liked about this book: First, the tone is fairly positive, in contrast to Breslin’s more caustic account. The Mets phenomenon is presented as a merry lark, with fans enjoying the moment. At the U. S. Military Academy at West Point, the marching band serenades the visiting Mets with the Rheingold Beer commercial jingle, which aired on Mets television and radio broadcasts. It turns out the plebes are big Mets fans, too.

“They even have the results of the previous night’s Mets game read to them during Orders of the Day,” a West Point official tells Mitchell. “You should hear the cheers when the Mets win.”

The other thing Mitchell does well is draw a bit on the stories of the Mets players, sensitive men who cared about their craft and didn’t like seeing it turned into a joke, however beloved.

“You know it takes courage to go out there and get beaten,” centerfielder Richie Ashburn, the Mets’ lone All-Star in 1962 with a .306 batting average, tells Mitchell. “Anybody can go out there and win. There’s a lot of pressure on us, more than on a club up in the pennant race. It’s a lot easier playing for a winner than playing on a losing club.”

Ashburn, a future Hall of Famer, retired from baseball rather than return to the Mets in 1963. For a time, he was replaced by Jimmy Piersall, who ran the bases backwards the first (and only) time he hit a homer for the Mets. As Mitchell notes, this proved too much even for the Mets, who gave Piersall his release.

Looking at the stats, you can see Piersall was one of the lucky ones that way. He enjoyed a rebound of a kind in his playing career, as did some other former Mets. Yet reading The Amazing Mets doesn’t make you envy them the way you might. Casey and his little band, and the not-so-little crowd of fans they had around them, were making history of a kind, enjoying a legend in the making like few other teams, including most winning ones, ever get to do.