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.
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.
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment