Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? – Jimmy Breslin, 1963 ★½

Who’s On First? Who Cares!

Here’s a thought: A book has to be about something. Find an interesting topic and really delve into it, examine it from different angles, give it a beginning and an ending and build a thesis around it.

Legendary newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin found a way around that and wrote what is hailed by many as one of the best baseball books ever. I don’t even think it’s the best book about the 1962 New York Mets.

What’s wrong with me, you ask?

What’s wrong with you!

Jimmy Breslin at rest. In Can't Anybody Here Play This Game, he says "I'd never take a job in any office that didn't let you throw cigarette butts on the floor." He died in 2017. Image from https://english.newsnationtv.com/world/news/iconic-us-newspaper-columnist-jimmy-breslin-dies-at-88-165099.html.

Sorry, that Breslin did have an affecting style. He didn’t care two cents about the Mets nor their fans, nor could he be bothered to research his facts or spend more than a few minutes chasing quotes, but the guy was a true raconteur and I catch myself sometimes trying to mimic his signature voice.

Reading through the six chapters of Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? feels like you are elbow-to-elbow with Jimmy at his favorite watering hole, say Toots Shor’s in early 1963, listening to his stories and trying not to be seen peeking at your watch.

The 1962 Mets are famous for losing the most games of any season in Major League baseball. They were a first-year expansion team that set a number of still-standing records for ineptitude yet managed to excite a fledgling fan base and begin a love story that continues to this day.

The actual name "Mets" comes from "Metropolitan," though Mets has always been the team's name, not an abbreviation. Image from https://www.arleyart.com/store/.

Breslin emphasizes the Mets’ unorthodox success:

The Mets tried to play baseball, and the players trying to do it were serious. But the whole thing came out as great comedy, and it was the tonic the sport needed.

But instead of following this train of thought to someplace fruitful and uplifting, Breslin focuses on the ineptitude, as if exposing some terrible scam being perpetuated on the city.

His take on the Mets: they were a farce perpetuated on the good people of New York by greedy baseball overlords. The Mets owner, a nice lady named Joan Payson, deserves but doesn’t know better:

It was the kind of a scheme only some sneak businessman could come up with. Baseball has plenty of these. What makes it worse is that the scheme was obviously designed to harpoon money away from Joan Payson. She was coming in with millions, and everybody thought it would be smart to grab some of it. Here was a lady coming into baseball for sport. More important, she was coming to stay. She would be an important addition to the game. So what do they do? Why, rob her.

Joan Payson shakes hands with Mets manager Casey Stengel. According to Breslin, while vacationing in Greece she had telegrams sent to her after every game. Finally she telegrammed back: PLEASE TELL US ONLY WHEN METS WIN. Image from https://metsinsider.mlblogs.com/womens-history-month-joan-payson-4a2949395de3

There were two new teams participating in the 1961 National League Expansion Draft; the Houston Colt .45s were the other, and managed to field a much better lineup. The Mets’ big mistake, which Breslin doesn’t bother explaining, was going for too many older, established players who were remembered for their time on other New York clubs.

One Met in particular draws Breslin’s notice so much it made me squirm: “Marvelous Marv was holding down first base. This is like saying Willie Sutton works at your bank.” “Marvin Throneberry’s teammates would have given him a cake for his birthday except they were afraid he would drop it.” Or quoting Yankee manager Ralph Houk, who had managed the first baseman back in the minors: “If he ever played that way for me, I’d of killed him with my bare hands.”

There aren’t a lot of quotes in Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? and those you get seem suspiciously jewel-cut as zingers for one of Breslin’s stories. I’m not saying the guy made it all up. The Mets did lose 120 games in 1962, and they did so in some mind-boggling ways, several of which Breslin no doubt got right.

Al Jackson was one of two starters to lose more than 20 games for the 1962 Mets. (Roger Craig was the other.) Breslin notes how one day against the Reds, Jackson pitched effectively only to watch his team botch two double plays and give up four runs. Image from https://twitter.com/mets/status/416252211031584768.

But not always. On Opening Day, Breslin writes that the first run scored against the Mets was balked in by their starting pitcher, Roger Craig, in the first inning when he dropped the ball. It’s a funny story, but not true. Craig did balk that inning, but not until after that run had scored.

Jerry Mitchell’s The Amazing Mets, which covers both the 1962 and 1963 seasons, gets the history right and features plenty of player interviews. If you can find it, it’s definitely the book on this subject.

Breslin, by contrast, doesn’t let facts get in the way of his barbs. In dunning the Mets’ poor performance he promotes manager Casey Stengel as the voice of sanity. But Stengel was a major part of the team’s dysfunction, a non-communicator well past his prime. What he had was charm, which he doled out to the press while ignoring his players.

Casey Stengel leaves the mound at the Polo Grounds, presumably after making another pitching change. The team's earned-run average in 1962: 5.04. Image from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/497647827568657178/

It sure worked on Breslin:

Casey Stengel last season was simply the stand-up guy. He went through 120 losses with a smile, a try, and a few badly needed drinks. He tried to teach his players. They simply could not learn. When he realized this, he would sit back and smile and take the heat off the poor player.

Yet the very title of the book came from a Stengel rant. There was a lot to criticize, but Stengel sleeping in the dugout wasn’t blameless, either. Only Breslin writes it that way because Stengel was a reporters’ buddy.

There is a lot of this in Can Anybody Here, Breslin giving extended shout-outs to pals like Toots Shor and Joe E. Lewis. These were Manhattan nightlife luminaries of the time with no real link to the Mets.

In that way, the book does deliver a flavor for the period, New York City in the Kennedy 1960s, when hopes seemed bright even amidst a certain worldly cynicism. Breslin rambles on for pages about horse races and cocktail waitresses and the war movie they ran on TV when the Opening Day broadcast got rained out.

It is sometimes diverting but wildly unfocused, as we shift from a construction worker high atop the new stadium being built for the Mets to a couple whom Breslin writes got rich by betting on Mets games since the bookies gave away such great run differentials.

The 1962 New York Mets made 210 errors, a figure they matched the next season. No major league team has had more than 200 since. Image from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/27/sports/baseball/mets-1962-first-season.html

William A. Shea, whom that new stadium would be named after, tells Breslin how he tried to entice another National League club to relocate to New York City but thought better of it: “I was not going to be a party to moving any club, so long as that city had people willing to support it.”

Breslin also talks to Payson, Stengel, and some of the players. Centerfielder Richie Ashburn, who left behind a Hall-of-Fame career in order to escape the Mets, making 1962 his last season, marvels at the positive dynamic he saw in the clubhouse and on the field.

Roger Craig notes the grind of pitching for a shutout every time out:

“You can’t win the game. You go out there knowing that. So you try harder. Try too hard, it usually turns out. You’re out there concentrating so hard that the first thing you do is make a mistake.”

Breslin’s more interested in the mistakes than the people, and certainly more interested in quoting himself than anyone else, about how betting horses got him a wife and how it is sad people get older. I guess it was enjoyed widely when it came out because it wasn’t another book about baseball, but I come back to the idea I started with, that a book should be about something.

Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? has a great title, but its reputation seems sustained by people who haven’t actually read it, at least not in a while. During his long career, Breslin was as much a character as he was a writer, and this book works in its fitful way at establishing that character more than telling you anything about the struggling Mets.