A TALE OF THREE CITIES: NEW YORK, L.A. AND SAN FRANCISCO IN OCTOBER OF ‘62 (40 page)

This contradicted previous Stengelese about Neal
leading off, Mantilla hitting second . . .

“Didn’t you say that Neal was going to lead off?”
asked Schecter.

“Well, put Neal third and Mantilla second,” as if
Schecter was making the decisions and Casey now just offering
advice.

From there: “Let’s see. You can put Hodges fifth. No,
put Bell fifth. Hodges sixth.” He looked at a reporter’s notebook.
“Better write it down so I’ll remember it.” Now the scribes were
his secretaries. “And put Marshall along with Hodges.
Maybe I’ll put Hodges in for a while and then Marshall.”

Batting fourth?

“Thomas. That’s right, Case?” a writer inquired.
“Thomas in left field batting fourth.”

“That’s right,” assented Casey, followed by some
discussion of Don Zimmer hitting seventh and playing third.

Schecter: “One more thing. Who’s the catcher,
Landrith or Ginsberg?”
“It’s Ginsberg or Landrith,” replied Casey. “Ginsberg caught him
pretty good. I’ll decide
when I get there.”

“This was the process by which Casey Stengel made up
his line-up every day,” Schecter, whose bright idea became
Ball
Four
in 1970, later recalled.

Perhaps Stengel talked like this when he was with the
Yankees, maybe even made out his line-up that way – although when
you have Mantle, Berra, Howard and the like it tends to make itself
– but the Mets, as Robert Lipsyte pointed out, were a
feature
story
, not a sports story. The press coverage looked for this
angle and played it up. Still, there were comedies that went beyond
seeming coincidence. The names of players certainly had a ring.

There was “Butterball” Botz, who apparently was one
of the “youth of America” Casey invited to try out . . . and fail.
It was like the old Dodgers of the “Daffiness” era, up-dated now to
“Choo Choo” Coleman and “Marvelous Marv” Throneberry.

The opener told the whole story in a nutshell.
According to legend,
nine Mets got stuck in an elevator
,
making them late for the first game in St. Louis, an 11-4 loss.
They dropped their first nine games and celebrated the first win,
behind Jay Hooks at Pittsburgh, as if the Series had been won.

Casey on Don Zimmer, who had a plate in his head
after having been beaned: “He’s the perdotius quotient of the
qualificatilus.”

??

Stengel told Zimmer he would “love the left field
fence.” He meant the left field fence at Cincinnati’s Crosley
Field, where he had just been traded to, only Zim had not been told
that part yet.

In May, Stengel got back on the “try-out” bandwagon.
There was a little more reasoning behind his invitation for young
folks to come out and play for the Mets because you “
can
play for the Mets. If you want rapid advancement, play for the
Mets. We’ve got the bonus money. We’ll even buy you a glove. So
join us. Take the bonus money. Play a year or two. Then you can go
back to school.”

It was like an Army enlistment commercial, but old
Stengel was smart despite his contortions of language. His
enticement of college money applied to pitcher Jay Hook, an
engineer out of Northwestern University who certainly was
academically inclined. It would later resonate with the likes of
Tom Seaver, who signed with the Mets based on specific guarantees
that they would pay for him to continue at USC. Then there was his
Fresno High teammate, Dick Selma, in 1962 being scouted by
everybody. The draft was a few years away. A high school or college
prospect like Selma was a free agent who could choose the team he
might sign with, rather than subject himself to the vagaries of a
wide-open draft. Selma had choices within the pro and college
ranks, but went for the Mets because he could advance, which he
did, all the way to the big leagues. When Seaver was waiting to see
whether the Phillies, Indians or Mets would draw his name out of a
hat in 1966, he rooted for the Mets for the same reason: rapid
advancement.

The lyrical stories of the early Mets did not become
so famous by accident. They were in New York, the media capital of
the world, and the writers in that city were the most talented.
Aside from Jimmy Breslin, Jimmy Cannon, Red Smith, Maury Allen and
many others, a self-professed “non-professional” named Roger Angell
was assigned their version of the “baseball beat” by
The New
Yorker
. A highbrow arts and leisure magazine, it seemed the
last place great baseball writing would come from, but it was.

A huge baseball fan who mourned the loss of the
Dodgers and Giants, Angell viewed the Yankees from a pedestrian’s
point of view. He wanted color, humanity; the essence of the “Bums”
from Brooklyn, of Willie Mays’s cap flying off. The Yankees just
shut everybody up, like the time at Ebbets when the crowd hooted
and hollered at Mickey Mantle incessantly. Then Mick hit a
gargantuan home run which mockingly bounced and caromed and broke
windshields and dented car doors belonging to Dodgers’ fans outside
the park.

Angell resisted the Polo Grounds in April and May of
1962 despite frequent invites to see “those amazin’ Mets.” But by
late May Angell was fascinated with the team’s strange habit of
actually leading in late innings before blowing games. The Mets are
thought to be the worst team of all time, but despite the numbers,
this may not be accurate. They lost by a landslide often enough,
but not every time. They often lost in crazy ways. Among their 40
wins in 1962 were some impressive performances, including a series
of come-from-behind efforts. After they actually swept Milwaukee in
a double-header on May 20, Angell made it to the Polo Grounds for
five days until June 2.

He bought his seats instead of taking a press pass,
sitting in the stands with his then-14-year old daughter and
197,428 fans who came to see the Mets take on the Los Angeles
Dodgers and San Francisco Giants. The villains had returned to the
scene of the crime.

The Dodgers utterly destroyed the Mets. It was like
O’Malley was a Roman general ordering his legions to crush the
rebellion. Angell’s daughter compared it to the “fifth grade
against the sixth grade at school.”

Old Dodgers were wearing “LA” caps, and some old
Dodgers were wearing “NY” caps, plus there were a few new stars in
the Los Angeles constellation. Amid everything the stomping fans
started to chant, “Let’s go,
Mets!
Let’s go,
Mets!”

Angell was stunned to find goodwill in the air, not
bitterness. The next day the Dodgers had to scrape for a win, but
New York pulled off a triple-play. After Los Angeles completed the
sweep, San Francisco ran New York’s losing streak to 15 with a
lopsided four-game explosion of power and pitching. The losses to
Los Angeles and San Francisco surprised nobody; after all, the 1962
Dodgers and Giants, respectively, were two of the best in each
team’s storied history. The Giants eventually won the league
championship. Both clubs won over 100 games before San Francisco
captured a play-off.

But Angell fell in love with the Mets. Apparently so
did “The ‘Go! Shouters,” the name of his
New Yorker
piece,
later published in one of the finest baseball books ever written,
The Summer Game
.

“The Mets’ ‘Go!’ shouters enjoyed their finest hour
on Friday night, after the Giants had hit four homers and moved
inexorably to a seventh inning lead of 9-1,” wrote Angell. “At this
point, when most sensible baseball fans would be edging towards the
exits, a man sitting in Section 14, behind first base, produced a
long, battered foghorn and blew mournful blasts into the hot night
air. Within minutes, the Mets fans were shouting in counterpoint –
Tooot!
‘Go!’
Tooot!
‘Go!’
Tooot!
‘GO!’ – and
the team, defeated and relaxed, came up with five hits that sent
Billy Pierce to the showers.”

It was all “exciting foolishness,” of course, since
San Francisco did win the game going away. Angell thought about the
demographical possibility of New York City producing “a 40- or
50,000-man audience made up exclusively of born losers – leftover
Landon voters, collectors of mongrel puppies, owners of stock in
played-out gold mines - who had been waiting for years for a
suitably hopeless cause.”

This was a Friday night in June, with the sensory
pleasures of the New York bar scene beckoning in “a city known for
its cool,” but these people had no place they would rather be.
Angell wanted to know what was going on. Two apparent Yankee fans
sitting next to him derided the Mets in snide tones, going over the
line-up and announcing that each was a player who would not even
make the Bronx Bombers. Angell determined that it was not bitter,
anti-Dodgers or anti-Giants sentiment. Rather, these people and
this team were the
anti-Yankees
, who Angell had no love
for.

The Giants won, their impressive stars – Willie Mays,
Willie McCovey, Juan Marichal – all shining, but Angell observed
that the Mets were “like France in the 1920s,” with a “missing
generation between the too-old and the too-young.” He determined to
see the Mets “as a ball team, rather than a flock of sacrificial
lambs,” calling Stengel “an Edison tinkering with rusty parts”;
noting the receding star of Felix Mantilla, Charlie Neal, Frank
Thomas, Richie Ashburn and Gil Hodges; the eager, opportunistic,
oft-dumb baserunning antics of Rod Kanehl and Choo Choo Coleman;
Stengel’s “bowlegged hobble” walking style; Elio Chacon’s hesitancy
costing an out; a pitching staff of Hook, Jackson, Anderson and
Roger Craig (“the Mets’ own Cyrano”), delivering glimpses of
competence, even brilliance, before falling apart.

San Francisco won a Sunday double-header. Angell
departed to write what was not merely a brilliant story, but
perhaps the most telling explanation of the early Mets and their
fans. There was prescience in it, too, in describing some youth
with promise that seven years later made him a small-time prophet
of sorts.

On June 17, Marv Throneberry was at first base when
the Mets caught a Chicago base runner in a rundown between first
and second. Throneberry ran into the runner without the ball in his
possession and was called for interference. Chicago scored four
times after that. When Marv came to bat in the bottom half of the
inning, he hit a drive to the right field bullpen, pulling into
third with a “triple” just as the umpire called him out at first
for having missed the bag. Stengel came out to argue but was
rebuffed by news from his own bench that Throneberry also missed
second. In July the Mets were 6-23.

Throneberry had some power and four times hit a sign
for a clothing company, who awarded him a $6,000 sailboat. Richie
Ashburn was also given a boat for winning the team MVP award. Judge
Robert Cannon, legal counsel for the Major League Baseball Player’s
Association, told Throneberry not to forget to declare the full
value of the boat.

“Declare it?” Throneberry asked. “Who to, the Coast
Guard?”

“Taxes,” Cannon replied, as in the IRS. “Ashburn’s
boat was a gift. He was voted it. Yours came the hard way. You hit
the sign. You
earned
it. The boat is
earnings
. You
pay income tax on it.”

At season’s end, Jimmy Breslin visited Throneberry in
his hometown of Collierville, Tennessee.

“In my whole life I never believed they’d be as rough
a year as there was last season,” said Throneberry, who believe it
or at one time was considered a prospect with the
Yankee
s.
According to most accounts of his career he was, if not a really
good player, not a terrible one; not the “worst player who ever
lived,” or whatever moniker has been attached to him.

The “worst ball player” never made the Major Leagues,
or even signed a professional contract. If such a player existed in
the big leagues he lasted one day, one inning, like the midget
Eddie Gaedel. He did not pick up big league paychecks for the
better part of a decade, as Marv did. “Terrible” Mets pitchers like
Roger Craig (10-24), Al Jackson (8-20), Jay Hook (8-19) and even
Craig Anderson (3-17) were not that terrible. Roger Craig was in
fact a very food pitcher, Jackson a genuine talent. The truth is, a
man cannot last long enough to
lose 20 games
if he is that
bad; he would be drummed out of the corps long before given the
chance to compile such a record.

Throneberry’s home in Collierville was at least 100
miles from anything resembling a
sporting waterway
, and the
man was never going to be part of the “skiff off the Hamptons
crowd,” wrote Breslin.

“And here I am, I’m still not out of it,” said Marv.
“I got a boat in a warehouse someplace and the man tell me I got to
pay taxes on it and all we got around here is, like, filled-up
bathtubs and maybe a crick or two. I think maybe I’ll be able to
sell it off someplace. I think you could say prospects is all
right. But I still don’t know what do about the tax thing.”

It was that kind of year.

“We get to the end of the season, and I might need a
couple of games to finish higher and what am I going to get?”
Stengel said. “Everybody will be standing up there and going,
whoom! Just trying to win theirselves a nice boat while I’m sittin’
here hopin’ they’ll butcher boy the ball onto the ground and get me
a run or two. I don’t like it at all.”

??

Hall of Famer Rogers Hornsby, an irascible sort who
could not stay hired in his post-playing gigs, was hired by Weiss
to scout Major League games, looking for players the Mets could
use. Hornsby lived in Chicago and attended White Sox games, played
at night in Comiskey Park. He spurned Wrigley because their day
schedule interfered with his horse track pursuits.

“They say we’re gonna get players out of a grab
bag,” he said. “From what I see, it’s going to be a garbage bag.
Ain’t nobody got fat off eating out of the garbage, and that’s just
what the Mets is going to have to be doing. This is terrible. I
mean, this is really going to be bad.”