THE 1969 MIRACLE METS: THE IMPROBABLE STORY OF THE WORLD’S GREATEST UNDERDOG TEAM (21 page)

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.”

Stengel celebrated his 73
^rd
birthday in a
private party room at the Chase Hotel in St. Louis. He ordered a
Manhattan.

“I’ve seen these do a lot of things to people,” he
said of the Manhattan. He smoked cigarettes and let his hair down,
so to speak, with Jimmy Breslin. He spoke with trepidation of the
Mets’ initial visit to the brand new Dodger Stadium. “We’re going
into Los Angeles the first time, and, well, I don’t want to go in
there to see that big new ballpark in front of all them people and
have to see the other fellas running around those bases the way
they figured to on my own pitchers and my catchers, too.
Wills and those fellows, they start running in
circles and they don’t stop and so forth and it could be
embarrassing, which I don’t want to be.

“Well, we have Canzoneri Cannizzaro> at Syracuse, and he catches good and throws real
good and he should be able to stop them. I don’t want to be
embarrassed. So we bring him and he is going to throw out these
runners.

“We come in there and you never seen anything like
it in your life. I find I got a defensive catcher, only he can’t
catch the ball. The pitcher throws. Wild pitch. Throws again.
Passed ball. Throws again. Oops! The ball drops out of the glove.
And all the time I am dizzy on account of these runners running
around in circles on me and so forth.

“Makes a man think. You look up and down the bench
and you have to say to yourself, ‘Can’t anybody here play this
game?’ ”

Hours later, “the bartender was falling asleep and
the only sound in the hotel was the whine of the vacuum cleaner in
the lobby,” wrote Breslin. “Stengel banged his empty glass on the
red-tiled bar top and then walked out of the room.”

Casey walked to the lobby, stopping to light a
smoke

“I’m shell-shocked,” he told the guy working the
vacuum cleaner. “I’m not used to gettin’ any of these shocks at
all, and now they come every three innings. How do you like
that.”

No answer.

“This is a disaster,” he continued. “Do you know who
my player of the year is? My player of the year is Choo Choo
Coleman, and I have him for only two days. He runs very good.”