THE 1969 MIRACLE METS: THE IMPROBABLE STORY OF THE WORLD’S GREATEST UNDERDOG TEAM (22 page)

“This, then, is the way the first year of the New
York Mets went,” wrote Breslin, an old-time scribe whose clipped
style was reminiscent of Ring Lardner (and Mark Twain before that),
in
Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?
“It was a team that
featured 23-game losers, an opening day outfield that held the
all-time Major League record for fathering children <19; “You
can look it up,” as Casey would say>, a defensive catcher who
couldn’t catch, and an overall collection of strange players who
performed strange feats. Yet it was absolutely wonderful. People
loved it. The Mets gathered about them a breed of baseball fans who
quite possibly will make you forget the characters who once made
Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field a part of this country’s folklore. The
Mets’ fans are made of the same things. Brooklyn fans, observed
Garry Schumacher, once a great baseball writer and now part of the
San Francisco Giants management, never would have appreciated Joe
DiMaggio on their club.

“ ‘Too perfect,’ said Garry.”

Bill Veeck announced that the 1962 Mets were
“without a doubt the worst team in the history of baseball,”
claiming that he spoke with authority since his St. Louis Browns
were the previous “title holders.”

Technically, statistically, and by the record, he
was right, but the ’62 Mets were not the worst. Veeck’s Browns had
no name players, nobody worth remembering. The Mets had former big
names like Ashburn, Hodges, Craig, Gene Woodling and Frank Thomas.
Over the hill, yes; but there is something not quite right about
saying a team with so many one-time stars was the worst ever
assembled. Sometimes, not so bad. Ashburn batted .306; Thomas hit
34 homers and drove in 94 runs. Then again, sometimes they sure
looked terrible. In June, Sandy Koufax struck out the first three
Mets on nine pitches, finished with 13 Ks, and a 5-0 no-hit
win.

Certainly no team nearly that bad has been analyzed
and talked about so much. Being in New York was part of that. Casey
Stengel was part of it. But it went beyond these obvious factors.
Sportswriter Leonard Koppett said it was part of a larger social
revolution, embodied by the new, youthful President John F.
Kennedy; the young taking over from the old.

“The times they are a-changin’,” sang Bob Dylan.

The players poked fun at each other. There was much
self-deprecation in the Mets’ clubhouse. When Ashburn won the team
MVP award, he said, “Most Valuable on the worst team ever? Just how
do they mean that?”

He made fun of Throneberry, but the big ol’ country
boy took it in stride. The fans picked up on their humble, comical
ways and ate it up. Strange, confusing things happened to that team
that somehow did not happen to others. They had two pitchers named
Bob Miller: Robert G. Miller, left-handed and Robert L. Miller,
right-handed. Robert L. made 21 starts with an 0-12 record and was
preferred among the two.

One day Stengel called to the bullpen.

“Get Nelson ready,” he told the bullpen coach.

“Who?” was the reply.

“Nelson,” Stengel said. “Get him up.”

The bullpen coach looked around. There was no
Nelson. Nelson was broadcaster Lindsey Nelson. But Robert L. Miller
knew that when Casey called for Nelson, he meant him, so he warmed
up and went in the game. Later the Miller’s appeared on the TV quiz
show
To Tell the Truth
. When the MC called, “Will the real
Bob Miller please stand up?” both did so to confused delight.

Stengel would occasionally call on some past star of
the Yankees or Giants to go into the game. He confused Jim Marshall
with John Blanchard, a Yankee reliable of the 1950s. In a strange
twist of coincidence, when his protégé, USC’s Rod Dedeaux (who
played for Casey at Brooklyn) got old (sometimes showing up late
for games after attending a cocktail party), he reportedly would
call out, “Lynn, get your gun,” or “Seaver, get loose.” These were
references to past Trojans like Fred Lynn or Tom Seaver who had
graduated 10 or 15 years earlier.

Banners and placards made their appearance at the
Polo Grounds, possibly for the first time. Certainly, the existence
of this kind of fan signage began a trend. “Marv.” “Marvelous
Marv.” “Cranberry Strawberry We Love Throneberry.” “MARV!” “VRAM!”
(“Marv” spelled backwards). The Mets responded with a team sign of
their own: “To the Met Fans – We Love You Too.”

Stengel called it all “Amazin’.” “Come out and see
my ‘Amazin’ Mets,’ ” he said in an open invite to the public. “I
been in this game a hundred years but I see new ways to lose I
never knew existed before.”

Stengel got into a taxi with several young writers
and inquired whether they were ballplayers. They said they were
not.

“No, and neither are my players,” said Stengel.

Of the Northwestern engineer Jay Hook, Stengel said,
“I got the smartest pitcher in the world until he goes to the
mound.”

When Yale’s Ken MacKenzie entered a game Stengel
advised, “Now just make believe you’re pitching against
Harvard.”

Throneberry was “Thornberry.” Casey never came close
to Cannizzaro’s proper pronunciation. Gus Bell was an established
player but Casey never got a handle on who he was.

“And in left field, in left field we have a splendid
man, and he knows how to do it,” Stengel said. “He’s been around
and he swings the bat there in left field and he knows what to do.
He’s got a big family leaguer Buddy Bell> and he wants to provide for them, and he’s a
fine outstanding player, the fella in left field. You can be sure
he’ll be ready when the bell rings – and that’s his name,
Bell!”

“About this Cho Choo Coleman,” Casey told Dan Daniel
of
The Sporting News.
“Is he a catcher or an outfielder? . .
. Watch this carefully.”

Other bits of Stengelese:

1. “I don’t mind my ballplayers drinking, as long as
   they don’t drink in the same bar as me.”
   

2. “We have a great young outfield prospect. He’s 22
   and with a little luck he might make it to 23.”
   

3. “I was the best manager I ever saw.”
   

4. “I was fired more times than a cap pistol.”
   

5. “I want to thank all these generous owners for
   giving us those great players they did not want.”
   

6. “If I was winning I’d play five games a day because
   you tend to keep winning when you are winning. But I had a chance
   to call this game, so I did. You tend to keep losing when you’re
   losing, you know.”
   

7. “Everybody here keeps saying how good I’m looking.
   Well maybe I do, but they should see me inside. I look
   terrible.”
   

First baseman Ed Kranepool, a native of nearby
Yonkers, spend most of 1962 in the minor leagues but got called up
and hit .167 in his brief stint. He was only 17 years old.

Infielder “Hot Rod” Kanehl, a one-time Yankee prospect, hit
.248. Married with four kids, he was one of those “record breaking”
fathers of multiple kids, supposedly something the ’62 Mets did
better than anything.

“He can’t field,” George Weiss told Casey.

“But he can run the bases,” Stengel replied.

“But Weiss always wanted to get rid of me, and now he couldn’t
because I had become a hero in New York,” said Kanehl. “All of New
York was asking, ‘Who is this guy?’ and the front page of the
Daily News
had a picture of Stengel pulling me out of a hat
like a rabbit.”

Kanehl was one of those strange hybrids of baseball; a Yankee
farmhand who never made it there, but became a household name,
still fondly remembered, because he played for the Mets. It did not
last long. A few years later he was playing for the Wichita
Dreamliners against USC’s Tom Seaver, then pitching for the Alaska
Goldpanners.

“Even though we lost, we were still upbeat,” said Kanehl. “And
so was Casey, who was leading the parade down Broadway. A lot of
people identified with the Mets – underdog types, not losers –
quality people who weren’t quite getting it together.

“In May we beat Cincinnati, and we beat the Braves
at home, we were playing well, but then we went on the road and
lost 17 games in a row. We sure could dream up ways to lose.”

When the Mets were mathematically eliminated from the National
League pennant the first week of August, Casey called a
meeting.

“You guys can relax now,” he told them.

The season ended, appropriately enough, with a triple-play and a
worst-ever 40-120 record. More than 900,000 fans attended Mets
games at the Polo Grounds, a significant improvement over the
attendance of the New York Giants, a team featuring such stalwarts
as Willie Mays, playing at the same park in their last year
(1957).

“It’s been a helluva year,’ Casey remarked.

****

The 1963-68 New York Mets gradually morphed from the “lovable
losers” of Casey Stengel’s 1962 team to just plain losers. Stengel
lasted until 1965, and when he finally departed the team’s image
changed. Fans began to expect more out of them. Young, promising
players were brought in. This had a double-edged effect. On the one
hand, talented youth raised hopes. On the other, when the team
still lost some frustration began to occur.

Still, the essential nature of the team never really changed.
They were losers. The Mets were synonymous with the concept of
losing. Looking back, it was a seven-year period, but it seemed to
have lasted forever and nobody really conceived of a time in which
this club would not be cellar dwellers. It was the reverse of the
UCLA basketball dynasty under John Wooden, which occurred during
those same years. The Bruins won 10 NCAA titles in 12 seasons
(1964-75), but in the mind’s eye it lasted forever. It was
inconceivable that they could lose, or at least it seemed that way.
The Mets eventually winning almost has a Biblical quality to it,
which plays to the theme of George Burns’s
Oh, God!
statement that they were
The Last Miracle
. The Bible is
filled with constant references to seemingly endless diasporas and
bondage, but eventually it all “came to pass.” But when it is going
on, it seems like hell; despair, hopeless, begotten.

When Shea Stadium was built in 1964, it seemed that now was a
time to begin expecting improvement, but there was none. When Casey
left the next season, the clown act would end in favor of
professional baseball, but that did not happen, either. At least
the clown act might have been diminished, but it was not replaced
by competence. Perhaps it was because the sportswriters did not
note such things, or look for it as much, but the funny quotes, the
comic plays, the crazy ironies of 1962 never quite repeated
themselves. With the “Ol’ Perfessor’s” retirement that part of the
team was replaced only by raw numbers: 40-120 (1962), 51-111
(1963), 53-109 (1964), 50-112 (1965), 66-95 (1966), 61-101 (1967),
and 73-89 (1968).

They were dead last in a 10-team league (prior to division play
in 1969) in each of their first six seasons, but in 1966 the Mets
did move the boulder an inch or so up the hill. It was their first
year without 100 losses and they finished ninth, not
10
^th
. That “honor” went, ironically, to Leo Durocher’s
Chicago Cubs. The fact that the old Dodger and Giant manager took
over the Cubs; that the Mets beat him in his first year; and that
it was Durocher’s Cubs, representing the “Second City” that has
always competed for status with New York (who the Mets battled it
out with in 1969); it all adds up to a bundle of ironies. But the
Mets’ 73-win finish under Gil Hodges in 1968, again good for ninth
place, for the very first time ahead of their expansion rival and
nemesis Houston, represented a paradigm shift in Mets fortunes.

Two new faces arrived in 1963, and both were appropriate Mets.
Jimmy Piersall was once run out of baseball, literally, for being
crazy. After climbing the backstop at Fenway Park he was
institutionalized, all of it depicted in a bad movie called
Fear
Strikes Out
.
Psycho’s
Anthony Perkins played Piersall.
Piersall “hated it,” which was understandable. Who would want
Anthony Perkins playing you?

Piersall recovered to become one of the finest defensive center
fielders in baseball, but his tenures were short-lived with various
non-contending clubs. He was controversial, snubbing fans, running
the bases backwards, and later as a broadcaster for the Chicago
White Sox declaring baseball wives to be “all a bunch of horny
broads.”

Casey could not stomach him and Piersall was gone after 40
games, but Duke Snider was a welcome addition. The “Duke of
Flatbush” was a huge favorite in Brooklyn, who jealously defended
him in arguments over who the best of the New York center fielders
were in the 1950s; Mays, Mantle or The Duke? Duke was a huge power
threat at little Ebbets Field, built in the “dead ball era.” A Los
Angeles native he seemingly would have been pleased, as Don
Drysdale was, to be going home. But Drysdale was still a young
player. Snyder and another veteran Californian, Jackie Robinson,
knew where their bread was buttered. Robinson chose retirement
instead of becoming Willie Mays’s teammate in New York and later
San Francisco, after O’Malley traded him to the Giants. The whole
winter of 1957-58 was star-crossed, with Roy Campanella’s paralysis
in a car accident preventing him from taking his big right-handed
swing to the L.A. Coliseum’s short left field porch.

But the Coliseum was “disaster city” for poor Duke. His power
was to right. The Coliseum was and is a famed football stadium,
chosen by O’Malley for baseball because 90,000 paying customers put
more moolah in his pocket than the 20,000-plus at L.A.’s minor
league Wrigley Field. The dilemma of the field’s baseball
dimensions was “solved” by a high fence in left field, which was
only about 250 feet from home. It meant legitimate line drive
homers bounced off the screen for singles while lazy pop-ups were
home runs. Wally Moon hit 19 that way in 1959.