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June 22 - July 13, 2022
The losers have their day. Jimmy Breslin has written a history of the Mets, preserving for all time a remarkable tale of ineptitude, mediocrity, and abject failure.
So the Mets started with the worst pitching, backed by the most deplorable infield and outfield, ever assembled on a single diamond. While “selecting” their players they didn’t (as the expansion committee professed so loudly to fear) dilute the talent pool of the major leagues, but dealt almost a death blow to the Sally.
Marvin Throneberry, who is known as Marvelous Marv to his admirers, plays first base for the New York Mets, the team which is going to play its home games in this new stadium. In fact, Marvelous Marv does more than just play first base for the Mets. He is the Mets.
Ruth said something about how heavens to Betsy hot he was, and then he picked up the glass and opened his mouth, and there went everything. In one shot he swallowed the drink, the orange slice and the rest of the garbage, and the ice chunks too. He stopped for nothing. There is not a single man I have ever seen in a saloon who does not bring his teeth together a little bit and stop those ice chunks from going in. A man has to have a pipe the size of a trombone to take ice in one shot. But I saw Ruth do it, and whenever somebody tells me about how the Babe used to drink and eat when he was
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“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?’”
“They are without a doubt the worst team in the history of baseball,” Bill Veeck was saying one day last summer. “I speak with authority. I had the St. Louis Browns. I also speak with longing. I’d love to spend the rest of the summer around the team. If you couldn’t have any fun with the Mets, you couldn’t have any fun any place.”
THE METS OPENED THEIR season on April 11 and closed it on September 30. In this time, the players did enough things wrong to convince even casual observers that there has never been a team like them. From the start, the trouble with the Mets was the fact they were not too good at playing baseball. They lost an awful lot of games by one run, which is the mark of a bad team. They also lost innumerable games by fourteen runs or so. This is the mark of a terrible team. Actually, all the Mets did was lose. They lost at home and they lost away, they lost at night and they lost in the daytime. And
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It is because of this that you do not simply use figures to say that the Mets of 1962, with 120 losses and only 40 wins, are the worst team in modern times. Instead, you investigate the matter thoroughly. Then you can say, with full authority, that the Mets are the worst team.
“You look back on it,” one of their players noted last winter, “and you have to say forty games is about all we could win. After all, we were playing against teams that had all major-leaguers on them.”
Roger Craig was the starting pitcher. In the first inning, Bill White of the Cardinals reached third base. Craig eyed him carefully. Then he started his motion to the plate. The ball dropped out of Craig’s hand. The umpire ruled it a balk and waved White across the plate. The Cards led, 1-0. The Mets’ season now was officially shot.
He was right. The Mets lost nine games before they finally got their first win of the season.
“I’ve been a Mets fan all my life.” Nearly everybody was saying it by mid-June. And nearly everybody had a good reason for saying it. You see, the Mets are losers, just like nearly everybody else in life.
It is the team for every guy who has to get out of bed in the morning and go to work for short money on a job he does not like. And it is the team for every woman who looks up ten years later and sees her husband eating dinner in a T-shirt and wonders how the hell she ever let this guy talk her into getting married. The Yankees? Who does well enough to root for them, Laurence Rockefeller?
