Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?: The Improbable Saga of the New York Mets' First Year

by Jimmy Breslin

I must admit, in fairness, that the Mets deserve the title. They won it fair and square. They achieved total incompetence in a single year, while the Browns worked industriously for almost a decade to gain equal proficiency.

The Mets is a very good thing. They give everybody a job. Just like the WPA. —BILLY LOES, the only pitcher in the history of baseball to be defeated in a World Series game because he lost a ground ball in the sun

And all around the place there are workers just as high up and taking just as many chances. It makes you nervous to look at them. It also would frighten hell out of you to pay them. McLaughlin is on the clock as an iron worker.

The Mets lost because they played a brand of baseball which has not been seen in the Big Leagues in over twenty-five years. And in doing this they warmed the hearts of baseball fans everywhere.

The Mets have changed all this. In one season they stepped out and gave sports, and the people who like sports, the first team worthy of being a legend in several decades. And they are a true legend. This is rare.

if one is to have any fun out of life, one should proceed with the understanding that reminiscences are to be enjoyed, not authenticated.

The way they played baseball made them the sports story of our time. This was not another group of methodical athletes making a living at baseball. Not the Mets. They did things.

Marvelous Marv was holding down first base. This is like saying Willie Sutton works at your bank.

In the middle of the posse of Mets chasing the runner,

“Things just sort of keep on happening to me,” Marvin observed at one point during the season. Which they did. All season long. And at the end, here was this balding twenty-eight-year-old from Collierville, Tennessee, standing at home plate with a big smile on his face as he proudly accepted a boat which he had won as the result of a clothing-store contest.

He also represents a book publisher, but the clothing store does not hold that against him.

The whole season went this way for the Mets. Take any day, any town, any inning. With the Mets nothing changed, only the pages on the calendar. It was all one wonderful mistake.

The Mets of 1962 were to be formed with baseball players given to them by the other teams. As we are going to see, this little matter is, by itself, a saga of American charity rivaling that of United States Steel.

“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?’”

This, then, is the way the first year of the New York Mets went. It was a team that featured three twenty-game losers, an opening day outfield that held the all-time major-league record for fathering children (nineteen), a defensive catcher who couldn’t catch, and an over-all collection of strange players who performed strange feats. Yet it was absolutely wonderful. People loved it.

“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.”

It all was over the sculptor, who happened to be a perfectionist. When he chiseled out Bolívar’s horse, he made a whole horse, and no art commission was going to make him put Simón Bolívar on some old gelding.

When he woke up he found he had been slapped with a heavy fine. The Red Sox, of course, had a still better way to reward Pumpsie for his wanderings. They sent him to the Mets. And this season, when Pumpsie Green takes the field for the Mets, anybody who does not stand up and root for him, and root hard, simply has no taste for the good life.

As noted earlier, it took more than baseball people to create the Mets. One of the biggest culprits,

the team, as if operating from a script, let the Dodgers score thirteen runs. They also took four hours to let this happen.

But he is a lawyer, and these guys want everything they can get their hands on, including hot stoves, to help a case.

These moves accomplished two fine things. For one, it gave two big cities major-league baseball, something they should have had several years before somebody decided to bring it in. And, more important, it exposed most of the people on the business side of baseball for exactly what they are—arrogant, money-hungry people with a sense of loyalty only to a bank account.

Webb didn’t want to hear of any New York Mets. They were not part of the deal. It turned out they were, like it or not. And, like the guy at Rheingold says, they are giving Ballantine one hell of a battle.

from 1957 until the Mets arrived it was a place where stock-car races and a foreign game called soccer were held.

That is, he was a member of the Giants as far as the Giants’ roster was concerned. By 2:30 in the morning at the Red Parrot, he thought he was Prince Valiant.

This is a man who can shake hands with a polar bear and the bear is going to let out the first yelp.

He is particularly rough on Polish food. Put 75 Poles who are registered voters in the same dining hall with Keating, and he touches bottom five minutes ahead of the field.

the square jaw of a guy who would know how to punch back. Which he certainly does.

is one of those people you find, but not too often, who is willing to do something for his own and knows how to do it. His own in this case is people who live and work in New York.

there is no place for business when you are dealing mainly with the fact that Marvin Throneberry’s teammates would have given him a cake for his birthday except they were afraid he would drop it.

She is from Manhasset, Long Island; Hobe Sound, Florida; Bar Harbor, Maine; and wherever else she feels like living this month.

I had them sew a Mets’ insignia on him right away. The tortoise and the hare. That’s the Mets.

She wired back: PLEASE TELL US ONLY WHEN METS WIN. “That was about the last word I heard from America,” she recalled.

her brother Jock—John Hay Whitney—once decided to go into producing movies as a sideline. In 1938 he boarded a plane in New York that was taking him to California. Under his arm were the galley proofs of a book by a woman named Margaret Mitchell. It was about the South in the Civil War. It already had been turned down by Samuel Goldwyn, who sniffed, “Who needs a movie about the Civil War? And the losers in it already?”

this is not a woman who came to be a nice happy loser. At the same time, she’s not about to cry. This one knows the game.