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

by Jimmy Breslin

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

But a man does not become an institution on one play.

The whole incredible thing started in the agile brain of a Madison Avenue public-relations man whose accounts include a large chain clothing company. He also represents a book publisher, but the clothing store does not hold that against him.

This P.R. man leaves in the middle of a job for only one reason: the client isn’t coming up with the money.

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.

“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. 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.

“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 NEW YORK METS are in existence for a simple reason: New York City needed them.

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.

You see, the Mets are losers, just like nearly everybody else in life. This is a team for the cab driver who gets held up and the guy who loses out on a promotion because he didn’t maneuver himself to lunch with the boss enough. 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.

One word from Madison Avenue, the world center for poor taste, and a ballplayer will rub some hog-suet compound into his hair and say it isn’t greaseless.

The idea of a ballplayer taking money to go out and promote his own business is, at best, disgraceful.

The National League, to a lot of people around New York, is something hard to describe, but important. Like the chip in the table in the living room when you were growing up. It was always there. Sometimes you can buy ten new tables over a lifetime. But the one with the chip is the one that would make you feel the best.