Can't Anybody Here Play This Game? Quotes

“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. The Yankees? Who does well enough to root for them, Laurence Rockefeller?”
― Jimmy Breslin, Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?: The Improbable Saga of the New York Mets' First Year

“So the Mets are a bad ball club. All right, they're the worst ball club you ever saw. So what? The important thing is they are in the National League and they are familiar.”
― Jimmy Breslin, Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?: The Improbable Saga of the New York Mets' First Year

“In his time, Hornsby was an unbelievable hitter who three times finished with an average of over .400, reaching .424 in 1924, a record still standing. This background has not made him exactly tolerant of the ability of baseball players. To illustrate, we reprint herewith the most glowing report on an individual which Hornsby handed in all season: LOOKS LIKE A MAJOR-LEAGUE PLAYER The name at the top of the sheet said the report was about Mickey Mantle.”
― Jimmy Breslin, Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?: The Improbable Saga of the New York Mets' First Year

“The bartender put a couple of fistfuls of ice chunks into a big, thick mixing glass and then proceeded to make a Tom Collins that had so much gin in it that the other people at the bar started to laugh. He served the drink to the Babe just as it was made, right in the mixing glass. 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 playing ball, I believe every word of it.”
― Jimmy Breslin, Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?: The Improbable Saga of the New York Mets' First Year

“You think of all these things as you stand and watch this big job. And then, just for a minute, everything changes. The ground, piled with dirt and covered with empty beer cans and crushed coffee containers, turns into cropped Merion blue. The turf surrounds an infield that doesn’t have a pebble on it. The bare steel beams turn into gleaming stands, and they are filled. You can hear the crowd making noise. And now it hits you. Now you realize, for the first time, what this is all about. All of it, all of the workers risking their lives, and all of the huge payrolls and all of the political wrangling. There is a reason for it all: They are building a brand-new stadium for Marvin Throneberry. 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.”
― Jimmy Breslin, Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?: The Improbable Saga of the New York Mets' First Year

“Long Island is a sandspit 150 miles long. It originally was the great outwash plain of a glacier, and history shows even the Indians didn’t want much to do with it. They moved out without a fight and without asking for a dime when the whites arrived. Later the redcoat General Howe engaged Washington’s Colonials in something called the Battle of Long Island, and Howe succeeded in driving Washington off Long Island and up the Hudson to someplace like Dobbs Ferry. Anybody who knows anything about Dobbs Ferry as opposed to Long Island can never accept a history book which says this was a defeat for Washington. In fact, there are many people who still wonder why we did not insist that the English, as part of the Yorktown surrender, be forced to retain Long Island.”
― Jimmy Breslin, Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?: The Improbable Saga of the New York Mets' First Year

“LONG ISLAND, WHICH IS considered part of New York and the new home of the Mets, is the perfect place for them. Nothing particularly good has happened on Long Island for over fifty years, so nobody is going to get unduly concerned if the Mets take more than a little while to pull themselves together.”
― Jimmy Breslin, Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?: The Improbable Saga of the New York Mets' First Year

“For consistency, Philadelphia baseball, among other things in the town, always has been the worst.”
― Jimmy Breslin, Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?: The Improbable Saga of the New York Mets' First Year

“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?”
― Jimmy Breslin, Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?: The Improbable Saga of the New York Mets' First Year

“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.”
― Jimmy Breslin, Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?: The Improbable Saga of the New York Mets' First Year

“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.”
― Jimmy Breslin, Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?: The Improbable Saga of the New York Mets' First Year

“The Dodgers won it, 9-8, when Robinson hit a home run in the fourteenth inning. In the eleventh, he had knocked himself unconscious in a dive for a low line drive hit by Del Ennis. If he had not made the catch, the game would have been over. It was one of the matchless individual performances baseball has seen.”
― Jimmy Breslin, Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?: The Improbable Saga of the New York Mets' First Year