Meeting the Mets: A Love Story

I went to my first baseball game with my parents and older brother at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. It was Labor Day, 1953 and I was five years old. The Dodgers won both games of the doubleheader and I thought to myself: “This is fantastic. The Dodgers will always win, everyone is happy and this will go on forever.” 

I was soon disabused of the notion that the Dodgers won all the time by my brother and his friends. I was raised on tales like Mickey Owens dropping a third strike that would have ended a World Series game against the Yankees in 1941, opening the door for a Yankees comeback; how the Dodgers lost the pennant on the last day of the season to the Whiz Kids Phillies in 1950 when Cal Abrams was thrown out at the plate to end the game; the shot heard round the world when Bobby Thomson hit the most famous home run in history (The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!) I was told how one of our apartment building neighbors threw his radio out of his sixth-floor window into the backyard, smashing it to smithereens. I learned about our losses in the World Series to the hated Yankees in ’47, ’49, ’52 and ’53. 

Nevertheless, the Dodgers were our absolute heroes. There were a few outliers. A family of Giants fans lived across the street and a lone Yankee fan lived at the end of the block, but almost every kid proudly wore the blue cap with the white B.  Between 1954-58, I went to many games at Ebbets Field, mainly with my brother and friends, a short twenty-minute subway ride away. The Dodgers looked so good in their bright white uniforms, with the Dodgers in blue script across their chests. We loved them all: Duke Snider, Pee Wee Reese, Carl Furillo, Jackie Robinson, Gil Hodges, Don Newcombe, Carl Erskine (Oisk), Clem Labine, and Jr. Gilliam. There was also a very wild, young, mostly unknown left-handed pitcher who hardly ever played named Sandy Koufax. We loved him anyway because he was from Brooklyn and Jewish! Most of the players lived in Brooklyn. Gil Hodges lived only a few streets away, but we never went over to bother him. I was not yet aware of the social significance of Jackie Robinson and hadn’t even noticed that there were players of different colors on the team.

When the Dodgers were again in the World Series in 1955, the radio broadcast was piped into all the classrooms at P.S. 199. We sprinted home to watch the last two innings on TV as the Dodgers finally triumphed. All the kids and whatever adults were home spilled out onto East 17^th Street, jumping up and down, yelling, and clapping each other on the shoulders.

In 1958, the Dodgers broke my heart. We had heard the rumors, but me and my ten-year old friends discounted them. The Dodgers could not move to Los Angeles because it rained all the time and they would never be able to play a game. If a new stadium was the issue, we had the perfect solution. They could play at Wingate Field, a high school stadium that had stands, located a mere three blocks away. We could walk to the games and wouldn’t even have to pay, because we could just stand outside and look through the fence. Unfortunately, the Dodger’s owner, Walter O’Malley did not agree to our plan and instead tore the heart out of Brooklyn. 

Now, I was faced with the agonizing decision of what to do with my fandom.  Rooting for the hated Yankees was out of the question. My brother half-heartedly became a Phillies fan, because it was the closest National League team, but he soon lost interest. A lot of kids and adults stayed with the Dodgers, but not me. I was abandoned and angry.  I did not blame the players, but I hated the team and the city that stole them and above all the evil, greedy, Walter O’Malley. I often repeated the well-known Brooklyn joke: If Hitler, Mussolini and Walter O’Malley were lined up in front of you and you had a gun with only two bullets, who would you shoot? The answer was of course, Walter O’Malley twice. 

When I got older, I realized that it wasn’t solely O’Malley’s fault, but equally responsible was Robert Moses, the all-powerful urban planning czar. Moses rejected O’Malley’s plan to build a stadium in downtown Brooklyn where the Brooklyn Nets now play. Instead, he wanted to develop Flushing Meadows in Queens and build a stadium on the site of the 1939 World’s Fair. (That would come to fruition in 1964 when the Mets opened beautiful, new Shea Stadium.)  O’Malley rejected the idea saying he owned the Brooklyn Dodgers, not the Queens Dodgers.  However, sixty-seven years later, even though the Dodgers have played many more games at Chavez Ravine than they did at Ebbets Field, I still root for the Dodgers to lose every single game. I know it’s not rational, but who ever said that being a fan is rational.  I did though make a pretty rational decision for a ten-year old. I became a Milwaukee Braves fan. They had wonderful players like Hank Aaron, Eddie Mathews, Joe Adcock, Warren Spahn, and Lew Burdette and they had the best chance to beat the Dodgers for the pennant and maybe the Yankees in the World Series. I still have a warm spot in my heart for those Milwaukee Braves (but certainly not for the Tomahawk Chopping Atlanta Braves).

During those years of wandering in the baseball desert between 1958-62, I went to many Sunday doubleheaders at Yankee Stadium with my friends to vociferously root against the Yankees. The Yankees had a star-studded dynasty, so it was pretty futile except when Detroit came to town. The Tigers were the only team that had the Yankee’s number.

Around 1960, I began hearing rumors about National League expansion. The American League was adding two new teams, and there was a threat that the new Continental Baseball League would locate a team in New York. To head that off, the commissioner of baseball, announced that two new National League expansion teams in New York and Houston would commence play for the 1962 season. I had heard rumors that the Cincinnati Reds might be relocating to New York and I was relieved as I did not want to steal another city’s team. The Houston team was the Colt 45s and the New York team was rumored to be the Meadowlarks. Luckily, that name did not pan out and the New York Metropolitan Baseball Club Inc. was born—the Mets!

 It was love at first sight and I was a fan from Day 1. (Even before that. Does anyone remember Butterball Botz from spring training?) My fourteen-year-old self was realistic enough to know that the Mets were not going to win the pennant, but with established stars like Gil Hodges, Charlie Neal, Richie Ashburn, Gus Bell, Frank Thomas, Clem Labine, and Roger Craig, I thought they would at least play .500. It didn’t quite work out that way. Most of these players were fading stars and just hanging on. It was not assured that New York City would embrace the Mets, so the ownership felt that they had to bring in big names, particularly former Brooklyn Dodgers. They also brought in the ultimate pitchman and salesman, the former manager of the Yankee dynasty, Casey Stengel. 

The season got off to an inauspicious start as the Mets dropped their first ever game 11-4 to the St. Louis Cardinals. Then, they went on to lose their next eight games, outscored by a total of 69-29, before thrashing the Pirates 9-1. When the Mets recorded their first home win on April 28 against the Phillies, they were 1-12. Seventeen games into the season, the Mets traded their number 1 expansion pick, catcher Hobie Landrith to the Baltimore Orioles for first baseman, Marv Throneberry.  According to Stengel, Hobie had been picked first, because if you don’t have a catcher, a lot of balls will be rolling to the backstop. (They did anyway.)  Marv had once been a hot prospect for the Yankees but wound up as a suspect. He could hit and belted 16 homeruns but his stumbling fielding and his bumbling baserunning just epitomized the Mets and for some reason endeared him to adoring fans. Dubbed Marvelous Marv, fans wore VRAM (Marv spelled backwards) tee shirts. They chanted “Cranberry, Strawberry, we love Throneberry.” A fan club was formed and it was gleefully pointed out that Marv’s initials were M.E.T. Marv made 17 errors with a dismal fielding percentage. I was at the game on June 17 when Marv hit a triple and was called out for not touching first base. Stengel stormed out of the dugout to argue the call, but was stopped dead in his tracks by Umpire Dusty Boggs: “Don’t even bother Case. He didn’t touch second either.”

I was not happy with all the losing, but I knew the Mets could turn it around. The high point of the season came in mid-May when the Mets took three out of four from the Braves in Milwaukee, including a doubleheader win. The Mets were primed for my own little revenge tour with thirteen straight games coming up against the Dodgers and the Giants, the other team that had abandoned New York. The Mets lost all thirteen. 

By the end of the season, the Mets had compiled a record of 40-120, the worst team in modern major league history. That dubious record stood for sixty-two years until last season when the just as inept but not quite as loveable Chicago White Sox finished at 41-121.  The Mets starting pitchers respectively lost 24, 20, 19, and 17 games. They lost the season series against every team except the Cubs, who they split with. Shamefully, they were 3-13 against their expansion cousins, the Colt 45s, and finished 24 games behind Houston. Don’t think that Canadians were exempt from this disaster.  Two Mets relief pitchers were Canadian—Ray Daviault from Montreal, and Ken Mackenzie from Gore Bay, Ontario, but Canadians should be proud that Ken finished at 5-4, the only pitcher on the Mets to have a winning record.  The team batting average was the worst in baseball as was the pitching earned run average. The Mets also made the most errors of any team, pulling off the triple crown of futility. The fielding was absolutely atrocious.  The outfield was really old and slow. (The three opening day outfielders had 21 kids between them.) The Mets could not seem to figure out how to stop the steal of home with runners on first and third. The runner from first would take off, the Mets catcher would throw to the infielder, the runner from third would easily beat the throw home and the runner from first would either go back to first or cruise into second. In the event that the runner got into a rundown, he had nothing to worry about because the Mets would invariably botch the play.

Somehow, this team managed to endear itself to the fan base, which had been dubbed the “new breed.” Casey was a master showman; the TV/radio announcing team of Bob Murphy, Lindsay Nelson, and Ralph Kiner was first rate. An adorable live dog mascot named Homer, tried pulling a little wagon around the bases after a homerun, but that was soon abandoned. Fans brought signs to the stadium and a popular Banner Day was created. A snappy theme song called “Meet the Mets” caught on. A high school friend and I translated the song to very poor Spanish and we performed it in Spanish class on Senior Day (“Encontre a los Mets”).  A utility player named Rod Kanehl, became a good luck charm, always seeming to score a run when brought in as a pinch runner. Casey had insisted that he be on the team because he had once seen him catch a fly ball at full speed and jump over the fence. Little did Kanehl know, but he was destined to become my computer password for many years. There were two pitchers on the team named Bob Miller. Luckily for Casey, who sometimes fell asleep on the bench and could often not differentiate between his players, one was a righty and one a lefty. Don Zimmer, the former Dodger and opening day third baseman busted out with two hits after going 0 for 30 and Casey said “we gotta trade him when he’s still hot” and they did to the Cincinnati Reds. It was all very innocent and great fun.

Even in losses, there always seemed to be something quirky going on. I was at the Polo Grounds on May 30^th when the Dodgers returned to New York for the first time. It was a doubleheader and the announced attendance was 55,704, but there were many more than that. Every seat was filled and thousands were standing or sitting on the steps in the aisles. It seemed pretty evenly divided between Met fans and Dodger fans. Predictably, the Mets lost both games, but pulled off a triple-play that happened so suddenly, that most of the fans didn’t even realize what had occurred.

Home attendance was 922,530. It was way below the Dodgers, Giants and Yankees, but better than eight of the twenty major league teams. The Mets had gotten a foothold. In spite of all the losing, it was a joyful season because everyone was just glad to have a team again. The Mets continued their losing ways through the 1968 season, but that only made 1969 that much more special. A man walked on the moon, but more amazingly, the Miracle Mets roared from behind to overtake the Cubs, swept the Atlanta Braves in the first ever divisional playoffs, and then stunned the mighty Baltimore Orioles in one of baseball’s greatest upsets. For me, it remains the sweetest fan experience that I ever had, but that’s a story for another day.

This article is dedicated to Michael Murray. Unfortunately, I never met Michael,  but I understand how special he was to so many people, including my friend, Yael Friedman. Michael was a Montreal Expos fan so we both went through a similar trauma of losing our beloved team. I understand that Michael felt a kinship with the Mets.