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    Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?: The Improbable Saga of the New York Mets' First Year
    Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?: The Improbable Saga of the New York Mets' First Year
    Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?: The Improbable Saga of the New York Mets' First Year
    Ebook154 pages2 hours

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

    By Jimmy Breslin

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    A “hilarious” look back at the worst baseball team in history—the 1962 Mets—by the New York Times–bestselling author (Newark Star-Ledger).
      Five years after the Dodgers and Giants fled New York for California, the city’s National League fans were offered salvation in the shape of the New York Mets: an expansion team who, in the spring of 1962, attempted to play something resembling the sport of baseball.  Helmed by the sagacious Casey Stengel and staffed by the league’s detritus, the new Mets played 162 games and lost 120 of them, making them statistically the worst team in the sport’s modern history. It’s possible they were even worse than that. Starring such legends as Marvin Throneberry—a first baseman so inept that his nickname had to be “Marvelous”—the Mets lost with swashbuckling panache. In an era when the fun seemed to have gone out of sports, the Mets came to life in a blaze of delightful, awe-inspiring ineptitude. They may have been losers, but a team this awful deserves to be remembered as legends. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Jimmy Breslin including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateFeb 14, 2012
    ISBN9781453245323
    Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?: The Improbable Saga of the New York Mets' First Year
    Author

    Jimmy Breslin

    <p>Jimmy Breslin was born in Jamaica, Queens. He was awarded the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary. His bestselling and critically acclaimed books include <em>The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight</em>; <em>Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?</em>; <em>The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutiérrez</em>; several anthologies; and the memoir, <em>I Want to Thank My Brain for Remembering Me</em>. He lives on Broadway, the Big Street, in New York City.</p>

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    Reviews for Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?

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    • 4/5
      I celebrated the beginning of the 2015 baseball season by pulling this wonderful, short, book down off my shelf, where it had been waiting patiently for my attention for many years. This is Breslin's look at the very first season of the New York Mets. Those 1962 Mets set a record for futility, losing 120 of their 162 games. But in the process, they created a sensation, becoming much beloved in New York City, which had been starved for National League baseball since the Giants and Dodgers had left for California in 1957. Breslin has a breezy, Runyonesque writing style, and since the book was written and published in 1963, before the team even began their second season, it really is a time-piece. While Breslin chronicles in detail the ways in which the 1962 Mets were terrible, describing many of the bonehead plays they pulled off during the year, he also gets inside the phenomenon they created on the way to their wild popularity. Breslin makes a believable case that the team came to represent an era that New Yorkers instinctually felt was fading in the city, a time of community and fun. He decries the ways in which the coming of television has kept people inside and away from smaller events like sandlot ballgames. So we get, in this book, not just a picture of the Mets, but one writer's look at New York in the early 60s, and earlier. For example, there is the following passage that comes up as Breslin is describing Joan Payson, the Mets' first owner, about a group of fans of those departed New York Giants:"{Payson} was talking about the late Jack White, a comedian who subsisted on brandy and ran a saloon called the 18 Club. White was considered the town's number one Giant fan. It was natural that he considered Joan Payson a pal. The 18 Club is no more, and the only reminders of it are Pat Harrington, the great old comic, and Jackie Gleason, who was a third-stringer in the 18 Club lineup. When the 18 was operating, waiters would spit ice cubes at customers, and White either was loaded or was out on the floor telling unprintable stories. A linescore of the day's Giant game was always hung in front of the bandstand. But only if they won. The "No Game" sign went out after a loss. It was Mrs. Payson's idea of a helluva night joint. Every afternoon when the Giants were at home, a mob from the 18 Club, White, Harrington, bartenders, waiters, a big singer named Hazel McNulty and the inevitable group of loan sharks would sit in the upper tier in left field, open shirt collars, lean back and get the sun. . . . "Breslin also spends a lot of time quoting and describing the great and colorful Casey Stengel and providing snapshot profiles of some of those original Mets. He tries to understand what it must have been like to be a player on that team, often through the eyes of the players themselves, and tells us what it was like to root for them.
    • 4/5
      Dedicated to the 922,530 brave souls who paid their way into the Polo Grounds in 1962. Never has so much misery loved so much company.Right off the bat I knew I was in good hands with Mr. Breslin, as he recounts the historical ineptitude of the New York Mets in 1962, their first year of existence in the National League. The '62 Mets set a record for futility, losing 120 of the 160 games they played, that still stands. Of course, any expansion team is bound to struggle at first, but Breslin recounts — between one-liners — all the ways that the National League and its owners put their thumb on the scale to make sure the Mets were worse than bad. Greedy owners and collusion have always been with us in baseball, it seems.I was born and spent the first 8 years of my life on Long Island (or Lawn Guyland, as the local accent renders it), so I came by my Mets fandom honestly, even though they are two years older than I am. I can still rattle off many names of players from the era, from Ed Kranepool (my favorite) to Marv Throneberry to Gil Hodges. They were terrible, but they were ours: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. In some ways, reading Jimmy Breslin on baseball is a lot like reading Roger Angell, another favorite of mine. Both have a keen eye and a gift for description that gives you a perfect picture. But while the writing of Angell (an editor at The New Yorker) wears a bespoke three-piece suit, Breslin's writing does its best work in shirtsleeves, with the collar unbuttoned and the tail half untucked.(Congressman) Keating brought with him all the attributes of a great campaigner. An excellent right hand, for one thing. This is a man who can shake hands with a polar bear and the bear is going to let out the first yelp. (William) Shea has dark hair, blue eyes, and the square jaw of a guy who would know how to punch back. I don't know if Breslin ever wrote a sequel to Can't Anybody Here Play This Game? to detail the Mets' triumph in the 1969 World Series (just seven seasons removed from the utter haplessness he chronicles here. Imagine!). On the other hand, maybe it's better to quite while you're behind. Losers are a lot more interesting than winners.
    • 2/5
      Underwhelming. There's a good story to be told about the disastrous first year of the New York Mets -- several good stories, probably -- but this isn't it. Since Jimmy Breslin wrote this one before the 1963 season even started, he was probably still too close to the story, and the lack of perspective hurts the book. Indeed, there barely seems to be enough material here to make a book out of: the now-famous "yo la tengo" incident isn't even mentioned. A few personalities do come through, like Casey Stengel, Joan Payson, the team's first owner, and maybe even poor, cursed Marvin Thorneberry, as does Breslin's obvious love of baseball. Still, he spends a lot of time in a nostalgic mode, complaining about how big money has changed the game for the worse. Of course, this was decades before Alex Rodriguez got a contract that might have allowed him to purchase one of baseball's smaller franchises, and I sort of wonder what he makes of it now. Also, I was expecting something straightforward and newspaper-ish, but Breslin's prose, while appropriately masculine, often seems curiously padded and stagey. I picked this one up to get myself mentally prepared for baseball season, and I suppose it did its job, but I can't really recommend it. Fans of stories involving athletic calamities and lovable losers are advised to search elsewhere.
    • 4/5
      Can't Anybody Here Play This Game? by Jimmy Breslin. 124 pages, non-fiction (and proof that truth can, indeed, be stranger than fiction!)In 1962, the baseball world was taken by storm by the unique phenomenon that was the first year of New York Mets baseball. (When I say "storm," think of a DISASTER.) The 1962 Mets set a whole new standard of ineptitude for Major League Baseball. They were also, almost certainly, the most beloved losing team in MLB history -- perhaps in all of pro sports.This is Jimmy Breslin's classic baseball book, written between the 1962 and 1963 seasons, and re-issued in 1982 as part of the Penguin Sports Library (the edition I own). It is laugh-out-loud funny at times as Breslin describes (in his inimitable style) the improbable progress of games on the field (think of Keystone Cops playing baseball), and shares off-the-field comments by those close to the team and ordinary fans. A two-page appendix lists the dubious records which the Mets set in their rookie season as a team.However, this book is also thought-provoking. At times, it is clear that it was written in a totally different era. Breslin's description of the wages of those laborers constructing Shea Stadium (then in progress) suggested great expense to readers at the time -- but it is all well below minimum wage for workers today. But much of the commentary sounds familiar to today's fan, as Breslin mourns the fall of "sport" and the rise of "business" in the major leagues. It was his contention that the Mets were beloved in 1962 because of, not in spite of, their shortcomings. In an era when pro athletes were already becoming too "perfect," too "professional," these were ballplayers to whom fans could relate.One statement, however, has perhaps proved false, if my choice to re-read this book is any indication:"Someday, when George Weiss's cold, automatic methods of running an organization turn the team into just another boring winner, everything happening now probably will be forgotten."On the contrary, it was the memory of the 1962 Mets that made the world-champion 1969 Mets such a miracle for fans. And I do believe the memory still lingers on today. This book is still a fun read; it's a blast from the past, well written, with something to say that's still worthwhile.

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    Can't Anybody Here Play This Game? - Jimmy Breslin

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    Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?:

    The Improbable Saga of the New York Mets’ First Year

    by Jimmy Breslin

    Introduction by Bill Veeck

    Dedication

    To the 922,530 brave souls who paid their way into the Polo Grounds in 1962. Never has so much misery loved so much company.

    Contents

    Introduction by Bill Veeck

    1. Just Like the WPA

    2. A Bad Report to the Sponsor

    3. 119 or Bust

    4. The Nickel Line

    5. They’re Afraid To Come Out

    6. Wait Till Next Year? We’re Fine Now!

    7. Appendix I Around the Diamond with the Mets in 1962

    8. Appendix II Mets’ Records, 1962

    A Biography of Jimmy Breslin

    Acknowledgments

    Introduction

    FROM THE DIMNESS OF the past to our highly illuminated present, each troubadour, jongleur, and soothsayer, whether from the glittering court of Fernando and Isabella or the glass and mortar confines of Madison Avenue, has sung his paean of praise to record for a breathless posterity—or a quick buck— the wondrous and daring deeds of the mighty. Few are the voices raised in defense of peasant, peon, or .179 hitter, and these few are soon stilled by the pitchman’s glowing accounts of another winner.

    At long last the flood of excellence is dammed. The trend reversed. 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.

    It’s stories like his that are important. They spur the losers of the world to take heart—to rise and lose again. Without losers, where would the winners be? So who, in the final analysis, is most entitled to historic memory?

    I feel eminently qualified to write the introduction to a history of the Mets. I operated the St. Louis Browns. It was our image that was toppled from its niche in the darkest recess of Cooperstown. It was from us that the Mets, with pitiful ease, wrested the title of The Worst Club in Baseball History." It was, in truth, the Brownies who made possible the Mets’ only victory.

    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. We employed Patkin and Price, both professional clowns. They beat us again; they had Marv Throneberry. We had the help of the American League, they the wholehearted cooperation of the National, plus the assistance of the league’s expansion committee, of inestimable advantage in any drive for the bottom. Here, in clear focus, is the rock being thrown to the sinking swimmer.

    Here’s Mrs. Payson, who justifiably emerges as a lady of courage and class, if not acumen; Casey Stengel, whose reputation needs no burnishing from this writer; and New York baseball fans, who unquestionably deserved a far better shake. But the philosophy of baseball, like that of the late Texas Guinan, precludes fair shakes. In this game when they’re down you tromp ’em—good—lest they someday get up to annoy the winners. Competition is for professional football and amateurs. Furthermore, according to Walter O’Malley, it’s socialistic.

    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.

    The caliber of the Mets’ play could easily have earned for them other honors. That of Games Played Most Often in Secret, for instance. In this, as in almost all else, they failed dismally, ending the season with well over 900,000 paying customers—a tribute to Casey Stengel’s sure knowledge of public relations and the enduring fanaticism of Giant and Dodger fans. It is unrecorded how many paid more than once to see baseball—Met style. It is, however, quite possible that more different individuals saw the National League teams than wandered from Coogan’s Bluff to watch the more skillful exhibitions in Yankee Stadium.

    It is my understanding that Mrs. Payson, the club’s principal angel, has both money and real staying power. I hope so. I hope too that both of these equal Mr. Weiss’s prospective tenure in office. Now, lest the reader feel I am picking unfairly on the Met general manager, let me explain. I am. Intentionally. Mr. Weiss took the bows during a long and successful career with the Yankees. I would be the last to deprive him of equal rights with the Mets. He helped to conceive them. Why shouldn’t he nurse them along? Boy! What a picture that makes.

    Bill Veeck

    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

    1

    Just Like the WPA

    THE JOB PROGRESS SHEET in the office says the weather is clear, with a high for the day of 54 and a low of 40, which is fine to keep work moving along on this $19,100,000 stadium New York City is having built alongside its World’s Fair grounds.

    Outside, a pale sun washes what is now a latticework of steel, but which will be, hopefully by summer, a horseshoe-shaped ballpark seating 55,000 people. And crawling over the steel beams on this day is the flower of New York’s construction trades, a group of 483 tin-hatted workers.

    As you watch, you are struck with the immenseness of a construction job such as this one. Take that guy way up on the top, the one moving along a solitary white-painted beam that seems to be held up by nothing. His name is Tommy McLaughlin, and he has a wife and six kids at home. He is over five hundred feet in the air, without even a rope to hold onto. One strong gust of wind or one slippery spot on the beam, and that will do it. You’d be surprised how many times this happens on a construction job. But here he is, walking like a guy going over to play the jukebox in the neighborhood saloon. 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. At $5.25 an hour. There are steamfitters up there, too, and they come in at $5.37 an hour. Then there are electricians ($7.63), laborers ($4.94), wire lathers ($5.72), and operating engineers ($5.43). The payroll for this one day is going to run $15,585.72 by quitting time.

    This is only part of the story. The planning and political wrangling that went on earlier were incredible. Why, once they argued for two days about how many toilets the new stadium should have. Plans called for 329, but somebody insisted that he would not be associated with a stadium that did not have at least 600 johns. Finally a Parks Commissioner named Newbold Morris put his foot down when he found an architect busily penciling in a spot to hook up Unit No. 526 of American Sanitary’s best.

    What are we building, a ballpark or a place to go to the toilet? Morris said.

    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.

    The New York Mets are a team that was formed at the start of last season. They lost 120 games, which made them, on paper, the poorest team in modern baseball history. On the field they were even worse. The Mets did not lose games merely because they played badly. Never. 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. They became, in their first year of existence, almost a national symbol. Name one loyal American who can say that he does not love a team which loses 120 games in one season.

    As far as all of sport is concerned, the Mets are the most delightful occurrence in a long time. For this is the era of the businessman in sports, and it has become as dry and agonizing a time as you would want to see. In golf, for example, all they talk about is how much money Arnold Palmer makes and how he uses top corporation thoroughness in running his career. This is fine for Palmer, but who ever wanted a sports guy to be like a business executive? Once the big thing in that sport was whether the bartender would close up in time for Walter Hagen to get out to the first tee on schedule. Things have gone like this every place else in sports too. And it is even worse in baseball. Today you hear of pension funds and endorsements, and the players all seem to know what to say and what not to say, and after a while, as you go around, everything seems to come down to this kind of conversation:

    REPORTER: Did you know it was going to be a home run?

    PLAYER: Sure.

    REPORTER: How could you tell?

    PLAYER: Because I seen it go into the stands.

    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

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