A TALE OF THREE CITIES: NEW YORK, L.A. AND SAN FRANCISCO IN OCTOBER OF ‘62 (41 page)

Stengel celebrated his 73
^rd
birthday in a
private party room at the Chase Hotel in St. Louis. He ordered a
Manhattan.

“I’ve seen these do a lot of things to people,” he
said of the Manhattan. He smoked cigarettes and let his hair down,
so to speak, with Jimmy Breslin. He spoke with trepidation of the
Mets’ initial visit to the brand new Dodger Stadium. “We’re going
into Los Angeles the first time, and, well, I don’t want to go in
there to see that big new ballpark in front of all them people and
have to see the other fellas running around those bases the way
they figured to on my own pitchers and my catchers, too.
Wills and those fellows, they start running in
circles and they don’t stop and so forth and it could be
embarrassing, which I don’t want to be.

“Well, we have Canzoneri Cannizzaro> at Syracuse, and he catches good and throws real
good and he should be able to stop them. I don’t want to be
embarrassed. So we bring him and he is going to throw out these
runners.

“We come in there and you never seen anything like
it in your life. I find I got a defensive catcher, only he can’t
catch the ball. The pitcher throws. Wild pitch. Throws again.
Passed ball. Throws again. Oops! The ball drops out of the glove.
And all the time I am dizzy on account of these runners running
around in circles on me and so forth.

“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?’ ”

Hours later, “the bartender was falling asleep and
the only sound in the hotel was the whine of the vacuum cleaner in
the lobby,” wrote Breslin. “Stengel banged his empty glass on the
red-tiled bar top and then walked out of the room.”

Casey walked to the lobby, stopping to light a
smoke

“I’m shell-shocked,” he told the guy working the
vacuum cleaner. “I’m not used to gettin’ any of these shocks at
all, and now they come every three innings. How do you like
that.”

No answer.

“This is a disaster,” he continued. “Do you know who
my player of the year is? My player of the year is Choo Choo
Coleman, and I have him for only two days. He runs very good.”

“This, then, is the way the first year of the New
York Mets went,” wrote Breslin, an old-time scribe whose clipped
style was reminiscent of Ring Lardner (and Mark Twain before that),
in
Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?
“It was a team that
featured 23-game losers, an opening day outfield that held the
all-time Major League record for fathering children <19; “You
can look it up,” as Casey would say>, a defensive catcher who
couldn’t catch, and an overall 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. Brooklyn fans, observed
Garry Schumacher, once a great baseball writer and now part of the
San Francisco Giants management, never would have appreciated Joe
DiMaggio on their club.

“ ‘
Too perfect,’ said
Garry.”

Bill Veeck announced that the 1962 Mets were
“without a doubt the worst team in the history of baseball,”
claiming that he spoke with authority since his St. Louis Browns
were the previous “title holders.”

Technically, statistically, and by the record, he
was right, but the ’62 Mets were not the worst. Veeck’s Browns had
no name players, nobody worth remembering. The Mets had former big
names like Ashburn, Hodges, Craig, Gene Woodling and Frank Thomas.
Over the hill, yes; but there is something not quite right about
saying a team with so many one-time stars was the worst ever
assembled. Sometimes, not so bad. Ashburn batted .306; Thomas hit
34 homers and drove in 94 runs. Then again, sometimes they sure
looked terrible. In June, Sandy Koufax struck out the first three
Mets on nine pitches, finished with 13 Ks, and a 5-0 no-hit
win.

Certainly no team nearly that bad has been analyzed
and talked about so much. Being in New York was part of that. Casey
Stengel was part of it. But it went beyond these obvious factors.
Sportswriter Leonard Koppett said it was part of a larger social
revolution, embodied by the new, youthful President John F.
Kennedy; the young taking over from the old.

“The times they are a-changin’,” sang Bob Dylan.

The players poked fun at each other. There was much
self-deprecation in the Mets’ clubhouse. When Ashburn won the team
MVP award, he said, “Most Valuable on the worst team ever? Just how
do they mean that?”

He made fun of Throneberry, but the big ol’ country
boy took it in stride. The fans picked up on their humble, comical
ways and ate it up. Strange, confusing things happened to that team
that somehow did not happen to others. They had two pitchers named
Bob Miller: Robert G. Miller, left-handed and Robert L. Miller,
right-handed. Robert L. made 21 starts with an 0-12 record and was
preferred among the two.

One day Stengel called to the bullpen.

“Get Nelson ready,” he told the bullpen coach.

“Who?” was the reply.

“Nelson,” Stengel said. “Get him up.”

The bullpen coach looked around. There was no
Nelson. Nelson was broadcaster Lindsey Nelson. But Robert L. Miller
knew that when Casey called for Nelson, he meant him, so he warmed
up and went in the game. Later the Miller’s appeared on the TV quiz
show
To Tell the Truth
. When the MC called, “Will the real
Bob Miller please stand up?” both did so to confused delight.

Stengel would occasionally call on some past star of
the Yankees or Giants to go into the game. He confused Jim Marshall
with John Blanchard, a Yankee reliable of the 1950s. In a strange
twist of coincidence, when his protégé, USC’s Rod Dedeaux (who
played for Casey at Brooklyn) got old (sometimes showing up late
for games after attending a cocktail party), he reportedly would
call out, “Lynn, get your gun,” or “Seaver, get loose.” These were
references to past Trojans like Fred Lynn or Tom Seaver who had
graduated 10 or 15 years earlier.

Banners and placards made their appearance at the
Polo Grounds, possibly for the first time. Certainly, the existence
of this kind of fan signage began a trend. “Marv.” “Marvelous
Marv.” “Cranberry Strawberry We Love Throneberry.” “MARV!” “VRAM!”
(“Marv” spelled backwards). The Mets responded with a team sign of
their own: “To the Met Fans – We Love You Too.”

Stengel called it all “Amazin’.” “Come out and see
my ‘Amazin’ Mets,’ ” he said in an open invite to the public. “I
been in this game a hundred years but I see new ways to lose I
never knew existed before.”

Stengel got into a taxi with several young writers
and inquired whether they were ballplayers. They said they were
not.

“No, and neither are my players,” said Stengel.

Of the Northwestern engineer Jay Hook, Stengel said,
“I got the smartest pitcher in the world until he goes to the
mound.”

When Yale’s Ken MacKenzie entered a game Stengel
advised, “Now just make believe you’re pitching against
Harvard.”

Throneberry was “Thornberry.” Casey never came close
to Cannizzaro’s proper pronunciation. Gus Bell was an established
player but Casey never got a handle on who he was.

“And in left field, in left field we have a splendid
man, and he knows how to do it,” Stengel said. “He’s been around
and he swings the bat there in left field and he knows what to do.
He’s got a big family leaguer Buddy Bell> and he wants to provide for them, and he’s a
fine outstanding player, the fella in left field. You can be sure
he’ll be ready when the bell rings – and that’s his name,
Bell!”

“About this Cho Choo Coleman,” Casey told Dan Daniel
of
The Sporting News.
“Is he a catcher or an outfielder? . .
. Watch this carefully."

First baseman Ed Kranepool, a native of nearby
Yonkers, spent most of 1962 in the minor leagues but got called up
and hit .167 in his brief stint. He was only 17 years old.

Infielder “Hot Rod” Kanehl, a one-time Yankee
prospect, hit .248. Married with four kids, he was one of those
“record breaking” fathers of multiple kids, supposedly something
the ’62 Mets did better than anything.

“He can’t field,” George Weiss told Casey.

“But he can run the bases,” Stengel replied.

“But Weiss always wanted to get rid of me, and now he
couldn’t because I had become a hero in New York,” said Kanehl.
“All of New York was asking, ‘Who is this guy?’ and the front page
of the
Daily News
had a picture of Stengel pulling me out of
a hat like a rabbit.”

Kanehl was one of those strange hybrids of baseball;
a Yankee farmhand who never made it there, but became a household
name, still fondly remembered, because he played for the Mets. It
did not last long. A few years later he was playing for the Wichita
Dreamliners against USC’s Tom Seaver, then pitching for the Alaska
Goldpanners.

“Even though we lost, we were still upbeat,” said
Kanehl. “And so was Casey, who was leading the parade down
Broadway. A lot of people identified with the Mets – underdog
types, not losers – quality people who weren’t quite getting it
together.

“In May we beat Cincinnati, and we beat the Braves
at home, we were playing well, but then we went on the road and
lost 17 games in a row. We sure could dream up ways to lose.”

When the Mets were mathematically eliminated from the
National League pennant the first week of August, Casey called a
meeting.

“You guys can relax now,” he told them.

The season ended, appropriately enough, with a
triple-play and a worst-ever 40-120 record. More than 900,000 fans
attended Mets games at the Polo Grounds, a significant improvement
over the attendance of the New York Giants, a team featuring such
stalwarts as Willie Mays, playing at the same park in their last
year (1957).

“It’s been a helluva year," Casey remarked.

There's no business like show business

"If you build it, they will come."

- "The Voice,"
Field of Dreams

Indeed, Walter O'Malley did build Dodger Stadium, and
Hollywood sure did come a-callin'. Sports and Hollywood were
already a natural fit in Los Angeles. Marion Morrison, a football
player for coach Howard Jones at the University of Southern
California, quit the Trojans when he injured his shoulder surfing
in Newport Beach and went to work for Fox Studios. He became a big
star using the name John "Duke" Wayne. USC built their program in
large measure on the recruiting advantages of nearby Hollywood,
which was an advantage unavailable to the likes of Iowa or
Alabama.

According to a late 1990s edition of
Los
Angeles
magazine, Duke arranged for the USC team to satisfy the
insatiable sexual appetites of silent screen "it girl" Clara Bow on
Saturday night orgies at her Hollywood Hills mansion. A search of
the Internet, however, reveals that while this rumor has lived for
decades, it is false; an "urban legend" if you will.

Wayne did arrange for USC players to be used for the
football scenes in a movie about the Naval Academy called
Salute
. His college teammate, Ward Bond, was his film
sidekick in many movies, including
The Quiet Man
. Bond was
often the friendly priest or rival for the affections of a lady who
would get in knock down, drag out fisticuffs with Wayne and then,
when it was over, share a shot of whiskey with him.

UCLA quarterback Bob Waterfield became a star with
the Los Angeles Rams, but was never a bigger name than his
girlfriend, the busty actress Jane Russell, who starred in the
infamous close-up-on-her-breasts shot in Howard Hughes's
The
Outlaw
.

But the cross-pollination of film and sports never
reached greater heights than when the Dodgers arrived, reaching its
crescendo in 1962, the year Dodger Stadium was unveiled to
bravura
reviews.

Hollywood and the entertainment industry were on the
verge of major change in 1962. The studio system was still in
place, but it was only a few years before Gulf + Western would
nearly shut the doors at Paramount; United Artists would begin a
slide towards dissolution; and the1960s generation would shun
old-style movie fare in favor of edgier stuff.

The post-modern architecture of the 1950s, which
manifested itself in the ranch 'n' kitsch style embodied by homes
in the Hollywood Hills, began to find its way into art forms.
Jackson Pollack's paintings led to Andy Warhol's new "pop art'
exhibition in New York. Out of Greenwich Village, the folk-revival
movement offered
The Free-Wheelin' Bob Dylan
. On Broadway,
audiences shocked to the acid-tongued
Who's Afraid of Virginia
Woolf
. Vladimir Nabokov's
Lolita
, which dared to explore
forbidden love between a middle-aged man and a teenage
not-yet-at-the-age-of-consent girl, was made into a controversial
film by director Stanley Kubrick, starring James Mason and Shelley
Winters.
To Kill a Mockingbird
(Gregory Peck), developed
from the Harper Lee novel, dared the South to change its racist
ways.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
by Ken Kesey
was published, as was the stimulating
Sex and the Single
Girl
by
Cosmopolitan
editor Helen Gurley Brown.
Traditional fare still had its place, in the form of
How the
West Was Won
, a standard Western of epic proportions, with a
stirring sound track.

ABC debuted a color cartoon,
The Jetsons
.
Perry Mason
,
Andy Griffith
and
Candid Camera
were all still black-and-white. Other popular programs included
Wagon Train
,
Bonanza
,
Gunsmoke
,
Rawhide
,
Lawman
,
Maverick
,
The
Rifleman
,
Danny Thomas
,
My Three Sons
,
Dennis
the Menace
and
Dick Van Dyke
.