Can't Anybody Here Play This Game? (10 page)

With the Mets, a different betting line was quickly sent out. Instead of odds, the handicappers drew up a run system. The Mets became, almost invariably, a 2-to-2 ½ underdog. To bet the Mets, you took 2 runs. If the Mets lost the game by only 1 run, you won your bet under this system. If you bet against the Mets, you gave 2 ½ runs. To win your bet, the Mets had to lose by at least three runs.

This system went over big with a girl who started out the year with blond hair and a big good-looking guy from the garment center who took her to Hialeah for a couple of weeks in February. By the end of June she had red hair, a boy friend who never wears a tie, and a reputation among most bookmakers of being the smartest bettor of Mets games in New York. Her gambling allowed her to buy a sizable piece of a going beauty parlor in Brooklyn. It was a big year.

“Muh-ther,” she was saying one night. “How did anybody ever live without this team?”

She was standing at the bar of the nicest place her new boy friend had taken her to thus far in their romance. The place was in Brooklyn and it was smoky and small. Its patrons had made history some months before when a double gangland killing occurred on the dance floor during a crowded Saturday night. When the police arrived, every one of the 150 patrons insisted he had seen nothing. The saxophonist was most vehement. He had been so close to one of the .38s that he had powder burns on one cuff. But he demanded of a detective:

“What shooting?”

Now, on this night in late June, the redhead, her hair in a big pony-tail, was with her man on the tiny dance floor of the joint. They made a striking couple. In spike-heeled shoes, she was about a head and a half taller than her guy. He clutched her with his left hand. He kept his other hand flat against his right ear. If you moved close enough, you could see Dave didn't have an earache. He was holding a leather-covered transistor radio to his ear.

“He is always working, that guy,” one of the bartenders said. “He is listening to the Mets game. He picks the games, she bets.”

The band was playing something called “Where Are You?” but on the dance floor Lindsey Nelson, the Mets' broadcaster, was putting something important into the boy friend's right ear. He stopped, let go of his girl, and plugged a finger into his left ear so he wouldn't hear the music. Then he took the finger out of his ear and started dancing again.

“We're in the game again,” he said. “Two runs in. We got a chance to win out.”

“This is the greatest,” the redhead said dreamily.

The music ended, and they came back to the bar. He kept the radio pressed to his ear. The redhead swallowed Scotch.

“The Mets are in Houston,” she said. “They're down five runs a few minutes ago. Now they got it to three. I took two runs. If they get us two more runs, it's Christmas.

“You ought to hear the bookmakers. Every time I call, I say, ‘Hello, mother, give me the nickel line on the Mets.' This fellow who deals to me, he says, ‘Why don't you go someplace else?'

“You know what I tell him? I tell him, ‘I'm going to have you driving a taxicab by August.'”

In the next twenty minutes the Mets got another run in the eighth, then a big one in the ninth. And the boy friend slapped the bar. “We're in,” he said. “We cash a bet.”

“That's the greatest comeback of my time,” she said. “That team fights. Imagine. They lose the game by only one run.

“Baby, you're beautiful,” she told her guy.

He needed a shave.

By September the redhead had seven subscriptions to
True Confessions
magazine for her beauty parlor, and things were humming.

“I'm here to stay,” she said. The subscriptions are for three years. I want to name my joint ‘Mets' Hairdressers' but I don't think any of the customers would understand.

“Dopes. They spend their time reading about Elizabeth Taylor. Give me the
Sporting News
and the line on the Mets. That's all I want out of life, mother.”

T
HE SECOND HALF OF
the season for the New York Mets was, generally speaking, a catastrophe. The second half of the season consisted of the months of July, August, and September, although some of the more responsible players on the team insisted it never really happened. Whatever it was, it left an indelible impression on many of those connected with the club.

In Rochester, New York, during the winter, Casey Stengel sat in the lobby of the Sheraton Hotel and, in the middle of one of his highly specialized lobby seminars, he stopped and shook his head.

“Everybody here keeps saying how good I'm looking,” he said. “Well, maybe I do. But they should see me inside. I look terrible inside.”

And in Tilden, Nebraska, one afternoon, Richie Ashburn called a Philadelphia advertising agency to tell them that he would certainly like to retire from baseball and take their offer to announce the Philadelphia Phillies games.

“Weren't you making more with the Mets?” he was asked.

“Yes, quite a bit more.”

“Why did you quit, then?”

“Well,” he said.

He meant he was taking a big cut in pay for the privilege of not having to go through another year with the Mets.

From a non-Met viewpoint, however, the last part of the 1962 season was something else. It was not rough. It was, instead, the finest thing to happen to the sport of baseball since Abe Attell helped save the game by deciding that, seeing as long as it made people so mad, he was not going to become involved with anyone who was trying to fix World Series games.

You see, in the last fifteen years baseball has needed help. This is becoming a tired, predictable game. It is overexposed on television. It is played too slowly to maintain a hold on this fast-moving era. And, probably worst of all, it has become so commercialized, and the people in it loaded with so many gimmicks, that it all reminds you of the front window of a cheap department store. For money, a baseball player will go to the end of the world to embarrass himself. 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. Or he will make a toy-company commercial that should be jammed by the FCC. Or, most sickening of all, for a check of $500 or so he will show up at any dinner of any organization this side of the Murder, Inc., Old Timers Association and sign autographs for the kids, mutter some sort of speech, then disappear out the side door with the waitress from the cocktail lounge. All of it is demeaning at best, and in the long run harmful to the game. Other athletes from other sports go in for this too, and they have the same quick-buck air about them, but since baseball is the biggest sport it is the one in which this sort of thing is most prevalent. And most sickening. The idea of a ballplayer taking money to go out and promote his own business is, at best, disgraceful.

And, in the playing of the game itself, baseball acts as if we are still in a depression and nobody has any place to go. There is the manager's strategy. With nominal maneuvering, a major-league manager can halt a game for ten minutes while changing pitchers. Baseball still thinks this is 1934. Only this is 1963 and people are working and have money and move around and spend it. The entire character of leisure time has changed drastically. Since 1945 everything has changed with it except baseball, and that is baseball's trouble right now.

But last season the New York Mets came to the rescue. Dressed in their striped uniforms, with blue lettering and orange piping, they put fun into life. It was hell to play for them, but for anybody who watched them it was great. This was what you wanted out of life. This was Bert Lahr in
The Wizard of Oz
or the Marx Brothers in
Room Service.
The Mets tried to play baseball, and the players trying to do it were serious. But the whole thing came out as great comedy, and it was the tonic the sport needed. People did not follow the Mets. They loved the Mets.

Absolutely anything the Mets did last season, from a viewer's position, was great. They were great during the season. And even in the long winter layoff they didn't let anybody down. In January, for example, the Mets called up their three best pitchers from the minor leagues. They were Larry Bearnath, who won 2 and lost 13 at Syracuse; Tom Belcher, 1-12 at Syracuse; and Grover Powell, who was 4-12 between Syracuse and the Auburn, New York, club. The three had a combined record of thirty-seven losses and only seven wins.

“I saw all their old pitchers,” cab driver Martin Goldstein, hack license 437-265, assured us one afternoon. “But I can't wait to see Stengel bring one of these new ones out of the bullpen.”

It will be hard to top the final half of last season, however. All of it went along the lines of the night game the Mets played against the Reds at Crosley Field on August 10, although dates are of no consequence here because things were substantially the same each day or night the team took the field.

In the third inning of this particular contest, Frank Robinson of the Reds led off with a double down the left-field line off Al Jackson, the Mets' pitcher. Wally Post then grounded out, Robinson holding second. Robinson then stole third. The batter, Don Pavletich, walked. There was now one out, men on first and third. The Mets' infield came up a step or so. The hope was for a sharply hit ground ball which could be converted into a double play or a play at home plate to prevent the run from scoring.

Jackson pitched to Hank Foiles, the Reds' catcher. Pitched beautifully, too. Al's curve was coming in low, the kind of pitch that winds up being hit on the ground. Which is exactly what Foiles did. He hit a sharp one-hopper toward first. Throneberry made a great stop. Then he straightened up and looked around. He found that the ball had been hit so sharply that it gave him all the time he needed to make an inning-ending double play any way he wanted.

Here was Pavletich running toward second. He wasn't halfway there. Throneberry could throw to second for one out, then take the return throw and get the batter. That would be easy. Foiles was still scrambling away from the batter's box. There was another play Marv could make too. He could step on first and then throw to second. Only then they would have to tag Pavletich out at second. That could be dangerous, for Robinson might score in the meantime. But you still had plenty of time. When you have time you rarely make errors. Marvin stood alongside first base, the ball firmly held in his glove, and thought it out. Then he made his decision.

He threw to the plate. His throw arrived just after Robinson slid across with a run.

There were now runners on first and second with one out. Pitcher Jackson seemed to sway a little on the mound. Then he threw four balls to Vada Pinson, and that loaded the bases.

Don Blasingame stepped in to hit. By now, Jackson had talked himself into trying again. He stretched, then came in with that good low curve once more. Blasingame slapped a hard ground ball straight at Rod Kanehl at second base. It was a certain double-play ball. Kanehl, in his exuberance, neglected to field the ball. It kicked off his leg, and another run scored. The bases were still loaded.

Jackson now has forced the Reds to hit into two certain double plays. For his efforts, he has two runs against him on the scoreboard, still only one man out, the bases loaded, and a wonderful little touch of Southern vernacular dripping from his lips.

Jim Maloney, the Cincinnati pitcher, stepped in. The count ran to three and two on him. Then, for some reason, the Cincinnati baserunners broke with the pitch. With two out, this is normal. But there was only one out here, and there is a slight suspicion somebody on the Reds was so mixed up by now he thought there were two out and he had the runners going. At any rate, Jackson came right back with that low curve, and Maloney went for it and here came another grounder straight at Kanehl. This time Rod wasn't going to make any mistakes. He kept his head down, scooped up the ball, and flipped it to second with the same motion. It was a fine move for starting a double play. Except Blasingame, running from first with the pitch, was now standing on second. He was safe. So was everybody else. During the maneuvering, the third Red run of the inning came across.

Jackson held out his glove for the ball, scuffed the dirt, then looked down for the sign so he could pitch to the next hitter. Don't ever say Al Jackson is not a well-trained pitcher. People come out of West Point and go on to become big generals and they don't have this kind of discipline. And when Leo Cardenas got in to hit, Jackson came right back with that curve ball and he got Cardenas to go for it and hit into the dirt.

The ball went right at Charley Neal at shortstop. The temptation was to go for the inning-ending double play, short-to-second-to-first. It looked easy. But you were not going to get Charley Neal into a sucker game like this. No, sir. Charley straightened up and fired the ball to first base to get one out. The fourth run of the inning came across.

When this happened, Richie Ashburn, out in right field, turned around and looked up at one of the light towers. In his time Ashburn had seen many things. Granny Hamner in a clutch: he always moved the runner up a base. Joe DiMaggio going after a fly ball: he covered half an outfield and never seemed to do anything hard enough to work up a sweat. Jackie Robinson bothering a pitcher: he would brazen the guy into a mistake. He had, Richie felt, seen just about everything. Except this.

“I don't know what's going on, but I know I've never seen it before,” Ashburn mumbled.

Then he turned around and watched as Jackson finally got the third out and headed for the bench with the all-time record for making batters hit into consecutive double plays that did not work. As he got to the dugout, Stengel thought kind things about him.

“If I let this man go out there again, he may never be the same,” Casey said. He ordered Ray Daviault to come in and pitch the fourth inning. This he neglected to tell Jackson. So when the Mets made their third out Al picked up his glove and went out to the mound. He was in the middle of a warm-up pitch when the public-address announcer proclaimed, “Now pitching for New York, Number 35, Ray Daviault.”