Can't Anybody Here Play This Game? (14 page)

But the little kid stayed in the batter's box, and finally the manager of the Floral Park team complained to Nick Miranda, who managed the team with the kid on it.

“A joke is a joke,” he said. “But we're passing the hat for good money here. Let's not chase this crowd. Put a ballplayer in there.”

“Don't you worry about this kid,” Miranda said. “You just tell your third baseman look out he don't get killed.”

So they pitched to this little kid. He reached up over his head for one and slammed it down the left-field line and he went into second standing up. It was the last time anybody questioned what Phil Rizzuto could do on a baseball field.

There were many things like this. Then television turned everything upside down. It produced the age of the money-hungry in sports and a whole way of life went out. People stopped going to events. Only the big games made it. Everything else died. And pretty soon normal big money was not enough for a fellow like O'Malley. He wanted more. Take a cab ride through Brooklyn and turn off Eastern Parkway at Bedford Avenue and go down the hill four blocks. Then you see what time and money-hungry people did to a way of life.

The big silver letters alongside the entrance to the apartment building said: 1700 BEDFORD AVENUE. The letters were stuck onto the red brick of the building. It is twenty-two stories high. Under the window of each apartment is a neat plaque saying that the place has been air-conditioned by General Electric.

On the sidewalk, two women stand and talk.

“I don't like that supermarket,” one, in a gray coat, was saying.

“You know, you're right. I feel kind of uncomfortable in the place myself,” her friend, who had blond hair and wore a kerchief, said.

“I know,” the gray coat said. “I go in this place and they don't even have Purina Dog Chow. What kind of a supermarket is that?”

It was enough to make you sick. Once this was a national institution. Mention Ebbets Field and everybody in the audience would laugh. Danny Kaye did it for years. It was a standard with Fred Allen. Now it is just another address for a post office. It is twenty-two stories of apartments, and all of them are the same, and all of the people in them get to be the same after a while. Once we had Ebbets Field and a way of life. People went to games and drank beer and argued. When the Giants played the Dodgers it was nerve-racking. How a grown adult could sit in a seat and say, from the bottom of his heart, that he absolutely hated Duke Snider, whom he never met, is something for analysts. But that's what Giant fans used to do. Brooklyn fans hated right back. It was wonderful. Then we turned everything over to the moneychangers, and we wind up with twenty-two stories of red brick and plate glass and plaques by GE.

This is why the New York Mets come out as something more than a baseball team as far as an awful lot of people are concerned. The Mets are a part of life. You can start keeping track of time with them. They are not going to move for money. The owner's name is Payson, not O'Malley, and Payson stays with her own.

You ought to take a look at this picture of Hodges. It will remind you of all the years we lost because of these hustlers who came into the business. Only don't talk to Hodges about the years. He doesn't want to know anything about it.

“All I know,” he was saying later this day, “is that I'm old. Nobody has to tell me that. I came into baseball yesterday. Today they throw the fast ball at me and you'd be surprised how fast it comes on top of me. A lot faster than it ever did.”

Hodges was wearing an olive-drab sweater and gray slacks. He was sitting at the restaurant counter of the huge bowling establishment he owns in Brooklyn.

“Once,” he was saying, “I'd be on first base and look out and we'd have Pee Wee [Reese] at short, Billy [Cox] at third, and Jackie [Robinson] at second. What an infield to look at. The games were great. No matter how far behind we fell, you knew you were never out of it. We had seven guys who could hit home runs and put us right back in it.

“Last year with the Mets was strange. The Polo Grounds always was the enemy park. I felt strange in it. I guess it sounds funny to you. We're supposed to be playing this game for money. This ‘enemy park' business sounds like something out of high school. But if you played for the Dodgers against the Giants, then the Polo Grounds will be the enemy park forever. Those games, they came down to more than a matter of money. I mean it. So it was strange to be in the Polo Grounds.”

He got up from his coffee and walked across to see a repairman who was in to look at the dishwasher.

The record books say Hodges is the all-time right-handed home-run hitter in the National League. Around the dugouts he was always known as the first baseman with the fastest feet alive. A lot of times Hodges would be well off the bag when he took the throw from an infielder, but the umpire would always blink and call an automatic out. That would do it. Nobody ever called Hodges for not touching the bag, and in the confusion he became known as one of the great fielding first basemen of all time. Hodges had his own ideas about this, however.

“I'm going to do a story about my career when I retire,” he said in the Brooklyn dressing room one day.

“What are you going to call it?” Pee Wee Reese asked him.

“‘I Never Touched First Base.'”

Hodges came back and sat down at the counter. He talked about all the trouble he had over his career, trying to hit outside pitches.

“I just never could see too well when they threw an outside curve that broke away from me,” he was saying. “It was a flaw I had. Everybody knew it. But it was up to the pitcher to put the ball out there, and that's not as easy as it sounds. So I had a fairly successful career.”

Then he got up and walked over to the information desk. He limped a little. He'll probably be limping for a long time. But that's all right. As long as he can get back into a uniform and be around, even as a coach, he'll be familiar. I match him up with the day I made up my mind what kind of a job I wanted. He is the only one in the world I can do it with. Hell, I need the guy.

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. The National League, to a lot of people around New York, is something hard to describe, but important. Like the chip in the table in the living room when you were growing up. It was always there. Sometimes you can buy ten new tables over a lifetime. But the one with the chip is the one that would make you feel the best. People are that way about the National League. They are more at home looking at the box score of a game between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Philadelphia Phillies than they ever could be going over one between the Cleveland Indians and the Detroit Tigers. If they came out of Cleveland it would be different. But they are from New York, and this is National League. Now we have the Mets, and that's the way it should be. We're with familiar things again.

The Mets lose an awful lot?

Listen, mister. Think a little bit.

When was the last time you won anything out of life?

Mets' Records, 1962

During last season the Mets, collectively and individually, set a number of records, some of them quite bizarre. We offer here a collection of them which, if it is not complete, is at least impressive.

Major League Records Broken

Most games lost in a season—120

Most home runs allowed in a season—192

Major League Records Tied

Most pinch-hitters struck out by one pitcher in one game—Galen Cisco, 4

Most home runs by pinch-hitters in one inning—2

Most home runs by one batter in three consecutive games—Frank Thomas, 6

Most assists by outfielder in one inning—Gus Bell, 2

Batter hit most times by pitcher in one inning—Frank Thomas, 2

National League Records Broken

Most home runs by first baseman in lifetime—Gil Hodges, 355

Most home runs by right-handed batter in lifetime—Gil Hodges, 355

Most wild pitches by staff in season—71

National League Records Tied

Most strike-outs by team in two consecutive games—26

Most double plays hit into in one game—6

Most consecutive losses at start of season—9

League Leaders in 1962

Worst earned-run average for pitching staff—5.04

Most earned runs scored against individual pitcher—Jay Hook, 137

Most earned runs given up by pitching staff—801

Most total runs given up by team—948

Most hits given up by pitching staff—577

Most batters hit by pitching staff—52

Most errors committed by team—210

Near Misses and Other Oddments

Craig Anderson lost 16 games in a row. His streak was still intact when the 1963 season opened, so he still had a crack at the record of 18 consecutive losses.

R. L. Miller had a record of 0-12 going into the next to last day of the season. This would have tied a major-league record. Miller then blew his chance at immortality by beating the Cubs.

The Mets were the first team since the 1936 Phillies to have two 20-game losers—Al Jackson and Roger Craig.

The Mets were the only team in major-league history ever to have two players with identical first and last names, Bob Miller and Bob Miller.

Attendance

HIGHEST HOME ATTENDANCE BY LAST-PLACE CLUB—922,530

Jimmy Breslin (b. 1928) is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who has, for more than fifty years, been among the most prominent columnists in the United States. Known for his straightforward reporting style that relates major news to the common man, Breslin has published more than a dozen books of fiction and nonfiction, in addition to writing columns for newspapers such as the
New York Daily News
and
Newsday
.

Born in Queens, New York, Breslin began his long newsroom career in the 1940s, lying about his age to get a job as a copyboy at the
Long Island Press
. He got his first column in 1963, at the
New York Herald Tribune
, where he won national attention by covering John F. Kennedy's assassination from the emergency room in the Dallas Hospital and, later, from the point of view of the President's gravedigger at Arlington Cemetery. He also provided significant coverage of the civil rights turmoil raging in the South, and was an early opponent of the Vietnam War.

In 1969, Breslin ran for city council president on Norman Mailer's mayoral ticket. The two campaigned on a platform arguing for statehood for New York City and for banning private cars in Manhattan, among other issues. Breslin placed fifth in the primary election, garnering eleven percent of the vote. He later quipped that he was “
mortified to have taken part in a process that required bars to be closed,” referring to a law in place at the time that prohibited the sale of liquor on election days.

In the early 1970s, Breslin retired from newspaper journalism to write books, beginning with
The Gang Who Couldn't Shoot Straight
(1970), a national bestseller that was adapted into a 1971 film starring Robert De Niro and Jerry Orbach. By this time Breslin had also published
Sunny Jim
(1962), about legendary racehorse trainer Jim Fitzsimmons, and
Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?
(1963), about the disastrous first season of the New York Mets baseball team. He also wrote
How the Good Guys Finally Won
(1976), about the Watergate Scandal and Nixon's subsequent impeachment, a prevalent topic for him in the early 1970s.

Breslin returned to column-writing later in the decade, taking jobs first at the
New York Daily News
, then at
Newsday
. As always, he covered the city by focusing on ordinary people as well as larger-than-life personalities. His intimate knowledge of cops, Mafia dons, and petty thieves provided fodder for his columns. In the late 1970s, his profile was so high that Son of Sam killer David Berkowitz sent him letters, to boast about and publicize his crimes.

Known for being one of the best-informed journalists in the city, Breslin's years of insightful reporting won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1986, awarded for “columns which consistently champion ordinary citizens.” Among the work cited when he received the Pulitzer were his early columns on the victims of AIDS and his expos
é
on the stun-gun torture of a suspected drug dealer by police in Queens. Although he stopped writing his weekly column for
Newsday
in 2004, Breslin has continued writing books, having produced nearly two dozen to date. These include collections of his best columns titled
The World of Jimmy Breslin
(1969) and
The World According to Jimmy Breslin
(1988). He lives in Manhattan and continues to write.