Can't Anybody Here Play This Game? (3 page)

“Never mind that, you just give me the horse you like in this race,” Hornsby insisted.

Forrest relented and mentioned a horse, the name of which is forgotten. Hornsby bet $200 on him. The name of the horse is forgotten because of what happened in the race. Frisky Phil got out of the gate on top, and his legs folded and unfolded beautifully, and he never took a bad step. They are still trying to get him. He paid $33.60.

Hornsby went home. He did not forget.

Last season, as things got rougher and rougher with the Mets, Rogers Hornsby could be found at the Polo Grounds, or in Chicago and on his way to a scouting trip in Decatur, and he summed up his feelings in one bitter quote:

“You can't trust them Kentucky bastard trainers.”

The Mets' run of luck held to the end. They finished their first season on September 30, a dull afternoon in Chicago. They were at Wrigley Field, playing the Cubs. Losing, 5-1, in the eighth inning, the Mets went to work on Bob Buhl. Solly Drake opened with a single, then Richie Ashburn singled. Nobody out, runners on first and second, and Joe Pignatano, the catcher, up. Buhl gave him a fast ball, and Pignatano, a right-hander swinging late, hit a looper into right field. Drake, on second, thought the ball would drop in. He took off for third. Ashburn, on first, was certain the ball would drop in. He went for second.

Ken Hubbs, the Chicago second baseman, was absolutely positive he could catch the ball. He went out into right field and proved he was correct. Then he threw to Ernie Banks at first base. Ashburn was all the way to second. This made it a double play. It also gave Solly Drake, who was somewhere around third base, the idea that he was in trouble. He was. Banks threw to Andre Rodgers, who covered second, and it was a triple play.

It was things like this which made it a memorable summer for the manager of the team, Casey Stengel. But the season was no more memorable than Stengel was. At seventy-three, and coming from a run of ten pennants and eight world championships in twelve years of managing the New York Yankees, Stengel last year gave what must be the finest performance of his life. He came to the Mets expecting it to be tough. He never expected it to be as tough as it turned out to be. But it made no difference. He gave one of the finest performances under bad circumstances that can be seen in any walk of life.

Casey Stengel last season was simply
the
stand-up guy. He went through 120 losses with a smile, a try, and a few badly needed drinks. He tried to teach his players. They simply could not learn. When he realized this, he would sit back and smile and take the heat off the poor player.

“I can't change a man's life,” Stengel would say softly. When he put it that way, nobody was going to go out and make a point of how bad the player in question was.

Now there is supposed to be nothing new anybody can tell you about Casey Stengel. In his twelve years with the Yankees he was the most written-of and spoken-about figure in sports. When he was fired from the Yankees, he was given a huge check by
The Saturday Evening Post
to tell of his life in baseball. For free, Casey Stengel talks for hours. For the big check he sat down and wrecked tape recorders, and by now he is supposed to be an old story.

But if you had seen Stengel manage the New York Mets last season, you would know that he was anything but an old story.

You see, the notion here is that Stengel never quite was what he always was purported to be in the newspapers. The double-talk, for example. The man is not a double-talker. As colorful a conversationalist as we've ever had, yes. But a mysterious double-talker, never. Except when he was putting on a show. The newspaper sports writers, as a rule fairly horrible at writing quotes even from a plain talker, went overboard on Casey's double-talk gag. In doing so, they succeeded in losing much of his humor. And they also gave the reader the impression that Stengel was a man only Communists did not truly love.

Well, Stengel is a human being. And with the Yankees he had his human habits. One of which was to be awfully rough and impatient with young ballplayers at times. Once he called an outfielder named Norman Siebern into his office and gave him a going-over that was so rough there are baseball people today who insist it was the thing that ruined Siebern, who once was a tremendous prospect. And players like Clete Boyer and Bobby Richardson, both the real goods, were anything but relaxed under Stengel. Richardson came this close to quitting baseball—and this is a fellow who acts, not talks—over Stengel's gruffness.

But last season Stengel was everything they ever wrote or said about him. He came with humor, compassion, and, above all, class. He also came onto some awfully tough days and nights, and, no matter how nice he was about it, you knew he really wasn't used to it.

There was one afternoon in training at St. Petersburg, Florida, when the exact quality of this ball club started to show itself to Casey. When he came into the clubhouse he did not seem to be completely filled with confidence.

And that night old Rogers Hornsby sat in his double-breasted suit in a chair a few strides from the bar of the Colonial Inn and expounded in the subtle, couched tones that have cost Rogers fifty jobs in baseball.

“Casey come back today like a ghost,” he said. “I mean, those players out there frighten him. Like a ghost, I tell you. Don't you know, that man is used to good teams. These fellas here, I tell you they frighten you.”

Throughout the year Stengel insisted he never was frightened. “Shocked” was the word he kept using. Back in the old days, as manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers and Boston Braves, he had had some bad players under him. But this was so long ago it was hard to recall. The problems Stengel were used to when he came to the Mets consisted mainly of nagging Mickey Mantle to chop down at a high pitch so that, in between his five-hundred-foot home runs, Mickey would not hit a fly ball or two that would be caught. With the Mets, Stengel was confronted with some rather strange things. His third baseman of record, Felix Mantilla, had a funny habit. If a ball was hit to the shortstop side of third, Mantilla broke toward the foul line. If the ball was hit down the foul line, Mantilla threw himself toward short. It was surprising how often balls went right past Mantilla because of this.

One memorable night in St. Louis, on the occasion of his seventy-third birthday, although he produced a doctored Kansas City certificate to show he was only seventy-two, Casey came into a private party room at the Chase Hotel with his gray hair slicked down, and he sat in a leather arm chair in front of a small cocktail table, accepted a Manhattan, and talked about his team.

“I've seen these do a lot of things to people,” he said of the Manhattan. Then he began to puff on cigarettes and talk. He went from Brooklyn to Oakland to Kansas City and then to the Yankees and the old Newark Bears of the International League, and then he leaned forward and came to the Mets.

“We're going into Los Angeles the first time,” he was saying, “and, well, I don't want to go in there to 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 pitchers and my catchers, too. Wills [Maury] 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 this Canzoneri [catcher Chris 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.”

Stengel took a big drag on the cigarette. Then he leaned forward and shook his head.

“We come in there and you never seen anything like it in your life. I find I got a defensive catcher, only who 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?'”

Later, long after midnight and well after the birthday celebration was over, the bartender was falling asleep and the only sound in the hotel was the whine of a vacuum cleaner in the lobby. Stengel banged his empty glass on the red-tiled bar top and then walked out of the room.

In the lobby, the guy working the vacuum cleaner was on his big job, the rug leading into a ballroom, when Mr. Stengel stopped to light a cigarette and reflect on life.

“I'm shell-shocked,” Casey addressed the 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?” The cleaner had no answer. “This is a disaster,” Stengel 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.”

Casey then went to bed.

This, then, is the way the first year of the New York Mets went. It was a team that featured three twenty-game losers, an opening day outfield that held the all-time major-league record for fathering children (nineteen), a defensive catcher who couldn't catch, and an over-all 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,” Garry said.

It is that way with those who follow the Mets.

“They are without a doubt the worst team in the history of baseball,” Bill Veeck was saying one day last summer. “I speak with authority. I had the St. Louis Browns. I also speak with longing. I'd love to spend the rest of the summer around the team. If you couldn't have any fun with the Mets, you couldn't have any fun any place.”

T
HE
N
EW
Y
ORK
M
ETS
are in existence for a simple reason: New York City needed them. This team was created as more of a civic enterprise than a product of baseball's expansion. This is not as bad a rap on the City of New York as you think. New York always has trouble starting anything. Once, for example, it took a couple of years to get a statue of Simón Bolívar or some such hero on a horse placed in Central Park. Fifteen city agencies, plus the State Department and a couple of South American governments, were involved in a terrible fight over the statue. It all was over the sculptor, who happened to be a perfectionist. When he chiseled out Bolívar's horse, he made a
whole
horse, and no art commission was going to make him put Simón Bolívar on some old gelding. Central Park with its women and children or no Central Park.

Because of this civic need for another baseball team in town, many people from many areas of endeavor became involved. In fact, so many people got into the picture that when you look back on it, you do not know who to blame first. Go to any day of any year since the Dodgers and Giants left New York in 1957 and you find that somebody was doing something which eventually led to the Mets. This team was no accident. It was put together on purpose.

And in re-creating all this effort to start a team, everything seems to fall into the pattern of the bright afternoon in January of 1962 when Wid Matthews, the scout, walked into a car agency in Zanesville, Ohio, for a talk with the manager of the place, one R. G. Miller. R. G. once had spent a couple of years in the major leagues disguised as a left-handed pitcher. He retired at the age of twenty-seven, breaking the hearts of most American League batters by doing so. Now, at twenty-nine, R. G. had much to look forward to. He ran the agency competently, and had a chance to get a piece of the business someday. It was going to take a lot to talk Miller into doing anything but sell cars.

Unfortunately, Matthews had all that was needed. In his hand was a sheet which showed that Miller needed only eighteen days in a major-league uniform to qualify as a five-year man under the baseball players' pension.

“Just eighteen days,” Matthews said. “If you can do anything you can be up for that long. Then, when you reach age fifty, you'll get a check for $125 every month until you're dead. How can you let a thing like that go by? If you'll start the season with Syracuse and show us enough, you'll come up to the Mets and make that pension. You can't turn your back on this one. It's too good.”

It was, Miller's boss told him to take it; the job would stay open. So with great resolve R. G. Miller reported to spring training with the Syracuse team of the International League and he got in shape.

And on July 24 at County Stadium, Milwaukee, with his team locked in a desperate 4—4 game with the Braves that was now in the twelfth inning, Manager Casey Stengel waved grandly to his bullpen for a new pitcher. It was the same wave that in other years had brought forth a Joe Page or an Allie Reynolds. This time it produced R. G. Miller. He was wearing a spanking new Mets uniform. And he was now only seventeen days from a pension of $125 a month upon reaching age fifty.

But sordid business was forgotten as Miller took the mound. R. G. was a pitcher now, not a man looking for a pension. He meant it. He took his eight warm-up pitches, then put the ball in his hand, looked down for the sign, and glared at Del Crandall, the Milwaukee batter. Miller had put everything he had into getting into shape at Syracuse. It had been a big gamble. But it was all worth it, because here was R. G. Miller picking up his leg and coming down with his first pitch as a New York Met.

The pitch was a slider. Crandall hit it over the left-field fence for a home run. With his first pitch of the season, Miller had lost the game, 5-4.