Can't Anybody Here Play This Game? (9 page)

At it turned out, Craig was on the mound for 233 innings.

“He pitched all that time with a team like that behind him?” James Riddle Hoffa said one day last winter. “Well, he sure as hell deserves a lot more than a raise. He ought to bargain for a piece of the ballpark.”

By Memorial Day weekend, the Mets were a solid tenth. The Dodgers came into town for a league game for the first time since O'Malley took them West. The Giants were to follow next. The two teams came in for a total of seven games. A staggering 191,675 fans came out to see the games. The Mets lost all seven. But this seemed to be important only to the players and to the standings. It certainly was not important to the fans. For at this time a phenomenal thing was happening. With each loss the team seemed to draw more people around it. The people came to the Polo Grounds to see the Dodgers and Giants on this particular weekend. But they were just watching their old favorites. They were
rooting
for the Mets. And before the season ended, the team drew 922,000 into an old, poorly located ballpark. This season, if they get into their new home, the Mets figure to have one of the most profitable years any club has ever had.

The newspapers call the Mets fans “The New Breed.” This is a good name, but there is more to it than this. It goes deeper. As the Mets lost game after game last season, for example, you heard one line repeated in place after place all over town. It probably started in a gin mill someplace with a guy looking down at his drink and listening to somebody talk about this new team and how they lost so much. Then it got repeated, and before long you were even hearing it in places on Madison Avenue.

“I've been a Mets fan all my life.”

Nearly everybody was saying it by mid-June. And nearly everybody had a good reason for saying it. 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. The Yankees? Who does well enough to root for them, Laurence Rockefeller?

Take the thing about Elio Chacon. One day the Mets proudly announced that Chacon had handled 95 chances at shortstop without an error. As a rule, errorless streaks for infielders are not mentioned until the man has made 225 plays or so. But the Mets' publicity department did not have this kind of time. When the Chacon announcement was made, the club had just struck out thirty-four times in three games, which is some sort of an all-time record. More important, Chacon was playing every day. The plug had to be gotten in right away, or else. The Mets' release was just under the wire. For the next day Chacon moved in on a ground ball that was his ninety-sixth chance. Rather, the ball moved in on Chacon. It was touch and go. Chacon reached, the ball touched his shins, then kicked off half a mile, and two runners took off and scored.

The next day's mail in the Mets' offices produced a letter written on a saloon's stationery and signed by twenty people. It was addressed to Lindsey Nelson, the Mets' radio and TV broadcaster.

“We the undersigned feel that Elio Chacon is the greatest, flashiest, finest, most magnificent baseball player we ever seen. We want to adopt Elio Chacon as our hero. Could you please see to it that we get an autographed picture of Elio Chacon so that we can hang it up on the wall?

“We have watched Chacon play all year. He is our idol. We used to think Pee Wee Reese was pretty good. That was until Elio Chacon came along. He is our kind of guy. He fought Willie Mays in San Francisco. And he plays every day. He must have some guts to play every day.

“Please send the picture.

“TYRONE GOLDBERG, Secretary, Gilmore's Tavern.”

The other nineteen names were listed underneath.

All the mail and all the phone calls and all the conversations in town ran along these lines. Typical was this letter:

“Even though the Mets aren't in first place to me there the greatest team in the history of baseball. Please send me an autographed picture. Yours truely, MICHAEL HOROWITZ.”

And at the games the clientele came early, stayed to the last out, and roared if the Mets so much as had a man reach second base. People simply were carried away by this team. It seemed rather silly, but on one bright afternoon—the Mets were playing at night—it was clearly explained during a visit to my psychiatrist. He practices on Park Avenue, he is known all over the world, and he is not a man to be taken in by fads like sanity.

“I like the Mets,” I complained to him. “I'm starting to die every time they play. What's the matter, am I getting silly?”

“It is pity,” the doctor explained. “Pity is kin to love.”

“But I like to be a winner. Why can't I root for the Yankees? I hate the Yankees.”

“You can't pity the Yankees.”

“I go deeper than that, though. I hate General Motors too.”

“Let's remain concerned with the Mets,” he said. “Don't you think Casey Stengel should stop using that fellow Christopher in the outfield? How can we win with a guy like him around?”

I also presented the situation to a great expert on the whims and actions of human beings, chairman of the Sociology Department at an important university in New York and a scholar known wherever scholars meet.

This scholar, austere, reeking of massive intellect, was found in a study lined with great books in his home overlooking the Hudson. He listened intently as I described the situation to him.

“Why are all these jerks rooting for the Mets?” I finally asked.

He gazed out the window in deep thought.

“You know,” he said, “this Cannizzaro. If somebody would teach him to control his throwing,
we
might have one of the finest defensive catchers I've ever seen.”

People simply loved the Mets. On June 17, when Marvelous Marvin Throneberry made his unforgettable maneuvers, messing up that rundown against the Cubs, then failing to touch first base, the fans were beside themselves when, right after Throneberry was called out, Charley Neal stepped in and hit a home run. Before Neal reached first, Casey Stengel stormed out of the dugout and held out his arm and pointed to first. Neal stepped on the bag. Then Stengel pointed to second. Neal stepped on the bag. Casey also pointed to third and to home plate and after Neal was across with the run, the old man nodded and went back to the dugout. The crowd roared.

Throughout the entire town, however, nobody came up quite as bad as Jack Semel, who started the season holding his umbrella over George Weiss's head and ended it by claiming he was going to break it over Weiss's head.

Jack Semel is a short, husky man of sixty-one with brown eyes, close-cropped graying hair, a powerful larynx, and an incredible record.

“You think I'm crazy, don't you?” Jack Semel keeps saying. “Go ahead. Tell the truth. You think I'm crazy.”

The answer is obvious. Jack Semel last season saw every pitch of every inning of every home game the Mets played.

“I had sixteen season box seats,” he says proudly. “And I had thrills you couldn't count. It was the greatest summer of my life.”

Jack was sitting in the office of the paper box company he owns on the West Side of New York. “A better fan you don't have than Jack Semel,” he says.

Which is right. In all the history of any sport, there never has been a guy like Jack Semel. Night after night last season he sat through the Mets games, and it usually was after midnight when he left the Polo Grounds. He would drive to his home in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, flop into bed for a couple of hours, then get up and grope his way over to his plant so he could be around to supervise shipping when the trucks pulled up at four-thirty
A.M.
At four in the afternoon Jack would leave his office and drive straight to the Polo Grounds. He'd snatch dinner, then get to his seat in time to watch batting practice.

“I've got to be at a ballpark two hours before a game,” he says. “If they start bat practice without Jack Semel, believe me, it's no game. I went with people, or I went and sat alone. Sometimes when the club got real bad nobody would come sit with me. So I sat alone. I didn't care. Going to baseball games is my life.

“And listen, I'm no hanger-onner. I have my own personal opinion. Once I pay for tickets I can say what I want. Now you take George Weiss. He sat near me many times. Do you know something? Mr. George Weiss has shown me nothing, and he knows that's how I feel. The same with Stengel. Every time he went out to take out a pitcher he heard from Jack Semel. I leaned across the dugout and I told him good. Why don't you take yourself out?' I asked him all year. Casey Stengel knew how I felt. The trouble with this team was that they were disorganized. They needed a younger manager. And Weiss, he should retire.

“I'm going to tell you something now that I really believe,” Jack said. He leaned forward and gripped his desk. “I believe personally—and this is something that might be a comment on me—that the Mets were a good team. A very good team. But they was disorganized. If they was better organized they would be a good team. What do you think?”

“Just like you say, you're crazy.”

“Well, anyway, I'm looking forward to next year,” Jack said. “I can hardly wait.”

He certainly can't. Once a week during the winter Jack drove over to Flushing Meadows to see how the new ballpark was coming along. He has his box seats—sixteen of them—already staked out. He likes to see how work is coming on them.

“I go home and tell my wife Clara how it's coming. She says ‘Good.' She never liked the Polo Grounds. And you could tell Casey Stengel for me that I'll be right behind the Mets' dugout this year and he'll be hearing from me. I want a Charley Dressen or a Leo Durocher to run this club. I want they should have a doghouse for the players who do bad. Organization, that's what we need. We need Leo Durocher's doghouse. A player doesn't put out, shoo him off. Put him on the end of the bench and don't talk to him or play him for a couple of weeks. In the doghouse. That straightens them out.”

“Does Semel yell loud?” Jim Thompson, the Mets' business manager, was asked recently.

“Mr. Semel can do anything he wants,” Thompson said. “Mr. Semel, between himself and his friends, sold about $30,000 worth of tickets last season. If Mr. Semel doesn't like me, I'll let him announce it over the public-address system.”

Of all the people who were attracted to the Mets last season, none had a better reason than Mr. Patrick Hastings of Philadelphia.

In mid-June, Mr. Hastings took off the apron with a purpose one day in his Brown Jug Bar on South 45th Street. After making an appropriate pass at the day's receipts (a move which was to cause some friction in his marriage some days later), Pat walked out of the place and went crosstown to 30th Street Station and got a train to New York. He was coming to see the Mets for himself.

Some days before, it seems, he had read that the Mets were the worst team of all time. This upset Pat. For some years now he has publicly claimed that he has sat through more bad baseball than any man alive. For consistency, Philadelphia baseball, among other things in the town, always has been the worst. On nine occasions during Pat's tenure at old Baker Bowl and Shibe Park, both the A's and Phillies finished in last place. Pat contends that only winter was worse than watching the old Phillies. But in June he was at the Polo Grounds, a beer in his hand, and he did not believe what he was seeing.

In front of him, Charley Neal wandered off first, then casually ran for second as Frank Thomas hit a soft fly to right field. The scoreboard showed only one out. The Cubs outfielder caught the ball and threw to first for a double play. Neal thought there were two out when he took off.

This was the night that Stengel announced, “I intend to trade anybody on this ball club. And we intend to start trying to make deals with other clubs right now.”

“The hell you will,” said the other nineteen teams in baseball.

“Buzz Arlett,” Hastings mumbled. “I am going to go home and write him a letter of apology. He played right field for the Phillies in 1931. People used to go out and get stiff whenever he caught a fly ball. We always made jokes about him. But he done more fielding standing still than most of these fellows here can do at full speed.

“You know, the Athletics in 1916 were unbelievable. But they had Stuffy McInnis. And some of them Phillies teams, no matter how bad they were, they could hurt you with the bat pretty good. There was fellows like Chuck Klein, Virgil Davis, Don Hurst. It hurts me to say it, but I never saw anything real bad until I got here today.”

It was at this time, too, that the Mets became a problem for the American gambling industry. Now, on the off chance that somebody will regard gambling as a side issue to all of this, let it be stated that betting on baseball is the true national pastime. Bookmakers handle far more money on baseball than they do on horses. And if the day ever arrives when they put mutuel windows in a baseball park and make the whole thing legal, you'll see Carry Back working for $4 an hour on the bridle path in Central Park. Race tracks will be a thing of the past.

The Mets' trouble, as far as gambling was concerned, was fundamental. In order to have gambling, three elements must be present. One is money. Cash money, because people in this business seem to have something against personal checks. The other two elements needed are the chance that a team can win, and the chance that a team can lose. Obviously the Mets lacked one of these elements. So, gamblers agreed, something had to be done about them.

In offices in New Orleans and Minneapolis, where professional handicappers issue daily odds on major-league baseball games, listings on the Mets changed. In drawing odds, a handicapper always works with the starting pitchers for a game. He keeps a record of how each pitcher on a club does against every other team in the league. When starting pitchers are announced for a game, he looks up the pitching records, weighs in all other factors, and then decrees that, say, the Yankees, with Ford pitching, are 8-6 favorites over the Red Sox and their starter, Monbouquette. This means that you can take the Yankees, but you must give 8-5 odds. If you take the Red Sox, you get only 6-5 odds. There is a missing number here, of course. In this case it is seven. Without going into undue intricacies, let it be said that the missing number is why bookmakers live well.