Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?: The Improbable Saga of the New York Met's First Year

There have been many benchmarks for sports futility. The 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers were 0-14 in their inaugural season. The 2008 Detroit Lions were 0-16. The 1973 Philadelphia 76'ers won only nine games. But the 1962 New York Mets seem to be the standard for incompetence. Maybe it was the carnival atmosphere surrounding this first year juggernaut. Or maybe it was the way they seemed to be laughing at themselves as they spun further into the cellar. Jimmy Breslin has graced every type of writing he put his writing hand to, and sports is at the top. Although a thin tome (117 pages), it left this reader begging for more. I wanted more Casey Stengell witticisms, as he oscillated between exasperation and dead on humor at his predicament. I wanted more Marv Throneberry anti-hero tales. I wanted to read more about the battered and bruised, but ultimately noble pitching trio of Roger Craig, Larry Bearnearth and Al Jackson. The interesting thing is that this team spawned some of the great baseball minds of the generation to come. Gil Hodges managed the Mets to the 1969 World Series. Roger Craig became a pitching coach par excellance, and an excellent manager. Al Jackson was a pitching coach for many years. This was a team that New York fell in love with. They were decent, family people, who respected and genuinely liked each other. They just weren't any good, and their creativity in finding ways to lose games was off the charts. They were the only major league team to play .250 ball over a whole season, and more amazingly, they won 9 of 12 games in one stretch, meaning the rest of their season they went 31-117. Breslin nails the scoundrels of the National League on how they forced the sewerage of the dregs of every organization on the Mets. His writing is hilarious at times, and this was a story that was begging to told. Any baby boomer baseball fan would enjoy this book.

An outstanding sports writer did an outstanding job of capturing the essence of the first year of New York Met baseball. For those of us who lived through that magnificent demonstration of ineptness, we can recall how easy it was to follow the antics of a team that lost three times for every time that they won but found new and improbable ways to do so almost every day. Breslin captures the hilarity that characterized the efforts of this team to play a game that was not as new to them as it sometimes seemed to be. The reader also feels the pain of some of the top players of the sport who ended their careers in something less than glory that year. The reader for whom this is history will enjoy this crisply written story and learn the names of some of the heros of that first year who may not have left marks on the game of baseball but certainly left more than a few smudges. Still as good a sports read as the day it was written.

Last week, the Dodgers came to Shea Stadium. There's not a ballplayer left alive, except Jesse Orosco, who was born before the Dodgers left Brooklyn, but the residual anti-Dodger resentment which inhabits the ugly orange, blue, green and red seats at Shea still makes these games interesting. The score was tied, 1-1 in the 6th, and LA had runners at first and third, with one out. The batter hit a ground ball to Mets SS Rey Sanchez, less known for his .179 batting average than for reportedly getting a haircut in the clubhouse while the Mets getting clobbered in another loss. Sanchez needed to do just two thing with that grounder, which was too slow to turn into a double play. He needed to A) look the runner back to third and prevent the go-ahead run from scoring, and B) throw the batter out at first.Sanchez, of course, failed to do either.The runner on third scored (the winning run) and the batter was safe. Sound familiar?Jimmy Breslin's 1963 magazine-feature-length rumination on the woeful 1962 Mets (who lost 120 games -- more than the 1985 and '86 Mets lost *combined*) has fallen out of the baseball consciousness for a while. But it's still hilarious. The book is both a celebration of the underdog, and a scathing review of the National League's expansion process, which allowed for the creation of a new team full of players who simply couldn't play.It takes a while for Breslin to actually get into game descriptions. He talks at length about the building of Shea Stadium (which, true to Mets form, was completed a year late, and way, way over budget) -- "which they are building... for Marvin Throneberry". He talks about original Mets owner Joan Whitney Payson (be warned that, since this book was written in 1963, she's still referred to as Mrs. Charles Shipman Payson without any sense of irony), and reprints some of manager Casey Stengel's unforgettable monologues. He talks about the business of baseball, even in 1963 lamenting that too many were in it for the money, and not for the love of the game.Finally, Breslin gets to his recap of the Mets season, and gets it wrong from the very first inning. He repeats -- actually, he creates -- the myth that the first run scored against the Mets in their first game, in St. Louis, came in when pitcher Roger Craig balked with runner Bill White on third. Well, that never happened. It happened, but it was already 1-0 at that point and White wasn't on third. Since Breslin makes a big fetish of his scorecard later in the book, I have to assume this is dramatic license.Breslin's book is now 40 years old, but if you went into a time capsule in '63 and came out again this April, you'd never realize that, for most of their history, the Mets were not actually this horrible. When I have the choice of watching the Mets (who, in mid-May have already lost 60% of their games), or re-reading the epic saga of Pumpsie Green... well, just give me some more Pumpsie!

Jimmy Breslin, really, wrote only one book which ought to be required reading for anyone, even if they do not appreciate immediately the sublime, ridiculous, and surreal that was the 1962 New York Mets. Of every page and paragraph I have ever read of that wonderfully absurdist gathering of once-upon-a-times and never-would-have-beens known as the Amazin' Mets, none strikes with quite the humour and humanity of Mr. Breslin's gracefully murderous review of that first season. He gave all the heavies - Casey Stengel, Marvelous Marv Throneberry, Roger Craig, Elio Chacon, Harry Chiti (read: the only player in major league history to be traded for himself), Frank Thomas (the Big Donkey, not the Big Hurt), et. al. - both their just desserts and their poetic justice. He writes with the proper distribution of sympatico toward both the Mets' befuddled opponents and their bewildered observers. And he reminds baseball fans that sometimes the most transcendent joy of the game is when the name of the game is pure madness. Those who believe baseball needs to improve its sense of humour should adore this book. Those who cannot believe the 1962 Mets existed but in the warped imaginations of New York sportswriters and sociopolitical commentators trying to make sense of the unsensible should disabuse themselves with this book. Each will likely do one of two things, by the time Mr. Breslin's lyric prose completes its song of the broken road: Either you will empathise with their very real soulfulness amidst the months of Barnumesque deconstruction that was Original Met Baseball; or, you will simply rub your eyes, ponder how it could have been and who could have possibly conceived such bedlam, and, even when it makes sense, and you realise it was all of it true and none of it likely to ever pass our way again, just purr along with Perfesser Stengel: "Amazin'!"

I agree that this book needs to be reissued. It's a gem. Jimmy Breslin writes story after hilarious story about the inept, hopeless but lovable '62 Mets. Marvelous Marv, Choo-Choo Coleman - they're all there, including the great one-liners of Casey Stengel. Please, Please, Please reissue this book. It would sell a million copies.