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

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Can't Anybody Here Play This Game: The Improbable Saga of the New York Met's First Year ReviewLast 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!Can't Anybody Here Play This Game: The Improbable Saga of the New York Met's First Year OverviewHere, back in print, is Jimmy Breslin's marvelous account of the improbable saga of the New York Mets' first year, as Bill Veeck notes in his Introduction, "preserving for all time a remarkable tale of ineptitude, mediocrity, and abject failure." Indeed the 1962 Mets were the worst major league baseball team ever to take the field. (The title of the book is a quote from Casey Stengel, their manager at the time.) Breslin casts the Mets, who lost 120 games out of a possible 162 that year, as a lovable bunch of losers. And, he argues, they were good for baseball, coming as a welcome antidote to "the era of the businessman in sports...as dry and agonizing a time as you would want to see." Although they were written forty years ago, many of Breslin's comments will strike a chord with today's sports fan, fed up with the growing commercialism of the games. Against this trend Breslin sets the exploits of "Marvelous" Marv Throneberry, Stengel, and the rest of the hapless Mets."Wonderful."-Charles Salzberg, New York Times."A touching, enjoyable, and interesting addition to anybody's sports reading list."-Patrick Conway

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