The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (7 page)

Last year, I took my first look at the Mets in late May and saw them drop seven games in a row to the Dodgers and the Giants; that losing streak eventually ran to seventeen. This year, hoping to change matters, I had planned an earlier spring reading period at the Polo Grounds, but the validity of my first-inning, first-game premonitions almost frightened me away from the team for good. Only the fact that I had already paid for the tickets brought me back to watch a doubleheader against Milwaukee on Sunday, April 21. It was a happy decision, for on that afternoon the Mets almost exorcised their past and for the first time relieved themselves and their supporters of some of the dead weight of superstition and doom. The subsequent adventures of this tattered band has been the most absorbing spectacle of the young season.

The Mets had snapped their opening losing streak at eight games—one short of last year’s record—with a Friday victory over the Braves. They had won again on Saturday, but the significant Sunday doubleheader at first promised only a reburial. Jay Hook, a Met pitcher who seems to live under a permanent private raincloud of misfortune, blew a two-run lead in the sixth inning. Then, with the bases loaded and the score tied at 3–3, he let fly a wild pitch. Another run scored from third. Hook hurried in to cover the plate, but his catcher, Choo Choo Coleman, flung the retrieved ball between Hook’s legs, and the fifth Brave run came across. I entered the fiasco in my scorecard, nodding my head sadly; same old Mets. A few minutes later, however, I received a tiny premonition that this might be a different kind of team after all. With two out in the top of the seventh, the Braves’ Hank Aaron ripped a low drive through the box, and Ron Hunt, the Mets’ rookie second baseman, made a sprint and a flying dive to his right, landing on his belly in a cloud of dirt. He missed the ball by about two inches—it went through for a single—but he brought a gasp from the crowd. There was nothing meretricious or flashy or despairing about that dive, even though the team was behind. Hunt very nearly pulled it off, and I suddenly realized that not once last year had I seen a Met infielder even attempt such a play. It gave me a curious, un-Metsian emotion—hope. Then, in the bottom of the eighth, with the Mets still trailing 3–5, Ed Kranepool, another home-team youngster, led off with a triple to left. Coleman walked, and Neal drove in one run with a double. Harkness, pinch-hitting, was walked, and Jim Hickman hit a grand-slam home run and trotted around the bases in a storm of screeching disbelief and torn-up paper. The Mets then played errorless ball in the second game, kept their poise when they fell behind 2–0, and jumped on Lew Burdette (
Lew Burdette?
) for nine runs in their last three innings. The fans trooping out into the darkness at the end of the long day chattered ecstatically about the team’s new power, its four-game winning streak, its imminent escape from the cellar. We had witnessed something like a jail break.

In the three weeks that followed the Braves series and the big bust-out, the Mets won ten games, lost nine, and moved up into eighth place. In this tiny euphoric period, Met followers began to collect and exchange tidings, tidbits, and little moral tales that seemed to confirm the new vigor and startling bourgeois respectability of their old ne’er-do-wells. The team lost three out of five games on a road trip and came home in last place again; while in Chicago, however, they had won a game on a Thursday—something they had never managed to do before—and had thus slain the last of their foolish statistical dragons. Back at the Polo Grounds, they took on the Dodgers in a night game and came from behind to win, 4–2. It was a happy beginning against a team that had humiliated them sixteen times in 1962. The Giants, the defending National League champions, arrived a few days later and administered a fearful cannonading to the outfield fences, winning three games in a row while scoring twenty-eight runs on thirty-six hits. Was this the beginning of a new collapse? No, it was not; Carlton Willey, a veteran pitcher whom the Mets acquired from the Braves this spring, stopped the Giants, 4–2, in the second game of a Sunday doubleheader, while 53,880 “Go!” shouters shouted. Against the Phillies two nights later, Ron Hunt ran down a bouncing single behind second base to save a run in a tight game, which the Mets won. The Mets then took three games in a row, to achieve seventh place and a five-game winning streak—both for the first time ever—and to come within one game of the first division in the standings. More significant, perhaps, was the fact that these three victories—two over the Phillies and one over the Cincinnati Reds—all came on scores of 3–2. In the lore of baseball, the ability to win one-run-margin ball games is a telling mark of team maturity, pitching depth, and a cool defense; last year, the Mets lost no fewer than thirty-nine games by one run. Finally, as the home stand drew to a close, the Mets played three really bad games against the Reds, looking slack in the field and foolhardy on the bases; they were lucky to pull out a 13–12 victory in the last one, after blowing two five-run leads. This year, the Mets have often looked lucky; last year they were jinxed.

Watching baseball at the Polo Grounds this spring has made cruel demands on my objectivity. The perspiring earnestness of all the old and new Mets, their very evident delight in their own brief flashes of splendor, their capacity for coming up with the unexpected right play and the unexpected winning game, and the general squaring of shoulders visible around the home-team dugout have provided me with so much fun and so many surprises that my impulse is simply to add my voice to the ear-rending anthem of the Met grandstand choir—that repeated, ecstatic yawp of “Let’s go,
Mets!
” backed by flourishes and flatted arpeggios from a hundred dented Boy Scout bugles. Caution forces me to add, under the yells, that this is still not a good ball team. Most surprising, in view of the Mets’ comparative new success, is the fact that nobody is hitting. Last year, when the team trailed the entire league in batting (it also finished at the bottom in club pitching and club fielding, stranded the most base-runners, gave up the most home runs, and so forth), its team average was .240. So far this year, the Mets are batting .215, and a good many of the regulars display all the painful symptoms of batters in the grip of a long slump—not swinging at first pitches, taking called third strikes, lashing out too quickly at good pitches and pulling the ball foul. The batting will undoubtedly pick up someday, but Casey Stengel may not be able to wait. If the team begins to lose many close games for sheer lack of hits, he will be forced to insert any faintly warm bat into the lineup, even at the price of weakening his frail defense. This desperate tinkering can lead to the sort of landslide that carried away the citadel last year.

The Mets’ catching is embarrassing. Choo Choo Coleman and Norm Sherry, the two receivers, are batting .215 and .119 respectively. Neither can throw, and Coleman, who is eager and combative, handles outside curve balls like a man fighting bees. He is quick on the base paths, but this is an attribute that is about as essential for catchers as neat handwriting. The Met outfield, by contrast, is slow. Duke Snider, although in superb condition, is thirty-six years old and can no longer run a country mile with his old pounding
élan
. Jim Hickman may be spryer, but he can be frighteningly uncertain in the field. More than one shallow fly has dropped in front of him because of his slow, thoughtful start in center field. (In a recent night game against the Reds, on the other hand, he got a fine jump on a line drive hit by Vada Pinson and thundered in at top speed; then he had to stop and thunder
out
at top speed as the ball sailed over his head for a triple.) Finally, to conclude this painful burst of candor, I must add my impression that the Mets’ base-running is deteriorating—another indication of the character-sapping effects of low base-hit nutrition. A hitter who seriously doubts whether the man who bats behind him can get the ball out of the infield is tempted to try stretching a double into a triple in a close game, and quite frequently succeeds only in shooting a rally right behind the ear. I witnessed three such assassinations in the final days of the Mets’ home stand.

The sun’s brightest rays this spring have shone around the middle of the infield. Ron Hunt, a skinny twenty-two-year-old second baseman up from the Texas League, and Al Moran, a rookie shortstop snatched away from the Red Sox farm system, are the most impressive inner defense perimeter in the team’s young history. Hunt has quick hands, excellent range to his left, and a terrierlike eagerness for a moving ball. Moran has made some dazzling stops at short, and his arm is so strong that he can almost afford his cocky habit of holding the ball until the last moment before getting off his peg. Together, they have pulled some flashy double plays and messed up some easy ones; more familiarity with each other’s style is all that seems needed. The pair may not last long enough to acquire this polish, however, because Moran has not yet shown that he can hit big-league pitching. Hunt, by contrast, has kept his average close to .300. He reminds me of Pee Wee Reese at the plate—an unassuming, intelligent swinger who chokes up on the bat and slaps singles to all fields.

The remaining Met assets are harder to define. The disparity between bright-eyed youth and leathery age among the team’s regulars seems, for reasons I cannot entirely fathom, a source of interest this season, where it was only grotesque in 1962. The contrast can be startling, though. In a game at Cincinnati in April, Duke Snider banged his two-thousandth major-league hit in the first inning; when he came up again in the fourth, looking for No. 2001, Ron Hunt was standing on first base, having just rapped his first major-league hit. And the big right fielder/first baseman who frequently bats right after Snider in the Met lineup is Ed Kranepool, who is eighteen years old and was playing baseball for James Monroe High School at this time last year. Collectively, the Mets are still both too young and too old to afford any but the most modest ambitions, but I think the time has arrived when they can look at each other with something other than pure embarrassment. They can at least admire their own hardiness, for they have survived. No fewer than thirty-two other Mets have vanished from the team in the past year—a legion of ghosts, celebrated and obscure: Richie Ashburn and Solly Drake, Gene Woodling and Herb Moford, Marv Throneberry and Rick Herrscher, R. L. Miller and R. G. Miller. That time of hopeless experiment and attrition is, in all likelihood, finished, and the Mets of the future—the squad that eventually erases the memory of these famous losers—will almost surely include some of the twenty-five men who now wear the uniform.
*
That is progress.

I am so aware of the attractiveness of this year’s Met team, and I share so much of the raucous, unquenchable happiness of its fans, that I cannot achieve an outsider’s understanding of this much-publicized love affair. I made a try at it during the long Sunday doubleheader against the Giants, when the biggest crowd of the baseball year imperiled its arteries with more than six hours of nonstop roaring, sat through a small rainstorm, threw enough paper and debris to make the outfield look like the floor of the Stock Exchange after a panic, and went home, at last, absolutely delighted with a split of the two games. Met fans now come to the park equipped with hortatory placards as well as trumpets and bass drums, and during the afternoon one group unfurled a homemade banner that read:

M is for Mighty

E is for Exciting

T is for Terrific

S is for So Lovable

Reason told me that the first three adjectives had been chosen only for their opening letters; it was the
Giants
who looked mightily, excitingly terrific. The day before, they had ripped off six homers, a triple, and eight singles, good for seventeen runs, and now Willie Mays settled the outcome of the Sunday opener in the very first inning, when he hit a three-run homer that disappeared over the roof of the Polo Grounds in deep left center—approximately the distance of six normal Met base hits laid end to end. The Mets’ boosters were unsilenced by this poke, or by Jack Sanford’s almost total mastery of the locals. In the fourth inning, when Choo Choo Coleman struck out with the bases empty, amid deafening pleas of “Let’s go,
Mets!
” I suddenly understood why Met fans have fallen into the habit of
permanent
shouting. It was simple, really: Supporters of a team that is batting .215 have no heroes, no mighty sluggers, to save their hopes for. The Mets’ rallies fall from heaven, often upon the bottom of the batting order, and must be prayed for at all times.

Another revelation came to me by degrees, from various Giant fans who were sitting near me in the upper deck. Their team had just gone into first place in the standings; on this day, with Mays, McCovey, Felipe Alou, and Cepeda ripping off extra-base hits in all directions, it seemed capable of winning the pennant by the middle of August. Yet the Giant loyalists were burdened and irritable. “Look at that McCovey,” one of them said bitterly, as Stretch fielded a Met single in left. “He just won’t run. He’s no goddam outfielder. I tell you, Dark oughtta nail him onna goddam bench, save him for pinch-hitting.” He was not watching the game before us; his mind was weeks and months away, groping through the mists of September, and he saw his team losing. The Giants’ pennant of last year, the Giants’ power of today had made a miser of him, and he was afraid.
I
had nothing to lose, though; I clapped my hands and shouted, “Let’s go,
Mets!
”

Most of the identifiable Giant fans left before the end of the nightcap. They just couldn’t take it. The Mets had stumbled into a first-inning lead on a pop-fly, wrong-field home run by Cliff Cook, good for two runs, and Carlton Willey was pitching carefully and intelligently, keeping the ball low and scattering the Giant hits. The absentees missed a Giant defeat, which might have done them in, and they also missed the last, tastiest bit of Met quirkiness. With two out in the top of the ninth, the bases empty, and the Mets leading 4–1, José Pagan hit a deep grounder to Al Moran, who heaved the ball away, past Harkness at first. Tom Haller then pinch-hit and scored Pagan with a monstrous triple. Willey sighed and went to work on Davenport, who now represented the tying run. Davenport hit another grounder to short. Moran cranked up and made good with his second chance, and the lovable Mets sprinted off to the clubhouse through snowbanks of trash and salvos of exploding cherry bombs.