The Little Team That Can
Behold, we count them happy which endure. Ye have heard of the patience of Job.
--Epistle of St. James
IF he lived today, Job would undoubtedly be a fan of the New York Mets. So would Sir Francis Bacon ("Adversity is not without comforts and hopes"). So is anyone with the slightest sympathy for the underdog, the smallest shred of a sense of futility, the least understanding of how it feels to lose, and lose, and lose.
From the first, it was clear that the true Met fan had to be a man of almost mystical forbearance, untrammeled optimism and infinite compassion for the inept. Born in 1962, when the National League expanded to ten clubs, the Mets promptly lost their first nine games. They finally won one on their tenth try, but defeat was more their style. Baseball, according to a hoary cliche, is a game of inches. The Mets lost by feet, even yards, and they did so with agonizing regularity. In their first seven seasons they threw away the awesome total of 737 games while winning only 394 (see chart, page 51). Only the staunchest of supporters could have sat in the stands through those long afternoons and borne the relentless booting of ground balls, the repeated mistakes on the base paths, the dreary succession of batsmen looking at called third strikes.
To most New Yorkers, the very thought of a Met victory was an alien concept. "In those days," recalls Leftfielder Cleon Jones, "people never even asked if we had won. Most of the time it would have been a silly question." But the fans went on cheering, ever hopeful that some day heroics would replace horselaughs.
That day has come. The Mets started this season in typical fashion. They lost their first game--as they have lost every opening-day game they have ever played--to the league's new expansion team, the Montreal Expos, by the exasperating score of 11-10. By late May, they had lost five more games than they had won. Then, suddenly, they caught fire. They won eleven in a row, the longest winning streak in their history. They slumped briefly in midsummer, but they have since rallied to win twelve of 13 games. As the season turns the Labor Day corner and heads into the stretch, the Mets are serious contenders for the National League pennant. Last week they were only 2 1/2 games behind the faltering Chicago Cubs, the leaders of the league's Eastern Division.* Like the fabled little engine that could, they are pulling mightily, and they really believe they can make it. Whether they do or not, the very possibility that they might makes the Mets the biggest surprise of the baseball year.
Guided by steady, low-keyed Manager Gil Hodges, the Mets' young prodigies are the happiest, hungriest, hustlingest team in baseball, and they seem to have acquired the emotional wherewithal to stand up 'under pressure'. They demonstrated that the last time they faced the Cubs, when they won four of six crucial games. In the opener of a three-game set at Shea Stadium, their home ballpark--the first crucial series ever to involve the Mets--Chicago's crack righthander, Ferguson Jenkins, entered the ninth inning with a 3-1 lead. Minutes later he stalked off the field in disgust, a 4-3 loser. The following night Tom Seaver, 24, the husky, hard-throwing ace of the Met pitching staff, put on the most dazzling one-man show in Met history. He faced just 28 batters to achieve a 4-0 victory. Only a line single by Rookie Jim Quails in the ninth inning spoiled his bid for what would have been the eleventh perfect game since professional baseball began 100 years ago. Cub Manager Leo Durocher was roundly unimpressed. The next day, when the Mets committed two errors in one inning and went on to lose to the Cubs 6-2, Durocher, who is neither magnanimous in victory nor mellow in defeat, smugly observed: "Those were the real Mets."
Durocher may have to munch on those words. While the Mets were blasting the San Diego Padres last week, his Cubs were pulling out of the mire of a four-game losing streak. For a time, though, Durocher's dig seemed prophetic. Through late July and early August the Mets played down to their past reputation. In one horrendous doubleheader in Houston, the Astros pasted Met pitchers for a total of 27 runs. The Mets lost 3-2 to the last-place Expos when Rookie Gary Gentry yielded an embarrassing total of three home runs in one inning. As summer waned, the New Yorkers found themselves in third place, 9 1/2 games off the pace.
Then they snapped out of it. They whipped the poor Padres four straight and took five of six tumultuous games from two of the Western Division's toughest teams, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Said First Baseman Ed Kranepool: "We've come back from the dead again."
A Taste of Winning
Clearly the new Mets are a far cry from that congeries of castoffs, has-beens and never-would-bes who made their debut in 1962 by losing a record 120 games--and learned to laugh about it. To today's brassy Wunderkinder, those days are ancient history. Says Manager Hodges, a 17-year veteran of the majors who is not given to superlatives: "These boys have had a taste of winning, and now they know how to win. They're thinking ballplayers. They bounce back as well as any club I've ever seen."
Hodges' pride in his team's resiliency is well founded. The raw young Mets are less than one season removed from last year's ninth-place finish. The difference is that this year's players are consistently coming through with the big play and the timely hit. Once they could be counted on to lose the one-run decisions (the most famous: a 24-inning, 1-0 loss to Houston in 1968); this year they have won 21 of 31. They have swept eight doubleheaders. What is more, they defy all Met tradition by actually trying when they are down: they have come from behind to win in no fewer than 27 ball games. At Pittsburgh earlier this season, the Mets spotted the Pirates a 6-1 lead after three innings, but finally won 8-7.
Pitching is the key to the Mets' success. Seaver tossed a four-hitter against San Diego last week and became the loop's top pitcher (18-7). He and Jerry Koosman, 25, the Appleton, Minn., farm boy who won 19 games as a rookie last year, give the Mets the most potent one-two delivery in baseball. A powerful lefthander who may be as fast as the great Sandy Koufax ever was, Koosman pulled a muscle deep in his left shoulder during spring training last
March and got off to a shaky start. Still, his two-hit victory over San Diego last week raised his season's record to a respectable 12-8. His earned-run average (ERA), the most reliable index of a pitcher's effectiveness, is an admirable 2.24 per game. Gentry, despite his occasional lapses, is already ranked by Hodges as "just short of Seaver and Koosman." Jim McAndrew, a second-year man, pitched a shutout against the Padres to run his consecutive-scoreless-inning streak to 23. Nolan Ryan, 22, is improving with each game, and the bullpen crew of Tug McGraw, Ron Taylor and Cal Koonce have 19 wins and 28 saves to their credit.
Hodges' dogged emphasis on defense has also paid off. Jones, 27, and his lifelong buddy, Tommie Agee, 27, have regularly made spectacular catches in crucial situations. The team has reeled off 104 double plays. The offense does not exactly remind anyone of Murderer's Row, but the hitting has been increasingly sharp. Agee's performance has been particularly gratifying to Hodges. Tommie was the American League's Rookie of the Year with the Chicago White Sox in 1966, but after he joined the Mets last year, he hit a dismal .217, including only five home runs and 17 runs batted in. This year he is hitting .281 and already has 22 home runs and 64 RBls. He blasted two home runs and a single and made a diving catch of a sinking line drive as the Mets came from behind to defeat Montreal 9-7. Recently he broke a 14-inning deadlock with San Francisco by smashing a home run off Juan Marichal to give the Mets a 1-0 victory. The Mets may even produce their first batting champion in Jones, whose current .350 average is second in the league.
Such impressive statistics raise an important question: Can the Mets continue to play at their present pace? After all, the season's end is still long weeks away, and better teams than the Mets have wilted under September's pennant-race pressure. Still, a durable pitching staff is the essence of late-season success. So who knows?
And if they do hang on, what about those defeat-happy fans? Many psychologists--accredited and armchair--predicted that if the Mets ever started winning, the boisterous crowds would grow indifferent. Sheer nonsense. Now that the Mets are winning, they rank No. 1 in National League attendance by a handsome margin of 225,853. They passed the 1,600,000 mark during the Los Angeles series, and by October they should top 2,000,000.
If nothing else, the figures indicate that baseball still rates its claim to the title "the national pastime." True, the flagging Detroit Tigers, last year's world champions, have been all but abandoned by their fair-weather followers, and the Oakland Athletics, a strong American League pennant contender, drew only 5,000 fans on the night that Reggie Jackson slammed three home runs. But Boston, Atlanta, the Cubs and the new Montreal Expos are attracting huge crowds. Washington has already passed last year's total attendance. In nearly every National League town the Mets, once the worst draw in big baseball, are pulling more customers than ever before.
The Mets, however, were drawing huge crowds at home when they were incontestably the most ludicrous team in the chronicle of baseball. Why? The answer probably lies in the visceral feeling shared by most New Yorkers that mere existence is one long losing game. Choked by traffic, suffocated by fumes, drained by the highest taxes and the highest cost of living on the continent, they form a bond with the underdog that transcends their reputation for lofty indifference. So right from the start they clutched the hapless, hopeless clowns to their beleaguered bosoms, chanting "Let's Go, Mets!" and unfurling brave banners that proclaimed:
WE DON'T WANT TO SET THE WORLD ON FIRE--WE JUST WANT TO FINISH
NINTH.
Bed Sheet Banners
New Yorkers saw in the lurching ineffectuality of their anti-heroes a reflection of their own uphill struggle with life. As New York Post Columnist James Wechsler wrote: "The Mets are a symbol. They embody the furtive hopes and desperate dreams of every underdog and lost soul in the universe, of every historian who maintains there are no iron laws of history, of every philosopher who sees man capable of rising above his seeming limitations, of every theologian who truly believes in the power of prayer, of every incorrigible long-shot bettor who refuses to be intimidated by the hardened experts." Another Mets fan puts it more prosaically: "No one likes to lose--I can tell you something about that. Of course we want them to keep on winning. That kind of spirit is catching. It makes everything seem possible." Those heartfelt words came from New York's Mayor John Lindsay, who himself is a decided underdog in his battle for re-election this November.
There was something intrinsically glorious about the total, abject, unalloyed failure that was wrought by the original Mets. When it was first pieced together, the team had little choice but to fill its roster with a handful of aging former stars (Richie Ashburn, Frank Thomas and Hodges himself), plus a gallimaufry of such forgettables as Ed Bouchee, Bobby Gene Smith and Choo-Choo Coleman. The Mets sealed their comic fate by hiring as manager that master of surrealistic syntax, Charles Dillon ("Casey") Stengel. It was Casey who had piloted the New York Yankees to seven world championships before he was eased into retirement in 1960. But it was asking a lot of the 72-year-old veteran to expect him to cope with a crew of pitchers who could not pitch, infielders who could not field and outfielders whose arteries were beginning to harden. "Come on out to the Polo Grounds and watch my team play," Casey told a throng of well-wishers. "They're gonna be amazin'."
The phrase stuck--"the Amazin' Mets." But not even the antic Casey could have imagined just how amazin' they would be. The 1962 opener in St. Louis proved a harbinger. The night before the first game, 16 Mets got trapped in a hotel elevator. The next day they lost 11-4. The rest of the season was an exercise in incompetence. Pitchers Roger Craig and Al Jackson, who were better than their records show, lost a total of 44 games. The mound staff broke a National League record by yielding 192 home runs. The team itself led the league in errors, with 210. Of every four games they played, the Mets were able to win only one.
Even as they fumbled away their first home game in the old Polo Grounds to Pittsburgh, 2-0, a group of teenagers behind the third-base dugout slowly began to chant, "Let's Go, Mets!" It sounded so odd, that clarion call for support of these tragic bunglers, that others took up the cry. Within a few games, the banners began to appear, fashioned from bed sheets:
WHAT, ME WORRY?
I'M A METS FAN. And, ALL THE WORLD
LOVES A LOSER ESPECIALLY THE HICKSVILLE FIRE DEPARTMENT.
A cult was forming, and its members searched for a non-hero to focus upon. They quickly found him: First Baseman Marv Throneberry. "Marvelous Marv" was a monument to imperfection. His capacity for blunder verged on the supernatural. What made him especially marvelous was his sense of drama. He saved his snafus for close games, when they really hurt. Once he blasted a bases-clearing triple, only to spoil his triumph by neglecting to touch first base.
Marv received more fan mail that summer than the rest of the team combined. There was a Marv Losers Club and a Marv-for-President Club, and thousands of kids wore T shirts blazoned with VRAM (Marv spelled backward). Marv wore the cap and bells with undisguised glee, and the other Mets laughed along with him. But a few--like Rookie Ed Kranepool --found the business of losing day after day downright humiliating. Says Kranepool: "The crowd would give you a standing ovation if you only caught the ball. Winning and losing weren't really important. It was an achievement just to play and not get hurt."
Buffoonery to Mediocrity
Marvelous Marv departed early in 1963, but the Mets' maladies lingered. The humor began to wear a little thin --at least in the clubhouse. "It was no fun, no laughs at all," recalls Jones, who played in six games that year. "Imagine walking into a locker room before a game and hearing guys ask, 'Well, who's going to blow it for us today?' Or people referring to you as the Ringling Brothers Circus. I was too embarrassed to show my face in public." For those who groused about their station in life, Casey conjured a classic reply: "I been hearing that some of these ballplayers are not too happy about being with the Mets. I told 'em maybe they shouldn't be so proud, and that they should consider that they are fortunate in being with the Mets because there must be some flaw in them or they wouldn't have been sold to us by those other clubs."
When the Mets moved into their new Shea Stadium in 1964, they played about as badly as they had in the old Polo Grounds, losing 109 games and winding up, as expected, in last place. But they were slowly undergoing a transformation--from beguiling buffoonery to mundane mediocrity. Casey was forced to retire in 1965 with a fractured hip, and things were dull without him standing on the dugout steps, crossing two fingers on each hand and shouting "Whommy! Whommy! Whommy!" at opposing players. His lackluster successor, Wes Westrum, guided the Mets past the Cubs to their first ninth-place finish. They recorded another first in 1966: they lost fewer than 100 games. Despite the change, attendance rose, and the steadfast fans still brandished their banners and sang their chants. But some of the old elan was gone. The Mets had become just another bad ball club.
Out of a Hat
Still, the seeds of future success were being planted. The front office had developed a five-club farm system and hired a covey of scouts to prowl school stadiums and the American Legion circuit in search of promising talent. The scouting system sometimes flopped. In 1966 the Mets drafted as their first choice Catcher Steve Chilcott, passing up hard-hitting Reggie Jackson. Chilcott has never played a major league game, while Jackson--who has already hit 45 home runs for Oakland this season--is developing into one of baseball's great sluggers. Sometimes, though, the Mets had better luck. That same year, for example, they picked up a handsome young pitcher named George Thomas Seaver.
Being the Mets, they naturally acquired the first of their new child wonders almost by accident. Seaver compiled an impressive 10-2 record his sophomore year at the University of Southern California, and signed a $50,000 contract with the Atlanta Braves. Major league officials ruled the contract void, and after that, the Mets, along with the Philadelphia Phillies and Cleveland Indians, made offers to Seaver. The league decreed that the contest should be settled by lot, and the scrap of paper drawn out of a hat read "Mets."
Until Seaver started mowing down collegiate batsmen at U.S.C., he had appeared to be anything but a prize major league prospect--even in his own eyes. "I frankly thought I was too small," says Seaver, who now stands 6 ft. 1 in. and weighs a respectable 200 Ibs. "I had decided to become a dentist." He was still fairly small when he graduated from high school, he recalled recently, "but there was one advantage in it. I couldn't throw hard enough to rely on my fastball, so I concentrated on sliders and curves."
Six months of lifting crates for the Bonner Packing Co. of Fresno, Calif., of which his father is vice president, and another six months of active duty in the Marine Reserves put 4 in. and 35 Ibs. on Seaver's frame. "People didn't even recognize me," he says. Nor did they recognize his pitching style. The extra heft had added a searing fastball to his precocious collection of "junk" pitches.
After a year of seasoning with the Jacksonville Mets, Seaver was summoned to New York in 1967. He became an overnight sensation. He pitched 18 complete games, and won 16 while chalking up 170 strikeouts. Of his 13-losses, seven were by one run. He was named the National League's Rookie of the Year.
For all that, Seaver was very nearly overshadowed last year by Jerry Koosman, a gangling (6 ft. 3 in., 205 Ibs.), grinning pitcher who learned to throw the ball in the family barn, has a brother named Orville and says things like "I haven't had this much fun since my third-grade picnic." If Seaver's acquisition was fortuitous, Koosman's was truly preposterous. Who but the Mets would act on a tip from one of their stadium ushers? The usher's son, who caught for an Army nine at Fort Bliss, Texas, wondered whether the Mets might be interested in the team's pitcher, who had won 20 games, lost only three and averaged 18 strikeouts a game. The Mets were interested in anyone who even sounded that good. Koosman was signed and packed off to the minors in 1965. There his record was not overwhelming. He enjoyed his best season in 1966, winning twelve and losing seven for the Auburn, N.Y., Mets. But his performance in New York was all that mattered.
Koosman's fastball shrieked, and he threw roundhouse curves like a poised veteran. In his first two appearances, he astonished baseball buffs by registering shutouts. He pitched a total of seven shutouts to tie a 63-year-old record for rookies, won 19 games, and posted a 2.08 ERA. He lost out to Cincinnati's rugged Catcher Johnny Bench as Rookie of the Year by a single vote --the closest balloting ever for the honor.
The ascent of slugging Outfielder Cleon Jones was less dramatic, but perhaps even more satisfying. A native of Mobile, Ala.--home town of a raft of stars, including Agee, Hank Aaron and Willie McCovey--he starred in high school football and track. Always lacking in self-confidence, he lost what little he had when he joined the defeatist Mets of 1963. Although Jones is a natural line-drive hitter, Manager Westrum made him swing for the fences. Later, Hodges decided to "platoon" him by playing him only against lefthanded pitchers. Cleon's batting average sagged, along with his self-assurance. Last year Hodges wisely decided to play Cleon regularly, and his average soared to .297. Now everyone is trying to keep up with Jones in the race for the league batting crown.
Cooperation and Pride
That was not the only sagacious move that Manager Hodges has made. He brought a calm, contemplative, commanding presence to the exuberant, undisciplined youngsters who poured into the Mets' 1968 spring training camp. There are those, in fact, who feel that Hodges is a bit too commanding. Says Cleveland's flamboyant outfielder, Ken ("The Hawk") Harrelson, who played for Washington during Hodges' five-year stewardship of the Senators: "He was unfair, unreasonable, unfeeling, incapable of handling men, stubborn, holier-than-thou and ice-cold." But the Mets seem to hold an altogether different view. Koosman sums up the team's attitude: "Hodges is one hell of a leader. He always has time to talk to you, he has a good sense of humor, and if he's distant, it's because he never wants to embarrass himself or the team. I wouldn't trade Hodges for any two other managers."
However opinions of Hodges may vary, everyone knows he means business. Within hours after the Mets arrived at camp last year, Hodges had them standing tall: curfews were enforced, jackets and ties were worn on road trips. Then he settled down to the arduous business of teaching them the fundamentals of baseball. That herculean undertaking soon exacted its toll. Hodges suffered a heart attack and was ordered to give up the two packs of cigarettes a day he was smoking. But he pressed on.
Mindful of the Mets' conspicuous weaknesses, Hodges stressed basics--pick-offs, cutoffs, double plays--until the players had them down pat. "In the old days," says St. Louis Manager Red Schoendienst, "you could always expect the Mets to give you a few runs by doing dumb things. Now they make the plays in the field like professionals. The Mets have grown up." Perhaps most significant, they have developed a large measure of team cooperation and team pride. Says Hodges: "My main goal was to change the notion that everything the Mets did was wrong. I wanted them to do things right."
A Real Good Shot
At long, long last, they do. Hodges is wise enough in the ways of the game to know that it may take more than one season to transform baseball's most persistent losers into perennial winners. But whether they are backing up one another in the infield, putting together a three-run rally in the ninth, or whooping it up in the locker room in their half-barracks, half-fraternity-row style, the new young Mets have shucked off the mantle of defeat and despair that clung to the team for so long. "The Mets have the makings of a good sound ball club for the next ten years," says their proud manager. From the offices of the Valley National Bank in Glendale, Calif., where he now serves on the board of directors, Casey agrees, in purest Stengelese: "We had to start the team with aged players who it was questionable they could play a full season. Now if I was to go ahead and stick my neck out, I'd say the Mets had a real good shot at winning it all in their league. They're doing so good that people are even talking about the Mets up and down the whole Pacific Coast. They got a young ball club with lots of spirit and they got the fans behind them all the way."
The fans were always behind them.
The only difference is that where once they were resigned to defeat, and almost came to relish it, now they exult in victory. There are sunshine patriots, to be sure, who will turn away if victory is not forthcoming often enough. But the authentic Met fans have learned to accept both victory and defeat with blue-sky loyalty. In their inchoate, inarticulate way, the fans realize that the team is their surrogate, sometimes succeeding, sometimes stumbling, but always striving. If the Mets fail, the true fan understands and empathizes. If they prevail, why can't he?
So the rooters will continue to crowd the grandstands, shouting through soot-stained lungs: "Let's go, Mets!" They know in their gritty hearts that some day, some day, a National League pennant will snap smartly in the breeze atop Shea Stadium.
*This year the National League, like the American, has two six-team divisions to accommodate new expansion clubs in Kansas City, Montreal, San Diego and Seattle.
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