Summer Game

by Roger Angell

  Two attractive youngsters have emerged from the Mets’ kiddie corps. (The Mets, like France in the nineteen-twenties, have a missing generation between the too old and the too young.) Rod Kanehl, a lanky all-purpose infielder-outfielder, has been hitting and running bases with an opportunism and an energy that are conspicuous on this team, and the shortstop, Elio Chacon, although he cannot always make the double play, has the knack of getting on base with bunts, scratchy singles, and frequent walks. He is an eager, hilarious base-runner, for he runs almost exactly the way Casey Stengel walks—in a fast, bowlegged hobble, head twitching, elbows rotating.

  In the six innings that the Mets were in the ball game on Sunday, I savored the tautness, the cleanness, the absorption in every detail of play that had been so glaringly absent before. Good pitching in a close game is the cement that makes baseball the marvelous, complicated structure that it is. It raises players to keenness and courage; it forces managers to think about strategy rather than raw power; it nails the fan’s attention, so that he remembers every pitch, every throw, every span of inches that separates hits from outs. And in the end, of course, it implacably reveals the true talents of the teams on the field.

  In the sixth, Miller, who had fanned Mays in his two previous trips to the plate, tried to blow another fast ball past him on the first pitch. It was his first mistake. Willie hit the ball against the upper façade of the top deck in deep left center, and the game was tied. A little disconsolate, Miller started the seventh by giving up a single and hitting the next batter. Chacon then hesitated a fraction of a second on Pagan’s grounder and was too late with his throw, and the bases were loaded. Miller walked in one run, Kuenn singled in two, and after McCovey’s out the infield botched a double play, and the Mets were finished. They had wasted the rarest of their meager assets—a good pitching performance.

  Abysmal pitching, in the end, is what keeps the Mets on their knees. The Polo Grounds has become Coogansbad this year—the spa where ailing National League hitters come to get well—and there is no present hope that its doors can be closed. Even when one of the team’s better pitchers—Jay Hook, Al Jackson, Craig Anderson, or the Mets’ own Cyrano, Roger Craig—achieves a few innings of competence or even brief brilliance, he is almost surely betrayed by egregious fielding or flabby hitting, and thus leaves the field with a fresh loss against his record and the deepened conviction that he is being punished for some unforgivable misdeed in his past.

  But for me, so far, the terrible performance of the Mets matters much less than the simple joy of their presence. When my daughter and I left the park on Memorial Day, with the second game of the doubleheader still in progress, we found a taxi on the Harlem Speedway. The cab swung west on 155th Street, and I glanced to my right, along Edgecombe Avenue, and saw a little crowd gathered on a path that runs through a scrap of park and down Coogan’s Bluff toward the Polo Grounds. There were perhaps thirty or forty men and women there. Most were Negroes; many were carrying portable radios. Below them, the great bank of lights above the roofed horseshoe illuminated the bones of the absurd, doomed old stadium. The ticketless spectators stood immobile, staring down through the early dusk, although they could see no more of the field than the big scoreboard above the bleachers and a slice of emerald grass in deep center field. It seemed likely that some of them had been there all afternoon, listening to the roars from below, smiling and nudging one another at each momentary bit of good news over their radio—a small standing committee gathered to welcome the new team and the old league to our city.*

  *The boyish optimism of this dawn report on the Mets can be explained partly because it was written too early in the year (the Mets didn’t hit their real stride until July, when they won six games and lost twenty-three), and partly because, as a sometime, nonprofessional Mets-watcher, I often missed their most memorable performances. I missed the game of June 17, for example, against the Cubs, when Marv Throneberry, the new first baseman, began working on his own legend. Early in the game, the Mets caught a Chicago base-runner in a rundown between first and second, and Throneberry managed to collide with him while not having the ball in his possession; reprieved by the interference call, the Cubs scored four times. In the bottom half, Marv attempted to make amends. With two mates aboard, he hit a drive to the right-field bullpen and chuffed happily into third, only to be called out because he had failed to touch first base. Ordinarily, there is hot protest over this kind of appeal play, but the Met bench did not exactly erupt, since it was perfectly plain that Throneberry had also failed to touch second. The Mets lost the game by one run.

  S IS FOR SO LOVEABLE

  — May 1963

  THE FIRST MAN TO bat at the Polo Grounds in 1963 was a right-handed outfielder named Curt Flood, who plays for the St. Louis Cardinals. As he stepped up to the plate shortly after two o’clock on the afternoon of April 9, he was studied by me and the 25,848 other spectators at the park with an almost palpable apprehension. Flood represented the first hazard of the new season to the New York Mets, who had begun the previous season, the first of their existence, by losing the opening game to the Cardinals; had then tied a National League record by losing eight more games in succession; and had gone on to establish an all-time record by losing a hundred and twenty of the hundred and sixty games they played. During the endless, turbulent summer of 1962, Met fans and Met players developed a needlelike sensitivity to omens and portents, a superstitious belief in historical inevitability, and a fondness for disaster that were positively Sicilian, and here, on opening day, we gave Curt Flood the same apprehensive, defiant glare that a farmer on the slopes of Mount Etna might cast toward the smoke plume on the summit just before he began his spring lava-plowing. Flood took his stance at the plate, looked over a couple of pitches from Roger Craig, the Mets’ starter, and then swung at a curve. The pitch fooled him, and he barely managed to top the ball, which rolled slowly down toward third. Charlie Neal, the Met third baseman, dashed in, but Flood, who is fast, was only a step or two away from first when Neal snatched up the ball. At this instant, several appalling intuitions struck me simultaneously. Flood would beat out the hit, which was unfortunate but not especially serious. However, I also knew that Neal would make a useless, off-balance throw toward first, and then the ball would end up in right field, Flood would move to second, the Cardinals would score in this first inning, and the Mets would lose this first game. They might even be worse than last year; they might end up losing a hundred and fifty games. All these conclusions came to me—and, I’m sure, to most experienced Met students in the park—before Flood’s foot came down on first base. Corroboration followed quickly. Neal’s wild throw sailed into right field, and Flood proceeded to second. The Cardinals then added three singles, the Mets came up with another error, and two runs scored. The Cards won the game, 7–0. The Mets lost again the next day, and then left town and lost six more games in succession.

  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.