Love and Hate in Nine Innings

I keep tripping over my Mets baseball caps in the walk-in closet, as if they’re little children vying for my attention. My attitude at this point is that they’d better knock it off. Spring training begins this week and I haven’t been this disgusted with the organization since 1965, when I spent the summer as a turncoat Yankee fan. That didn’t work out too well … I hopped on the Bronx Bombers bandwagon just as the wheels were coming off and eventually slinked back to the Metsies when the buds started sprouting the following year.


Growing up a rabid baseball fan on one hand and adopting a dead-by-June corpse as were the Mets back then must have been scarring for me on some level. People ask how I could grow up in the Yankees’ home borough and root for a team of such polar opposite characteristics. My answer: this kid was raised in a National League house. A Brooklyn Dodger fan, Dad passed the royal blue gene onto me. The year I started breathing air, the Brooklyns were the defending world champions. Things baseball would never be so bright for me again, highlighting the tenet that one should never start out at the top – the trip downward is an inevitable and steep descent. Mom rooted for the Giants of Willie Mays and Bobby Thomson and it’s just as well that my parents weren’t dating in 1951, when Thomson blew up the Dodgers with his season ending shot-heard-‘round-the-world. A relationship that endured much in fifty-five years could never have survived such an explosion. Giant fans were way too ecstatic and Dodger fans way too devastated to co-exist in a small space. I certainly wouldn’t be here, since one of my future parents would be dead of a brutal stabbing and the other incarcerated for the crime.


Considering my life as a Mets fan covers a fair stretch of recent history, I decided to break it down for myself and make the point, hopefully, that it wasn’t a complete waste of time and attention. I will provide individual posts covering nine reasons why I shouldn’t jump out a window and nine reasons why I should, beginning here:


Top of the First – Casey Stengel


Casey was the first Mets manager, after Yankee brass grew weary of watching the old fellow napping on the bench during games. Never mind that Casey’s Yankees were monsters during the Fifties and, arguably, the most dominant team of all time. The Yankees also cut loose the architect of those teams, GM George Weiss, who moved to the Mets and brought Casey over with him. Casey was a humorist of the first order and his experience with the Mets provided him with plenty of material.


Bottom of the First – Prior to the Mets inaugural season, Weiss and Stengel went along with ownership’s idea to concentrate on drafting older players whose resumes included previous experience in NYC and whose names were still familiar to New York fans. Don Zimmer, Joe Pignatano, Charlie Neal, Rube Walker, Gene Woodling and an aging Gil Hodges were among the names pulled out of the hat, while the other expansion team, the Houston Colt .45s (later to be renamed the Astros) focused on stockpiling young talent through the draft. In combining a motley collection of tired, old veterans with a tired, old manager, the Mets first season resulted in a league record 120 losses and an attendance count of less than one million. That the season’s highlights (and those in the following years) were genuinely comical was lost on this little boy.


Next up - Jack Fisher