The New York Mess

The New York Mess
Marvelous Marv - Don't Phone Home (You Don't Want To Know...)

by Jeff Kallman

"To be a Met fan," wrote Rick Moody, leading off a 2000 World Series postmortem, "is to be preoccupied with underdogs, and therefore to love and doubt equally." Easy for him to say. But let's see what Moody has to say now, with our Mets deep enough in the tank to be unable to see the bottom of the water level ball without a telescope, and on their 40th anniversary to boot.

The 2002 Mets seem bent on ending the season in fifth place, which translates today to last place. In 1962, fifth place translated to a consummation devoutly to be wished, and a wish symptomatic of acute dementia. The 1962 Mets finished in tenth place, and it was the first time the National League had a tenth place. They finished there with one exception (1966) for the next six times the league had a tenth place. And watching the 1962 Mets finish in tenth was an awful lot less painful than watching the 2002 Mets finish in fifth.

The 2002 Mets, essentially, were a team of familiar enough names, at least one prospective Hall of Famer, and sporadically young comers who turned out unable to execute fundamental baseball if you had sentenced it to death. Well, come to think of it, the 2002 Mets just about did exactly that. They damn near put fundamental baseball out of its misery before they did it to themselves.

The 1962 Mets, essentially, were a team of familiar enough names, at least one prospective Hall of Famer (there remains following enough to see Gil Hodges enter the sacred arterials, and he has a very good case for it), and sporadic young comers who also turned out unable to execute fundamental baseball if you had sentenced it to death.

Except that the 1962 Mets knew better where to draw the line, once in awhile. And the Original Mets were funnier.

About the biggest laugh on the 2002 Mets - beyond the sight of Mo Vaughn trying to run the bases, resembling a cement truck with two flat tires, and you don't need me to tell you what's unfunny about a laugh like that - was that they were bad enough to make you want to go to pot...as seven Mets apparently did. (All things considered, you can't really blame them.)

About the worst the 1962 Mets could do was drive you to drink. And the biggest laugh on the 1962 Mets was whichever one came the day after the biggest laugh on the 1962 Mets.

The 2002 Mets were merely the understudies for the latest Adam Sandler exercise in urinal wit. But can you think of a baseball team managed by Cosmo Kramer and coached by Charlie Chaplin, Ernie Kovacs, Rod Serling, and Andy Kaufman? Can you think of them sending Bud Abbott to the mound and Lou Costello behind the plate, the Four Marx Brothers to cover the infield and the Three Stooges to patrol the outfield, with the Mighty Allen Art Players on the bench and the Kids In The Hall in the bullpen?

The Original Mets could sue that team for grand theft performance art. Just about every day showed evidence for such a suit, but two will do very nicely for now.

17 June 1962: The Chicago Cubs were the designated straight men. This alone made for a contest bearing unlimited prospects for baseball deconstruction, for the Cubs were well enough into their second consecutive decade of futility as a mystic art and their second season under weight of a ludicrous managerial experiment - exterminating the manager's position in favour of a system of revolving head coaches. This so-called College of Coaches earned no accreditation beyond making bedlam's purse from chaos's ear, keeping the Cubs in shape enough to enhance their singular battle for supremacy among the National League's basket cases.

The Cubs this day began with the kind of exercise that usually dogged them like a collection agency. They got a very early first inning baserunner, nondescript outfielder Don Landrum, who wasted almost less time losing himself. He took what broadcast legend Vin Scully loves to call a bigger lead than the law allows off first base. The Mets' starting pitcher, a slender, stout little lefthander named Al Jackson, wasted even less time laying down the law, whipping a throw to first and picking Landrum off dead.

The Cub lumbered desperately toward second base, the Mets' first baseman having speared the throw over and chased him a few steps before throwing to second. That throw forced Landrum to the usual desperation retreat and second scampering breakaway, as second and first basemen exchanged throws. Then, the first baseman threw Landrum the sort of block that usually has football scouts going Pavlov and errant baserunners going back to the dugout, claiming title to the nearest available crawling hole.

Don Landrum went nowhere except to second base. On the house. For such brilliant blocks, ordinarily, are predicated on the blocker having what the Mets' first baseman lacked: a baseball in hand when throwing such blocks.

As the saying went, them's the breaks. For the Cubs, them's was usually rare and never to be squandered. For the Original Mets, them's usually meant another violation of their Eighth Amendment rights, often immediately, punctured frequently enough by someone in enemy fatigues hitting a Met pitch into the Harlem River or close enough to shore.

The Cubs spent wisely enough to cash in four runs before their half of the first expired, and the Mets set about the business of bottom-of-the-first revenge. Almost at once, it looked as though they might get it, enough to get back into the game as fast as they fell out, putting two men on base before the Cubs could count that high. And as the Polo Grounds went into a rock-and-roaring LET'S GO METS! LET'S GO METS! up stepped the Mets' first baseman to hit, ready enough to prove himself borne of entertainment far more transcendent than turning a dead meat pickoff into a lifesaving fielder's interference.

The crowd turned up the volume, hoping it might move him to have a blast. Mates on base ready to whip the horses if he got hold of one, in came a particularly swollen pitch and our man swung like a woodsman bringing down a mighty oak, driving it well past two converging Cub outfielders toward the deepest turn of right center field. Batter and baserunners took off as though picking up hellhounds on their trails.

The ball reached the turn of the right center field wall before any Cub got near it. If this was for real, the Mets were about to cut their deficit exactly in half and put a fresh man into scoring position at minimum.

Our man rounded first, rumbled into second, ground toward third at fullest available power, as his two mates crossed the plate and George Altman, the Cubs' right fielder (himself fated to become a 1964 Met, in fact), reached and retrieved the ball at last. Altman's throw came up short enough. The crowd shouted loud as human throats allow and there our man stood, beaming, a mere ninety feet away from coming home with the third Met run.

And, then, perhaps the sunniest creature ever to wear a major league uniform this side of Satchel Paige picked the perfect moment to prove he, too, could spoil a party when warranted. Ernie Banks hollered for a throw over from the pitcher's mound and got it. He clapped his mitt tight shut around the ball and stepped on first nice and easy; the first base umpire punched a hole in the sky with his thumb. The Polo Grounds crowd wanted to punch a hole in the famous above-center-field clubhouse facade with his flying body.

Casey Stengel, the furrowed, triple-talking manager-philosopher of the Original Mets, must have wanted them to take a number. The Ol' Perfesser hobbled up from the dugout and creaked toward first base, bellowing all the way, until Mets first base coach Cookie Lavagetto stopped him cold.

Stengel picked up his dropped jaw and pointed toward his equally incredulous hitter at third. "Well," Casey growled, "I know damn well he touched third, because I see him standing on it."

Our strapping first baseman took his freshly nullified triple back to the dugout, his rounded face suggesting himself as the awkward geek kid who just got a jolt when feeling a bump on his leg, looked down, and saw the neighbour's china closet wrapped around it, and how the hell did that thing get there in the first place?

The two Mets he thought he'd driven home went from badly-needed runs to badly-declared nonpersons in mere moments, returning to their former bases wondering, perhaps, if anything could come to within ten city blocks of topping what just went down.

Up to the plate stepped the next Met batter, second baseman Charley Neal, bent on teaching these Cubs and that renegade Banks that when it came to party pooping they were still in the midget leagues. And with all hands barely realigned, following the previous breach of protocol, that is just what Charley Neal did. He swung on a too-delectable first pitch and bombed it off the upper deck facade over left field for a three-run homer.

Neal wasn't five steps running up the first base line when the Perfesser popped up from the dugout, standing athwart hysteria, yelling Stop! The surprised bombardier froze like a man who's just been harpooned with a paralysing nerve drug. Then, Neal saw Stengel pointing to first place and stamping his foot. Only then did Neal dare continue toward first and turn toward second, glancing back to see Stengel pointing to second and stamping his foot again. Manager and hitter repeated the routine until Neal came down the third base line and crossed the plate the old fashioned way. Then Casey nodded and returned to his own normal game position in the dugout.

The Polo Grounds went nuclear. The Mets were back in the game in spite of themselves. They went on to lose, 8-7. The Cubs didn't know what the hell to think.

21 August 1962: Our strapping first baseman left people not knowing what the hell to think even after he did things right, as periodically enough he did, such as on this day's second game of a doubleheader with the Pittsburgh Pirates.

The Pirates had won the first game, 8-6. During the second inning of the second game, Mets third base coach Solly Hemus got into a snit with umpire Frank Walsh and thus got an early evening off post haste, a result not necessarily to Hemus's distaste. ("There has always been the suspicion," the late Ed Linn once wrote, "that (he)...was (eventually) fired because he ignored Stengel's admonition that coaches should be seldom seen and never heard, and more particularly because he ignored it so frequently on the television show hosted by Howard Cosell, an abrasive critic who has got under Casey's skin.")

Stengel sent first base coach Lavagetto across the field to take command at third, and sent a Met player, veteran Gene Woodling, whom the Perfesser managed over several fat previous Yankee seasons, to coach at first. This chain of command held until the fifth inning, when Stengel needed Woodling to pinch hit, thus leaving a fresh vacancy on the first base coaching line.

Enter Richie Ashburn, the longtime Philadelphia Phillies star come to the Mets after two purgatorial seasons in Chicago. He had made our hero his comic confederate, drawing out his rural wit, and the twosome made for one of New York's top comic hits of the summer while helping to make our man the most surrealistic baseball idol of his and most times, his field slapstick and scattered bat heroics mellowed by his self-deprecating humour into a hundred fan letters a day at the peak of his bizarre popularity.

Ashburn nodded our hero to the first base coaching line. Our man looked quizzically toward Stengel, who nodded affirmative. He stood up and jogged out to the box. The scream of approval would have smothered that hitting the Beatles two years later.

By the time the Mets got to the bottom of the ninth, the Pirates were threatening to make it a doubleheader sweep, with a 4-1 lead and their nonpareil relief pitcher, Elroy Face, in the game. We were up and rocking the old rambling wreck (I was there, as a six-year-old fan), stomp-and-rolling LET'S GO METS! inexhaustibly.

Richie Ashburn started the inning with a crisp single, with a pair of followups from Joe Christopher and Jim Hickman bringing him home. This was achievement enough against Face, still the National League's premier relief pitcher, but we wanted just a little bit more. And somewhere amidst the racket the chant morphed into our hero's nickname, as he remained out there coaching at first.

From our lips to Casey's ears. Our man suddenly turned around and trotted back to the Mets' dugout. Then, he stepped back out, making for the plate with a bat in his hands. Damning the consequences, Stengel was giving the people what they wanted. Even if we seemed to want a fleeting promise transmuted into a dramatic pratfall, with no Met better endowed to make that transmutation.

Elroy Face must have known a spell or two of amusement working against the Mets, but he also knew he was still on cushion enough that he could practically dare our man to lay pipe on his famous-enough fork ball, unless his aim wasn't quite true enough to keep it from coming up to the plate as a spoon job, which is exactly what happened for once. Face watched as incredulously as we, as out man spooned it into the right field seats for a three-run homer and the game, 5-4.

Our man rounded the bases and crossed the plate behind Christopher and Hickman, then joined his mates jubilantly for the long day's journey to that elevated center field clubhouse, flanked by bleachers on either side, the tireless racket of adoration following them all the way, the bleacher fans especially shouting, chanting, and clapping, refusing to leave until our man delivered a curtain call.

At last, he did just that, appearing at the top of the clubhouse steps, waving to his fans, flashing his odd smile that seemed appreciative and apprehensive at once.

Seven summers later, according to The Year The Mets Lost Last Place, our hero was working for Carl Carlson Car and Truck Rental in Memphis, while his old team - with a younger, hungrier cast - dropped into overdrive a quest he and his old mates would have thought doable with hallucinogenic drugs alone: a conquest of the National League East; a sweep of the Atlanta Braves in the first National League Championship Series for the pennant; and, following a Game One loss, a stupefying, acrobatic World Series sweep of the team which sold him to the Mets in the first place, the Baltimore Orioles.

He now liked to tell visitors and customers, according to the same book, that he tended to save his baseball enthusiasm for World Series time. But then he would hand them his business card. It was a fold-over card with an oval hole cut into the center of the top fold, framing an inside-printed mug shot of himself in his old Met uniform and cap. All the relevant business information was on the inside; on the outside, there appeared no printing but a single, center-embossed sentence, beneath the frame hole:

That was then. This is now. Marvelous Marv once stood nearly naked for a curtain call, but the 2002 Mess stood completely naked for a full season. No wonder even New York draws the line at public nudity.

"Come an' see my amazin' Mets," Casey Stengel liked to hector then, including to the paying customers waiting to get through the old Polo Grounds gates. "I been in this game a hundred years but I see new ways to lose I never knew existed before."

Enough of those who witnessed the anything-but-amazin' 2002 Mess probably attended funnier murders. And I don't mean those committed by the National League against the team most likely to have handed them the murder weapons.

Richie Ashburn, Original Met, during that memorably crazed 1962: I don't know what to call this, but I know I've never seen it before.

Bobby Valentine, incumbent Met manager: Humina-humina-humina-humina-humina-humina-I dunno why...

Roger Craig, Met pitcher 1962-63, after being traded to the St. Louis Cardinals following 1963 (when he tied the then-National League record for longest losing streak): My two years with the Mets were a blessing. It taught me how to cope with adversity.

Bobby Valentine, incumbent Met manager: Rowrowrowrowrowrowrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

Bobby Valentine has his grille so far up his tailpipe he can't even see a traffic light without moving his fan to one side.

Let's go, Mets...

Aha! Found the clarification and Mr. Flashlight had the light on in the right place - I wuz wrong! ;) (All my source material never really specified anything of the rule of the time, and it took me several places just to learn there were less than two outs on the play itself.) Though if there were two outs on that hit, since it was a base hit, they would still have counted, since the batter wasn't thrown out, technically, until after the runs were home safe and the appeal play had been called for and made. Thus, the score stood at 4-2, Cubs, when Charley Neal stepped up after the Throneberry mistake and smashed that home run to make it 4-3.

Thanks for the call and the catch, Flash!

I would think seriously about moving Mo Vaughn - the man cannot play National League baseball. He can't run, he is a big oaf at first base, if he stays in baseball he is better off as a DH, and surely there's an American League team who can use at least his bat. You watch - make him a DH, take the fielding burden off him, and he begins to hit more like his former self for a few seasons, unless he really let himself go enough that he's smothered his own once-potent swing. If they can't move him, the Mets have a point in their favour: they could release him and eat that contract (they can afford it).

Either way, the stupidest move they could have made was signing Vaughn and leaving Mike Piazza behind the plate. Piazza still has a lot of hitting left in him but he's too wrung out physically to play behind the plate. They should have ignored Vaughn and moved Piazza to first base, where he still has some good footwork and doesn't have to throw the way you do as a catcher. They also should never have brought Burnitz and Cedeno back - Burnitz is not an intelligent hitter and kills himself at the plate; and, Cedeno is a jerk whose head just isn't in the game. They can be moved reasonably enough if need be or released - it won't kill the Mets to eat their deals. Moving Vaughn might be a problem, but he's a liability to them. They could find an American League taker in exchange for maybe a prospect and a younger but established position player. But they can't stand on what they have now, except their pitching.

I think Piazza can play a credible first base. The footwork is a little different, but he is adaptable. The key is that he doesn't have to throw as far from that position as he would behind the plate. And he has a very good glove hand, you can readily enough transmute the glove work involved in blocking the plate or an errant pitch into a low scoop at first base. Plus there's no reason he can't maintain field leadership from first base, it worked brilliantly for Keith Hernandez in his peak seasons as a Met. I think if you lifted the defencive weight from him and moved him to first base where he can work within his age and skill level, you would take an awful lot of burden off him when he hits, and he will probably post up very solid bat performance for the rest of his Met career. He's still a no-questions-asked Hall of Famer as a catcher and the rest of his career will be, basically, an embellishment of his offence, but the Mets need that bat to rebuild around.

The bullpen will get a huge boost if John Franco decides to pitch one more season - he's still a good pitcher and he's a very strong mentor, exactly what a developing bullpen needs. David Weathers and Mark Guthrie are excellent setups/middlemen. Armando Benitez I think is about through as a closer in spite of his save numbers - he's simply not a guy you can go to in the heat of a race.

I can't prove this, but I think Benitez has never really been the same at-'em pitcher ever since that time he knocked down Tino Martinez, when Benitez was with the Orioles, and it started a near-riot on the field. I'm convinced his inability since then to come hard inside when needed has been what has hurt him, and I am not certain he'll ever get it back, and you've got to work inside to work successfully especially as a closer. Working middle or outside, Benitez is nails, but the minute the hitter starts crowding the plate he's meat.

Look at Byung-Hyun Kim and the comeback he made from last year's World Series disasters - this kid isn't afraid of anything, and he certainly isn't afraid to go inside when he needs it. And if you take him downtown, he just picks himself up, dusts off, and goes right after you again. There's a reason why his blown saves didn't make people as nervous as others' blown saves did this year - Kim, for all his boyishness on the mound, gets a little tougher when you tie it up on him, he just runs right after you and shuts you down and hangs in there, and if his team takes the lead back, he stays in and shuts you down. He's had six blown saves all year and turned four of them into wins that you can't say were all the other guys' doing; he'd usually pitch another inning and nail it. This kid has heart.

I also think Roberto Alomar can recuperate from this season. I think he hasn't said much about it but the roll-over-play-dead that hit most of the team affected him. I think it affected Edgardo Alfonzo the same way. Rey Ordonez isn't the same glove he had been several seasons before this one, and his hitting weakness cuts down on too many options. I'd like to see the Mets either develop or deal for a more consistent shortstop to play between Alfonzo and Alomar, then move Piazza to first, dump Vaughn, and concentrate on a younger catcher. Not to mention dumping Burnitz and Cedeno. And, then, start looking for a new general manager and manager. If I were Fred Wilpon, I'd think about romancing Felipe Alou this winter...

So who is going to win the World Series this year? My pick is Minnesota.

There are a lot of reasons to like the Twins except one: they played in the weakest division in baseball this year. And they generally didn't fare as well against Oakland or Anaheim as they did other clubs. If they get past the A's in round one, they have a decent chance, assuming they can get past the Angels if they survive against the Yankees - the Angels are a near-even match to the Twins until you get to the bullpens and then it's no contest: the Angel pen is far stronger and deeper.

Both Oakland and the Angels acquitted themselves decently enough against the Yankees, all things considered, but the Yankees aren't quite the same team they were the past four seasons and not just because of the odd personnel shifts here and there. They just don't have the pitching solidity they had before. They can club you to death in the lineup still, but if you can outpitch them you have a chance. And the Yankees know in their guts that had it not been for having a shortstop who played his position in the crunch as though he learned it from Bob Cousy, they wouldn't have gone to the Series last year.

My call: If the Angels get past the Yankees, they can take it. (The non-AL East team with the best record against the East: The Angels, 28-13. The Yankees against the AL West: 17-15.) They're itching for revenge against the A's, who gave them the fits last week after the Angels gave the A's the fits the week before, and you better believe they're scouting the A's as arduously as they're scouting the Yankees. The one mistake that will kill the Angels, especially if they get to the LCS against the A's: if they try to beat the A's at their own game rather than play Angelball. It hurt them in the second A's series in September; it hurt them against the Mariners and Rangers and kept them from nailing a postseason spot, and likely kept them from overtaking the A's to win the division. The Angels developed a very strong game of their own but they beat themselves when they step out of that game to play the opponents' game. Just play Angelball, fellas.

If the Yankees beat the Angels and the Twins beat the A's, the Twins are doomed - the Yankees are just a little more strong offencively and have just that much more bullpen solidity. The Twins against the AL West: 19-17. Against the AL East: 15-17. Not good.)

If the Twins manage to survive to the pennant, their best chance at winning the Series would be if Atlanta wins the pennant, though it would probably be a six-game Series at minimum. If the Braves don't win it, the Twins have a problem, since both the St. Louis Cardinals and even the reeling Arizona Diamondbacks can just plain outplay them. So, actually can the San Francisco Giants, assuming their surge is the real thing and they snatch the division unexpectedly. If the Cardinals hang in to win the pennant, they're more likely to avenge 1987 than are the Twins to win. A Cardinals-Twins Series won't be a sweep, will likely go six games at minimum, but these Twins are still a home team: their record on the road as of today was exactly .500; the Cardinals, on the other hand, went 45-36 on the road.

Indeed it was Lou Brock who bombed that one. Brock himself remembers that when he hit it, he took off like mad from the plate and saw the ump giving what he thought was a sign that he had a chance for an inside the park job if he kept running like hell. It wasn't until he got back to the Cub dugout that he realised just what he'd hit. Did you see where that ball went? Man - I needed binoculars! Ron Santo is said to have said to Brock after the blast.

The very next day, by the way, the Braves came to town to play the Mets - and Henry Aaron hit one the same distance, but his may have cleared the wall entirely.

According to Essential Cubs, that tape-measure belt was Brock's first major league dinger off a lefthanded pitcher.

Did you know: One Cub actually tried to dissuade the club from dealing for Ernie Broglio at all: Lew Burdette, himself acquired earlier in 1964 from the Cardinals and thus in a position to know Broglio was suffering arm trouble and taking shots daily. He told the pitching coaches, who in turn told what was left of the College of Coaches, whose informing the front office fell on deaf ears. The rest is, depending on your point of view, either baseball history or Cub infamy.

Thanks for this thread tonight because the Mariners were eliminated today---I deserve nothing but chastisement for so closely following this team for the past six months.

The Mariners problems are many. I see the possibility of them being in 4th place next year after the Texas Rangers blew them out in that 4 game set in Arlington.

Edgar and McClemore are getting old, Olerud can't run, Guillen is the worst SS in the AL West, Cerillo is a pillow, Cameron swings too hard, and the league has learned how to pitch to Ichiro. Freddy Garcia seems confused, and the bullpen sorely missed Norm Charlton.

The best feat I ever saw in NY was when Roger Maris caught a ball and fell into the stands. I also saw Don Zimmer get beaned at Ebbets Field by the Reds' Hal Jeffcoat---I was a real little tyke then.

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