Feb 19 2015 10:10 AM
Re: Spring Things, 2015
| It's a freebie today via one of the Times' twitter feeds. |
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Here's an unqualified free one from the NYT.
Essay
Spring of ’62: Revisiting the Dawn of the Mets
By ROBERT LIPSYTE
Published: February 19, 2012
Casey Stengel, right, ever directing his Mets troops at spring training. From left, Don Zimmer, Felix Mantilla, Charlie Neal and Gil Hodges.
| The glove I took to spring training in 1962, hooked through the handle of my portable manual typewriter, saw service only once, which was enough. Early one morning in St. Petersburg, Fla., while the scrubs were batting against a hung-over bullpen coach, I slipped into right field and settled under what broadcasters call “an easy soft fly.” It exploded in my hand. My palm still stings at the memory. I hung up my glove that day, having survived the revelation that professional athletes were a different species, even if they were the has-beens, hardly-ables and never-will-bes stocking an empty shelf on its way to becoming one of the worst baseball teams of all time. It’s a lesson that has lasted 50 years, since the Mets were new and America felt good about itself. There was room for a lovable loser in sports in those heady days of J.F.K.’s Camelot, the Peace Corps and John Glenn orbiting the earth. We could take a joke then. America was flexing its muscles, shaking off its ’50s flab as surely as winter-sodden ballplayers were groaning their way into shape for a fresh season. Among the Mets acquired in the expansion draft because they were considered past their prime or otherwise expendable were some star players, including Frank Thomas, a three-time All-Star slugger at Pittsburgh; Gus Bell, a four-time All-Star at Cincinnati; and the onetime Phillies Whiz Kid Richie Ashburn, a former batting champion with a .308 career average. Alas, there were more critical numbers — the three made up an outfield with 19 children and a combined age of 102. While most of the reporters, including me, saw this as further proof of the Mets’ inevitable haplessness (why else would I have taken my glove?), my best friend on the team, Jay Hook, saw stars. He was, like me, a 24-year-old college boy, but he was also a real prospect, expected to become one of the club’s starting pitchers. “I was optimistic that spring, I was optimistic for years,” he told me recently from his farm in northern Michigan. “The beauty of baseball is that it’s a new game every day. I never thought we were that bad. There were some pretty good guys on the team, especially the old Dodgers.” Although they also tended to skew old, veteran valiants like Roger Craig, Clem Labine, Charlie Neal, Don Zimmer, Gil Hodges and Cookie Lavagetto gave the Mets a patina of respectability, if not nostalgia, perhaps none more than the former Dodgers player and manager Casey Stengel. Hiring Stengel was a stroke of promotional genius. He had won 10 pennants and 7 World Series with the Yankees. He was considered a brilliant tactician, ruthlessly shuffling players. He was endlessly quotable. He had been fired after the 1960 season for having grown old. Upon taking the Mets job, in a sly nod to his age, 71, and a Civil War-era baseball team, he said, “It’s a great honor to be joining the Knickerbockers.” Cranky, smart, mean, compassionate, profane, hilarious, Stengel was the show’s leading man. He was up early, instructing the younger players on life (“Get yourself in shape now, you can drink during the season”) and hitting (“He who stands up to bat is all right; he who sticks his fanny out isn’t worth a road apple”) while bantering with fans and holding a running news conference. The nutty language called Stengelese (“So this here fella on second base, let me tell you he was not as horseapple as he was in Kankakee, which was amazing for a left-handed dentist, which I did not get to be”) was a construct of big-time columnists parachuting into camp for 15 minutes with “the ol’ perfesser.” Heard in their entirety, his hours-long monologues made perfect sense. I spent many nights in the hotel bar, at his elbow, absorbing his intricate, though coherent (if you were there from the beginning, that is) theories of platooning and pinch-hitting and his ribald reminiscences of players he managed, especially Joe DiMaggio, whom he did not like and referred to by an Italian slur. Even for his time, Stengel was not politically correct. Once, acting on a tip that guests at the Colonial Inn, where we were all staying, had complained about African-American ballplayers in the hotel pool, I asked Stengel if that was the reason he barred the Mets from swimming. “Thass right, pool’s off limits,” he growled, pushing his pleated, leathery mug into my face. He also said in a salty way that they could not have sex “all season.” He added, “Now print that.” A few days later, with a straight face, he introduced his two worst rookies to the press as the future face of the franchise. Their fame was affirmed in the next day’s issues of the seven daily New York City newspapers. The youngsters were soon cut and never heard from again. It was recognizable Stengel: cruel to players, contemptuous of the news media. He could also be incredibly kind, particularly sensitive to the disabled. He would unselfconsciously offer up his seamed face to the questioning fingers of blind fans and trot up the grandstand on his bandy legs to patiently chat with people in wheelchairs. Once, while I was talking to Stengel, a middle-aged man approached, dragging a sullen teenager. This was clearly a troubled son and dad. The man claimed to have played for Stengel years ago in the minors. Stengel took his time, regaled them with tales of the father’s prowess and promised the kid a Mets contract if he got as good as his old man. As they left with arms around each other, Stengel rolled his eyes at me and shrugged. He had no memory of the man. Stengel was true to himself in his fashion, never more than when he would say, after another losing Mets performance, “The attendance and Mrs. Payson got robbed.” The First Owner The team’s owner, Mrs. Joan Whitney Payson, one of the country’s richest women, had been the beneficiary of a power elite baseball coup. Then as now, there was a shady side to the Mets. In the late ’50s, Branch Rickey, who had integrated the game in 1947 with Jackie Robinson in Brooklyn, and William A. Shea, a politically wired Manhattan lawyer, concocted the threat of a rival, the Continental League, to squeeze-play baseball into returning the National League to New York. Since 1957, when the Dodgers and the Giants went west, New York had felt baseball-deprived, none more so perhaps than Mrs. Payson, who had owned a piece of the Giants and pined for Willie Mays. (She bought him for the Mets embarrassingly late in his career.) The new owner installed her stockbroker, M. Donald Grant, as chairman of the board. Grant was no Bernie Madoff, to be sure, but imperial enough. He would swagger through the clubhouse lining up ballplayers so Mrs. Payson, regally dotty under a floppy garden club hat, could review them like the Queen Mum trooping the Household Cavalry. She trilled over them, offering a gloved hand, as Grant hovered. Grant seemed to have attended that first spring training in 1962 primarily to get massages in the trainers’ room. Actually, this fit with the more relaxed mood of that day. The news media had almost total access to the clubhouse and to Miller Huggins Field. Eavesdropping on players took no skill at all. I remember how a light-hitting utility infielder named Ted Lepcio, who had played 10 years for five clubs, liked to rank on Richie Ashburn. He followed him around the field one day, saying, “Tell them how I was your bat boy in Utica, Richie.” At first, Ashburn pretended not to hear him, but Lepcio wouldn’t let up. He raised his voice. “Bunch of cocky rookies in Utica in 1945, and I was the bat boy.” Ashburn, a most amiable man, must have suddenly felt his age because he wheeled on Lepcio and snapped, “You were a lousy bat boy.” Lepcio was released before the season began. Ashburn hit .306 for the Mets that season, then went on to a brilliant broadcasting career and the Hall of Fame. Pitchers and Pitchmen In the relaxed atmosphere of 1962, Miller Huggins Field was often swarming with Mad Men in button-down shirts, rep ties and Harris tweed jackets overseeing the making of commercials. “We want to have our product associated with symbols of acceptance,” said a man from the advertising agency representing Viceroy cigarettes. He gestured at Gil Hodges, posing for $750. “If Hodges smokes Viceroy, it might do something for you, too.” It seems almost churlish now to add that the laconic, stoical Hodges died after his second heart attack, at 47. He should be better remembered as the gifted pillar at first base (“So strong,” said Stengel, “he could tear your ear brows off”) who managed the Mets to the World Series title. Stengel, naturally, was also the star of the Mad Men Mets. He spent an entire day clutching his stomach in thespian agony before snatching a Bromo Seltzer out of his locker, gulping it down, then brightening at its double-play action. The scene had to be shot over and over because Stengel clutched too hard and brightened too quickly. One of the ad men told me that ballplayers were easy to deal with. “They’re regimented, so they take orders well,” he said. “And they’re vain. They like to see their pictures around town.” Stengel later complained about how hard he worked on his Alka-Seltzer commercial. Walking On, Ushered Off Almost as ubiquitous as the ad men were the walk-on Mets who believed our stories about how bad this team would be. My favorite was a skinny, sallow, round-shouldered 21-year-old from Astoria named John Pappas. Because the younger sportswriters (Yes, guilty) were eager for a Cinderella story, a Mets official, John Murphy, finally agreed to talk to him. “When was the last time you threw a ball?” asked Murphy, once a Yankees relief pitcher. “Last Sunday, in New York,” said Pappas, looking down at his black, pointy-toed shoes. Murphy smiled triumphantly. “It snowed in New York last Sunday.” Pappas nodded. “Yes, sir. But not under the Triborough Bridge.” Pappas got 18 minutes at a nearby high school field with a fourth-string Mets catcher. He was wild, and not very fast. We were disappointed. Murphy was kindly. He told Pappas to go back to school. Maybe if he were 15, said Murphy, he might have a shot, but he had too much to learn. On the drive back to the hotel, Pappas told me he would be back. He also played the outfield. Rocket Science The morning that Pappas arrived, Glenn orbited the Earth, making Jay Hook the go-to guy in the clubhouse. The lanky pitcher was an engineering student at Northwestern and a member of the National Rocket Society. He provided a play-by-play of the historic ride along with sidebars on propulsion and the problems of re-entry. But he was a baseball player first. Roger Maris’s ability to hit 61 home runs in 1961, he said, was “a more impressive individual achievement” than Glenn’s three orbits of the Earth. Hook told me he expected to do well with the Mets because he would finally have a chance to play. The previous season, his last with Cincinnati, he caught the mumps and mononucleosis and sat out the pennant drive and a World Series loss to the Yankees. This time, Hook got his playing time. He started and lost the Mets’ first spring training game, at Al Lang Field against the St. Louis Cardinals. There were portents. A historian from the Hall of Fame locked himself in the press box bathroom and missed most of the game. When he emerged, he said, “Now I’ve seen everything.” When the game was over, a fan uttered the mantra of the next seven years: “Same old Mets.” The Rajah in the Lobby Hook and I shared a favorite coach, Rogers Hornsby, the Rajah, considered the greatest right-handed hitter of the century. By day, Hook pestered Hornsby for batting instruction, especially bunting. He thought if he could learn to sacrifice, he wouldn’t be lifted for a pinch-hitter in the late innings. By night, when I wasn’t at Stengel’s elbow, I’d be in the hotel lobby with Hornsby. Lobby sitting was his hobby, according to The Baseball Register. Sitting tall, his double-breasted suit open to starched white shirt and tie, his icy little eyes, supposedly the sharpest in the game, missing nothing. He’d see two young women trolling the lobby and mutter to the players around us, “Try not to go for bad balls.” He was a font of personal advice couched in ballspeak. He was big on getting a good night’s sleep. “If I don’t get the pitch I want between 7 p.m. and midnight,” he would say, “forget it. I’ll always get another chance to go to bat.” A heavyset, 66-year-old Texan, Hornsby was a link to an earlier time in baseball and America. He had been pushed out of the game 10 years earlier for such mean-spirited behavior, while manager and coach, as punching Branch Rickey for lecturing him on morality and for urinating on his players in the shower room after a loss. The stories were easy to believe, sitting with him as he disparaged “city phonies” and “foreigners” as well as most current players. He denied being a bigot because, “our” black people “are buried on Rogers land in a cemetery right next to ours” back home on the ranch in Hornsby Bend. He also warned me against writing about him. “If I don’t like it, I’ll be on your back so fast you won’t know what happened.” Rabid Fans From the Start Like Hornsby, the early Mets fans were throwbacks, from a time when New York had three teams. Because spectators could sit close enough in spring training to chitchat with the players, there was no escaping the likes of Louis Kleppel, a stout, disheveled retired furniture mover in his 60s who had cheered for the Giants until they betrayed him and moved. “You want I should go to Candlestick Park?” he would bellow. “The Mets are my team now. I give them my voice. I will support them all the way.” Even after he knew my name and called to me, I tried to avoid Kleppel and his claque of senior citizens. I didn’t realize the depth of the Mets’ fans’ passion until after the end of that first miserable, hilarious season when I found him weeping outside the Polo Grounds. “A bunch of sandlotters, those Mets,” he blubbered. “If the baloneys of baseball want trash, well, they got it. And I’ve had it.” But I found him again outside for the home opener in 1963. He had renewed hope, he said. And he never lost it, always coming back, through the bedsheet banner years as the Mets beat the Yankees in the first Mayor’s Trophy game, as Marvelous Marv Throneberry became the quintessential Met, as the 17-year-old Ed Kranepool began his 18-year career. He followed the team to Shea Stadium in 1964, and he was there for the seven years in 9th or 10th place until that amazing 1969 season when the Miracle Mets won the World Series. I was actually happy to see him at spring training in 1970. This time, I hurried over when he called. “The Mets will repeat,” he boomed. “You heard it here.” Life After the Mets By that time, my friend Hook was a rising manager in the Chrysler Corporation. He had pitched three seasons for the Mets, failing in his childhood dream of being a 20-game winner (he lost 19 in his first season as the Mets lost 120), but he got credit for the team’s first victory (in its 10th game). Hook and his wife, Joan, had decided to get out of baseball in 1964. “I was 28, an average player, and our oldest was just starting school, so the family wouldn’t be able to travel with me,” he said. “Also, we didn’t make the kind of money current players do, so I thought I better start a career in business. It was the right decision.” Hook, who had worked on his master’s degree in thermodynamics as a Met, was remembered for explaining Bernoulli’s Law, which describes how planes stay aloft and baseballs curve. When the diagrams he drew appeared in The New York Times, Stengel said, “If Hook could only do what he knows.” “I’ve dined off that line for years,” Hook said recently. “It has great business implications. But the biggest thing I learned from Casey that spring was to always take care of my customers. I watched the way Casey kept you sportswriters entertained so you would write about the team for his customers, the fans.” Hook took care of his customers. After Chrysler, he rose to senior management positions at Rockwell International and Masco before retiring to become a professor in Northwestern’s M.B.A. program. He always played down his baseball career. He thought it would distract people from teaching him what they knew. It was only recently, after retiring from academia, that he began reaching out to those who remembered him as a Met. When he asked me six years ago for a copy of his Bernoulli’s Law story, he said that he didn’t want his 13 grandchildren to think he was merely a science geek. He understood when I told him that my grandchildren didn’t grasp my spring training glove story. Last month, in New York, with the former Mets teammates Al Jackson and Frank Thomas, Hook attended the Baseball Writers Association of America dinner as part of a Mets 50th anniversary celebration. He got a big laugh recounting Stengel’s response to Bernoulli’s Law. Hook also went to several card shows and awards lunches. He sounded excited to have met the Tigers’ ace, Justin Verlander, and to have talked baseball with Joe Girardi, Don Newcombe and Tommy Davis. He felt reconnected to the game, now and 50 years ago, a prospect again on a brand-new team. “I’d forgotten what a good time I had,” he said. “Casey was so terrific, he used to play with my kids. The fans and sportswriters were nice. Maybe I’m just getting to the age when the past means more, but I remembered what fun it was being there.” Robert Lipsyte, a former New York Times columnist, covered the Mets’ first spring training for the newspaper. He is the author of the memoir “An Accidental Sportswriter.” This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: Correction: February 22, 2012 An illustration on Monday with an essay about the Mets’ first spring training, in 1962, carried an incorrect credit. The image of former Mets pitcher Jay Hook was by Charlie McGill — not by John Robert Williams, who photographed Mr. McGill’s illustration. |
