|
George Vecsey, present at the 1962 creation, offers a 60th-anniversary tribute to those Original Mets without whom we wouldn't be here today or most days.
Some of us can still remember how this all began, when Stengel assembled his pitchers at home plate on a funky lakeside practice field in St. Petersburg, Fla., in February 1962 and commanded them to run to first base, because that was the essence of baseball.
I was 22, enjoying covering high school sports for that great paper Newsday, on Long Island, and also enjoying the gaggle of New York baseball writers in Florida spreading the word about the ineptitude/lovability of this new team.
In those days, before teams' ubiquitous presence on social media, radio and TV, newspapers were the major outlet for a new team — and Stengel knew it.
The dispatches reached an instant Mets fandom looking to right a moral wrong — the abdication of the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers to California after the 1957 season.
Other cities have lost their only team — some got a new one — but New York, New York, did not take kindly to the loss of both National League teams. |
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/23/sports/baseball/mets-60th-anniversary.html
| 
