Mack Ade - Mack On Baseball – Chapter 8 – 1962 Mets

I was in high school when the Mets began to play. It was 1962 and New York City was without a professional baseball team since the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants moved to California after the 1957 season.

I was 10 years old when these teams moved, but I remember it well. I lived in a Dodgers household, so you never talked Giants. There was a better chance of hearing my father say something nice about the Catholics, which just never happened.

Rooting for baseball in those days was pretty simple. You picked one of three teams and you stayed loyal to them for the rest of your life. The problem was that two of these teams weren’t loyal back and their fans were left without a team to root for in the entire league.

It would have been interesting to see if fans would crossover if only one team left town. It’s hard for me to envision rooting for Willie McCovey.

The four year period of 1958-1961 was very strange for old Dodger fans. We didn’t have the kind of access that the Internet gives today and the only chance you had of keeping up with your team was a small box score each morning in either the New York Daily News or New York Mirror.

I don’t remember if any of the New York radio stations still carried the 1958 Los Angeles Dodgers games, but I, like most young fans, went into baseball shock.  The announcement that the Mets were being formed came in 1961 and we simply couldn’t wait.

I particularly remember the day the of the expansion draft. Baseball had granted franchises to both New York and Houston and each team could ‘draft’ players placed on a list from each of the other teams in baseball.

The Mets chose to pick players with a definable past, which was designed to bring their old fans out to the Polo Grounds. Some were old Bums, like P Roger Craig, 1B Gil Hodges, and IF Don Zimmer. Others were aging stars, like OF Gus Bell.

No remarkable prospects were picks, and I’m not sure any were available on the list of players submitted. Neither team produced any stars from their picks and the teams were so bad in the first two seasons that baseball actually conducted a second draft in 1963 to send better players to them.. Only P Jack Fisher was picked off of the San Francisco roster.

The Mets had to play their first two seasons at the Polo Grounds, in upper Manhattan. It did lengthen a day at the ballpark; however, teenagers in cities like New York learn early how to get around without parental supervision. Fifteen cents could get you a train ride from the beaches of Far Rockaway to the Bronx Zoo, so a four block walk to the A-train on Liberty Avenue was no problem for me and my friends.

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I had to do some research to bring back my memory of the Mets home opening day, 1962.

I wasn’t there. One million New Yorkers will tell you they were, but the attendance that day was only 12,477.

CF Richie Ashburn, who was purchased by the Mets after the expansion draft, was the leadoff hitter (Ashburn went on to hit .306 for the season, his last in baseball). 1B Frank Thomas was the hitting star, slugging the Mets first home run and SP Sherman “Roadblock” Jones pitched well, but the Pittsburgh Pirates beat the Mets, 4-3, handling the Mets their first of 120 loses for the season.

This was a bad team. Roger Craig won ten games, but he also lost 24. Craig and I lived in the same county and I called him a few years ago to hopefully set up an interview, or take him to a Sand Gnats game. He hung up after I told him why I called. Al Jackson also lost 20 games. It’s hard to find a team that had two 20-game losers in the same season. Jay Hook pitched better. He had only 19 losses.

Jackson, who still works with the Mets, was the famous pitcher that writer Jimmy Breslin used his famous one-liner for his book. Seems Jackson went back out on the mound in the middle of a game, but manager Casey Stengel forgot to tell him they had called for a new pitcher to come in. Jackson warmed up as he heard the loudspeaker announce the “new Mets pitcher”.  

 He muttered to himself, walking off the mound: “can’t anybody hear play this game?”

The team included two first basemen, 38-year old Gil Hodges and 17-year old Ed Kranepool.

How bad was this team?

·        Only one team, ever, lost more games in one season (1899 Cleveland Spiders)

·        They lost their first nine games ever played.

·        Their home record was 22-58.

·        At one point, they lost 17 games in a row.

·        Their longest win streak was three.

·        They finished 60 ½ games out of first place.

·        They only had ten saves.

·        Their team batting average was .240

·        They were outscored by 331 runs

There has been so much written about the 1962 Mets, but very little about their fans. New Yorkers never saw this level of futility before. The Dodgers and Giants were always competitive in the 1950s and the Yankees… well, we all know about the Yankees.

For some reason we thought this team was going to compete for the divisional championship, something we were always used to when we rooted for either the Giants or Dodgers.

We were equally excited to have some of the great stars of the game on our team. There were a bunch of old Dodgers, plus established stars like Ashburn and Bell.

We didn’t realize they were all around 128 years old. We were 15 and we had a baseball team to root for again!