‘Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?’

While the Yankees are struggling to avoid a shutout tonight after three losses so far in the World Series, the 2024 season was a milestone year for the New York Mets. Yes, they reached the National League’s Championship Series, one step short of the World Series. However, for long-term Mets fans, 2024 brought something far more significant. On the final day of the season, the Chicago White Sox lost their 121st game, breaking the Mets’ eighty-two-year-old record for most losses in a season. Even that figure, however, left Chicago with a higher “winning” percentage than those Mets, .253 to .250. Those of us old enough to have lived through that 1962 season at the Polo Grounds can still boast that we saw, in the Mets, unquestionably the worst team ever to grace a diamond, one that inspired its inaugural manager, Casey Stengel, to inquire: “Can’t anybody here play this game?” It was a team that was so bad that the great Rogers Hornsby, after reviewing the team’s roster selected from the first expansion draft, remarked that the Mets had not plucked their team from “a grab bag,” but from a “garbage bag.” Stengel’s query became the title of Jimmy Breslin’s chronicle of that first year.Despite it all, New York embraced the Mets. Part of this was because the Mets, for all their incompetence, were fun. Shea Stadium was a place where, as I witnessed, reliever Larry Bearnarth was not greeted with boos after throwing ten straight balls upon arriving from the bullpen. Instead, the stadium erupted to a standing ovation when he threw a strike on the eleventh pitch. Part of this was also because New York was always a National League town. As Jimmy Cannon once wrote: “The Giants were the New Yorkers’ team. The Yankees got the tourists because of Babe Ruth. . . . The Brooklyn Dodgers were a road club that crossed the bridge to play the Giants.” Dodger fans and Giant fans, bitter rivals throughout the season, had only one thing in common — they hated the Yankees who, in the seven years before my birth, defeated those teams in five World Series. I never met a New Yorker who did not share that hatred. In Breslin’s words, hating the Yankees was like hating General Motors. As he explained: “You see, the Mets are losers, just like nearly everybody else in life. This is a team for the cab driver who gets held up and the guy who loses out on a promotion because he didn’t maneuver himself to lunch with the boss enough. It is the team for every guy who has to get out of bed in the morning and go to work for short money on a job he does not like.”Breslin added that the Mets are “the team for every woman who looks up ten years later and sees her husband eating dinner in a T-shirt and wonders how the hell she ever let this guy talk her into getting married. The Yankees? Who does well enough to root for them, Laurence Rockefeller?”Mets fans were given one year of magic, 1969, a miracle year that no one born after the advent of billionaire owners and free agency can begin to comprehend. As an advertisement outside of Shea once put it: “The Yankees have 27 championships. The Mets have 1969.”Nevertheless, the legacy of that original team seemingly came to haunt the franchise. Born of such utter ineptitude, the team has for the most part ascended, with one or two exceptions, from loveable failure to crushing mediocrity. Being a Mets fan has been so painful for so long that it seemed unimaginable that anyone, particularly a Yankees’ fan, would question our bona fides. Along comes an article in New York Magazine, by two writers, “Chipmunks” in Cannon’s parlance, who are so unschooled in Mets history that they seem unaware that the team’s “jaunty color scheme” is not some brainchild of a marketing consultant, but a tribute to the Dodgers (blue) and Giants (black and orange). The authors also seem unaware that the team’s “baroque cap lettering,” which they mock, comes also from the Giants, and has an older provenance than the Yankees’ pale imitation. According to the article’s headline, real New Yorkers root for the Yankees. Begging the question of who is a real New Yorker in a city almost entirely of immigrants and transplants, the writers argue that the Yankees — the team of DiMaggio, Mantle, Jackson, and Jeter — have become that primarily of the working class. In contrast, the Mets, the team of Kranepool, Swoboda, and Mookie Wilson, have become that for gentrifying poseurs. Yankee fans, for whom a bad year is early elimination in the playoffs are truer than Mets fans, for whom a good year is avoiding embarrassment.Some things have not changed since Cannon’s time. For one, the Yankees still get the tourists. Travel abroad, and one will see dozens of Yankee hats before one will see, if ever, a Mets cap. Consequently, it will take more than “refusing” the Wave to persuade me that other things have changed as well. I would reconsider if I were to see a group of twenty golfers, having paid to play on a public golf course, abandon their round to listen to a midseason Yankees game on my transistor radio, as Mets fans did during a crucial July 1969 road trip to Wrigley. Or maybe I would reconsider if I were to see traffic on Third Avenue almost completely blocked by Yankee fans spilling into the street to peer through the window of P.J. Clarke’s to catch a glimpse of a playoff game, as Met fans did during Game 6 of the 1986 NLCS.I recognize that I am at an age where the New York of my youth is no longer the New York of today. In today’s New York, McDonald’s has replaced the Automat. Starbucks has replaced Chock Full o’ Nuts. Disney has replaced Times Square. Perhaps the Yankees have replaced the Mets as well. However, if this is now the “real” New York, the Yankees can have it.

‘Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?’

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