Matthew Silverman - Best Mets: Fifty Years of Highs and Lows from New Yorks Most Agonizingly Amazin Team

Best Mets

Best Mets

Fifty Years of Highs and Lows from New Yorks Most Agonizingly Amazin Team

Matthew Silverman

Taylor Trade Publishing

Lanham New York Boulder Toronto Plymouth, UK

Published by Taylor Trade Publishing

An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

www.rowman.com

Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom

Distributed by National Book Network

Copyright 2012 by Matthew Silverman

All rights reserved . No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Silverman, Matthew, 1965

Best Mets : fifty years of highs and lows from New Yorks most agonizingly

amazin team / Matthew Silverman.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-58979-670-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. New York Mets (Baseball team)History. I. Title.

GV875.N45S549 2012

796.357'64097471dc23

2011033206

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

For Dana A. Brand (19542011)

Bard of the Mets, who searched inside the concrete of a dingy, multipurpose municipal facility in Queens and found the souls of millions of people residing there.

For almost fifty years, Mets fans have been invited to step right up or come to the park and Meet the Mets. Well, weve met the Mets. And they are us.

D. A. B., The Last Days of Shea

Contents

Acknowledgments

Fifty years of Mets baseball is now in the books. In that time, the team has worn just about every hat possible: fool, miracle worker, believer, laughingstock, comeback kid, underachiever, disgrace, overachiever, hero, slacker, hacker, champ, chump, and underdog. And fans have stuck with the Mets throughout this epic journey. Not every fan has remained trueNew Yorkers can be ficklebut the stands are still mostly filled with the hard core, the ones who dont give in, who dont leave early, who read the acknowledgments in a book on their club. Thank you.

Thanks also go out to the former Mets who provided me with their top-five Mets of all-time to use as a comparison with my top fifty. Number one on the list, Tom Seaver, is the same for everybody who has ever followed the Mets, but the other four picks are far from automatic. Thanks to Bud Harrelson, Keith Hernandez, Jerry Koosman, Ed Kranepool, Bobby Ojeda, and John Stearns for their thoughtful responses that were divined on the spot. And thanks to USA Today Sports Weekly for coincidentally publishing their surveys top five while I was tracking down the answers from the ex-Mets. Also thanks to Mets groundskeeper extraordinaire Pete Flynn and Eddie Boison, aka Cowbell Man, for talking with me for the Mets People profiles in this book. And thanks to the Mets for granting me field access when requested, notably during spring training in 2011.

The nature of a book like this is to tell the story as thoroughly as possible from many different perspectives. Events are repeated in a few places, but with the Mets the grand moments are worth savoring, and the disappointments you cant forget anyway.

Now that the action on the field is covered, there is the matter of those who helped make this book a reality. Thanks to Rick Rinehart, Flannery Scott, Alden Perkins, and the people at Taylor Trade, part of the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group. This book would not be possible without the work of my agent, Anne Marie OFarrell of Marcil-OFarrell Literary LLC.

Then there is the inspirational part of the equation. Ive been fortunate to have now worked on eight books on the Mets. Not many teams enjoy the unique history and perspective of the Mets, and none has the kind of fan base that so eagerly awaits the publication of each book. I have always taken my responsibility of chronicling this team as a matter of the highest order. I truly appreciate the opportunities afforded me and the support given me in the New York Metropolitan areaand I dont simply mean the tristate region. Beyond geography, the Mets community is thriving in cyberspace. Beyond the usual haunts for general Mets knowledge at ultimatemets.com, mets.com, metsblog.com, baseball-reference.com, and ESPN New York, independent Mets sites prosper. Several such sites are featured in this book: Centerfield Maz, Faith and Fear in Flushing, Mets by the Numbers, Mets Police, Mets Report, On the Black, and Ted Quarters. I would be remiss not to mention the sites that feature my work, including the Mets section at The Baseball Page and my personal blog at metsilverman.com. Additional thanks go to Greg Prince and Greg Spira for their help. Special thanks for generous photography assistance go to Jacob Kanarek, Dwayne Labakas, Tim Wiles at the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, and, as always, Dan Carubia.

A few years ago, I had the distinction of finishing a book on the Mets while they were playing in the postseason. No playoffs this timethis book was completed while I coached my daughters softball team, the Silverbacks, in the Rondout Valley Little League. The girls reminded me how hard and how much fun the game can be to learn and play. Thanks go to Kendall Becraft, Chantelle Bigler, Lindsay Harder, Jessica Meyer, Bianca Novotny, Sophia Pellegrini, Stella Picuri, Jessi Schlosser, Jan Silverman, Sasha Stratton, Baylee Szekeres, and Nicole Zeboris. Also, thanks go to the parents plus able assistants Fabian Meyer, Deb Silverman, and Elaine Szekeres. And what better omen for putting out a Mets book could there be than to have my Mets-mad son, Tyler, randomly assigned to don the Mets uniform in the Major-Minor League. Amazin coincidence.

Introduction

Fifty Never Felt So Young

So you thought being a Mets fan was going to be easy? If youve been around for a while, or even for the whole fifty years of Mets existence, welcome again. If youre relatively new to all this, have a seat, get comfortable. As a Mets fan you wont be comfortable for long.

The Mets were born out of longing. The Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants owned the rights to the heart of the National League fans from the late 1880s through most of the 1950s. They both moved to California and left behind not so much as a Dear John note.

Attorney William A. Shea was charged with bringing National League baseball back to New York. He took on a league that was apathetic to expansion and unmoved concerning the relocation of New Yorks National League soul. That New York wound up with an NL team is because of Sheas diligence and his threat to start the Continental League. The NL finally concluded that it was better to let in New York and Houstonand take their moneythan to deal with a third major league. (The American League also expanded, in 1961.)

The National League flotsam and jetsam made available to the Mets and Colt .45s (later the Astros) did not assure mediocrity, much less prosperity. George Weiss, who had maintained the Yankees as a powerhouse, took over running the Mets and made the dubious decision of picking recognizable names of veterans near the end of their careers rather than going with players who were unheard of yet might have a future. New Yorks best move was hiring Casey Stengel. Having a name manager proved quite useful. Creating a team from scratch was a daunting task, but the Mets had one of the games most entertaining characters on the payroll, pitching his new club everywhere he went. The seventy-two-year-old Stengel had known unprecedented success with the Yankees until his abrupt retirement, along with Weiss, in the wake of the 1960 World Series defeat. Now his team found new ways to lose em I never knew existed before.