Wayne Coffey - They Said It Couldn’t Be Done: The ’69 Mets, New York City, and the Most Astounding Season in Baseball History

Forty-one is a notable number in the history of Flushing, Queens, the biggest and easternmost borough of New York City. Its not so much because the neighborhood sits hard by the 41st latitude or because the number was once worn by men named Gordon Richardson and Jim Bethke, both of whom pitched briefly for the local baseball team, the New York Mets, in the mid-1960s. It is more because of the person to wear it after them, a rookie from Fresno, California, named George Thomas Seaver. He arrived in New York in 1967 and, unlike Richardson and Bethke, was a starting pitcher. He wore number 41 with such distinction that no Met will ever put it on again.

Tom Seaver and his contemporaries played their ball games in Shea Stadium, where the Mets took up residence in 1964 and stayed until 2008. Built on top of an ash heap, Shea opened just ahead of the 1964 Worlds Fair, not far from the former site of Neds Diner on Roosevelt Avenue. In its fifth year of existence, two men walked on the moon, four hundred thousand people descended on a farm in New Yorks Catskill Mountains for the biggest and muddiest musical event in history, and Shea Stadium became the epicenter of the baseball world.

The last of these developments was the most unforeseen.

Shea Stadium was a bowl-shaped edifice, long on symmetry, short on character, its most notable architectural feature the blue and orange tiles that were speckled around its perimeter like rectangular graffiti. It was located a long toss from a bay and creek that bore the name Flushingan anglicized derivation of the Dutch town Vlissengen, given to the area by its first European settlers. In its earliest days, Flushing was the horticultural hub of New York City, a locale with rich creekside earth that spawned a wide assortment of trees and shrubs, along with the first commercial nursery in the United States. Started by a father and son, Robert and William Prince, the nursery opened for business almost forty years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

In Shea Stadiums formative years, it was known for neither fertile soil nor winning baseball. A four-sided clock tower with the words SERVAL ZIPPERS rose in plain view over the left-center-field fence. For decades the Serval Zipper Company helped people keep their pants and dresses on but paid scant attention to its clock, which was stuck at 10:59 for years and showed no more signs of getting unstuck than the Mets showed of ever leaving last place.

The Mets began life as an expansion team in 1962, joining the National League along with the Houston Colt .45s (renamed the Astros late in 1964, to coincide with their move into baseballs first indoor ballpark, the Astrodome). Their principal owner was Joan Whitney Payson, a scion of one of the nations wealthiest families, a woman whose ancestry traced back to the Mayflower. A patron of the arts and noted philanthropist, Payson also had a deep passion for horse racing and baseball, owning a number of Thoroughbreds and a minority share in the New York Giants. When the Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers decamped for California after the 1957 season, Payson was among the appalled masses who couldnt imagine life in New York without a National League ball club. So when the league announced it was adding two franchises, Payson bought one. She thus became the first woman to purchase a club in big-league history.

Payson hired former Yankees general manager George Weiss to be the Mets first president. Weiss, in turn, hired 71-year-old Casey Stengel, who had led the Yankees to seven World Series titles and three American League pennants in 12 years, to be their manager. The two men had unassailable baseball credentials, but their winning pedigree did not carry over to their new enterprise.

The 1962 Mets went 40-120, losing more games than any ball club in the twentieth century and finishing 60 games out of first place. This is not easy to do. It requires staggeringly poor results over the full six-month season, and that is precisely what the Mets achieved, with losing streaks of 9 games (to start the season), 13 games, and 17 games, along with another patch in which they lost 16 of 17. The 62 Mets made 3 errors in their first game, 3 in their last game, and 204 more errors in between. Crisp baseball was in such short supply that one player remembered a road trip in which Stengel announced the days itinerary: There will be two buses to the park from the hotel. The two oclock bus is for those who need a little extra work, and then there will be an empty bus leaving at five oclock.

The Mets last rally of their debut seasontwo on and nobody out against the Cubs in the top of the eighth inning of game 160 at Wrigley Fieldended when catcher Joe Pignatano, a former Dodger and future Mets coach, came on for Clarence Choo Choo Coleman and hit into a triple play. It would be Pignatanos final big-league at bat, clearing his schedule to report to his off-season job in the toy department at Abraham & Straus, a Brooklyn department store.

The Mets played their first two seasons in the Polo Grounds, the former home of Paysons beloved New York Giants in upper Manhattan, just across the Harlem River from Yankee Stadium, before relocating to Shea. The move changed little beyond their mailing address. The Mets continued to lead all of baseball in futility, averaging 108 losses per season in their first half-dozen years, an avalanche of defeats that did nothing to diminish the enthusiasm of their ever-faithful fans, who kept coming through the turnstiles and kept embracing the players earnest, if unavailing, efforts to win an occasional game.