Metsomania - Part 2 of 3
In which the New York Mets stop putting up with Jimmy Breslin's crap.
Welcome to Part 2 of Project 3.18’s three-part Baseball Story, “Metsomania: Causes, Symptoms, and Treatment.” If you have arrived here without reading Part 1, we love that enthusiasm, but do go ahead and read that first.
There is no modern-day comparison for the 1962-1968 Mets, at least in baseball. But let’s get as close as we can and look, briefly and with apologies, to the 2017-2023 Pittsburgh Pirates.
The present-day Pirates have won 43% of the games they played over the past seven seasons, which is bad, but there’s no consistency. And there are notable peaks, like in 2018 when they won 82 games (51%), which just will not do. And while the Pirates were frequently bad during this sample stretch, they were rarely the worst: that happened only during the very-weird 2020 pandemic season, when they won a scant 31% of their games.
Still, the Pirates are about the worst the last seven years of baseball can do. The modern game simply does not want teams to stay bad, which is certainly a good thing for that poor guy with the flag up there. Hang in there, buddy. We see you.
Now let’s look at how the 1960s New York Mets compare:
In 1962, the Mets went 40-120 (and 1; there was a tie, don’t worry about it). That 25% winning percentage still stands as the third-worst record for a team since 1901, and no team since has done worse. The ‘62 Mets set an impossible bar for subsequent squads to dig under, particularly after the club sent Marv Throneberry out to the minors early in 1963. Nonetheless, the remaining Mets did their worst over the following six seasons:
They retained the worst record in baseball between 1962 and 1965
No Mets starting pitcher posted a winning record until 1966
After finally emerging from last place in 1966, another baseball-worst finish in 1967 gave them five such honors in seven tries, losing 100 or more games in each of those years (our modern Pirates have five 100+ loss seasons in their last 38 tries)
Jump-started by their historic 1962 performance, the Mets won just 32% of their games between ‘62 and ‘68
In his report on Metsomania, Jimmy Breslin had issued a warning: “If the Mets ever started to win any games, it would spoil everything.” For the next four years, nothing at all suggested that was an imminent concern.
Prior to 1969, the New York Mets never led or shared the lead in the National League. Not for one day, even though a single Opening Day win would have assured at least a 24-hour share of first place. The Mets lost their first seven Opening Day games.
In fact, the Mets lost their eighth Opening Day game, too. It was a reassuring but misleading start to the 1969 season, which would turn out to be the year the Breslin had longed worried about. The Mets were about to spoil everything.
Before the ‘69 season opened, The Sporting News magazine featured their postseason predictions as well as a poll of other baseball writers sharing the same. In this first season of two divisions per league, the St. Louis Cardinals were heavily favored to win the National League East and repeat for the pennant—160 writers chose the Cardinals while 13 writers chose anyone else. The publication earmarked the Mets for fifth place in the six-team division, above only the expansion Montreal Expos, arriving to replace New York as the new guy in the East, but opinions on the Mets among the polled writers widely varied.
The Mets’ cornucopia of young pitching inspired some watchers to squint and see the shape of a middle-of-the-pack team. Tom Seaver, the Mets’ 24-year-old ace, provided quite a bit of optimism all by himself. Jerry Koosman was as good a Number Two as anyone in the league, and a talented rookie named Gary Gentry would eventually lock down the third spot in the rotation. Oh, and somewhere in the middle of the bullpen was a third-year swingman named Nolan Ryan. Jack Lang, The Sporting News’ Mets correspondent, got as close to right as anyone did that spring when he predicted (without committing to a firm number): “[The Mets] could be the surprise team of the division.”
New York went 9-11 in April and 12-12 in May, offering very little in the way of surprises. The Chicago Cubs furnished those, famously going 11-1 in their first 12 games to quickly run away from the Cardinals (who would finish a disappointing fourth) and the rest of the NL East. Following their eye-watering start, the ‘69 Cubs were promptly anointed as one of the best Cubs teams ever, a take that aged well. That summer, the NL All-Star team included the entire Cubs’ infield and catcher. The club featured four future Hall of Fame players in Ron Santo, Fergie Jenkins, Billy Williams, and Ernie Banks. “Cub Power” swept the city as Wrigley Field set attendance records and looked ahead to postseason play.
Meanwhile, on May 21, after hanging around at .500 as late they ever had, New York lost five games in a row and dropped into fourth place. It seemed like the team had spotted the annual cyclone. At least the Expos would be there to break their fall into the cellar.
But then the Mets inexplicably turned and marched back up the stairs and threw open the storm doors, shaking their fists at the sky. They erased the five-game losing streak with 11 consecutive victories. They went 19-9 in June, scoring 26 more runs than they allowed. It was a startling performance, just the third winning month the Mets had ever had, and by a wide margin the winningest, but no one made too much of it. The team fell back a step in July, but still posted a winning record: 15-12. A pleasant overachievement, perhaps third place, seemed possible.
Next came August, when the New York Mets began to play as out of their minds as the fans who had long cheered for them, going 21-10 and outscoring their opponents by 34. They followed that with an incredible, incandescent September, outscoring their opponents by 42 runs and going 23-7.
The Cubs, after their sterling start, performed just as well as the Mets through much of the summer, posting comparable records in June, July, and even August. But something was amiss. As they looked towards the playoffs, a distant figure kept creeping into the corner of the Cubs’ vision. Easy to dismiss, at first, but persistent, with a profile that was unfamiliar and hard to make out. It wasn’t the Cardinals, who had already been dispatched. It was…something else and it matched them win for win and then some.
Nerves began to show in Chicago. On August 27, the Cubs’ first baseman, Ernie Banks, called Jack Lang—with the Mets at San Diego Stadium—to ask for an update on the score of that night’s game. The day-gaming Cubs had already lost, their fourth straight. The Mets won that game, their fourth straight. Rarely have two teams’ fortunes reversed with such brutal symmetry.
And then came the Cubs’ 8-17 September, remembered in Chicago as a nightmare of black cats, rejuvenated curses a battered and increasingly demoralized Cubs squad ran out of power.
In mid August, Chicago had led the division by nine games, but just two weeks later, their lead was cut to five. All the Cubs had to do was play .500 ball in September, but now they couldn’t stop looking over their shoulder, and with every nervous glance backward they seemed to stumble, committing 16 errors in one 11-game span.
Chicago won five in a row between August 28 and September 2, but gained no meaningful ground. Trapped in the baseball equivalent of a slasher film, the Cubs lost eight straight games, now stepping on every rake in their desperation to get away from their relentless pursuer, who would finally step fully into view in mid-September, giving Chicago a good look, but only at the very end.
On September 8 and 9, the Mets beat the Cubs at Shea Stadium to pull within a game of first place. After the second game, the Mets’ locker room received an unusual visitor, who was unusual in that she was a woman. Watching her arrive from a far corner, one of the old-guard coaches (anonymously) remarked to a friendly reporter: “There’s always something new in baseball, isn’t there?”
A New York Giants fan since she was six, the visitor was far from new in baseball, and in fact she she had every right to be in the locker room, or anywhere else, because she was the boss: Joan Whitney Payson—universally referred to as “Mrs. Payson”—the first owner of the New York Mets and the first woman to own a Major League franchise herself.
Before she became Mrs. Payson, Joan Whitney was one of several heirs to the Whitney family fortune. The family’s first success came in 1793 when her ancestor, Eli Whitney, invented and patented the famous “cotton ‘gin.” With that running start, the Whitneys prospered. While some of her relatives devoted themselves and their share of the loot to more high-brow pursuits, Joan’s first passion was baseball (though she too collected art—and bred racehorses; she could afford several hobbies). Her New York roots, baseball fanaticism, and nine-figure fortune made her an ideal co-conspirator for William Shea, who lined her up to buy the new team he’d won for the city.
From her box behind first base, Mrs. Payson looked every bit the die-hard fan, making the sign of the cross in high-tension moments and watching through binoculars and listening to the radio broadcast with a transistor radio pressed up to her ear. Of course, no Whitney could be completely mistaken for an every-fan. As a child, Joan performed an original “Veruca Salt” when she obtained the box-tops needed to send off for a collection of baseball photographs by having the cereal shipped by the crate to the family estate. As an adult, Mrs. Payson was happy to pay out-of-town television and radio stations to air Mets games when she traveled during the season, using her wealth to fashion her own All-Access package.
Mrs. Payson usually stayed out of the business and daily operations of the Mets, but on the night when her team took a share of first place for the first time in its history, she could not stay away. The owner sent advance word that she was coming down to the clubhouse to congratulate the players, prompting a calm but urgent scramble: “Put on your pants, everybody, the boss is coming in!” She arrived and went from locker to locker with a kind word and a warm handshake. The team’s beloved but reserved manager, Gil Hodges, received a kiss on his reddening cheek.
Hodges, who we last saw yielding first base to Marvelous Marv in 1962, had gone from lame to leadership during a subsequent stint with the Washington Senators, becoming a well-regarded young manager. In 1968 he was hired back to the Mets. That team won more than 70 games (a first) and finished in ninth place. For these accomplishments, Hodges was lauded. A year later, Hodges had steered the Mets to first place and could have started his own cult.
When the Mets overtook the Cubs, by the numbers, it was still either team’s division, but emotionally, the season may as well have been over. It was really over on September 24, after the Mets beat the St. Louis Cardinals, 6-0, at Shea Stadium, mathematically eliminating the Cubs and dynamiting the cellar in which previous iterations had seemed so comfortable. In isolation, coming from nine back was no small feat, but the Mets coming from nine back was brain-breaking. People put the Mets’ pennant in the same tier of human accomplishment as the successful Apollo 11 moon landing. New York sportswriters began to brush up on theological concepts like divine intervention and what technically constituted a miracle.
On that late-September evening, having defeated the Cardinals and the Cubs in one blow, the Mets’ players raced out onto the field to celebrate with rookie starter Gary Gentry, who had pitched the shutout. In this desire to rejoice, they were not alone.
“With empty hands and full hearts they came over the barricades,” George Vecsey wrote in the New York Times, “like extras in a pirate movie, hot-eyed and eager to plunder.” Out onto the field poured Metsomaniacs in their thousands, each one now a terminal case.
The Mets themselves quickly retired to the safety of their locker room, leaving reporters used to doing on-field interviews with players to instead seek quotes from keyed-up youngsters who had clambered down from the upper sections of Shea to participate in an impromptu ransacking. “Tell your paper we’re number one!” one fan said. His friend chided him for being too obvious: “Aw, he already knows that.” Nearby, a sixteen year old drank from a champagne bottle he’d brought in to celebrate the occasion and posed for a photo.
The fans turned their collective attention to the stadium’s natural grass turf, ripping the sod apart. “This is a historic moment,” one man explained, asked why he’d carved up a piece of the field. “I’ve been a fan since 1930 and I’m going to save this. You never know what might happen next year. They might turn into schlumps again.”
Some got more creative in their hunt for memorabilia, ripping rubber padding out of the coaching boxes. Two students (from Hofstra University, they proudly told a reporter) managed to pull home plate out of the ground. The bases went next, except for first, which the fans missed, perhaps in loving tribute to the ‘62 Mets and Marv Throneberry, who’d memorably done the same.
Artistic fans began to graffiti the green outfield wall. “We’re No. 1” was a popular message, but some got more personal, writing missives such as: “Roz loves Shamsky.” Art Shamsky was a reserve outfielder and pinch-hitter. While Tom Seaver and his 25 wins had finally taught the Mets’ fans how to love a superstar, some Metsomaniacs were evidently unable to shake their obsession with part-time players.
After nearly thirty minutes of glad-hearted destruction, the crowd was herded out through the center field gates, a choke point which allowed the ballpark’s special police to confiscate the stadium’s chairs back from the people filing out, who had liberated them from temporary extra seating areas.
The Shea Stadium nurse reported 24 injuries, most to employees. Seven fans were treated for fractures of arms, legs, and fingers. The most serious injury occurred when a fan tried to climb the six-story scoreboard in right field, only to fall after passing the 25-feet mark.
A police lieutenant said three people were arrested, but only because they had outstanding warrants. The smitten Roz, the champagne-toting teenager, the Hofstra boys, and everyone else all went free.
“What can you do?” John McCarthy, Shea’s groundskeeper mused philosophically as he surveyed the damage to the playing surface later that night. “Normally we could have the field ready to play in four hours,” he said. “But it looks like it will take four days.” Some of the craters measured several square feet.
In the Mets’ clubhouse, the players at last christened Shea Stadium, pouring champagne over each other, and then beer, and then Yoo Hoo, a chocolate drink sponsored by Mets coach Yogi Berra. When the Yoo Hoo was gone, someone broke out pints of strawberry yogurt from the team kitchen and started throwing those. Every shaving cream can was emptied.
“I’ve had about four bottles of champagne,” Seaver said, “and I’ve only managed to drink two sips.”
Mrs. Payson was safely out of town, so this was a strictly pants-optional affair, though being dressed seemed to make one into a target. Some of the players began carrying their soiled comrades—fully clothed—into the showers. Uncareful hands also swept up club officials, newspaper reporters, and anyone else that wandered into range. “My God,” remarked one sopping clubhouse visitor. “All they’ve won is a divisional title.” And then, wringing out his hat, he embarked on a dippy little tangent of his own:
“What will it be like if they ever go on to win the World Series?”
Next: Our story concludes and St. Jude is forced into early retirement.
Thank you for reading Part 2 of “Metsomania…” Here’s a link to the concluding Part 3 of our story.
A few stray photo credits:
Photo of Cubs’ murderer: "Mr. Met" by ShellyS is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
Photo of accessory to Cubs’ murder: "Cat Black" by @Doug88888 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.