Faces Along the Way

THE PERSONALITIES

Many people, and a cat, played a part in the Mets’ road to a championship.

By Jay Schreiber

CASEY STENGEL

He wore the uniform of the Brooklyn Dodgers, the New York Giants, the Yankees and the Mets. Although he was often depicted as engaging in “Stengelese,” Robert Lipsyte, who covered the early Mets for The Times, said that was nonsense. “His hourslong monologues made perfect sense,” he wrote. And if you listened, you would hear the always quotable, always clever Stengel advise young players to “get in shape now, you can drink during the season,” and proclaim after another loss that “the attendance got robbed.” In every way, Lipsyte said, Stengel was the Mets’ leading man.

‘MARVELOUS MARV’ THRONEBERRY

His real name was Marvin Eugene Throneberry, which meant his initials spelled MET. Originally a Yankee, he joined the Mets in May 1962 and, in the spirit of things, immediately started tripping over himself. His crowning moment came in a game in June when, playing first base, he was called for interference in the top of the first and then, in the bottom of the inning, failed to touch first and second base after hitting a triple. When a teammate, Charlie Neal, followed with a home run, Stengel came out of the dugout and pointed at each base for Neal’s benefit.

JIMMY BRESLIN

Long before he won the Pulitzer Prize for his newspaper columns, Breslin wrote a slim, engaging account of the 1962 Mets, “Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?” From Breslin’s gleefully subversive point of view, the Mets were nothing less than great comedy, as good as Bert Lahr in “The Wizard of Oz” or the Marx Brothers in “Room Service.” “Take any day, any town, any inning,” Breslin wrote of the season. “With the Mets, nothing changed, only the pages on the calendar. It was all one wonderful mistake.” Before long, Breslin’s book became a byword for the Mets. They had, with his help, become even more amusing.

THE UPRISING

“The Mets Is Coming,” declared one of the banners that Mets fans brought to the Bronx — although not into the stadium — on the night of June 20, 1963, for the first Mayor’s Trophy game. It was a matchup of the worst team in baseball and the mighty Yankees. The banner may not have made it inside Yankee Stadium but tens of thousands of Mets fans did. Amazingly, the Mets won, 6-2, although, to be fair, the Yankees had played a regular-season game earlier that day. Still, as Robert Lipsyte wrote in The Times afterward: “A frightened man told his foreman to shut up, a beaten dog bit a cruel master. The long shot came home and beautiful, blue-eyed tomorrow finally arrived.”

JOAN PAYSON

She was a wealthy society matron who was at home at the racetrack and at the ballpark, and in 1962 she became the first owner of the Mets. She had been a minority stockholder in the New York Giants, and had even tried to block their move to San Francisco. That didn’t work, but then along came the Mets, a team whose games she would sometimes follow at the track with a transistor radio stuck to her ear. Despite all her money, she was, said the writer Frank Sullivan, “a simple, generous woman with no swank.” And all her considerable patience was ultimately rewarded with a championship.

DUKE SNIDER

The Mets had begun their existence with a lot of players who were near the end of their careers. So it was hardly surprising that Snider, a Brooklyn hero who had gone to Los Angeles with the rest of the Dodgers, was back in 1963 as a Met. In Brooklyn, he had been a graceful center fielder, famous for sharing that position in New York with Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle. In 1963, at age 36, he usually played right field or left. And as a Met, he hit 14 homers, batted .243 and then went to San Francisco for the 1964 season, where he ended his career amid a lot less losing.

THE BANNERS

The original bedsheet banners that popped up at the Polo Grounds in 1962 and 1963 essentially came out of nowhere. There was no internet to organize the effort; no publicity campaign by the Mets to get things going. Instead, there were just banners, some of them pretty clever. But soon enough, the Mets tried to put a more respectable gloss on the phenomenon by creating an annual Banner Day. And for years at Shea Stadium, it proved to be a popular event, even if the banners tended to be a little more cute (see above, 1965) and a little less irreverent than the originals.

YOGI BERRA

As a Yankee, he won 10 championships and three Most Valuable Player awards before retiring in 1963. A year later, the Yankees fired him after just one season as their manager. And by the following May, Berra, about to turn 40, was back in uniform, for the Mets, but as a catcher and pinch-hitter. The Berra experiment did not last long. Four games, including two behind the plate. Nine at-bats. Two singles. At that point, Berra proclaimed himself “an old man” and retired again. But 1969 would bring him his 11th championship, as the Mets’ first-base coach.

GIL HODGES

He was a fixture at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1950s, and the ball landed in his glove for the last out of the 1955 World Series, the only time those Dodgers won it all. He finished his playing career with the Mets, in 1962 and 1963, and by 1968 he was managing them, his powerful physical presence allowing him to convey a quiet, unbreakable authority. George Vecsey, a longtime sports columnist for The New York Times, said he came to think of Hodges “as one of the most decent, straight, strong-minded managers I ever met.” It was a strength that “made you listen,” said Tom Seaver, and it would propel the Mets in 1969.

ED CHARLES

At 36, Charles was the elder statesman of the 1969 Mets, a team with many key players in their mid-20s. The team’s part-time third baseman and sometime poet, Charles grew up in the segregated South of the 1930s and ’40s and as a teenager he drew inspiration from spotting Jackie Robinson in spring training. He once even ran after a train on which Robinson was riding with his Dodger teammates. Charles hit only .207 in 1969, but he started the winning rally in Game 2 of the World Series. And at the Mets’ victory parade, he read a poem he had written while stuck in the minor leagues.

DONN CLENDENON

He joined the Mets in June 1969 in a trade with the Montreal Expos and represented the only significant pickup the Mets would make during the season. He turned 34 a month later, making him the second-oldest player on the team. Like Charles, a fellow African-American, he became a veteran leader on a team that was mostly white. Tall and powerful, Clendenon became part of the four platoons that Manager Gil Hodges used daily. He played first base against left-handed pitchers; Ed Kranepool played against righties. And it was Clendenon, who later earned a law degree, who became a huge factor in the World Series.

ERNIE BANKS

He was born in 1931, played for the same Negro league team that Jackie Robinson did and in 1953 became the first African-American player on the Chicago Cubs. In the years that followed, Banks became one of the best and most popular players in the game, first as the Cubs’ power-hitting shortstop and later as the team’s first baseman. He also became known as Mr. Cub, the optimist who endured one losing season after another and still hoped for better. And 1969 seemed to be that season, the one that would get him to his first World Series. It didn’t happen.

LEO DUROCHER

In 1948, Durocher was the colorful, controversial manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers and Gil Hodges was his rookie first baseman. But by July of that year, Durocher had left Brooklyn to become the manager of the Giants. After that, it was in the caldron of Dodgers vs. Giants that Hodges and Durocher sized each other up. In 1969 they were squaring off again, Durocher managing the Cubs, Hodges running the Mets; Durocher still fiery and quotable, Hodges just the opposite. But Hodges got the last word when the Mets beat out the Cubs.

RALPH HOUK

And what were the Yankees up to in 1969? What were they up to while the Mets pulled off one of the great reversals of all time? The answer is nothing much. The Yankees went 80-81, continuing a decline that came out of nowhere in 1965. The manager was Ralph Houk, in his second stint in that role. In his first, he had led the Yankees to World Series titles in 1961 and 1962. But in ’69 the Yankees weren’t winning. The best player on the team was Mel Stottlemyre, who went 20-14. Notable teammates included Gene Michael, Joe Pepitone, Horace Clarke and Bobby Murcer. All of them were overshadowed by the events in Queens.

THE BLACK CAT

The cat showed up uninvited, strolling right into the middle of a crucial Mets-Cubs game at Shea Stadium on Sept. 9, 1969. More precisely, it chose the top of the fourth to make its appearance, walking behind Cubs third baseman Ron Santo, who was in the on-deck circle, and then parading past the Cubs’ dugout. At the time, the Cubs were losing, 2-0, and the Mets had Tom Seaver on the mound. A black cat was not what the Cubs needed. In the end, the Cubs did get a run that inning, but that was it. The Mets won, 7-1, and moved to half a game behind the Cubs in the standings. The cat disappeared, its work done.

KARL EHRHARDT

He was the Mets’ Sign Man, the guy with the degree in design art from Pratt Institute who, from his seat at Shea Stadium, would hold up preprinted placards throughout the game to comment on the action. He was, in effect, picking up where all the fans’ bedsheet banners left off. A banner hung from a railing and stayed there. But Ehrhardt, with his bag of 20-by-26-inch placards by his side, could go with the flow as the game proceeded. He said he liked to anticipate what might happen in a game by studying beforehand. He began holding up his signs when Shea opened. Five years, and a lot of bad baseball later, he, too, made it to the postseason.

HANK AARON

The Mets confronted one future Hall of Famer after another on their way to the championship in 1969, but not one was better than Atlanta’s Hank Aaron, the Braves’ slugger and right fielder. And in the three-game National League Championship Series against the Mets, the 35-year-old Aaron was superb: three home runs and two doubles in 14 at-bats. But all of his heroics at the plate couldn’t bring the Braves a single victory against a Mets team that normally relied on pitching, but simply outhit Atlanta in the N.L.C.S. Afterward, Aaron called the Mets “amazing.” Casey Stengel had often called the Mets that, too, but with a big wink. Aaron was serious.

TUG McGRAW

The ebullient left-hander was the busiest member of the Mets’ bullpen in 1969, throwing 100⅓ innings while compiling a 9-3 record and a 2.24 E.R.A. while picking up 12 saves. And yet he never got to pitch in the World Series, when the Mets used only six pitchers from start to finish. McGraw did, however, appear in Game 2 of the N.L.C.S., throwing three scoreless innings to close out an 11-6 victory for the Mets. And in the bottom of the ninth of that game, after the first two Braves hitters reached base, McGraw struck out Hank Aaron looking.



Photo credits: Casey Stengel: Patrick Burns/The New York Times; Marv Throneberry: The Topps Company; Jimmy Breslin: Neal Boenzi/The New York Times; The Uprising: Larry C. Morris/The New York Times; Joan Payson: Neal Boenzi/The New York Times; Duke Snider: Ernie Sisto/The New York Times; The Banners: Ernie Sisto/The New York Times; Yogi Berra: Harry Harris/Associated Press; Gil Hodges: Meyer Liebowitz/The New York Times; Ernie Banks: Associated Press; Leo Durocher: Associated Press; Ralph Houk: The New York Times; The Black Cat: Dave Pickoff/Associated Press; Karl Ehrhardt: Barton Silverman/The New York Times; Hank Aaron: United Press International; Tug McGraw: Associated Press.

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