Ah, April! For me, Spring means renewal, hope and BASEBALL. Last season is washed clean. Every team starts out in first place on opening day. Anything is possible. Well, almost…Cue the montage of calendar pages floating away, signaling a flashback: 2022, 2002, 1992, 1982, 1962.

The Mets played their first two seasons at the Polo Grounds and on Sunday afternoons the Enright brothers attended many a doubleheader there. It only cost $1.50 for general admission, not a bad price for us to see two games that would live forever in baseball lore. In fact, Jimmy Breslin would immortalize the first one in his timeless monument to ineptitude, Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game.

It was June 17, 1962, a doubleheader against Ernie (“Let’s Play Two Today!”) Banks and his Chicago Cubs. We knew it would be a very long day when Marvelous Marv Throneberry committed two errors in the top of the first, leading to four Cubs runs. That year Marv had one of the worst fielding percentages in history, to include other star systems.

But in the bottom of the inning, Marv came to the plate with two runners aboard and cracked a tremendous drive to right center. The Cubs center fielder was a rookie named Lou Brock who got a bad jump on the ball – maybe he was still thinking about the homer he hit in the top half of the first that sailed into the right field bleachers, 475 feet away – some say the longest shot in the history of the Polo Grounds. Ironically, Lou went on to become a Hall of Famer for his small ball skills, not his power. In retrospect there must have been some weird warp in the time-space continuum on that particular day in Coogan’s Bluff.

So anyway, there goes Lou sprinting after Marv’s blast. The ball rolled into the bullpen area as the Mets pitchers scattered away from their bench. In the Polo Grounds, bullpens were in the field of play, the thinking being it was so deep out there, few balls would travel that far. A notable exception occurred April 18, 1955, when a Pirate rookie named Roberto Clemente hit the top of the bullpen awning in left field and by the time the ball was tracked down, he was relaxing in the dugout, enjoying his first major league homer, an inside-the-parker, thinking about which Spanish Harlem restaurant he would hit that night. By the way, Roberto played his home games in Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field which had an outfield so huge, the Pirates stored their batting cage out by the center field wall, which was in a different time zone than the rest of the park. But I digress. Back to Lou and Marv.

Marv was not a speedster – as a Met, he attempted only four stolen bases and was thrown out three times – but by the time the ball was relayed back to the infield, Throneberry had already chugged into third base, trying to catch his breath. The applause was loud and long as we all stood cheering the redemptive power of baseball – a goat one inning, a hero the next. In baseball, love was just a pitch away, a pitch away, a pitch away, with apologies to the Rolling Stones who on this date were just weeks away from their first gig at the Marquee Club in London.

Now the next batter, Charlie Neal, stepped in to hit. Neal, along with Gil Hodges, Clem Labine, and Don Zimmer were former Dodgers drafted by the Mets, hoping to draw fans of the team that deserted Brooklyn four years earlier (fans like the Enright brothers). Neal banged the plate with his bat, then waited for the first pitch. Instead, the pitcher wheeled and fired to second base, whereupon the ump there pointed to Marv and then pointed to the bag, yanked his thumb skyward and shouted, “You’re Out!” Apparently, Marv had failed to touch second on his sojourn around the base paths.

Now Casey Stengel, the Mets manager, came trotting out of the dugout, heading toward a confrontation with the ump. Casey was 72 years old and his trot was more the result of muscle memory than any firmly held belief in Marv’s base running talents; after all, Casey had managed the Marvelous One when he warmed the bench on some great Yankee teams in the late 1950s. The umpire, perhaps anxious that Casey not exert himself too much, trotted forward with his hands in the air as if to say, “Hold on Casey, wait until you hear me out” and they met by the pitcher’s mound. 

We watched the ump point toward first, and Casey stopped, trotted over to speak to the first base coach and then trotted ever so slowly back into the dugout. Odd. The morning papers and Breslin would report that Marv had missed first base as well. As a baseball aficionado, I must confess that this is a difficult feat to achieve. It also begs the question, what if Marv’s blast had been to dead center and rolled 500 feet to the stairway that led to the players’ dressing rooms in center field – also in the field of play. Marv would have had an opportunity to round third and head for home!

No doubt in my mind: Marv would have missed third too. But the real issue is this: assuming there was no play at the plate because Lou Brock had gotten lost under the stairs, and Marv came in standing up, would he have missed stepping on home plate? The mind boggles. Some accounts of this game claim that when Charlie Neal hit the next pitch for a home run, Stengel ran out of the dugout and pointed to each bag as Charlie circled them, showing Marv how it’s done.

But I don’t recall seeing this since everyone in the 100 rows in front of us stood to cheer Neal’s homer and blocked our view.  It really was a lousy ballpark for sight lines.

The second memorable game occurred a year later, on June  23, 1963, against the Philadelphia Phillies. The Mets were already mired deep in last place playing out the schedule. But in a possible attempt to add some personality to the team after banishing Marvelous Marv to the minors a month before – from whence he never returned – the Mets bought Jimmy Piersall from the Washington Senators. Jimmy was  semi-famous for freaking out as a young player with the Boston Red Sox in 1952, which led in short order to a hospitalization, a comeback, some more whacky behavior, an autobiography and a 1957 movie, Fear Strikes Out, starring Anthony Perkins in a pre-Psycho warm-up.

Jimmy and Casey figured to make some zany music together. After all, back when Stengel managed the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1930’s, an ump refused to call a game because of darkness, so Casey signaled from the mound to the bullpen for a new pitcher with a flashlight and promptly got booted.

Jimmy was a great outfielder –  Ted Williams called him the best he ever played with – but Piersall’s mood swings got him ejected quite often. Perhaps the most famous pre-Polo Grounds moment came during a game against the Red Sox after Jimmy had been traded to the Cleveland Indians. Piersall was playing center field when his old pal Ted Williams came to bat. Piersall proceeded to sprint back and forth in the outfield, waving his arms like a windmill, trying to distract Williams, who stepped out of the box. The umps warned Piersall to stop running around but he refused and was given the heave-ho. Piersall felt this was unjust and had to be restrained from going after the umpires by his teammates.

So now here was Piersall playing for the worst team in major league history. As Casey used to say, “you could look it up.” In their first two seasons, the Mets lost a combined total of 230 games, setting individual and team records for futility which likely will never be equaled. Rather than sulk, Jimmy knew exactly what to do in this new environment: have some harmless fun. Take for instance, an exhibition game at Yankee Stadium, the long-discontinued “Mayor’s Trophy Game.”

Piersall was playing centerfield in the first inning and as Mickey Mantle was announced as the next batter, Jimmy wildly retreated to the monuments, 450 feet from home plate. He stood there, amid three concrete slabs, bas reliefs of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Miller Huggins, all as tall as Jimmy. Then when Mantle stepped into the batter’s box, Piersall crouched behind the monuments, peering out between Ruth and Gehrig to home plate, where Mantle, now seeing Piersall pounding his mitt behind the stones, began to laugh and stepped out. 

I have never read an account of this hilarity (I laugh even now, remembering it), but since I was sitting in the upper deck on that night, an entire section to myself, let me take this opportunity to say, Thank you, Jimmy for giving me a memory I’ll never forget unless, you know, dementia and such. As the game wore on and Met pitcher after Met pitcher was summoned from the bullpen in the valley that separated the left field stands from the bleachers, Piersall would sit on the base of those monuments and gaze into the stands, seemingly as bored as the rest of us. As it turned out, this episode was just a warm-up…

Just a few days later my brothers and I went to see the Mets play the Phillies at the Polo Grounds. Another beautiful Sunday in June. We sat in lousy seats in the second deck grandstands behind third base. Given the upper deck overhang, it was impossible to see where any ball hit in the air was going. So when Piersall hit a fly ball to left field, we watched the outfielder for the Phillies move back toward the wall. Then we saw him stop and look up. At the same time we noticed the third base umpire running down the line waving his right arm in a circle above his head, the universal baseball sign for a home run. We then turned our attention to Piersall.

Jimmy had just finished rounding first base but now he momentarily paused, turned, and proceeded to trot backward toward second. Unlike Marvelous Marv, Piersall managed to step on second and as he rounded third facing backward, he reached out to shake the hand of the stunned third base coach who was barely able to grab it. Finally, peering over his shoulder, Jimmy spied home and stepped on it, whereupon he resumed a forward-looking orientation and trotted back to the Mets dugout. There were about 20,000 of us in attendance that day and we were all laughing. But Piersall was gone in a week, traded

to the Anaheim Angels. Apparently Stengel felt there was room for only one clown on the team. Piersall had the last laugh, though, enjoying five productive years with the Angels, a much better team. 

My favorite Piersall anecdote involves Yogi Berra. A wild Yankee pitcher had just hit two Red Sox batters and as Jimmy stepped to the plate, he smiled at Yogi and said, “If you knock me down, I’m going to get up and hit you across the head with this baseball bat – and I’m the only guy who can plead temporary insanity and get away with it.” To which Yogi deadpanned, “Jimmy, we haven’t knocked down a .230 hitter all year.”

VALUE ADDED EXTRA! The 1962 Mets shortstop, Elio Chacon, had a history of near collisions with outfielders. Richie Ashburn, a Hall of Famer playing his last year on the worst team in recorded history realized that Chacon didn’t understand the English warning: “I got it”. So Ashburn went to a bilingual Mets player and was told that Chacon would understand the warning in Spanish, Yo lo tengo (“I have it”). Soon thereafter a short fly ball was lofted to center field and a back-pedaling Chacon, hearing Ashburn shout YO LO TENGO!!! veered away.  Whereupon, the Mets English-only left-fielder Frank Thomas completely flattened Ashburn. While leaning over the injured Ashburn, splayed across the Polo Grounds grass like a rag doll, Thomas, who stood 6’3″ and weighed 40 pounds more than Ashburn, asked him: “What’s a Yellow Tango?”

AN ASHBURN HOMAGE Richie Ashburn was the Mets’ Most Valuable Player in 1962, with a batting average of .306. Ashburn commented years later: “To be voted the MVP on the worst team in the history of baseball is a dubious honor for sure. I was awarded a 24-foot boat equipped with a galley and sleeping facilities for six. After the season had ended, I docked the boat in Ocean City, New Jersey, and it sank.”