Free The Roger Angell Baseball Collection by Roger Angell

near me in the upper deck. Their team had just gone into first place in the standings; on this day, with Mays, McCovey, Felipe Alou, and Cepeda ripping off extra-base hits in all directions, it seemed capable of winning the pennant by the middle of August. Yet the Giant loyalists were burdened and irritable. “Look at that McCovey,” one of them said bitterly, as Stretch fielded a Met single in left. “He just won’t run. He’s no goddam outfielder. I tell you, Dark oughtta nail him onna goddam bench, save him for pinch-hitting.” He was not watching the game before us; his mind was weeks and months away, groping through the mists of September, and he saw his team losing. The Giants’ pennant of last year, the Giants’ power of today had made a miser of him, and he was afraid. I had nothing to lose, though; I clapped my hands and shouted, “Let’s go, Mets! ”
    Most of the identifiable Giant fans left before the end of the nightcap. They just couldn’t take it. The Mets had stumbled into a first-inning lead on a pop-fly, wrong-field home run by Cliff Cook, good for two runs, and Carlton Willey was pitching carefully and intelligently, keeping the ball low and scattering the Giant hits. The absentees missed a Giant defeat, which might have done them in, and they also missed the last, tastiest bit of Met quirkiness. With two out in the top of the ninth, the bases empty, and the Mets leading 4–1, José Pagan hit a deep grounder to Al Moran, who heaved the ball away, past Harkness at first. Tom Haller then pinch-hit and scored Pagan with a monstrous triple. Willey sighed and went to work on Davenport, who now represented the tying run. Davenport hit another grounder to short. Moran cranked up and made good with his second chance, and the lovable Mets sprinted off to the clubhouse through snowbanks of trash and salvos of exploding cherry bombs.
    The noisy, debris-throwing, excitable Met fans have inspired a good deal of heavyweight editorial theorizing this year. Sportswriters have named them “The New Breed.” Psychologists, anthropologists, and Max Lerner have told us that the fans’ euphoria is the result of a direct identification with the have-not Mets, and is anti-authoritarian, anti-Yankee, id-satisfying, and deeply hostile. Well, yes—perhaps. But the pagan après-midi d’un Met fan , it seems to me, also involves a simpler kind of happiness. The Mets are refreshing to every New York urbanite if only because they are unfinished. The ultimate shape, essence, and reputation of this team are as yet invisible, and they will not be determined by an architect, a developer, a parks commissioner, a planning board, or the City Council. Unlike many of us in the city, the Mets have their future entirely in their own hands. They will create it, and in the meantime the Met fans, we happy many, can witness and share this youthful adventure.
    The dirt, the noise, the chatter, the bursting life of the Met grandstands are as rich and deplorable and heartwarming as Rivington Street. The Polo Grounds, which is in the last few months of its disreputable life, is a vast assemblage of front stoops and rusty fire escapes. On a hot summer evening, everyone here is touching someone else; there are no strangers, no one is private. The air is alive with shouts, gossip, flying rubbish. Old-timers know and love every corner of the crazy, crowded, proud old neighborhood: the last-row walkup flats in the outermost lower grandstands, where one must peer through girders and pigeon nests for a glimpse of green; the little protruding step at the foot of each aisle in the upper deck that trips up the unwary beer-balancer on his way back to his seat; the outfield bullpens, each with its slanting shanty roof, beneath which the relief pitchers sit motionless, with their arms folded and their legs extended; and the good box seats just on the curve of the upper deck in short right and short left—front windows on the street, where one can watch