Free Can't Anybody Here Play This Game? by Jimmy Breslin

evidence of taking it for granted. The present philosophy seems to be that this is no time to get hurt. Most of the boys are playing as if their Blue Cross has lapsed. Those of the Mets who still hustle resent the quitting attitude of others, but they are helpless to do anything about it.”
    Many people, however, took violent issue with Young on the matter. They said the trouble was not that the Mets were not hustling. The trouble was that the Mets were just a lousy team.
    With all this, Mrs. Payson walked into the Polo Grounds on July 6 to see the Mets play the St. Louis Cardinals.
    â€œWhat is all this nasty talk about?” she was saying for the rest of the day.
    The Mets, on a grand slam home run by Rod Kanehl, were on their way to a 10-3 victory over the Cardinals. Not an error, not a missed base, not a man in sight asleep. Roger Craig went all the way.
    A day later she again sat in her box seat. This time she saw Throneberry for the first time. He came up as a pinch-hitter in the ninth inning. The Mets were trailing, 4-3. Throneberry hit one a mile, and the Mets won the game, 5-4.
    â€œIsn’t that marvelous?” Mrs. Payson cheered as Throneberry trotted around the bases.
    â€œThat’s what everybody has been saying,” she was told.
    Now, sitting here in her railroad car, Mrs. Payson thought about the season.
    â€œNothing went right, did it?” she said. “Well, let’s hope it is better this year. It has to be. I simply cannot stand 120 losses this year. If we can’t get anything, we are going to cut those losses down.
    â€œAt least to 119.”

4
The Nickel Line
    T HE M ETS OPENED THEIR season on April 11 and closed it on September 30. In this time, the players did enough things wrong to convince even casual observers that there has never been a team like them. From the start, the trouble with the Mets was the fact they were not too good at playing baseball. They lost an awful lot of games by one run, which is the mark of a bad team. They also lost innumerable games by fourteen runs or so. This is the mark of a terrible team. Actually, all the Mets did was lose. They lost at home and they lost away, they lost at night and they lost in the daytime. And they lost with maneuvers that shake the imagination.
    It is because of this that you do not simply use figures to say that the Mets of 1962, with 120 losses and only 40 wins, are the worst team in modern times. Instead, you investigate the matter thoroughly. Then you can say, with full authority, that the Mets are the worst team.
    It was Barney Kremenko of the New York Journal-American who put it best. Kremenko last season saw every one of the Mets’ games. By August, he was shell-shocked.
    â€œI have covered losing clubs before,” he announced. “But for me to be with a non-winner !”
    What follows herewith is more or less a recapitulation of the Mets and all that surrounded them last season. Unfortunately, there is reason to feel this material can also be used as a preview for the 1963 season. Most people do not expect the Mets to be improved this year. Most people don’t want them to be improved. It was too much fun as it was.
    â€œYou look back on it,” one of their players noted last winter, “and you have to say forty games is about all we could win. After all, we were playing against teams that had all major-leaguers on them.”
    In the interests of preserving a man’s paycheck, the player’s name is omitted here. However, Marvelous Marvin Throneberry’s expansive views on this subject have been unclassified for some time.
    â€œYou know,” he said, “they’s teams been playing together forty years and they’s still finishin’ down in last place or something. Just because you have a team, that don’t mean it got to finish on top.”
    The season, and all that went with it, went along something like this:
    Opening day was to be the tenth, a night