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

stands, and Groat moved to second. An infield out allowed Groat to reach third. Daviault then took a full windup and threw his second wild pitch. Groat scored, and the Mets lost by 4-3.
    The team then lost two more games and was scheduled to play Houston in the fifth game of the season when Stengel, who said a light dew was going to turn into a hurricane, had the game postponed.
    â€œIf I was winning, I’d play five games a day because you tend to keep winning when you are winning,” he explained. “But I had a chance to call this game, so I did. You tend to keep losing when you are losing, you know.”
    He was right. The Mets lost nine games before they finally got their first win of the season. During the losing streak, Stengel became a bit edgy. He sat at his desk in his office in the center-field clubhouse one night, looked down at the knots which stick out all over his old legs, and voiced a fear which he and everybody else in New York now carried in their hearts.
    â€œThe trouble is, we are in a losing streak at the wrong time,” he said. “If we was losing like this in the middle of the season, nobody would notice. But we are losing at the beginning of the season and this sets up the possibility of losing 162 games, which would probably be a new record, in the National League at least.”
    By moving along at a fine clip, the Mets, on the fifth day of the month of May, had a record of sixteen losses and three victories. Their pitching staff was allowing close to seven runs a game. They had seven players hitting .300 or better, but the team batting average was .236. This was because they had many players hitting under .200.
    At this stage, Stengel said he was getting mad. The anger did not last long, because the Mets then went out and shocked everybody by winning nine of their next twelve games. The highlight of this streak was the display of brute power the team put on in taking a doubleheader from the Milwaukee Braves at the Polo Grounds on May 12.
    In the first game, Warren Spahn was pitching for the Braves. He had the game won, 2-1, with two out in the ninth inning. A runner was on first. At bat was Hobie Landrith, the Mets’ catcher for this game. Spahn came down with the same curve ball that has made him one of the seven pitchers in modern times to win three hundred games. Landrith did not take back. Heroically, he went for the long ball. But the pitch fooled him, and the best he could produce was a soft fly ball that went 255 feet into right field.
    Part of the charm of the Polo Grounds, however, is the fact that a man pitching a game can, without turning his head, listen to fans in the right-field stands ask each other for matches. They are exactly 254 feet away. This meant Landrith’s drive had gone a full foot farther than necessary. As the ball went into the stands to give the Mets a 3-2 victory, the crowd of 19,748 came up with a roar. If a thing like this could happen, they were saying, then there is a chance for everybody.
    Landrith headed for first base. He took one look at Cookie Lavagetto, coaching at first, and the two of them broke into laughter.
    Spahn took the defeat with the typical shrug-it-off of the real-life professional. When he got to the dressing room he said he wanted to kill himself.
    Four hours and some minutes later, in the second game, Gil Hodges came to bat in the ninth inning of a 7-7 tie. There was one out and nobody on. Bob Fisher was pitching for the Braves. Hodges, swinging late, got a piece of the ball and hit it toward right field. This ball of his, smart observers insist, went farther than Landrith’s. By more than five feet. This time the crowd was beside itself. The Mets won the game, 8-7, for their first sweep of a doubleheader. They did it with two home runs that only a Little Leaguer would own up to. And there are smart people today who insist it never happened.
    It was in the middle of this winning streak that George Weiss swung