Even though the ’62 Mets were by any measure an embarrassment, they came to take on cult status as time passed. Anyone on that roster that year was “an original Met,” which meant autograph shows, anniversary revisits, and a special place in the hearts of baseball fans—just as though they had been world champions. As Ken MacKenzie would remember:
My first real contact with Casey came the first day of the full squad reporting, when he walked us around the bases and explained the perils and opportunities at each one. He’d been doing this for years. It was mostly double-talk, and I saw smiles on Craig, Hodges, Neal, and Zimmer as he did it.
He used the newspapers to make points about the players. A lot of guys didn’t like that. If he thought someone was any good, he’d say, “He could make a living.”
After that first season, when I was 5-4, I was sent the same contract, ten thousand dollars. I didn’t sign it and I thought Casey had said he’d go to bat for me. But he didn’t, I had to fight myself for the $13,750 that I got from Weiss. He told me I was lucky to win any games.
Roger Craig was clearly the staff leader, both in wins (ten) and in stature (he had seventeen “quality starts” by today’s standards). One day, Casey went to pull him, and Roger lost his temper. “ ‘You’re gonna lose another one, you old goat,’ ” said Craig, according to MacKenzie.
And he stormed off. Then, in the dugout, he felt badly. Casey put his hand on Roger’s knee and said, “You know, you’ve lost a few yourself.” After Craig apologized, Casey said, “Ah, forget it, I know you want to win. So do I.”
Once, almost in desperation, he said he’d give fifty dollars to anyone who got hit by a pitch. Kanehl got hit! I drew a dollar sign on his bruise, and sure enough Casey took out his wallet and gave him the fifty.
Howard Clothes had a billboard at the Polo Grounds, and the guy who hit the sign the most would win a boat. Casey didn’t like that contest at all, and he grumbled, “If you want a boat, join the navy.” [Throneberry, from landlocked Tennessee, won the boat.]
When I got traded to St. Louis, I went to Casey in his office to say thank you. And he said, “Good luck to you; I know you tried your best.”
He was great with the players’ kids, recalled Jay Hook, forever to be remembered as the first pitcher to win a game in the team’s history. Hook was brainy—he had a master’s degree in thermodynamics from Northwestern, and wrote a paper proving that a baseball can curve. Casey sometimes called him “the professor,” not to be confused with his own tag as “the Ol’ Perfessor.” Hook would later recall:
We had two little kids and lived in a rental house. Sometimes we’d bring them to dinner at the Colonial Inn. We’d dress the kids up nicely, and Casey and Edna really liked them. When I eventually got traded, Casey said, “Edna’s gonna be really upset with me for moving those kids.”
He showed me something with Al Jackson. Jackson arrived at the Colonial Inn for spring training, and the cab driver told him he would have to take him around to the back entrance. Al said, “I’m not paying you if you do that.” He went to his room and got a call from hotel management, telling him he could not use the pool or eat in the dining room. Casey went to bat for him, and told the hotel, “If you want to treat our players that way, we’ll move to another hotel.” They let Al use the facilities.
After my first win, the reporters took a lot of time with me, and there was no hot water left in the showers. Casey said, “Take as much time as you want, we’ll hold the plane.”
Casey called Roger Craig “Mr. Craig”; to him, Ashburn, Zimmer, Bell, Hodges, and Craig were the adults on the team. He looked to them for leadership.
“We all looked up to Roger Craig,” said Craig Anderson. “He was mature—he was our leader.”
Roger remembered:
He [Casey] told me if I got a contract that I didn’t think was enough, I should call him and he’d help me. And, of course, I got one, I called him, and he did help. I admired that. When my pitching record was bad, with all those losses, he’d tell me, “You’re pitching good, don’t worry about it,” and it did make me feel better.
Gus Mauch, with all his training equipment that he’d travel with, also carried a case of booze for Casey on the road. It was one of his responsibilities. Casey could hold his liquor, everyone knew that.
He would occasionally fall asleep in the dugout, especially on a doubleheader day. One year we played twenty-one doubleheaders! If he’d nod off, Lavagetto would cover for him, or he might prod him and say, “You might want to send so-and-so up to pinch-hit.” But he didn’t really manage that much; he’d do the lineup card, and he’d let his veterans play the whole game. Hemus and Lavagetto would help with small moves during the game.
Craig Anderson agreed. “He slept on the bench. Once we played in St. Louis on a Sunday, and all commercial airlines had been grounded. We had to take an overnight train to Pittsburgh and played two the next day. I saw him nodding off that day—who could blame him—he was seventy-three then—but he’d wake up and start flashing signals to make you think he was paying attention.”
“I was pitching one day and all of a sudden I kinda lost my control,” added Roger Craig. “Casey walked to the mound and says, ‘Mr. Craig, what seems to be the trouble?’ And I said, ‘The balls feel real slippery.’ He reaches down, and he says, ‘Well, there’s one ton of dirt below your feet. You might want to reach down and rub the blasted ball up.’ And with that, he waddled off.
“Casey always let the starting pitcher go over the other team’s lineup, so the defensive guys would know where to play. I’m going over the Giants one day, and I get to McCovey. I said, ‘He’s a low-ball hitter and a dead pull hitter. Play him to pull.’ And Casey interrupts me and says, ‘Mr. Craig, do you want the right fielder to play in the upper deck or the lower deck?’ ”
Late in the season, Craig stayed home with an injury as the Mets began a road trip. “I left my pitching staff back home,” Casey told his writers. It was a high compliment for Roger.
Craig Anderson had first met Casey when he was in high school in the Washington, D.C., area. A Yankee scout took him to Griffith Stadium to see Stengel, who said, “Oh, I’ve heard a lot about you.” “Of course,” recalls Anderson, “he’d never heard of me at all. But that was Casey; the gift of gab. He never had one-on-one moments with players. It was always the press in his office with him. No one just popped in and said, ‘How ya’ doin’, Casey?’ ”
Early in that first season, we were behind 5–0 in the fourth inning when Casey lifted our starter and brought in Herb Moford. Moford was to lead off our half of the inning. The coaches said to Casey, “Who you wanna pinch-hit?” They sort of pushed him, but he wouldn’t go along with it. He went to Moford and said, “Are you a good hitter?” Naturally, Moford said yes—no pitcher ever wants to come out. The coaches were mad, shaking their heads. And Moford singles to left. That would be a funny enough conclusion, except Casey then sent in a pinch runner. You could never figure him out, you could never read his mind.
He always rode the team bus; he never took taxis. But, oh boy, he could be tough on Lou Niss, our traveling secretary. He wanted everything just so, and anything that wasn’t, he’d let Niss have it. This was sad, because all the players liked Lou. We felt sad seeing that.
“He’d imitate Niss’s walk, which was a little prissy, smoking a cigarette and walking behind him,” Jacobson remembered, laughing.
Once, Niss overpaid everyone by ten dollars on their meal money, and had to ask for it back. Casey stood up and said, “Take it out of my check, Lou.” That was about three hundred dollars—another reason Casey wasn’t crazy about Niss.
“We were in Norfolk, Virginia, once to play an exhibition game with the Orioles,” recalled Craig Anderson. “At a fund-raising breakfast, Casey was called upon to introduce his team. He completely skipped the outfielders. When he was asked about it, he said, ‘We have big trades pending, and I didn’t want to mention any names.’ It made no sense.”
On August 16, the city of St. Petersburg decided to rename Miller Huggins Field to Huggins-Stengel Field. There was considerable opposition by locals and old-time baseball writers (Huggins and his family actually lived in St. Petersburg, and his brother was still living there), but the vote passed; two plaques are now side by side outside the old ballpark.
In the last week of the season, the Mets announced that Casey would return to manage again in 1963, when it was expected that the team would move into the new Shea Stadium. The idea of having Casey on hand to open the ballpark was appealing, but, alas, it would not be ready, and a second year at the Polo Grounds was necessary.
“Around this time, the Mets got Joe Pignatano, the former Dodger—he was like the tenth catcher of the season,” recalled Matt Winick, a longtime Mets publicist. “He got to New York early and sat in the dugout with Casey for a long time, just the two of them. Around four-thirty the writers arrived, and one of them says, ‘Who’s catching tonight?’ And Casey said, ‘This Italian fellow, if he ever shows up.’ He somehow missed Piggy’s greeting and never knew that was him.”
The inaugural season ended with a thud. The next-to-last game was a victory, the team’s fortieth. Somehow thirty-nine would have sounded a lot worse than forty, but 40-120, sixty games out of first, was easy to remember. (Two rained-out games were not made up.)
Fittingly, in the eighth inning of the last game, Pignatano popped up to second (in short right field), and the Cubs turned it into a 4-3-6 triple play. It was, in a sense, a perfect ending.
The Mets had used forty-five players and 124 different lineups. They never could find the right mix, because there wasn’t enough talent to mix anything. The regular starters had embarrassing marks of 10-24 (Roger Craig), 3-17 (Craig Anderson), 8-20 (Al Jackson), and 8-19 (Jay Hook). Casey called the right-hander Bob Miller, 1-12, “Nelson,” for reasons Miller never knew. The Mets also had a left-handed Bob Miller, who had a 7.08 ERA.
The season was memorable and defined in a number of ways, but the popular columnist Jimmy Breslin struck the right chord by writing the book on the Mets, Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?, which was published in 1963.
He took the title from a supposed quote of Casey’s, which he may or may not have said: “You look up and down the bench and you have to say to yourself, ‘Can’t anybody here play this game?’ ” (Some felt it was “Can’t anybody play this here game?”)
There were other books to come in ensuing years. The book agent Bill Adler compiled Love Letters to the Mets from real letters the PR department received. George Vecsey wrote Joy in Mudville. Leonard Shecter wrote Once Upon a Time. Leonard Koppett wrote The New York Mets. Lindsey Nelson wrote Backstage at the Mets. Jerry Mitchell wrote The Amazing Mets. All focused on Casey, which was what the Mets wanted. That’s a lot of books about a last-place team, although later ones ran up to the team’s 1969 championship from such humble beginnings.
An unpublished diary of the second season, “Let’s Go Mets,” written by two teenage fans in suburban New York, was discovered. Maury Allen, who would come to prominence with the New York Post in the sixties, made a side living doing Mets books and Casey books.
One thing was certain. Casey Stengel had more than earned his salary in 1962. The New York Mets were on the national consciousness, and on the heels of genuinely competing for attention with the Yankees.