38 CLOSING THE POLO GROUNDS

The 1963 season, when it came to inept play, was similar to 1962, but without the beauty of being shocking.

True, the Mets lost only their first eight this time around, not their first nine, but they did manage to put up a twenty-two-game road losing streak, which was the longest in baseball since 1890—the year Casey was born. (The streak ended with a win at Dodger Stadium on Casey’s seventy-third birthday.)

Ordinarily, an eleven-game improvement from one year to the next would be notable, but the Mets’ 51-111 record was still awfully bad, and, in fact, awful in so many other ways.

It became obvious that Shea Stadium—not yet officially named—would not be ready for opening day of 1963. When the Mets made that announcement, they still intended to move there sometime during the season, but that never happened. For the second year in a row, Casey would walk off to the clubhouse in center field to the strains of “Auld Lang Syne,” marking the last game ever played at the Polo Grounds. Again.

Ed Kranepool, just eighteen, had a “cup of coffee” with the Mets in ’62, which meant he could forever be called an “original Met.” Casey knew that Ed wasn’t going to be his next Mickey Mantle, but he later told listeners, “You’ve got this phenom, Ed Kranepool, and in ten years, he might be on his way to the Hall of Fame. And you’ve got this other phenom, Greg Goossen, and in ten years, he’ll be 30.”

Kranepool came out of James Monroe High School in the Bronx, where he had broken Hank Greenberg’s home run records. Local boy, good fodder for the New York press. At eighteen, he hit only .209 with two homers in eighty-six games in 1963, but Casey did see potential in him, and he would go on to play more games than any Met in history.

The Mets obtained the Brooklyn Dodgers icon Duke Snider on April 1, and one day soon after, Duke stood near the cage as Kranepool hit.

Casey had told Kranepool, “If I see you hitting the ball to right, I’m gonna send you to the minors.”

But Snider, observing the strapping lad going the other way, said, “What the hell are you doing—pull the ball!”

Kranepool, literally half Snider’s age, said, “Mind your own business; you’re not doing so good yourself.” Kranepool later said:

I apologized the next day; that was wrong on my part, and he didn’t deserve that. But some writers heard it and wrote about it, and suddenly Casey had a generation-gap fracas to deal with. Casey was good to me. In those days there was a thing called a progressive bonus, and I needed ninety days in the Majors for a fifteen-thousand-dollar bonus off my signing contract to kick in. The Mets were going to send me out on the eighty-seventh day, just as the All-Star Game was approaching. There would be three off days that made the difference. Casey knew when a player was getting screwed, and he spoke up for me and saw to it that I was sent out on Thursday—the ninetieth day—and that I got my bonus.

He really liked working with young players. He was a teacher at heart. He took me out to right field one day and said, “I want you to hit the cutoff man,” and he decided to demonstrate. Remember, he’s about seventy-three years old. And his throw—well, he hit himself in the foot with it. The ball sort of stuck in his hand. “That’s the way I keep it low, keep the ball down,” he laughed.

In clubhouse meetings, he would get right to the point—there was no Stengelese there. He was bright and articulate; always a little bit disheveled, not at all a Wall Street sort of guy despite being rich and being a banker. And he always rode the team bus with us.

I’ll tell you the truth, I was in awe of him, and he was great with me. He’d critique things he’d see on the field, never to embarrass a player, but to teach. He would call me over to sit with him in the dugout.

Snider, meanwhile, was playing out the final acts of his fine career. According to his old Brooklyn teammate Carl Erskine, one day, with the Mets down 6–1 to Cincinnati, Stengel said, “Hey, Duke, you manage a few innings and maybe you can get something started!”

As the story went, Casey proceeded to move to the far corner of the dugout to take a nap. After a few innings, Snider woke him up to say it was now 9–1. “I didn’t do any good,” he told Casey.

“Duke, don’t feel bad, look at that Cincinnati bench. All mahogany. Now look at our bench…all driftwood.”

—

Jimmy Piersall, obtained from Washington in a trade for Gil Hodges, was thirty-three and had been in the majors since 1950. Casey had always admired him from a distance, always said nice things about him to the press, and sort of liked his zaniness. His arrival on the Mets team marked his first time in the National League. On June 23, in the first game of a doubleheader at the Polo Grounds, Piersall hit his first home run for the Mets. It was the hundredth of his career, and he decided to run the bases backward—not in reverse order, but with his back turned.

Casey was not above on-field pranks—remember the bird flying out of his cap?—but this really rubbed him the wrong way. This wasn’t how you respected the game. Piersall played in fourteen more games for the Mets, with six hits, and he was gone, he and his .194 average. The Mets released him on July 27.

A genuine star the Mets added in 1963 was the second baseman Ron Hunt. Hunt, twenty-two, hit .272 and played a gritty brand of baseball on an everyday basis, finishing second to Pete Rose in Rookie of the Year voting. The following year, he hit .303 and made the All-Star team, and he is best remembered today for having been hit by a pitch 243 times, a record at the time he retired, eleven years later.

Fans were showing small signs of losing patience. On July 15, Casey started four second-string players in the second game of a doubleheader—Joe Hicks, Larry Burright, Norm Sherry, and Kanehl. Only sixty-five hundred fans were in attendance that day, and the Mets were losing 8–0 to Houston when Casey went out to change pitchers and bring in Grover Powell. And the fans booed Casey. This had never happened before. It was a one-day occurrence, not the start of a trend, but it was noteworthy.

Sherry was a respected receiver who had helped Sandy Koufax mature into a superstar during his time with the Dodgers, and later became a manager himself. “I remember sitting next to Hodges on the first day of spring training, as Casey addressed the team,” says Sherry. “I turned to Gil and I whispered, ‘I have no idea what he’s talking about. And Gil said, ‘I know, I got lost, too.’ ”^*

Sherry added:

His expressions were unique. “Run, sheep, run,” was one that I never really figured out. “Butcher boy, butcher boy,” he might yell if he wanted you to chop the ball into the ground and try to get a big bounce and beat it out. One day he yelled it to Kanehl, who missed the ball, and our guy gets thrown out at home. Casey muttered, “That should have been a walk across the river.”

One day, when we were playing in Pittsburgh, Gus Mauch came and told me Casey wanted to see me. I assumed he was sending me out or I was getting traded. He was sitting there in his Yankee underwear—I couldn’t believe how disfigured his right leg was—but all he said was “How did you pitch Clendenon when you were in L.A.?” That was all.

In September we were playing in Los Angeles, where I lived. He said to me, “You don’t have to go to Houston [where the Mets finished the season], you can call it a season and stay here.” We had three games left. And I said, “Oh no, I’m getting paid to be with you.” So Casey said, “If you had said okay I would have made you go. But since you said what you did, you can stay home, it’s okay.”

Matt Winick, the assistant PR director, was there for one of Casey’s better-remembered quotes. “There was a young reporter in Philadelphia who was assigned to interview Casey, and frankly he was pretty frightened. We all knew he was scared. He finally said something like ‘Mr. Stengel, what do people your age think of the modern player?’ And Casey said, ‘How the hell should I know, most people my age are dead at the present time!’ ”

Grover Powell, just twenty-two, pitched twenty games for the Mets that year, his only season in the majors. He was an Ivy League product—University of Pennsylvania—and the writers found him interesting and were drawn to him. The day of his only major-league win, a 4–0 shutout in Philadelphia, sort of imitating their interest, Casey wiggled through the pack of writers surrounding him after the game and, with a pencil and a notepad in hand, said, “Wuz you born in Poland?” It was satire, it was clever, it was probably a little bit of a Polish joke, but it was a much-repeated Casey line, since so many writers were standing there when he did it.

—

The whole 1963 season could be characterized by an August 27 game at Pittsburgh, in which the Mets had a 1–0 lead going into the ninth. Galen Cisco was pitching for the Mets, and with one out, he walked Dick Schofield, and then allowed a single to center by Manny Mota. As Mets fans were now accustomed to seeing, the center fielder, Duke Carmel, let the ball go past him. (Carmel was known to his teammates for ridiculing Casey’s mannerisms behind his back.) The right fielder, Joe Christopher, recovered the ball as Schofield scored the tying run. Mota was racing around the bases—all of them. Christopher threw home, off-line, and it sailed to the backstop. Cisco chased it down as Mota headed for home. Cisco fired to Jesse Gonder, the defensively challenged Mets catcher, who might have been able to make a tag had he not been two feet from the sliding runner. He never reached for the plate.

Pirates win it, 2–1. Stay tuned for a recap after this word from fine cold Rheingold.

What can you say about a season in which the high point was an exhibition victory—the Mayor’s Trophy Game on June 20 at Yankee Stadium? A rainout of the original date caused the Yankees to have to play a regular-season day game against Washington, and then the exhibition in the evening.

This was Casey’s first competitive visit to the old place, but, in true John McGraw fashion (circa 1923), he had the Mets dress at the Polo Grounds and take a bus to Yankee Stadium.

Mets fans arrived with their handmade placards and bedsheets, only to find them confiscated by Yankee Stadium ushers. Such behavior was unacceptable there: the Yankees explained (not incorrectly) that the banners blocked the view of other fans. At the Polo Grounds, that was often a good thing. But not at Yankee Stadium.

Casey started Jay Hook and all his regulars and played to win. The Yankees, a little less so, in front of over fifty thousand fans. And the Mets won it 6–2 behind a five-run third inning.

“There was no heartbreak for baseball’s most passionate fans this time…only glory,” wrote Leonard Koppett in the Times. His colleague Bob Lipsyte, covering the placard controversy, wrote:

“The establishment began the evening with a sneer. The Stadium has always been a cold and haughty place, and early yesterday evening it was hostile to Met fans as well. Their placards and their signs and their bugles were taken away at the gate.

“ ‘Whaddya think this is,’ asked the ushers and guards, ‘the Polo Grounds?’ ”

The Mets won both on and off the field that night, and the contrast between Casey’s former club and current club was now obvious even to those who weren’t paying attention.

—

Casey met the Giants coach Wes Westrum for the first time in a bar at the All-Star Game in Cleveland. The next morning, Casey said, “Say, that fellow really knows his baseball. He’s a pretty shrewd guy.” After the season, Westrum was added to Casey’s coaching staff, sort of a trade for Lavagetto, who went to coach San Francisco. Westrum would eventually succeed Casey as the Mets’ manager.

Casey covered the World Series for AP News Features, dictating twelve stories to Frank Eck, who said, “His knowledge of the game and of the participating Dodgers and Yankees made this writer’s task the easiest spot assignment ever.” It was understood that Casey would return to manage the Mets in ’64—this time, at last, in the new ballpark in Flushing.