WE WHO INHERIT THE EARTH
It’s not just saints and prophets who endure the weak, the lame, the denialists. So too do Mets fans comprise such noble breed. To endure the hell of rooting for fallen heroes – great athletes who won’t bust it out of the box, adjust too eagerly to failure, or break down upon doing a deal with the Wilpons – one earns points in the afterlife.
This is not to say that just one fare zone away lies that pearly obstruction to eternal reward. Yankee fans, by such measure, who get heroes in their prime and victories like summer rain drops, need not be damned to the split levels of hell and North Jersey. Even the souls of Steinbrenner, Giuliani and Wally Pipp are granted clemency after serving their time in office. Purgatory’s fine, but this ain’t no angelic mob.
AFTER 11-8
New Yorkers have three shifts in their daily routine. Work, off hours (leisure to some) and sleep. For most subjugated species, work and sleep are compulsory. These provide the carbohydrates and the dreams needed to walk upright and to reflect on societies’ contradictions, respectively. Leisure is largely reserved for consuming such things as media, entertainment, and for shopping, our most vital bodily functions.
Yet when media upped its volume and raised its pitch in November 2016, too few muzzled their radios, booted their picture tubes, or shoveled away unread stacks of Timesnewspost. Without a whisper from the corporate conscience we found culture (dishes in the sink, cobwebs on the ceiling, something rustling behind the sofa). But that all came to an end when Spring Training began. It was safe again to smile at the neighbors’ kid, answer the phone, turn on your radio.
Nowadays baseball broadcasts drown out the bad news in brief three- to four- hour doses. When we open the newspaper, American males go right to the box scores to bring down the blood pressure or reduce inflammation. The sinuses blossom. Back pain subsides.
BASEBALL EVERYDAY
Fifty years ago the news was just as bad. Youths let their hair grow. They neither bathed nor kept their place. They appeared in televised news reports, gestured threateningly, ridiculed authority, engaged in sex without a wi-fi signal . . .
Eventually the days began to lengthen and the nights got shorter. There were 540,000 troops in Vietnam. But the long, cold, lonely winter of ’69 lasted only until the end of May when the Mets won 11 in a row.
There’s an expression in American English meaning unmitigated joy: “baseball everyday.” And while that refers to playing it, media provides a daily armistice through its exclusive licensing of the pictures, descriptions and accounts of baseball coverage 162 days a year and October.
“We at Victim Central News Network interrupt our 24-hour endless loop of terror, helplessness and despair to bring you . . . a winning baseball season.”
HODGES
“‘Losing’s not funny, it’s a sickness,’ Gil Hodges told us at a team meeting at the start of Spring training in March of 1969,” writes Shamsky. “Last year you made a lot of mistakes,” he reports. “We’re going to cut that stuff out and turn everything around. You’re better than you think you are.”
Few religious leaders within broadcast range and only a handful of your better yogis of Uttar Pradesh have expressed this sentiment at any time between 1969 and the present as lucidly as the Wizard of Flatbush. Put another way: You can’t live on your knees. You can’t win if you don’t play. You ain’t on your heels if you’re joining into the fray. Hallelujah.
“We all looked around at each other while he spoke,” Cleon Jones later told to Shamsky. “Hodges was making us think differently about ourselves.” “Gil was teaching us . . . how to win, and how to think like a winner,” observed Ed Kranepool.
Tug McGraw was just that in Spring ’69: raw. Yet Hodges went right up to him and said, “You’re my man. You’re going to be my left-hander out of the bullpen,” pitcher Jim McAndrew recalled. “Despite McGraw’s outward persona,” McAndrew continued, “he was actually pretty insecure. In doing so Gil was his rock and stood right behind him.” McGraw pulled the Mets chestnuts out of the fire repeatedly after the move from starter to reliever. “I give Gil all the credit for Tug’s great career,” added McAndrew, “I really do.” Praise ye Jehovah.
KING OF THE JEWS
Art Shamsky was the preeminent role model among juvenile Members of the Tribe in the late 1960’s. Now author and broadcaster, to the critically circumcised of Generation X he was King of the Jews. By no means the sole Hebrew to earn such respect (Golda Meir could cover the hot corner but her bat speed had something to be desired), he was the only Yid in Mudville and a preeminent contributor to the New York Mets’ first World Championship team. He reigned supreme among this illustrious minority.
In “After the Miracle” (Art Shamsky with Erik Sherman, Simon & Shuster 2019)
Shamsky deciphers both the blemished and exalted histories of Queens’ most prominent, near-billion-dollar sports franchise. He introduces, quotes and profiles its personalities, its victories and its deviations. The knowledge he acquired as player, historian of the club’s humiliating early days, of its heirloom championship year, and of the present critical moment in the second generation of its present ownership, is precious. It’s all wrapped inside countless examples of the spirit that reigned true fifty years ago. (Sadly, he brings no news about some off-season exorcism of what’s plagued the clubhouse for the past 33 years).
I first ran into Shamsky on a rainy night in Midtown Manhattan about 20 years ago. We were both heading downtown and as the taxi decelerated toward our destination with neither of us having gone for his wallet, it appeared the hotshot ex-big leaguer must have expected me to cover the fare. I hesitated long enough to risk what could have become an uncomfortable moment, when he offered to split it and ended the standoff.
There’s not much character development on the back of a two- by three-inch baseball card, except the latest season’s statistics and either a five-o’clock shadow close-up or three-inch batting crouch. Hence, I learned about his most revelatory long-ball proclivities in retrospect, i.e. by reading the volume at hand.
In person he’s swarthier than thou. Kind of tallish and slender compared to what baseballers look like today. His heavy Semitic eyebrows don’t join in the middle, but set the tone for a tough customer staring up at the mound from the right side of the plate. It’s quick wrists that make bat speed, home runs, and put fannies in the seats. His big hairy paws must have clued-in the hurlers of his long-ball proclivities.
KEEPING THE TIPS
Recollections, anecdotes, and a rich back-story comprise a large portion of the book. (He hired McGraw and Wayne Garrett to work at his bar on the East Side after the Series, but never remembers paying them). However Shamsky adds an act to this passion play, a hook to the story, that any fan – hell-bound or from Queens – can appreciate. He hauls Ron Swoboda, Bud Harrelson and Jerry Koosman with him to visit Tom Seaver at his hilltop vineyard in the grape-covered peaks of Northern California.
There’s a lot of humor (reprising his role on the ‘69 team, Koosman is the hero of the journey), some surprising memories, touching reminiscences, and a timely reunion with Seaver whose complications from Lyme Disease have triggered accelerated symptoms of dementia. (The Wilpons threw in a street sign, most comfortably viewed from Citi Field’s Caesar’s Palace concession).
HAPPIEST PLACE ON EARTH
We who lived that championship baseball season have never forgotten it. The spiritual – if not hormonal – effects of aligning oneself with a winner are lodged in Gotham’s muscle memory, ready to resume pumping the day the Mets Club House is demolished and made-over for winning instead of its present losing trajectory.
Though your travel agent will claim that Disneyland is the happiest place on Earth, he’s never been to Hanshin Stadium, outside Osaka. Though relatively modest per the standards of the tri-state concrete lobby, at around 30,000 seats, one reflects on the contrast between mob dynamics in the East and the West through such lens. When thousands of Bleacher Bums behave as one in the Bronx, federal law requires issuance of an amber alert. But when half the gathered fans beat their drums, swing their towels, pump their fists and sing in unity for their beloved Tigers, it’s something between a love-in and Grateful Dead show. Disney, Woodstock and Jerry Garcia had nothing on Shea in ‘69.
A clue to the success of a major sports franchise was delivered by former Tiger Tsujoshi Shinjo. A Japan All-Star selection for his glove, Shinjo came to the Mets during the managerial tenure of Bobby Valentine, who won pennants in both the US and Japan. Shinjo couldn’t hit a change, but managed to hit more game-winning hits than any teammate one season in the late ‘90s. Asked whether Shinjo’s clutch hitting success was the result of his meditation or the discipline he developed practicing Aikido, Mets Team Psychiatrist Sparky Lans said, “No, it’s because he can’t understand English,” that is, he didn’t know what media was saying about him.
SAY IT AIN’T SO FRED
And while Fred Wilpon is said to have seen the effects of success on New York’s common spirit (i.e. with the whole city ‘getting together’ behind the Mets in 1986), winning a pennant or a World Series is neither brain surgery nor wizardry anymore, it’s return on investment. Shamsky establishes well that ‘69 cheered up a downtrodden public. But since the young Mets pitcher Mike Pelfry fell off the mound on the first pitch thrown in Citi Field in 2009, it’s getting to look like the amber alert will go off for giving a pious fan base a competitive team. Is it really so imperative to keep the underdogs from having their day again?
