Sport: A Fable for Our Time

ONCE, long ago in the verdant land of New York’s Flushing Meadow, there lived a band of sportsmen who got together often to play the ancient game of baseball. They were called the Mets. They were also called the Amazin’ Mets, because they did not play baseball very well. They were, as everyone knows, terrible. But the people of Flushing Meadow loved them; they loved the antics performed by the Amazin’s and they loved their names: Marvelous Marv Throneberry, Hot Rod Kanehl, Choo Choo Coleman. The people went to Shea Stadium, where the Mets booted away their home games and waved banners that proclaimed LOSING ISN’T EVERYTHING—IT’S THE ONLY THING.

But then the Mets got tired of losing. They acquired a new breed of men; men who had been raised on a Breakfast of Champions, men with strong, clean names like Tom Seaver and Jerry Koosman. And suddenly they began to win. In the year 1969, the Amazin’s beat out the Chicago Cubs for their division title; then they whipped the boys from Atlanta soundly to win the National League pennant.

Shoe Black. So it came to pass that the Mets found themselves competing in the world championship of baseball. Their foes were the strongest, most arrogant players of all—the gang from Menckenville. “A fluke,” said the wise men of Las Vegas. They called the Mets 8-5 underdogs. And, as predicted, the Mets lost the first game, 4-1. All the talk was of bubbles bursting and of the explosion of impossible dreams. “We told you so,” said the smart-money bettors. But the Mets were undaunted; they refused to heed the doomsayers.

“I’m the only Met ever to lose a World Series game,” said Pitcher Seaver, and everyone laughed. But Seaver did not really think losing was particularly amusing, and he reminded everyone, “God is not only alive and well in New York, but the Mets pay his rent.”

Perhaps God decided to pay them back. Their peerless outfielders Tom Agee and Ron Swoboda (a relic of the days of the hapless Mets) began making supernatural catches. Bonn Clendenon, who at the start of the season was a seller of Scripto pens, hit three home runs. Infielder Al Weis, a man who had never harmed anyone in his life, tied the last game with a home run. And when the Mets could not hit, they found other, more devious ways of arriving at first base. Not even the umpire, for instance, knew that Batter Cleon Jones had been hit on the foot by a pitch —until Manager Gilbert Hodges produced the ball with shoe blacking on it. Some said that Hodges had carried that smudged ball in his pocket all season long, waiting for the wonderful moment when it would be needed.

Meanwhile, stranger things were happening to the men from Menckenville. As the Mets came to look more and more like true champions, the Orioles (as they are called, after their state bird) came to look more and more like the Mets of old. It was amazin’.

Their outfielders grew sorely confused when baseballs flew their way; time after time, the balls landed safely between them. In the tenth inning of the fourth game, their pitcher hit a Met base runner on the wrist while trying to throw the ball to first. That blunder allowed the winning run to reach the plate and put the Orioles behind, three games to one. In the final game the Oriole pitcher and first baseman conspired to commit two errors on a single play (shades of Marvelous!) to permit the last, poetic Met run to score. The Oriole manager, a stocky fellow named Weaver, even began to look and act like a funny old fellow named Casey Stengel, who used to run the Mets. During the fourth game, in a transport of fury, Weaver was banished from the field. But nothing could hide the awful fact that the Oriole power had failed. Their heralded hitters mustered only a combined batting average of .146. Not even Hot Rod and Choo Choo had ever sunk that low.

Anointed. Thus it was that the hapless, hopeless Mets, who had kept the world in high humor for seven Pagliaccian years, triumphed in four succeeding contests to win the World Series. Their praises were trumpeted throughout the land. The people of New York went gloriously insane. They danced and sang and flooded the streets with paper; they tore the Shea Stadium turf to shreds and carried it home for souvenirs. King Lindsay the Shrewd, who after four precarious years of rule in his beleaguered city had come to understand the merit of identifying with a winner, appeared to anoint the Mets with effervescent waters. But the victory belonged to the doughty and determined fans who had stood behind their beloved anti-heroes through seven years of tears and laughter. At long last, not only a National League pennant but also a World Series flag fluttered in the breeze atop Shea Stadium.

Everyone agreed that it was amazin’. It was even more than that, said the Mets’ ancient and revered manager Casey Stengel, who offered the World Series’ ultimate moral: “You can’t be lucky every day. But you can if you get good pitchin’.”