Originality Still Counts for Something

The Chicago White Sox ended their 21-game losing streak Tuesday night, preventing them from owning outright the worst skid in American League history and momentarily pausing their pursuit of hallowed infamy that for 62 years has belonged to us. But as players and managers usually say following a loss rather than a win, it was just one game. Having gone 1-21 in their previous 22 contests, 2024 Sox have plunged to a record of 28-88 through 116 games, or two games behind the 1962 Mets at the same juncture of their year buried in the cellar like nobody gets buried in the cellar.

The Original Mets are the Original Mets for a reason. Every few years, some crappy team is billed as a challenger to 40-120. Lately, with tanking in vogue, it’s every year. The 2023 A’s were projected as on a 1962 Mets pace. The 2022 Reds were inspiring unflattering comparisons. But it’s hard to stay historically awful, not to mention endlessly fascinating while being so. All it takes is a spurt of competence, and suddenly a team of professionals begins to play just professionally enough to waft toward mere mediocrity. The only ballclub that maintained a legitimate shot at something worse than 40-120 since 40-120 was Detroit in 2003.

Oh, they tried. After 156 games, those Tigers were 38-118, the product of some really clutch September losing (ten in a row, fourteen of fifteen) that seemed to negate the effects of an ill-timed three-game winning streak just after Labor Day. The 1962 Mets after the same number of games completed were 39-117. The Motor City Kitties of four decades-and-change later simply needed to not suddenly remember how to roar over their final six games and they would share a piece of whatever it is that a team that loses that often winds up with.

A word on 40-120. The National League had begun playing a 162-game schedule in 1962. Your whole life as a Mets fan, you’ve seen 40-120. You might wonder whatever happened to those other two games. I certainly did (that’s the way I am). The first of them is discernible in the books as a tie. The other requires a touch of digging to discover.

(Rabbit hole dive incoming.)

The two tilts that at first glance escape existence at were both to be between Casey Stengel’s babes in the woods and their expansion cousins in Houston. The tie was played at outdoor Colt Stadium, the franchise’s pre-Astrodome home, on September 9, but it wasn’t as simple as deciding it was a tie on September 9, Mets and Colts, get on with your lives. Yes, the score was tied at seven and no more baseball was played that Sunday. Well, you might think, into each life a little rain must fall.

You’d think. It’s what I thought for years. And, as burrowing into newspapers.com reveals, a little rain did fall, but rain wasn’t really the reason the 1962 Mets went 40-120 rather than 40-122. No, a curfew was the cause of the tie. Oh, you might infer, the Mets and Colt .45s were swingin’ all night long on a Sunday, like that time the Mets and Astros stared each other down under the Dome over 24 innings on a weeknight in 1968, but this was the Lord’s day, and 24 innings was obviously too long for those bible-thumbers in the state legislature to cotton, huh?

It wasn’t that. This was a day game sans extra innings, though the Colts insisted on changing the start time from 2:30 PM to 4 o’clock, which itself seems like no big deal; afternoons, then as now, could get hot in Texas, and every little bit of shadow cooling things off should be appreciated. Except Dick Young, before he turned heel for the ages, explained the switch was made “in order to draw a big crowd” for the 35-108 Mets visiting the 55-87 Colt .45s (this after a day-night doubleheader on Saturday didn’t exactly have Houstonians busting down gates for the matinee or nightcap). The attendance on Sunday, Young wryly noted in the News, was 3,630.

Because the game started at four, and because the Mets were determined to stick to their getaway plan of taking off from Houston as slated (anything to get away from those Volkswagen-sized mosquitoes Ralph Kiner relished recalling once Colt Stadium was long demolished), a time limit was set in advance. No baseball after 7 PM. These were the days when ballgames were played fast, so no problem fitting in nine innings, right?

Since when does any story involving the 1962 Mets come without a problem? Young: “Three hours were allowed to play this one here — and you just know the Mets don’t finish games within three hours.” The box score shows the Mets and Colts required 2:49 to reach a 7-7 impasse, not helped along by a dozen minutes of “shower delays,” per Young.

Flight time was nigh, so the players stopped playing, but it wasn’t conclusively inconclusive. The National League office ruled that these boys had to get this game done when the teams got together in New York September 18-20. Sounded like a plan. A borderline insane plan, but a plan, nonetheless.

Except for rain, and not just shower delays. The Mets and Colt .45s got rained on a lot in 1962, especially in New York. They were postponed once in their very first Manhattan series, in April. The game was added to a Polo Grounds set in June, except it rained again, so another makeup was inserted into the final Colt trek to the Big Apple. The clubs were looking at a doubleheader on a Tuesday; a doubleheader on a Wednesday; and a single game on a Thursday…to be preceded by the completion of that all-important 7-7 suspended affair from what would be, by then, two Sundays earlier.

Whoever or Whatever controls the atmosphere decided people seeking out the Mets and Colt .45s in September of 1962 needed to be saved from themselves. The Tuesday doubleheader was played; two Met losses. But the Wednesday doubleheader was washed out, and the National League office finally got the hint from above. They okayed a twinbill for Thursday, that day’s regularly scheduled game (which the Mets would lose) plus a makeup of one of Wednesday’s rainouts (which the Mets would also lose). The NL let the other postponement from Wednesday morph into a cancellation. And as for that tie, senses were come to, and it was left as a tie.

Which is how the Mets ended 1962 at their memorable milestone of 40-120, or, technically, 40-120-1, with 1 rainout. Which is also why, if you had an eye on the 2003 Tigers as they sat at 38-118, you had to figure out how many losses they needed to land on the same plane (and not one jetting out of Houston) as the Original Mets. Lose their last six, and it’s clear. The Tigers are the worst, at 38-124. Lose at least two, and there’s a match: 120 losses then, 120 losses now. Except those 42 wins were kind of pesky if you wanted to be definitive about who was the absolute worst. A break-even run of 3-3, as impossible as it was to imagine those Tigers winning three of their final six, would give them both more wins (41) and more losses (121); we’d still have one record. The only thing they had to avoid was suddenly getting good for a week.

The 2003 Tigers got good for a week, taking five of their last six, including two on walkoffs, to finish 43-119, meaning all that losing was for nothing but draft position (picking second despite being the worst club in the majors by far—the NL and AL used to alternate—the Tigers in 2004 selected Justin Verlander). It also meant I would never again take anybody allegedly as bad as the 1962 Mets seriously when it came to a pursuit of 120 or more losses, let alone 40 or fewer wins.

This kid has legs.

Until now. The 2024 White Sox — who we will see for ourselves later this month — must be respected for being as lousy as they’ve been for this long. I still find it hard to believe they will outlose the 1962 Mets. They are due for a few wins, and a few is all that is necessary to propel them toward some pedestrian win total above 40 or 42 or whatever would place them out of reach of our Originals. Honestly, I’m not sure I want this record out of the family. Kind of, because a) it would be nice for a Mets team not to be identified as The Worst Team Ever (save for Cleveland Spiders fetishists); and b) records being broken make paying attention worthwhile. But this record has had legs (if not Spider legs). We talk about the 1962 Mets to this day. We’re literally talking about the 1962 Mets today. Other than as a foil for the Mets, when was the last time you heard anybody bring up the 1962 Colt .45s?

In covering the Mets’ travels and travails in and out of Texas, Dick Young reserved a moment to mock the aforementioned day-night doubleheader in Houston as evidence of ownership “greed”.

During the matinee there were 1,638 fans in the stands. A few hours later there were only 6,568 present to see their team win its sixth straight — and a house was being given away via a home plate drawing as an added inducement.

That’s a total of 8,000 fans to see two games — with a free house thrown in. Granted marvelous Marv Throneberry isn’t the big draw in Texas that he is in New York, but the fans stayed away as if nursing a deep seated resentment.

I can’t stress enough that as miserable a human being as he proved himself in the late 1970s, he was still a helluva beat writer in the early 1960s. But nobody ever wants to acknowledge anything good about Dick Young, so never mind that. The point in excerpting his coverage here is that the 1962 Mets had Marv Throneberry. Nobody had to elaborate on what that meant in 1962, and nobody has to much explain who he is today. Marvelous Marv says it all. Original Mets says it all. Let the 2024 White Sox usurp our futility. Or not. Either way, we’ll always be us.

In Denver Tuesday night, we still were.

I’m thinking of the bottom of the second inning, with the Mets ahead of the Rockies, 2-0, and Brendan Rodgers on first after Luis Severino hit him with a pitch. Perpetually achy Kris Bryant stepped up and lined a ball into the right-center gap. Balls get lined into the Coors Field right-center and left-center gaps all the time. Center fielder Harrison Bader, prepared for such an eventuality, did a fine job of tracking it down.

Getting it back into the infield is where it became a Metsian adventure one could imagine transpiring in 1962 had the NL expanded to Colorado sooner. Bader’s throw sailed over second base as Rodgers pulled into third (fortunately, Bryant, not up for running more than ninety feet at a clip, these days, had stopped at first). Nobody had backed it up (Bryant could advance to second after all). It fell to Mark Vientos to retrieve the ball and end this discouraging but hardly lethal sequence of events with runners on second and third. At least nobody scored.

Um, thing is, Vientos picked up the ball, but didn’t get a firm grip on it, so it slipped out of his hand and landed behind him by the third-base dugout. Did I say “by” the third base dugout? It rolled into the netting that forms the dugout’s protective screen…except the netting wasn’t properly secured to the dugout’s base, so the ball didn’t roll into the netting so much as underneath it.

Ball in the dugout? Every baserunner gets to move up a base. Out of thin air, Rodgers trots home and Bryant, who wasn’t intent on passing first, is on third. Two errors are distributed, one to Bader, one to Vientos. The Rockies get a run off the Mets on a play that, if you choose to re-read Jimmy Breslin, you’ll find probably happened in some form or fashion quite often in 1962.

Beautiful.

The run should have been charged to the Coors Field grounds crew for its shabby maintenance of that screen, but it was a run for the home team, no matter whose ledger bore the brunt of it. It certainly didn’t cost the Mets what became a 6-3 loss, no more than Rodgers’s double off Vientos’s glove that plated another run did. Yeah, sure, a Met third baseman not making plays in a Met defeat seems particularly characteristic of the franchise in its infancy (or until Ed Charles came along five years later), but let’s not lay this all at the feet of Vientos or Bader or Severino (five mile-high innings pitched) or any 2024 Met in particular. Maybe there’s something telling about the nine-minute rain delay that ensued in the middle of the game. That’s nine, not ninety. There wasn’t even enough time to bother with a tarp. Or maybe the Coors Field grounds crew can’t be bothered to do more than sprinkle Diamond Dust. You don’t have many rain delays that short, but this one was shorter than the twelve minutes of “shower delays” Young cited in Houston, and those were pretty short.

Spooky! Or fitting. On a night the White Sox acted as if they have no business being lumped in with the 1962 Mets, I’d like to think the modern-day Mets, with help from the elements and a ball nobody seemed to want, were simply channeling the spirit of their ancestors.