On this day, Luis Rojas told reporters the Mets are remaining "open-minded." Baseball, finally, is starting up again. He had been pushed out of the game 10 years earlier for such mean-spirited behavior, while manager and coach, as punching Branch Rickey for lecturing him on morality and for urinating on his players in the shower room after a loss. “And they’re vain. The Mets began the regular season on March 28, 2019, facing the The Mets started the month of May off slowly, losing 5 of their first 6.
He was wild, and not very fast. A historian from the Hall of Fame locked himself in the press box bathroom and missed most of the game. The Mets had a decent spring training with a record of 13–13–2, having equal wins and losses with two ties. “If Hodges smokes Viceroy, it might do something for you, too.”It seems almost churlish now to add that the laconic, stoical Hodges died after his second heart attack, at 47. Maybe I’m just getting to the age when the past means more, but I remembered what fun it was being there.”Casey Stengel, right, ever directing his Mets troops at spring training. But he was a baseball player first. He had no memory of the man.Stengel was true to himself in his fashion, never more than when he would say, after another losing Mets performance, “The attendance and Mrs. Payson got robbed.”The team’s owner, Mrs. Joan Whitney Payson, one of the country’s richest women, had been the beneficiary of a power elite baseball coup. )The new owner installed her stockbroker, M. Donald Grant, as chairman of the board.
On the drive back to the hotel, Pappas told me he would be back. But the biggest thing I learned from Casey that spring was to always take care of my customers. Roger Maris’s ability to hit 61 home runs in 1961, he said, was “a more impressive individual achievement” than Glenn’s three orbits of the Earth.Hook told me he expected to do well with the Mets because he would finally have a chance to play. He also played the outfield.The morning that Pappas arrived, Glenn orbited the Earth, making Jay Hook the go-to guy in the clubhouse. My favorite was a skinny, sallow, round-shouldered 21-year-old from Astoria named John Pappas. He was endlessly quotable.
He always played down his baseball career. This was clearly a troubled son and dad.
When he emerged, he said, “Now I’ve seen everything.” When the game was over, a fan uttered the mantra of the next seven years: “Same old Mets.”Hook and I shared a favorite coach, Rogers Hornsby, the Rajah, considered the greatest right-handed hitter of the century.
I remember how a light-hitting utility infielder named Ted Lepcio, who had played 10 years for five clubs, liked to rank on Richie Ashburn.
We could take a joke then. He’d see two young women trolling the lobby and mutter to the players around us, “Try not to go for bad balls.”He was a font of personal advice couched in ballspeak.
Since 1957, when the Dodgers and the Giants went west, New York had felt baseball-deprived, none more so perhaps than Mrs. Payson, who had owned a piece of the Giants and pined for Willie Mays. The Mets continued their hot play to begin the month, winning 9 of their first 10 in August, including eight in a row and 15 out of 16 stretching back to July 25--their best 16-game stretch since 1990. He had been fired after the 1960 season for having grown old. The New York Times sportswriter who covered the Mets in 1962, their first season, recalls the cast of characters who gathered in St. Petersburg, Fla., for spring training.