Tag Archives: 1962 New York Mets

Time will not dim the glory of their misdeeds

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Andrew Benintendi

Andrew Benintendi–his RBI single walking off a second straight White Sox win Wednesday night a) made him the first White Sox player to walk it off thrice in a year since Scott Podsednik in 2009; and, b) helped the White Sox refuse to go gently into that good gray night where record-breaking season losses live.

Baltimore’s long gone but still remembered Memorial Stadium was built as a shrine to those who fought in both world wars. On its façade, these words were posted: Time Will Not Dim the Glory of Their Deeds. The words could also have applied to the baseball team who played there before the advent of Camden Yards

To the Orioles, when they finally won a game in 1988 after 21 consecutive season-opening losses. And, to the second-longest run of sustained excellence in American League history (1960-1985, the Orioles having only two losing seasons in that quarter century span), behind the Yankees’ 45 years of winning records from 1919-1964, now relegated to memory alone.

Today’s Yankees and Orioles are both going to the postseason. But the Yankees look to have the American League East in hand and in the safe, even if there’s still no set-in-stone guarantee of their getting as far as the World Series. (And do remember the Yankee fan’s credo of entitlement that the Series is illegitimate without them.)

That’s after the Orioles went from spending 81 days atop the division including as much as a three-game advantage to second place and five games back of the Yankees thanks largely to winning only five of their last fifteen. Once on pace to win 104, a rash of injuries, especially to pitchers and infielders, leaves Oriole fans wondering whether their birds have flown since their May peak.

But both those teams would sure as hell rather not switch places with this year’s AL doormats, on the façade of whose ballpark won’t read a paen to glory but might instead read from a vintage Negro spiritual: Were we really there when this happened to us? 

The White Sox’s longest period of sustained excellence (seventeen years) began the same year Edward R. Murrow premiered See It Now with history’s first live coast-to-coast telecast and ended the same year as did the first Apollo astronauts’ lives in a launch pad fire. Their longest period of sustained single-season failure began with a 1-0 loss to the Tigers on 28 March this year.

It still seems given that these Blight Sox will break the 1962 Mets’ record for regular season losses. It could have happened Tuesday night but for the Sox doing what some people have become conditioned to believe can’t be done in White Sox uniforms: they turned a 2-0 deficit into what proved a 3-2 win with an RBI double and a pair of RBI singles in the eighth inning.

Of course, these being the White Sox, that game couldn’t be complete without some sort of mishap. Hark back to the fifth inning, when four Sox converged upon a popup around the right side of the home plate side of the infield and the ball hit the turf like a safe dropped onto a sidewalk from the fourteenth floor.

That was probably the most 1962 Metsian these Blight Sox, these White Sux, these Wail Hose, these South Blindsiders have been all season long. Until this month, the least likely development in 2024 baseball seemed the White Sox developing something heretofore bereft from their calamity and in their play: a sense of humour.

Tuesday night was also the first White Sox win this year in any game in which they trailed after seven innings. “People here tonight were trying to see history,” said left fielder Andrew Benintendi, who hit the RBI double that began the eighth-inning party. “They’re going to have to wait one more day. Maybe.”

Three years ago, the White Sox won the AL Central. The following season, microcosmically amplifying the division’s overall modesty, they finished second with a .500 record. (Exactly 81-81.) Last year, they went 61-101. None of the latter two prepared them for this season and this surrealistic collapse.

“A disaster of this magnitude must have multiple tributaries,” write ESPN’s Buster Olney and Jesse Rogers, in what must surely be the most obvious Captain Obvious utterance since Casey Stengel said of Hall of Famer Joe DiMaggio, a player with whom the Ol’ Perfesser didn’t always see eye-to-eye, “He was rather splendid in his line of work.” But the dynamic duo (Olney and Rogers, that is) proceed forth:

It’s not only about the decades-long habit of owner Jerry Reinsdorf loyally clinging to employees past peak effectiveness. “Old news,” said one staffer. It’s not only about a wave of injuries; lots of teams deal with a lot of injuries. It’s not only about a first-time manager [read: long-since deposed Pedro Grifol–JK] whose tenure was infected by a toxic clubhouse mix. Lots of teams have veterans who don’t get along, though the White Sox seemed to have had more than their share. It’s not only about a handful of players performing at their worst. It’s not only about a first-time general manager taking his first turn on the learning curve. It’s not necessarily about spending—in an era in which teams have slashed payroll to facilitate tanking, the White Sox’s payroll is about $145 million, ranked 18th among 30 teams.

According to more than two dozen sources inside and outside the organization, it’s all of that, together. Over the course of the season, there were missteps from every level of the organization—and just plain bad baseball—that turned the 2024 White Sox from a bad team into a historically awful one.

Once upon a time, Red Sox-turned-Brewers first baseman George (Boomer) Scott told then-Brewers chairman Ed Fitzgerald, “You know, Mr. Fitzgerald, if we’re gonna win, the players gotta play better, the coaches gotta coach better, the manager gotta manage better, and the owners gotta own better.” That fine fielding, power-hitting first baseman didn’t get to live to see these Blight Sox.

Once upon a more distant time, Bill Veeck marveled of the 1962 Mets, “They are without a doubt the worst team in the history of baseball. I speak with authority. I had the St. Louis Browns. I also speak with longing . . . If you couldn’t have fun with the Mets, you couldn’t have fun anyplace.” That from the man who owned the White Sox twice in his lifetime, won one pennant the first time, and survived the infamous Disco Demolition Night in his second go-round.

Grady Sizemore’s signature achievement since succeeding the deposed Grifol has been, seemingly, to ease the toxins out of the White Sox clubhouse. That alone graduated him from not a topic to on the list of candidates for the permanent managing job. His cheerful ways of finding glasses half full aren’t the worst things to happen to his team this year. Even if, as Olney and Rogers remind us, he got this gig purely because the players liked him.

The White Sox players now seem a lot less ready to throw each other under the proverbial bus. Most indications seem to be that they’re more likely to talk to each other in a let’s-go-get-’em-tomorrow mood, even if they’re the ones most likely to get got. There even seems a chance that when (not if) they pass the ’62 Mets, the White Sox might heave sighs of relief in the form of more gallows jokes.

First, they have to get there. Walking it off on Benintendi’s bottom-of-the-tenth RBI single for a 4-3 win against those Angels Wednesday night was either a continued re-awakening or prolonging the agony. Or, it was a simple declaration of, Not in our house! 

They have one more with the Angels at home, then a three-game set with the Tigers in Detroit to finish the season. They now seem bent on refusing to go gently into that good gray night, but the odds of them passing those ’62 Mets are still on their negative side.

These White Sox may not say of their too-unique season in hell, Time will not dim the glory of our misdeeds. But would you blame them for the temptation?

The Cincinnati Dreads

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Hunter Greene

Hunter Greene (here) and reliever Art Warren combined to keep the Pirates hitless—and the Pirates still found a way to win with a little help from the Reds themselves.

“Come an’ see my amazin’ Mets,” their original manager Casey Stengel liked to crow about his 1962 theater of the absurd. “I been in this game a hundred years but I see new ways to lose I never knew were invented yet.”

Reds manager David Bell isn’t that quick with a quip. Whatever his other virtues, he won’t occupy half the space in the quote anthologies that Stengel does. The Young Perfesser he ain’t. His team’s as funny as the eastbound end of a westbound horse.

Today’s Reds are compared a little too often to those embryonic Mets for futility. When the Original Mets won their very first game after nine straight life-opening losses, “Break up the Mets!” became a prompt wisecrack. These Reds have actually been 6-4 in their last ten games, but their 9-26 record hasn’t inspired such cracks as that. Red fans may yet just crack.

But even those Mets never figured out a way to no-hit the opposition and lose. This year’s Reds figured that out all by themselves in Pittsburgh on Sunday. Against the Pirates, who aren’t exactly out of the tank yet but have at least won in double digits by now. The franchise whose past includes a Big Red Machine have now become the Cincinnati Dreads.

The 1962 Mets (ha! you thought I’d avoid saying it again) had Abbott pitching to Costello with Who the Hell’s on First, What the Hell’s on Second, You Don’t Want to Know’s on third, and You Don’t Even Want to Think About It at shortstop. These Reds don’t even have the understudies for My Mother, the Car.

Those Mets finished their tragicomic maiden season with their first owner  insisting, as she entered 1963, “Let’s hope it is better this year. It has to be. I simply cannot stand 120 losses this year. If we can’t get anything, we are going to cut those losses down. At least to 119.”

This year’s Dreads have a team president who listened to his fan base’s lament over purging five key players on the threshold of Opening Day, thus leaping from competitiveness to tanking in a single bound, and replied, “Well, where you gonna go?”

Let’s start there. I mean, sell the team to who? I mean, that’s the other thing, I mean, you wanna have this debate? If you wanna look at what would you have this team do to have it be more profitable, make more money, compete more in the current economic system that this game exists, it would be to pick it up and move it somewhere else. And, so, be careful what you ask for. I think we’re doing the best we can do with the resources that we have.

Joan Payson had a wry sense of humour and a realistic assessment of her embryonic Mets and the unlikely, almost countercultural affection they stirred among New York fans bereft of two storied National League franchises, left with nothing but the smug hubris of a Yankee fan base spoiled by incessant success and blind to the Original Mets’ earthy appeal.

Phil Castellini thinks he can afford to be smug in a one-team baseball city, but he hasn’t learned that buying what you can afford doesn’t always mean you should buy it at all. Especially when you all but admit that the common good of your team and its game is nothing more than showing profit and making money for it.

Mrs. Payson—formerly the lone stockholder voting against the New York Giants moving west—became New York’s empathetic favourite grandma. Mr. Castellini, the son of the Reds’ owner, seems more like Cincinnati’s unapologetically distant, carping, authoritarian father.

Those Mets were a newborn team plucked from the flotsam and jetsam of the National League, in the league’s first expansion draft. These Reds may not even be that good. And that doesn’t stop at what might yet prove to be this year’s won-lost record.

Those Mets and their fans learned to laugh, like Figaro, that they might not weep. These Reds may have to learn to laugh that they might not fall to the temptation presented to 1988 Orioles manager Frank Robinson, late in that team’s season-opening 22-game losing streak. Robinson showed an empathetic reporter a button he’d been given saying, “It’s been lovely, but I have to scream now.”

It hasn’t been lovely for this year’s Dreads, but their fans have to scream now, anyway. The boss all but threw them under the proverbial bus. Among several major league fan bases about whom you can say frustration is a way of life, none of them are as rightfully frustrated as Red fans now.

Last year’s Reds finished third in the National League Central with a winning enough record and continuing hope for another solid race. Then Castellini’s general manager Nick Krall either sent or allowed to walk Nick Castellanos, Sonny Gray, Eugenio Suarez, and Jesse Winker. For the moment I struggle to remember the last time any team effected a fire sale on the threshold of Opening Day.

Castellanos signed with the Phillies and is having a solid season thus far. Gray is solid enough in the middle of the Twins’ starting rotation after his trade there for a spare bolt. Suarez and Winker have opened sleepily in Seattle for the most part, but the Reds could probably have received more in return than a middling pitcher and a few washers.

But nothing seems more telling about this year’s upended Reds than touted rookie howitzer Hunter Greene plus relief pitcher Art Warren combining to no-hit the almost-as-moribund Pirates but still losing, 1-0 Sunday. Thanks to the rule that proclaims no-hitters official only if the no-hit-pitching team throws nine no-ht innings, this one doesn’t even count—except as one further entry into the 2022 ledger of Reds roughing.

What a difference half a century plus eight years makes. On 23 April 1964, the Reds were no-hit by Ken Johnson (a former, very brief Red) and the Houston Colt .45s, but they won, 1-0 . . . and Johnson retains credit for a no-hitter. The game was played in Colt Stadium—about which Original Met (and Hall of Famer) Richie Ashburn observed, “This is the only park in the league where the women wear insect repellant instead of perfume.”

Thus did Johnson have to face the Reds in the top of the ninth. That’s where he lost the game but not the no-hitter. Johnson himself threw Pete Rose’s one-out bunt for a hit wild, allowing Rose to second. Rose took third on a ground out but scored when Hall of Fame second baseman Nellie Fox—approaching the end of his playing career—booted Vada Pinson’s grounder. Johnson retired Hall of Famer Robinson on a fly out to left for the side, but Reds pitcher Joe Nuxhall finished the shutout he started in the bottom of the ninth.

That was then, this was now. (Four other teams between 1964 and Sunday have thrown no-hit baseball but lost.) For Sunday’s eventual stinker, the good news was Greene striking nine out in seven and a third innings and 118 pitches. The bad news was Greene walking five while three Pirates pitchers kept the Reds to four hits and two walks. The worse news was Greene walking the next two men he faced after getting rid of Pirates right fielder Jack Suwinski on an eighth inning-opening ground out.

Exit Greene, enter Warren, who promptly walked Pirates left fielder Ben Gamel to load the pads before third baseman Ke’Bryan Hayes grounded into a run-scoring force out. Warren managed to induce an inning-ending infield pop out, but the Reds disappeared in order in the top of the ninth.

There wasn’t a Little Tramp, a Keystone Kop, a Marx Brother, or a Stooge among them, either.

By dint of their postgame comments, these Dreads don’t exactly have among them a Shelley Berman, a Lenny Bruce, a Godfrey Cambridge, a George Carlin, or even a Chester A. Riley. What a revoltin’ development that is.

And that single most frustrated fan base in the Show can only shrug, shake its heads, and not so much lament but accept, while quoting an ancient black spiritual that might yet become the Reds’ 2022 epitaph: “Were we really there, when this happened to us?”