Tag Archives: New York Mets

The continuing ballad of Billy the Kid

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Billy Wagner

Billy Wagner stood 5’10” . . . but to the hitters facing him, he must have looked and felt 10’5″.

When Billy Wagner called it a career after a short tour with the Braves, he spoke like a man who wasn’t worried about whether he’d make or endure on a Hall of Fame ballot. “I’m not going to change anyone’s mind about whether I’m a Hall of Famer,” the longtime relief pitcher said. “People are either going to like me or hate me, and I can’t change their minds. Besides, life is about a lot more than this game.”

That was fifteen years ago. Tomorrow should reveal that enough voting members of the Baseball Writers Association of America have changed their minds. Wagner’s first Hall ballot showed him with 10.5 percent of the vote. At this writing, his final appearance on the BBWAA ballot should usher him into Cooperstown with at least 85 percent of the vote, well above the minimum needed.

Thus would Billy the Kid stand on the induction stage with outfielder Ichiro Suzuki (bank on it: he’ll become the first unanimous election among position players on their first Hall ballot), CC Sabathia (another first ballot lock, though a hair over seven points less than Ichiro), and Carlos Beltrán. (80.3 percent.*)

Almost a week ago, Wagner wasn’t sounding as sanguine as he did upon his retirement from the mound. “You’re sitting here and you can’t control [the outcome],” he told The Athletic‘s Tyler Kepner by phone. “It’s tough. I hate it. It’s just not been a very fun experience, especially when it comes down to your tenth and final ballot. It’s not going to be pleasant. It’s a grind, but in a couple of days, this will be over—one way or the other, good or bad.”

That wouldn’t necessarily be true. Wagner could and likely would make an appearance on a future ballot of the Hall’s Contemporary Baseball Era (Players) Committee, perhaps as soon as next December. But it looks as though nobody has to worry about that anymore. Wagner, especially.

Last week you’d have had to go the extra hundred miles to convince him. Last year, he waited and waited only to fall short by five votes. When Kepner asked Wagner if that compared to being spurned for a prom date with his buddies watching live and millions more watching on television, he couldn’t resist laughing. Then, he calmed down again and answered soberly.

“My gosh. You’ve got thirty kids looking at you,” he began.

I’m emotional, I don’t want to be emotional, so I’m fighting it back like, “Well, you know, it’s great.” You’re saying all the things you need to say, but it was awful. So the ballot comes out, they take all their stuff and leave—and you’re still going through practice. There’s no, “Hey guys, we’re going to take a five-minute break here.” You couldn’t do anything. That was rough. I was so embarrassed.

If the current indicators hold, and I’m not sure how you can tumble from 85 percent of the vote to falling beneath the 73 percent line without some very suspect eleventh-hour activity, the man who stood 5’10” as a human being but about 10’5″ to the batters he faced pitching for the Astros, the Phillies, the Mets, the Red Sox, and the Braves, is about to become anything but embarrassed.

Which is more than you can say for those batters over the sixteen-year career that ended in 2010. You might wish to become the proverbial fly on the wall if those batters could round up for a seminar called, “How Not to Hit Billy Wagner—Because You Can’t.” The beginning of Wagner’s Hall of Fame case, and possibly the end, too, is this: Opposing hitters could only hit .187 against him.

.187.

Not even The Mariano himself kept hitters that sharply out of luck. Wagner’s .187 batting average against him will become the lowest BAA of any Hall of Fame relief pitcher. Lower than Rivera and Trevor Hoffman (.211 each), lower than Hoyt Wilhelm (.213), lower than Dennis Eckersley (.225), lower than Goose Gossage (.228), lower than Bruce Sutter (.230), lower than Rollie Fingers (.232), lower than Lee Smith (.235).

Among that group, too, are a mere four who pitched in the most hitter friendly of times: Smith (in the final third of his career), Hoffman, Rivera, and Billy the Kid. That, I’ve written before and don’t mind repeating, should make you wonder what the record would have been if Wagner could have avoided assorted injuries including a late-career Tommy John surgery.

And before you take up carping yet again over his comparatively small number of innings pitched, try to keep these in mind: 1) It wasn’t his idea to finish with 903 innings pitched. 2)  His lifetime walks/hits per inning pitchd (WHIP) rate, as Kepner pointed out, is lower than any pitcher with 900+ innings in the century between the final game of Hall of Famer Addie Joss and Hall of Famer-to-be Wagner. Including The Mariano and Trevor Time.

If it’s numbers you still wish, how about these: The best strikeouts per nine rate (11.92) in baseball history. The best ERA (2.31) by any lefthander in the live ball era (1920 forward). The lowest opposition OPS (.558) in that same century between Joss’s and Wagner’s final games.

All of which are rather surrrealistic for a fellow whose hardscrabble childhood (and “hardscrabble” is phrasing things politely about a kid for whom peanut butter on a cracker was dinner often enough when he was growing up) including driving himself to throw lefthanded because two right elbow fractures made throwing his natural righthanded impossible.

That’s about as close to a self-made Hall of Famer as you can get.

“You’re not supposed to get too high or too low,” Wagner told Kepner about The Wait, “but you just sit with a big pit in your stomach right now, wondering where this thing’s going to go. You’re constantly fighting the buildup to that moment.” Finally, it looks as though Billy the Kid’s going to win his final fight.

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* Seemingly, Beltrán is about to be told about his Astrogate co-masterminding, “All is forgiven.” As if the writers didn’t hear, didn’t see, or chose to ignore, how Astrogate co-exposer Evan Drellich (in Winning Fixes Everything) zinged Beltrán for his post-suspension apology, the one in which he said he wished he’d asked more questions about what the 2017 Astro Intelligence Agency was doing.

Beltrán was as powerful a clubhouse presence as there was on the 2017 Astros, begging the question, what was stopping him from asking those questions? (Emphasis added.)

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This essay was first published at Sports Central.

NLCS Game Five: A Mets blowout and a Dodgers gambit

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Jack Flaherty

On a day he didn’t have it, Dodgers righthander Jack Flaherty had to take eight (runs in three innings) for the team while the Mets blew them out in NLCS Game Five, so as not to compromise manager Dave Roberts’ Game Six bullpen game plan.

If the Mets deliver what some still think is near impossible, and snatch the National League pennant right out from under the Dodgers, don’t be terribly shocked if the number one question on the lips of Dodger fans and others will be, “Why did Dave Roberts leave Jack Flaherty in to take a three-inning, eight-run beating in Game Five?”

The most likely answer—considering the Mets would go on to finish what they started and blow the Dodgers out 12-6, thus sparing their elimination for another day—is Game Six.

In a National League Championship Series during which each team has won its games by blowout, Game Five may yet secure a place among the least conscionably allowed pitcher abuse by any manager. Ever. Abuse nobody could have seen coming. Could they?

Hadn’t Flaherty, a comeback kid of sorts starting with the Tigers before his trade to the Dodgers at this year’s deadline, pinned the Mets with seven shutout innings in Game One en route the Dodgers finishing with a 9-0 opening thrashing?

Yes, he had. But in Game Five he didn’t have it. His fastball wasn’t terribly fast, his breaking balls could have been court-martialed for insubordination, and the Mets were only too willing to wait him out, wait for the balls coming into the meat of the strike zone or close enough, and pounce.

Now the 29-year-old righthander went from virtuoso extension of Dodger pitching’s consecutive scoreless inning streak this postseason to a piñata in five days. But Roberts didn’t want to reach into his bullpen unless he absolutely had to with a likely bullpen game looming for the Dodgers in Game Six.

Their starting pitching has been so compromised that bullpen games became necessary survival for them. Roberts is counting on his Game Six bullpen game to win the pennant for him. He knows these Mets aren’t quite pushovers, but he has to take the chance that, somehow, his bullpen bulls can help him win a pennant and save Walker Buehler to open a World Series.

The manager had better be right, because what the Mets did to Flaherty Friday could have been called human rights violations. They only began with surrendering a one-out, three-run homer to Pete Alonso in the bottom of the first.

Flaherty shook a leadoff double by Starling Marte off to get three straight second inning outs. But then came the third. Then came back-to-back walks (Alonso, Jesse Winker) to open. Then came Marte doubling into left field to send them both home. Two outs later, Marte came home on Francsco Alvarez’s single, Francisco Lindor tripled Alvarez home, and Brandon Nimmo singled Lindor home.

Leaving things 8-1 Mets—Kiké Hernandez scoring on David Peterson’s wild pitch in the top of the inning seemed almost an excuse-us run for a good while—and leaving Flaherty the fourth pitcher in postseason history to get himself torn for eight or more runs in a game  that would have meant a series clinch for his team. (The others: Hall of Famers Walter Johnson [Game Seven, 1925 World Series] and Tom Glavine [Game Six, 1992 NLCS], and Charles Nagy [Game Five, 1999 American League division series].)

On a day Dodgers center fielder Andy Pages homered twice (solo in the fourth, three-run bomb in the fifth), you could remove Flaherty’s eight-run bequest and the Dodgers would have won the game and clinched the pennant with a 6-4 tally. Flaherty didn’t look like his best self early enough, but this was as unconscionable as it could get.

Roberts even hinted postgame that Flaherty was dealing with a health issue. He didn’t specify what, and Flaherty hadn’t discussed it at this writing. He’s dealt with injuries enough in his career—repeated shoulder injuries, an oblique injury—which helped reduce him from a Cardinals super pitcher to a kind of journeyman who shows flashes of his old mound brio and pitches as much on heart as stuff.

That the Dodgers don’t need. Not after everything else bedeviling their starting pitchers this year.

The Mets, of course, are showing how easy it isn’t to kill them this time around. Even if their bullpen isn’t as strong or consistent as the Dodgers. Blow them out one day, get blown out by them the next. With the set returning to Los Angeles, the Mets face yet another arduous test, even if they do find ways to pick, peck, pounce, and pound the Dodgers’ Game Six bullpen parade.

That test, if they make it, is called Game Seven, in hostile territory.

But wouldn’t it be nice to see one or two NLCS games that won’t become blowouts? They’re fun when the team for whom you root does the blowing out, but a good hair raiser has its place as well. Just so long as the hair isn’t raised because of sloppy or shaky play.

NLCS Game Two: Knuke the Knack

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Landon Knack, Mark Vientos

The wrestle between a Dodger reliever and a Met batter insulted by a bases-loading intentional walk ahead of him ends with Mark Vientos knuking the (Landon) Knack . . .

Let’s see. The Mets built a postseason rep for deploying serious weaponry when the games got late. But after a 9-0 blowout loss to the Dodgers in Game One of their National League Championship Series, the Mets struck early enough in Game Two. And, as things turned out, often enough, for a 7-3 series-evening Game Two win.

They struck first with one of their usual late-game demolition experts. This time, Mets shortstop Francisco Lindor wrestled Dodgers opener Ryan Brasier to an eighth pitch on a 2-2 count before sending that pitch into the right field bleachers to open the game. One inning later, with second and third, two outs, a second Met run home (RBI double), and rookie Landon Knack working the second for the Dodgers, they elected to put Lindor on to try their luck with Mark Vientos.

Said a broadcast announcer of Vientos: “As good as he’s been this year, nobody’s Lindor.” Said Vientos to himself, probably, knowing that he’s done damage enough for the Mets cause—he had a measly 1.674 with two home runs against the Phillies in the NLDS—Sure, he’s Francisco Freaking Lindor, but you’re gonna put him on thinking I’m a pushover for a third out? Boy, have I got a surprise for you, gentlemen.

It took Vientos a ninth pitch on a full count, but just like that he knuked the Knack.

Just like that, too, his blast over the center field fence had the Mets up 6-0, and they’d never really look back despite a Dodger run in the fifth and two in the sixth. Not on a night Mets starter Sean Manaea had the Dodgers stone frozen until Max Muncy punctured him for a fifth-inning solo bomb before he ran out of fuel in the sixth.

Two walks to open, a bases-loading fielding error at second base, and Manaea’s night was over. Mets manager Carlos Mendoza brought Phil Maton in to pitch. He got an almost immediate pop out from Will Smith. But he surrendered a two-run single to Tommy Edman, before getting Kiké Hernandez to dial Area Code 5-4-3 for the side and before any further Dodger damage.

The Mets tacked another insurance run on in the ninth with Starling Marte’s RBI single. But their bullpen held the Dodgers off admirably from the seventh forward. Even if Edwin Díaz had to channel his inner Craig Kimbrel in the Dodger ninth with a leadoff single (Andy Pages) and a walk (Shohei Ohtani) before striking the side out swinging to secure it.

All most of the Mets seemed to want to talk up, other than sending the NLCS to New York even-up, was Vientos leaving Dodger manager Dave Roberts with an omelette on his face.

“There’s one thing that Mark doesn’t lack,” chuckled Lindor himself, “and that’s confidence. That’s who he is. I’m glad he took it personal.”

“I didn’t think he was going to give me a fastball,” Vientos said of Knack, who’d fed him a diet of sliders four straight, two of which he let go and two of which he fouled off. “My approach was to see a heater up, but I wasn’t expecting heater. I thought I was going to get a slider and I was just going to poke it in the hole.” But he got the fastball at last. “Yeah, I wasn’t going to miss it,” he said.

The Dodgers did win a bullpen game in their division series conquest of the Padres. But that was before one of their key high leverage men, Alex Vesia, was lost for the rest of the postseason thanks to a side injury. And, before one of their others, veteran Daniel Hudson, let Roberts know he was still sore from a twenty-pitch eighth inning in Game One, available only if a dire emergency presented itself.

Roberts got three innings’ shutout relief from Brent Honeywell, Jr. and two innings’ one-run relief from Edgardo Henríquez Monday night. Second guessers might wonder why he didn’t turn to either of those instead of toward Knack, a 27-year-old rookie with a 3.83 strikeout-to-walk ratio on the regular season but a tendency toward surrendering the long ball, as in fourteen bombs in 69 innings.

Still, Roberts did manage to spare some of his other medium-to-high leverage for the New York leg, where the Mets and the Dodgers pick up after a day’s travel and rest. And, with three of those higher-leverage men, Blake Trienen, Michael Kopech, and Evan Phillips, all on four days rest. Considering the Dodgers’ starting rotation took such big hits this year they that have to think of bullpen games now, they may face another one in a Game Six if the game’s needed.

And, by then, the Mets may have figured enough out about working, hitting, pitching, and sneaking their ways around these Dodgers to make it irrelevant. May. They know the series isn’t won just yet. But they also have the home-field advantage now.

Maybe the Mets won’t get a shot at knuking the Knack again too soon, but don’t dismiss their home audience from their chances, either. Citi Field can make Dodger Stadium resemble a crypt when need be.

Ed Kranepool, RIP: “Wouldn’t it be great?”

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Ed Kranepool, Casey Stengel

Teenage Met Ed Kranepool listens to Professor Stengel, 1962.

As a teenage prospect out of New York’s James Monroe High School, Ed Kranepool landed an $80,000 bonus plus incentives to sign with the original Mets. He spent what the government let him keep of the bonus partly on a Thunderbird convertible and mostly on a split-level home for his widowed mother in White Plains.

Then he caught his first airplane flight ever to join the Mets in Los Angeles. Lucky him. He landed in time to join the team on the June 1962 day Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax no-hit them. The seventeen-year-old missed getting into the game; manager Casey Stengel wanted a pinch hitter late but decided on his old Yankee platoon hand Gene Woodling instead.

“Thank God,” Kranepool was recorded as saying. He’d have to settle for playing on the losing side of three no-hitters including Hall of Famer Jim Bunning’s Father’s Day 1964 perfect game.

A kid who begins his major league life as a 1962 Met surely had something to say about this year’s Blight Sox who threaten those Mets’ record for season-long futility. “I’ve gotten calls lately about the White Sox, but there’s not much to say,” said Kranepool, who died at 79 Sunday.

I don’t care if they lose more games than that original Mets team. It was a bad baseball team with a bad mix of young guys and some great older stars whose best years were behind them. In a clubhouse like that, when you’re young like I was, all you want is to learn and get better and have the season end. But whether the White Sox finish with more losses than that team—what does it matter to me?

Kranepool didn’t just have that season end. Before the decade ended, he’d go as he once phrased it, “from the outhouse to the penthouse,” as a member of the 1969 Miracle Mets. The outhouse years were rarely pretty for a kid upon whom wild expectations were piled. On the other hand, Kranepool developed a Metsian sense of humour about it.

He was one of only two licensed stock brokers playing in the National League at the time; Bunning was the other. He took to discussing Mets life in stock market terminology.

“During the World Series,” he told New York Times sportswriter Joseph Durso in 1967, “the Dow-Jones wire carries the score every inning, plus the home runs and pitchers. Wouldn’t it be great if the Mets got into the Series and I hit a home run that was flashed over the ticker along with the quotations? Boy, the office would go wild.”

A few million offices and residences in New York, when it actually did happen to both the Mets and Kranepool two years later. The Mets shook off a Game One loss to demolish the Orioles in four straight . . . and Kranepool smashed a one-out homer off Oriole reliever Dave Leonhard, sending a slightly hanging breaking ball over the center field fence with one out in the bottom of the Game Three eighth.

He had an up and down relationship with his teammate-turned-manager Gil Hodges, though. Both men headstrong but one the boss who’d survived World War II and the other a young man whose father was killed in that wae before he was born. They butted heads often as not until 1971, when Kranepool had a fine if not spectacular season.

“[T]hings seemed to get a little better between us, Gil and me,” he told Maury Allen for After the Miracle: The Amazin’ Mets Twenty Years Later.

I think we were beginning to understand each other. I had matured and was becoming a more productive player. Then he got his fatal heart attack in West Palm Beach that next spring of 1972, and Yogi [Berra] took over. Maybe I never appreciated Gil. I don’t know. He was a hard man to get to know. He was very tough, very strong. But he was smart. I think he was the first to know in 1969 how good we were.

Just like any other manager asked after a miracle Series triumph to explain how it came to be and answering by spreading his palms apart, grinning, and saying, “Can’t be done.” Kranepool thought otherwise. “Gil was a great manager, a very smart baseball man,” he told Allen. “I’m sure I would have learned a lot more about the game if he had lived.”

When Wayne Coffey wrote They Said It Couldn’t Be Done a few years ago, for the 50th anniversary of the 1969 Mets, Kranepool was even more concilatory, even if it could only be with Hodges’s ghost. “We really were a team,” he began.

Sometimes you win in spite of your manager, but not with this club. Gil did everything right. He made every possible move to help our club. He never tricked you. He was so consistent . . . You never showed up at the ballpark not ready. Once he said he was going to do something, he stuck to it. You were prepared when you went to the park. You got your rest. You were ready. You worked hard to stay in shape because you knew you would be called on. He kept everybody sharp.

Kranepool never became a bona fide superstar, but he remained iconic in New York, especially when he enjoyed a late career second life as a successful pinch hitter. Three years ago, studying pinch hitters with over 300 plate appearances since the heyday of their patron saint Smoky Burgess, I ranked Kranepool number sixteen according to my Real Batting Average metric. (TB + BB + IBB + SF + HBP / PA. Kranepool: .484 RBA.) Shea Stadium rocked with “Ed-die! Ed-die!” chants every time he loomed as a pinch hitter.

As content as he became with his Mets career as it was, as embittered as he became over the team’s mal-administration following the death of their beloved original owner Joan Payson (“Joan Payson was like a grandmother to me and to everybody else,” he once said), Kranepool came to take a realistic view of his Mets life. (His eighteen-season tenure remains a Mets record.) Including the ill effect of rushing a seventeen-year-old to the Show and not exactly letting him develop in short minor league stints in the seasons to follow.

“They shoulda left me in the minor leagues to develop, and they woulda got a better player out of it,” Kranepool was once quoted as saying. “A kid of seventeen isn’t equipped to handle that pressure. They said, ‘Ed’s going to lead them from a bad ballclub to the pennant.’ One player, even a Hall of Famer, can’t do that.”

1969 Mets

Ed Kranepool (at the podium) addresses a Citi Field crowd on the 50th anniversary of the 1969 Mets. Listening, left to right: Jerry Grote (C), Jerry Koosman (LHP), Cleon Jones (LF), Ron Swoboda (RF), Duffy Dyer (C). (Bergen Record photo.)

Nobody questioned his fortitude. After one such brief minor league turn in 1964, Kranepool was recalled to the Mets in time to play a doubleheader . . . all 32 innings of it at first base. He went 4-for-14 on the day/night with two runs scored, plus a double and a triple among the four hits. His mother went the distance with him in the Shea Stadium stands . . . because she was holding onto his car keys and house keys.

After his playing career ended. Kranepool took up life as a businessman, made peace with future Mets administrations, and became a happy presence at assorted Mets functions and commemorations as well as spring training. He also dealt with diabetes and kidney disease, receiving a transplant in 2019 after a two-year wait that was frequent news in New York. (A then-59 year old Met fan–whose own husband had received such a transplant—turned up as the donor.)

“I knew Krane for 56 years,” said Miracle Mets outfielder/first baseman Art Shamsky. “We did so many appearances together. We had lunch last week and I told him I would be there next week to see him again. I’m really at a loss for words. I can’t believe he’s the fourth guy from our 1969 team to pass this year.”

“We knew each other so well,” said pitcher Jerry Koosman, “and I could tell by his eyes if a runner was going or not. He saved me a lot of stolen bases.”

Kranepool’s death of cardiac arrest followed the 2024 deaths of shortstop (and eventual Mets coach and manager) Bud Harrelson, catching anchor Jerry Grote, and pitcher Jim McAndrew. As Mets together, those plus others listened attentively whenever Kranepool told them of those early Met seasons as lovable losers.

“We used to celebrate rainouts,” the man the fabled Shea Stadium Sign Man, Karl Ehrhardt, once called the Killer Krane would say.

In time Kranepool would be respected by teammates for baseball smarts as well as his straight, no chaser personality. A personality that compelled his teammates to name him their player representative as the Major League Baseball Players Association began finding its wings after hiring Marvin Miller to run the union.

“I wasn’t afraid to protect the players and attend the meetings and the associations,” he once told a reporter. “And the players, themselves, that doesn’t bode well for you, sometimes, when you’re speaking on behalf of the group, owners can take it as a bone of contention. I wasn’t afraid of getting traded, nor was I afraid of speaking out against others’ interests.”

Kranepool and his first wife, Carole, raised a son who was athletic but far more interested in music and electronics and ultimately raised two sons and a daughter himself. Kranepool remarried happily a Sotheby’s realtor named Monica whom he met during his stock brokering days. (She has four grandchildren of her own.)

“I’ve been lucky to have a great team at home—my wife and family. And also the Met organization,” he said after his transplant. “I’ve been with them since 1962. Those are the only two teams I knew up until that time. Now I have an extended team.”

He didn’t just mean his medical team, either. Kranepool was also one of several Mets who set up Zoom calls with residents of assorted elder care facilities, during the original COVID-19 pan-damn-ic, as a way to pay forward his kidney transplant. “This is a summer that none of us will forget,” he told northjersey.com writer Justin Toscano. “You’re always looking to talk to somebody to brighten their day, and hopefully they can brighten mine.”

He needn’t have worried. He had an immediate and extended family to brighten his days. He now has an even more extended one welcoming home to the Elysian Fields. Led, perhaps, by the skipper whom he didn’t always understand but who probably greeted him with, “We’re ok, Eddie. You got the point, after all.”

They’re not the ’62 Mets. More’s the pity.

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Francisco Lindor, Garrett Crochet

White Sox lefthander Garrett Crochet’s fourth-inning opening service had but one destiny Sunday afternoon: a blast into the left center field bleachers by Mets shortstop Francisco Lindor. (SNY image.)

Who’d have thought? Certainly not baseball’s 2024 schedule makers, who couldn’t possibly have predicted that this year’s White Sox’s road to eternal infamy would include hosting the team whose ancestors they threaten to eclipse for season-long futility.

“Meet the Mets,” the White Sox said of their weekend’s house guests. They certainly proved extremely generous hosts, allowing the postseason-contending Mets to sweep them in Guaranteed Rate Field. By now, Chicago’s South Side shrugs, when other condign responses seem more futile than the White Sox themselves.

In a way, the Mets out-scoring the White Sox 12-4 could be construed as showing mercy upon the downtrodden. By Baseball Reference‘s blowout definition (a five-run difference or better), the White Sox are 8-33 and counting. The Mets won with only a four-run advantage Friday, a two-run advantage Saturday, and a two-run advantage Sunday.

“They are not quitting,” said White Sox interim manager Grady Sizemore of his hapless charges after Saturday’s loss. “They are not folding. But it would be nice to have some of those balls fall, to get some bleeders or something.”

They’ve been the fastest to a hundred losses, the fastest to mathematical postseason elimination, and finished the weekend with a new franchise record for regular season losses. Their ballpark rang with chants of “M-V-P! M-V-P!” Sunday afternoon . . . for Mets shortstop Francisco Lindor, who started the day’s scoring by hitting Garrett Crochet’s first pitch of the fourth inning into the left center field bleachers.

I’m not sure “bleeders” is an appropos word out of a White Sox mouth this year. This team’s been bleeding from square one. And they haven’t even had a fragment of the perverse charm of the 1962 Mets whose modern-era single-season record of 120 losses the White Sox now threaten with too much credibility.

Which may be one reason why one starting pitcher and one relief pitcher on the 1962 Mets are wary of the Blight Sox pushing them out of the record books. Jay Hook was credited with the Mets’ first pitching win, when he helped bust a Met life-opening nine-game losing streak. Craig Anderson was credited with back-to-back wins in relief during a May 1962 doubleheader, and they’d be the last pitching wins with which he’d be credited in his entire major league life, a nineteen-decision losing streak just ahead of him.

They’re both well aware that this year’s Mets are chasing a place in the postseason while this year’s White Sox are chasing them and their 1962 teammates living, dead, or otherwise. Neither Anderson nor Hook wants to see the White Sox break their team’s 120 in ’62. “I want them to win at least twelve more games,” Anderson told The Athletic‘s Tim Britton before the weekend set began. “I hope they do, for their sake.” The White Sox would have to win half their remaining 24 games to make Anderson’s wish come true.

“It’s shattering when it’s happening to you, and I’m sure the White Sox are feeling that right now,” said Hook to the same writer. “I wouldn’t wish that on anybody. You don’t like to go through life thinking you were part of the worst team of whatever you did.”

It’s what the pair didn’t say aloud to Britton that makes the big difference. So I’ll say it, yet again. This year’s White Sox, like numerous historically horrible baseball teams, merely suck. The Original Mets sucked . . . with style. This year’s Blight Sox don’t even have the sense of humour of undertakers.  The Original Mets cultivated one to survive.

Now, it’s hardly the White Sox’s fault that they lack a Casey Stengel to take and keep the hardest heat off their players. But deposed manager Pedro Grifol was something between a wet blanket and a grump, and Sizemore is too earnest to help. He’s almost like National Lampoon’s Animal House’s Chip Diller, upright in his ROTC uniform, the streets overrun by the panicked under siege from a Delta House operation, pleading, “Remain calm. All is well!”

Telling the world his team isn’t folding isn’t enough. Especially since it’s been folded since the end of May. That’s when the Blight Sox stood proud with a 15-43 record. It wasn’t even enough to leave them room for a comeback comparable to the 2019 Nationals—who were 15-23 on 10 May but 24-33 at that May’s end, before overthrowing themselves to go 69-36 the rest of the way and wrest their way to a World Series conquest while they were at it.

Give Stengel the keys to a city, as New York did, and he’d say (as in fact he did), “I’m gonna use this to open a new team.” Give Sizemore the keys to Chicago and he’s liable to hand it to the opposition with the most sportsmanlike intentions after they handed his men their heads yet again.

“Come an’ see my amazin’ Mets,” Stengel would hector. “I been in this game a hundred years but I see new ways to lose I didn’t know were invented yet.” Sizemore wouldn’t shock anyone by saying, “It is what it was.” He’s hardly Grifol’s kind of grump, he’s too innately cheerful for that, but neither has he seized the moment with wit. He’d never cut the mustard in the Ol’ Perfesser’s parlour.

Sizemore can say his Blight Sox have hit more doubles so far than those Mets did all ’62, and stolen more bases, too. But the ’62 Mets even had a respectable team .318 on-base percentage to the Sox’s .278. Getting the ’62 Mets on base wasn’t half the problem that keeping them there or cashing them in without them dying by hook, crook, or schnook was.

Well, on Sunday afternoon, the White Sox had an inning that could have been from the 1962 Mets play book: Luis Robert, Jr. took one for the team leading off the seventh, getting plunked by Mets starter Sean Manaea, but then he was thrown out stealing. Andrew Vaughn drew a two-out walk and Gavin Sheets dropped a base hit in front of sliding Mets left fielder Jesse Winker, but Miguel Vargas flied out to Winker and out went that threat.

Those ’62 Mets were also infamous for the sort of fielding that made you think (ha! you thought I could resist another telling) they really had Abbot 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’s at shortstop. The National League’s first expansion draft rules and entry fees had much to do with it. But the Mets turned into Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Stengel Circus entirely on their own from there.

The Blight Sox defense at this writing is worth a few less defensive runs below league average than the Original Mets. But they don’t have anyone on the team with a fortieth of the perverse endearment of the Mets’ mid-May ’62 acquisition Marvelous Marv Throneberry. Their whole defense is about as funny as a stink bomb in a sewage treatment plant.

“[T]he Mets are losers, just like nearly everybody else in life,” wrote Jimmy Breslin in his post-1962 valedictory, Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?

This is a team for the cab driver who gets held up and the guy who loses out on a promotion because he didn’t maneuver himself to lunch with the boss enough. It is the team for every guy who has to get out of bed in the morning and go to work for short money on a job he does not like. And it is the team for every woman who looks up ten years later and sees her husband eating dinner in a T-shirt and wonders how the hell she ever let this guy talk her into getting married.

They were also the team through whom those people found ways to laugh through their sorrows before trying to drown them. Not so these Blight Sox.

“I love the idea that [the Original Mets] were the worst baseball team of the modern era,” writes A Year in Mudville author David Bagdade, whose book reviewed the 1962 Mets but who admits to being a White Sox fan, the poor dear, “but that they lost with personality and humor and that they remain one of the most loved teams of any era despite (or possibly because of) their record. The ’24 Sox are just a steaming pile of baseball ineptitude. They don’t lose with personality and humor. They just lose. I don’t want anything about this Sox team to be enshrined in baseball immortality.”

Too late, perhaps. In their perversely entertaining ways, the Original Mets gave the downtrodden hope. If these White Sox caught the downtrodden drowning, they’d sooner throw them anchors.