Fifty years ago, it all began for the Mets
Mets pitchers (left to right) Roger Craig, Jay Hook, Bob Miller, Craig Anderson, and Al Jackson during spring training. (March 5, 1962) Credit: UPI
This is not going to be so bad.
That, more or less, was the thought going through the mind of every player on the expansion New York Mets when they ran onto the field in St. Petersburg for their first workout 50 years ago Sunday. They all heard the gravel-pit voice of 71-year-old manager Casey Stengel announcing to the world, "Here they are."
The 22 pitchers and catchers and infielder Don Zimmer, who showed up early, also heard applause from 100 fans gathered to mark the historic occasion.
Mostly, each man listened to an optimistic voice inside his own head. "Actually, I'd have to say that first spring training, we had a lot of big-name guys and I thought we should be a pretty good team," said Jay Hook, a pitcher drafted from the Reds.
Said former Dodgers pitcher Roger Craig: "We had Frank Thomas, Richie Ashburn and Gus Bell. I felt we might be able to play .500 ball."
Of course, to quote Stengel, you could look it up: They lost a record 120 games in 1962.
"I didn't know it at the time, but I knew later that if we had put that group together a few years earlier, it would have been a hell of a club. We got them a little too late," said Al Jackson, a pitcher picked up from the Pirates.
They did get the over-the-hill- gang look early on. Hook, a fitness buff who learned isometric exercises from football coach Ara Parseghian while pursuing his masters in mechanical engineering at Northwestern, was asked by Stengel to lead the team in exercises. Three days later, so many of the older players were sore and complaining that Stengel told him to stop.
To this day, though, those 1962 Mets realize they had been right to begin with. It really wasn't so bad.
Instead of deriding those Mets, history and New York embraced them. They were honored just last month at the New York Baseball Writers dinner. Their endearing spirit endures because that first spring training set the tone for the season, and for the next 50 years.
And Stengel set the tone for that spring training. A huge picture of him was set up in the lobby of the team hotel, along with the sign, "Stengelese spoken here." One day, he took the entire Mets team on a tour of the bases, which got a lot of publicity. It wasn't that the Mets didn't know the way, it was just his way of teaching. "He did that every year," Jackson said.
One day, a voice from the stands shouted, "Hey Casey, tell us about the framis and the freebis." Stengel played along, fielding an imaginary pop fly and grounder and throwing the make-believe ball out of Miller Huggins Field.
About the only time anyone saw Stengel perturbed that spring was when Hook went over his head, asking Ralph Kiner and Lindsey Nelson to broadcast a plea for fans to help find housing for players. The front office was not expecting that and refused to take the calls. Hook threatened to boycott the first regular-season road trip if the club didn't find a place for him, his wife and their two young children. "Which was a bluff," Hook said recently from what he calls his grandchildren-friendly farm in Michigan.
But Stengel relented and had the staff start fielding real estate calls. It did not hurt that Casey and Edna took an instant liking to the Hook children that spring.
"I was intimidated by him at first,'' Craig said from his home outside San Diego. "This was the great Casey Stengel. But he made it so easy. He was such a neat guy, such a happy-go-lucky guy. He kept you loose. He always called me 'Mr. Craig.' "
A 1962 Met needed all the friends he could get. Player movement was not as widespread as it is now, and expansion was a foreign concept in the National League. So players were used to having camaraderie and familiarity in spring training, but not this time. Hardly anyone knew anyone else.
"It was really strange. You had heard about a lot of these guys, but you didn't know them," said Jackson, fortunate to room with Charlie Neal, a former Brooklyn Dodger.
Said Craig, "I was from the Dodgers and my roommate was Hobie Landrith and he was coming from the Giants, so we had a lot of things to talk about."
The whole thing sure was different, and memorable. There was the sight of Rogers Hornsby, one of the greatest hitters in baseball history, teaching pitchers how to bunt. There was the image of Hook, a member of the American Rocket Society, giving an impromptu clubhouse talk on propulsion and declaring that Roger Maris' 61 home runs in 1961 was a better statistic than John Glenn's recent three orbits around the Earth.
Then there was the first exhibition game, March 10 against the Cardinals at Al Lang Field. A 56-piece band performed. Commissioner Ford Frick gave a stirring speech. The Cardinals performed an 8-0 shellacking, sending many spectators to the exits early. One of them said, loudly, "Same old Mets."
A day later, the Mets got their first exhibition win and their first home run, by Choo Choo Coleman, who had not learned for a month after the expansion draft that he was a Met because no one got around to telling him.
Fact is, it really wasn't so bad. Craig said the first Mets camp taught him things that helped him become a pitching coach and manager. Said Jackson, "No doubt it shaped the rest of my life. I had been in the Pittsburgh organization seven years, but I never got an opportunity. This was my opportunity."
It opened the door for him to win a World Series ring with the 1967 Cardinals and to have a longstanding relationship with the Mets. Fifty years after his first Mets camp, he will be back again this week in his usual role as pitching instructor.
Maybe most important, that first spring training eased the way into that dubious season. Hook's talk on rockets in camp led to an in-season interview with The New York Times, in which he compared the physical laws affecting the Russian spheroid satellite Sputnik to a curveball. It turned out to be an award-winning piece.
"A week later, I got knocked out in the fourth or fifth inning," Hook said. "I was talking to the writers and Casey walked by and said, 'If Hook could only do what he knows.' "
For Craig, the Stengel demeanor that had been so disarming at camp proved helpful all the way through his 10-24 season.
"I'll never forget, we had a three-game series against the Giants and we had a meeting before it," the former pitcher said. "Casey was sitting there and he said, 'Oh, Mr. Craig, where are we going to defense Mr. [Willie] McCovey, in the upper deck or the lower deck?' "
And when Stengel was given a cake on the field in July for his 72nd birthday, he asked players in the dugout for help bringing it to the clubhouse. Craig recalled that Marv Throneberry, acquired in May from the Orioles, was among the first to volunteer: "Casey told him, 'Oh, no, you'd drop it.' "
