Member of 1962 Mets' 40-win team feels for this year's A's squad

Jay Hook was expecting the phone call.

Sitting on the front porch of his Michigan farmhouse, the former member of the 1962 Mets’ rotation is well aware of the latest challenger to the franchise’s infamous crown as the biggest loser of baseball’s modern era.

It tends to happen a few times a decade, when a team’s early-season nosedive stirs up comparisons to the Mets’ 40-win season, still the sport’s benchmark for futility more than a half-century later.

The ’88 Orioles.

The ’03 Tigers.

The ’06 Royals.

The losses snowball, and Hook’s phone rings.

But this year’s A’s team seems different. It really could happen this time.

Not only is the Oakland franchise thoroughly broken, but there is a cloud of despair hovering over this group as the owner navigates a defection to Las Vegas. To point out that the A’s (12-48 after Saturday’s 12-1 loss to the Marlins) are on a 32-win pace, which would be the worst since the 1899 Cleveland Spiders (20-134), actually feels generous in the first week of June.

Hook can relate, obviously. At least to the losing part. As for the 1962 Mets’ place in history after going 40-120-1, he’s not rooting for anyone to evict them from the sport’s basement. Nor does Hook necessarily want to retain the belt as the title-holder.

When I ask the question, Hook’s response is more sympathetic to Oakland’s plight, and especially for A’s second-year manager Mark Kotsay, who is coming off a 60-win season.

No manager was better equipped to handle the failures of the expansion Mets than the legendary Casey Stengel, who took over after leading the Yankees to seven World Series championships and 10 World Series appearances in 12 years. Stengel, in his own inimitable way, somehow made losing fun.

Kotsay has to wear this daily humiliation — amplified by the harsh, unblinking glare of social media — without the rings.

“I would hate to have that,” Hook said during a phone interview. “You know, Casey had made a name for himself. He had his reputation with the Yankees. It didn’t affect him one bit. I mean, I’m sure he hated the losses, as we all did. But it didn’t affect his reputation or anything else. I would hate to have [Kotsay] have that around his neck.

“Our team was a new team that was being put together. It wasn’t a team being moved from one place to another. And over the years, we had such a terrific group of fans that first year.”

Hook raises an important distinction. Lost amid the hard numbers of comparing the ’62 Mets to anyone else, or in this case the A’s, doesn’t account for the much different vibe surrounding New York’s fledgling club. It was assembled from scratch — the expansion draft was shared by the Houston Colt .45s (later the Astros) — and New York was just thrilled to have a National League club again after the Dodgers and Giants bolted for the West Coast following the 1957 season.

The Mets drew nearly a million fans that first season at the Polo Grounds (Shea Stadium wasn’t ready until 1964), which put them in the middle of the pack attendance-wise and not too far off the Yankees (1.5 million). While the A’s attendance at their crumbling ballpark has dwindled for years, in lockstep with their shrinking payroll, it’s down to an MLB-worst average of 8,675 this season, and that paid figure rarely resembles the actual fan count in the building (the No. 29 Marlins are at 11,997).

Sure, those ’62 Mets lost. A ton. But that debut season, maybe winning wasn’t the entire point.

“A loss is not a defeat,” Hook said. “There were so many guys on that team that went on to do other things and be successful. That didn’t create a problem for their whole life. And Casey was terrific. I’ve used him as an example over the years when looking at how you treat your customers.”

The A’s ownership flunked that course a while back. But Stengel spearheaded that early effort by the Mets, as Hook described the manager’s habit of entertaining the dozen or so beat reporters who covered those Mets with story after story, which in turn kept the fans/customers riveted by the team regardless of that day’s outcome.

That doesn’t replace winning, of course. But it certainly makes the disappointment feel like a distant second to the simple enjoyment of the sport.

Hook, now 86, was the staff leader on the ’62 Mets with 34 starts and tied Roger Craig for complete games at 13. The Mets lost nine straight to open that season, and it was Hook who stopped that streak by throwing a five-hitter (one earned run) to beat the undefeated Pirates (10-0) at Forbes Field. Hook also delivered a two-run single to give the Mets an early lead in the 9-0 victory. But in describing that momentous win, he recalled a very Mets moment afterward.

“Casey told me to take as much time with the writers as I want, because they want to talk to you,” Hook said. “So it took quite a while. Everybody had gotten dressed by the time I was ready to take a shower and there was no more hot water left in the stadium. So I took a bath in the whirlpool.”

Sounds like the A’s current home, which has featured everything from leaking sewage to possum communities taking up residence.

That’s soon to be in the A’s rearview mirror once they set up shop in a shiny new retractable-roof stadium on the Vegas strip, but they won’t be able to erase the stain of this year’s on-field embarrassment so easily. And coming in below that 40-win mark won’t produce the same nostalgic glow of the record’s previous owner.

“We already set records that no one is proud of,” Kotsay recently told USA Today. “You just try to keep a positive mindset and remind them of the success they had that day. And every victory we have needs to be celebrated . . . We’re in a complete rebuild, but we’re in the big leagues, where winning is important.”

That sentiment hasn’t changed much since 1962.

“The great thing about baseball is that it’s a new game every day,” Hook said. “We didn’t win a lot of games, but I think the attitude of the players, every day we thought we were going to win.”

And in that sense, maybe Hook does have an interest in how this all plays out for the A’s. Not so much from the Mets’ historical perspective but as a fellow major-leaguer.

“It doesn’t matter to me one way or another,” Hook said. “But I think I would hate to impose that on another team.”

Mad Max and pitch clock

One leftover item from this week in New York baseball was Max Scherzer’s postgame rant involving the pitch clock’s impact on his warmup pitches between innings despite another great outing by the Mets’ $43 million co-ace.

Scherzer’s attacks on the clock for being unnecessarily restrictive in some instances is what you would expect from someone who built a Hall of Fame career by operating under the non-timer system for the first 15 years of his career. But suggesting that the clock be turned off on some occasions or subjectively ignored on an umpire’s discretion just isn’t feasible — especially after MLB has taken great strides to implement the clock, which has been praised by almost everyone except Scherzer.

After Thursday’s win over the Phillies, Scherzer recounted his discussion with plate umpire Tripp Gibson, who cut him off after seven warmup pitches rather than his usual eight.

“This goes back to, why do we need a pitch clock for that situation?” Scherzer said. “If I throw one more pitch, what is it, one second slower? Why can’t the umpire have discretion in that situation to allow a pitcher to throw his eighth normal warm-up pitch? Why do we have to be so anal about this to have a clock shoved in everybody’s face to snuff out every single second that’s going through the game?”

Well, that question already has been answered. MLB tried for years to get players to voluntarily speed up the pace of the play, and all of those methods either were summarily ignored on the field or outright rejected in negotiations. Now that the clock is there, shutting off the timer at varying points is just going to result in backsliding to the same old delays.

Despite his complaints, Scherzer hasn't seemed negatively affected by the clock, going 3-0 with a 1.08 ERA in his last four starts. He’s walked four and struck out 28 in that 25-inning span, limiting opponents to a .182 average and one home run.

By David Lennon

dave.lennon@newsday.comDPLennon

David Lennon is an award-winning columnist, a voter for baseball's Hall of Fame and has covered six no-hitters, including two perfect games.