Tis Better To Have Loved And Lost ...

You see, the Mets are losers, just like nearly everybody else in life. 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. -- Jimmy Breslin, Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?

This was a new recognition that perfection is admirable but a trifle inhuman, and that a stumbling kind of semi-success can be much more warming. Most of all, perhaps, these exultant yells for the Mets were also yells for ourselves, and came from a wry, half-understood recognition that there is more Met than Yankee in every one of us.  -- Roger Angell, The Summer Game

In 1962, the Mets' first year of existence, they lost 120 games against 40 wins, the worst record of baseball's modern era. (The Cleveland Spiders were 20-134 in 1899.) It has remained the gold standard for baseball futility almost my entire life. (I was 3 years old in 1962.) But no longer. The 2024 Chicago White Sox, with their 120th loss (and six games left) will hold the ignominious distinction of playing worse than the 1962 Mets. I imagine for White Sox fans, this has been a season to forget. There has been nothing entertaining about that miserable team as illustrated by woeful attendance figures. But, while admittedly my knowledge of the inaugural Met squad is a priori, by all accounts, Met fans found the 1962 team to be fun, engaging, and loveable. We still embrace 1962, even those, like me, who were too young to remember it. This new reality is disorienting. (I'm not going to talk about the other new reality -- the exhilarating 2024 Mets -- kinehora!)

As poorly as they played -- and they really sucked in every aspect of the game -- the 1962 Mets were beloved. Fans of the Dodgers (like my dad) and the Giants -- teams that left for the West Coast five years earlier -- could not abide by the Yankees and were thrilled by having a new National League team to root for. The Mets honored those fans with the team colors of the former residents -- Dodger Blue and Giant Orange -- and fielded more than a few well-worn stalwarts from those teams' glory years, such as Gil Hodges and Duke Snider. As the great and ever-prescient Roger Angell put it during spring training that year, the Mets were "an attractive team, full of echoes and overtones" with "former headliners whose mistakes will be forgiven and whose accomplishments will win sentimental affection."  

And then there is Mets' lore, all those quirky, bizarre, and sometimes charming anecdotes that endeared the '62 team to their fans forever. Like all the crazy shit that their colorful manager Casey Stengel said (e.g., explaining why the Mets chose journeyman catcher Hobie Landrith as their first pick in the expansion draft: "You gotta have a catcher or you're gonna have a lot of passed balls." And describing another nondescript catcher, Greg Goossen: "he's only twenty and in ten years he has a chance to be thirty.") Their very first game was rained out, which was just as well since several of the players were stuck in the hotel elevator before the game. They had two pitchers named Bob Miller, one lefty and one righty. The ironically nicknamed Marvelous Marv Throneberry, their inept first baseman, famously hit a triple but was called out because he missed first base. When Stengel came out to argue, the umpire told him not to bother because Throneberry missed second base too. Joe Pignatano, back up catcher (and later a Met coach who grew a vegetable garden in the bullpen) hit into a triple play in the last game of the year and last at bat of his career.

And there's the story that gave the band Yo La Tengo their name. After center fielder Richie Ashburn and shortstop Elio Chacón collided in the outfield when they both tried to catch a fly ball, Chacón, who did not speak English, taught Ashburn to yell "Yo la tengo," which means "I got it" in Spanish. When Ashburn later attempted to catch a shallow fly ball, he called out "Yo la tengo," only to be run over by the left fielder, Frank Thomas, who spoke no Spanish. 

The Mets were terrible for the next several years too, finishing last or second-to-last every year from 1963 to1968. And then 1969 happened. The Miracle Mets won the World Series. And this is what makes 1962 so iconic for Met fans -- that this team of misfits went from being historically horrible to champions. It is this improbable arc that is so miraculous -- without the depths of 1962, the heights of 1969 would not feel as magical. (Although, given that the Mets have only captured one championship since then, it would still be pretty fucking special, to be honest.)  

Now, instead of Marvelous Marv and Hot Rod Kanehl and Choo-Choo Coleman, the worst team in history consists of players like Gavin Sheets, Nicky Lopez, and Andrew Benintendi, players of whom South Side fans don't seem quite as enamored. But I suppose it doesn't really matter.  For Met fans like me, there will always be a great fondness the team that Stengel dubbed the "Amazin' Mets." For our whole lives, the 1962 Mets were a touchstone -- a core part of who the Mets are and who we are as Met fans. As always, we embrace the loveable losers and, every season, hope we can become loveable winners.