Can't Anybody Here Play This Game? by Jimmy Breslin Read Free Book Online Page B

Street. But this soft-talking fifty-nine-year-old dowager sat and talked of heavyweights and horses and night clubs and first basemen. She could be the best person to come into baseball in our time. This is one who does not come to get contracts to build a ballpark or to maneuver for capital gains. This is a lady who comes for the sport of it. And it says here that she knows more about how to lose with a laugh than anybody working for her except Mr. Stengel.
    â€œJust before last season opened,” she was saying, “this wonderful writer from the Daily News , Dick Young, told me not to expect anything good at all. I said, oh, couldn’t we beat out the Cubs and Phillies? They weren’t particularly good clubs, you know. He said absolutely not. So I said to him, ‘Well, can’t we please expect to finish ahead of the other new team, Houston?’ He said, ‘No, I told you to expect nothing.’ So I said, ‘All right then, I’ll settle for tenth place.’ I certainly was not disappointed.”
    â€œIf you had to do it all over again, would you go in with all that money to buy the team again?”
    â€œOh, of course,” she said. “How else in the world could we have gotten Marvelous Marv into New York? I think the whole thing was just wonderful.”
    Then she talked about how things went in Greece last summer. A few days after the Mets opened the season, Mrs. Payson and her daughter and son-in-law left for the Greek islands. She asked to be informed of the Mets’ doings by telegraph. The telegrams came as requested, one right after the other, with the score always spelled out so there would be no error, and finally the lady couldn’t take any more of them. She wired back:
PLEASE TELL US ONLY WHEN METS WIN.
    â€œThat was about the last word I heard from America,” she recalled.
    Mrs. Payson and her party finally established a pool on what day a wire would arrive saying the Mets had won a game. After some time, the fun went out of that.
    â€œThe pot became too enormous,” she said.
    â€œYou know,” she said, “you can’t tell when this thing will end. It should be better this year. Dear, let’s hope so. But you have no idea when there will be success. I felt so badly for some of those players. Charley Neal with that bad hand. And Gil Hodges having such bad luck. It must have bothered them terribly. It’s a shame about Ashburn leaving us, isn’t it? He was our only .300 hitter.”
    It was explained to her that Richie Ashburn, at thirty-five, had decided that the Mets would have to go with young players this year, his .300 average or not, so he accepted an announcing job for Philadelphia Phillies games. He preferred that to sitting on the bench.
    â€œOh, I don’t think he would have been on the bench,” Mrs. Payson said.
    â€œThey would have had to put him there. The problem here is to break in players for the future.”
    â€œWell, perhaps. But he wouldn’t have been on the bench for the whole season.”
    â€œYes, only the guy said he sat on the bench for a while with another team once and it bothered him badly. And he said that if he ever had to be a benchwarmer for the New York Mets he’d commit suicide.”
    She broke up. The lady, you see, understands.
    Now all of this is not to say that the lady is going to be sitting down and laughing about the Mets for the next fifteen years. No, the Whitneys do not come that way. The first thing they lost at hasn’t been discovered yet. Just for openers, her brother Jock—John Hay Whitney—once decided to go into producing movies as a sideline. In 1938 he boarded a plane in New York that was taking him to California. Under his arm were the galley proofs of a book by a woman named Margaret Mitchell. It was about the South in the Civil War. It already had been turned down by Samuel Goldwyn, who sniffed, “Who needs a movie about the Civil War?