Read Can't Anybody Here Play This Game? for Free Online

owners. The plan was, of course, to have only one team to a city. One team in one city, with a monopoly on its people, its news space, and its television markets. And with the monopoly would come the kind of money nobody in sports ever knew existed.
    Happily, the people in New York who wanted another team in their town loused this up. It took a lot of doing, because the last thing in the world Walter O’Malley dreamed of when he moved to Los Angeles was that he would wake up some day and find another team in the same town with him. He has the Los Angeles Angels now. Similarly, Del Webb, co-owner of the Yankees, thought he was getting all of New York when O’Malley was given Los Angeles as a territory. Webb didn’t want to hear of any New York Mets. They were not part of the deal. It turned out they were, like it or not. And, like the guy at Rheingold says, they are giving Ballantine one hell of a battle.
    Anyway, the Giants and Dodgers left town, and millions of fans found themselves with only memories of National League baseball. Ebbets Field, the famous old wreck of a ballpark on Bedford Avenue, came into the hands of Marvin Kratter, a real-estate man. Mr. Kratter turned the place into a middle-income housing development which features seven lobbies—almost as many as they have at a resort hotel. Each lobby is decorated with a “murial,” as Brooklyn people used to call them, of a stirring event in the property’s past. The Polo Grounds, home of the Giants, was sold for another housing development. Nothing has been done to it yet, and in the period from 1957 until the Mets arrived it was a place where stock-car races and a foreign game called soccer were held. For one who saw Bobby Thomson hit Ralph Branca’s second pitch into the left-field stands in 1951, it seemed a sacrilege to have small-time events on the same field.
    Thomson’s home run is not the only great event that should be recalled. There are a couple of memories of baseball as it was when the Giants and Dodgers were in town which are unforgettable. Since baseball is primarily a sport where stories of the past are most important, no recent history of baseball in New York is complete without them.
    One is of a great Sunday game between the Giants and Dodgers that was played at Ebbets Field in June of 1949. Actually, much of the action centers on the night before in a place called the Red Parrot, which was a saloon, not a very nice one, either, on Myrtle Avenue in the Glendale section of Queens, a fifteen-minute drive from Ebbets Field.
    Among many people there during the evening was a right-handed pitcher who had started his career with the Dodgers but who was, at this moment, a member of the New York Giants. That is, he was a member of the Giants as far as the Giants’ roster was concerned. By 2:30 in the morning at the Red Parrot, he thought he was Prince Valiant.
    Sunday morning came a bit too quickly. In the pitcher’s case, it constituted a surprise attack, for in the first inning of the first game of the day’s doubleheader, Leo Durocher, the Giants’ manager, walked to the mound and, with the bases loaded, signaled for our hero to come in from the bullpen. This destroyed forever the myth of Durocher’s peerless command talents.
    The right-hander warmed up uneasily, then threw his first pitch eight feet over the catcher’s head. A run came in. He put his next pitch up deliberately, and it went between the outfielders and against the wall for a triple. Three runs were in, and Prince Valiant was out. Way out. The next time anybody heard anything from him was last winter when a saloon in Ridgewood announced it was taking up a collection to send him down to the Mets’ camp for a tryout.
    â€œHe can pitch good enough to make the club,” the saloon announced. The ex-pitcher, unfortunately, decided to remain ex; he never did arrive at St. Petersburg.
    The other stirring memory of National League