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

baseball at its greatest revolves about Billy Loes and the 1952 World Series. Loes was magnificent in this one. He set four all-time World Series records. He committed the only balk in Series history, became the only pitcher ever to lose a grounder in the sun, and was the first pitcher since Dizzy Dean to steal a base. This he did against all instructions. And finally, Loes made history before the Series opened by confiding to about forty-seven people that he was certain the Yankees would beat his Dodgers.
    His predictions ultimately reached the public print. Loes, the papers said, picked the Yankees to win in six games.
    Charley Dressen, the Brooklyn manager, became very angry at this. Not as angry as Loes, however.
    â€œHow do you like this?” Billy said. “I told the guy that the Yankees would win in seven and he goes and screws it up and puts it in the paper that I said they would win in six. Stupid bastard.”
    Billy then went out and committed the first balk in the history of the World Series. He was starting his wind-up when the ball dropped from his hand like a bar of soap.
    â€œToo much spit on it,” he explained later.
    New York City found, however, that memories of this sort were anything but what the town needed. When the Giants and Dodgers left, many smart people began to realize that the city was hurting. Here was New York, with a daily population of something like fourteen million, and with a need for every valid entertainment attraction there is, and it had only one baseball team. This was all right for places like Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. It was bad for New York. Merchants like Bernard Gimbel pointed this out. So did politicians. The whole town seemed to be affected. The best way to show what was happening, and why another team was inevitable for New York, is to go to the fall afternoon in 1958 when Kenneth Keating, Republican Congressman from Rochester who was running for United States Senator, rolled across the Brooklyn Bridge and brought his political campaign to the heart of the great area the voting-tally sheets call Kings County.
    Keating brought with him all the attributes of the great campaigner. An excellent right hand, for one thing. This is a man who can shake hands with a polar bear and the bear is going to let out the first yelp. His eating ability, for another. If votes are involved, this is the world’s champion eater. He is particularly rough on Polish food. Put 75 Poles who are registered voters in the same dining hall with Keating, and he touches bottom five minutes ahead of the field.
    But all this priceless ability was going to waste on this day in Brooklyn. The town was dead. Nothing Keating could do, talking or mingling or grabbing hands, was enough to get a reaction, any sort of a reaction, from people. Keating shook his head. He was not going to get anything done here, he told his staff. Furthermore, he knew the reason.
    â€œBaseball,” he said. “All these people seem to be interested in is the fact the Dodgers have gone to Los Angeles. They have no civic enthusiasm. This is our problem. There is only one team in New York City now. Well, I know New York. It is not used to having a single loyalty to a single team. This is a city which must have divided interests. All this apathy we are seeing is because of the baseball situation.”
    Keating was elected Senator by a wide margin. But he lost Brooklyn by over two hundred thousand votes, and a great campaigner like this one does not like to lose anything, much less lose by that much. He tied it all to baseball. A year later, as a United States Senator, and an effective Senator at that, Keating sat on a committee which did much to make certain that New York would have another team in town.
    In any analysis of the Mets and how they came about, however, you must always start with one man, an attorney named William A. Shea, who has offices on East 42nd Street.
    Shea has dark hair, blue eyes, and the