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There was something intrinsically glorious about the total, abject, unalloyed failure that was wrought by the original Mets. When it was first pieced together, the team had little choice but to fill its roster with a handful of aging former stars (Richie Ashburn, Frank Thomas and Hodges himself), plus a gallimaufry of such forgettables as Ed Bouchee, Bobby Gene Smith and Choo-Choo Coleman. The Mets sealed their comic fate by hiring as manager that master of surrealistic syntax, Charles Dillon ("Casey") Stengel. It was Casey who had piloted the New York Yankees to seven world championships before he was eased into retirement in 1960. But it was asking a lot of the 72-year-old veteran to expect him to cope with a crew of pitchers who could not pitch, infielders who could not field and outfielders whose arteries were beginning to harden. "Come on out to the Polo Grounds and watch my team play," Casey told a throng of well-wishers. "They're gonna be amazin'."
The phrase stuck—"the Amazin' Mets." But not even the antic Casey could have imagined just how amazin' they would be. The 1962 opener in St. Louis proved a harbinger. The night before the first game, 16 Mets got trapped in a hotel elevator. The next day they lost 11-4. The rest of the season was an exercise in incompetence. Pitchers Roger Craig and Al Jackson, who were better than their records show, lost a total of 44 games. The mound staff broke a National League record by yielding 192 home runs. The team itself led the league in errors, with 210. Of every four games they played, the Mets were able to win only one.
Even as they fumbled away their first home game in the old Polo Grounds to Pittsburgh, 2-0, a group of teenagers behind the third-base dugout slowly began to chant, "Let's Go, Mets!" It sounded so odd, that clarion call for support of these tragic bunglers, that others took up the cry. Within a few games, the banners began to appear, fashioned from bed sheets:
WHAT, ME WORRY?
I'M A METS FAN. And, ALL THE WORLD
LOVES A LOSER ESPECIALLY THE HICKSVILLE FIRE DEPARTMENT.
A cult was forming, and its members searched for a non-hero to focus upon. They quickly found him: First Baseman Marv Throneberry. "Marvelous Marv" was a monument to imperfection. His capacity for blunder verged on the supernatural. What made him especially marvelous was his sense of drama. He saved his snafus for close games, when they really hurt. Once he blasted a bases-clearing triple, only to spoil his triumph by neglecting to touch first base.
Marv received more fan mail that summer than the rest of the team combined. There was a Marv Losers Club and a Marv-for-President Club, and thousands of kids wore T shirts blazoned with VRAM (Marv spelled backward). Marv wore the cap and bells with undisguised glee, and the other Mets laughed along with him. But a few—like Rookie Ed Kranepool —found the business of losing day after day downright humiliating. Says Kranepool: "The crowd would give you a standing ovation if you only caught the ball. Winning and losing weren't really important. It was an achievement just to play and not get hurt."
Buffoonery to Mediocrity