They said it couldn't be done
The amazins' finish best in East
NEW YORK (UPI)—It all began with Hobie Landrith.
Yes it did. Hobie was the first player of all the baseball players, or players who thought they were baseball players, to be tapped by the New York Mets.
Landrith was a catcher for the San Francisco Giants, and when the National League expanded to ten teams in 1962, Landrith was the first man the Mets drafted.
It began with Landrith, but today the names are Seaver, Koosman, Jones, Clendonon, McGraw, Harrison, Boswell, Shamsky—and improbably perhaps, Swoboda.
There was the era of Casey Stengel, who spoke often of how it used to be when he was young in the days before the flood, and you could get a laugh out of a bird flying out of your cap, instead of a laugh out of two players falling down while a pop fly went for a triple.
The Mets were the impossible infants of the league in their first year, when their roster was filled with aging players who had made names for themselves but who were now playing out the string, hidden away and protected among younger, stronger players who could cover the mistakes of the old men.
There were no playable youngsters that first year, and the declining fortunes of too many good players of the past were exposed for all to see. There was Gil Hodges, for example. And there was Richie Ashburn, Gus Bell and Frank Thomas. There was one real youngster, though. Ed Kranepool, right off the concrete
campus of Monroe High School in New York.
In that first year of existence, if it could be called that, the Mets finished 10th in the field of 10.
There was no improvement the next three years. They were last each time, and the names slipped in and out of the box scores, some to be instantly forgotten, others to live on in Met lore ... names like Marvelous Marv Throneberry, Choo-Choo Coleman, Elio Chacon, Rod Kanehl, Craig Anderson, Jay Hook, the most erudite of then all who knew what made a ball curve when thrown—but couldn't throw one.
In 1966 the Mets saw the light of day—if ninth place is light of day. Pleasant memory finished, the Mets once more finished tenth of ten. $40 \frac{1}{2}$ games out in 1967
Hodges came back to Shea in
Met manager Gil Hodges
"Now Generation" greeted the ascendency of the Mets to the same plateau achieved by the football Jets.
New York is wild—World Series?
1968 and his indomitable leadership hauled the young, now, it seemed, faintly promising squad up to ninth place with their highest winning percentage ever—451 —on a record of 73 victories and only 89 losses.
And now it is now, and there they are, after coming back from $ 9^{1 / 2} $ games out on August 16 to win their division.
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NEW YORK (UPI)—The New York Mets better not win the National League pennant.
If they do, the city will have to rebuild Shea Stadium.
If they do, the New York newspapers will have to invent new adjectives.
And if they ever win the World Series—
Wednesday night all the Mets really did was clinch the Eastern Division championship, but the throngs at Shea Stadium, and supposedly blaze New Yorkers reacted in somewhat strange ways.
fell from—the scoreboard.
At Shea, when Joe Torre of the St. Louis Cardinals hit into a double play to end the game and give the Mets their 6-0 victory, hysteria set in.
The players fled to the compa-
rative safety of a dressing room
where they might well have
drowned in champagne, leaving
their playground to delirious
thousands who dug up the turf,
slid into bases, scrawled symbols
over the walls and climbed—and
In the stadium parking lots, where no cars could move, a symphony of blaring horns saluted the exploit with deafening cacophony, and many drivers who finally made it to the highways kept hands on horns all the way back to the far reaches of Long Island or New Jersey.
teel confines of "21" to the lowliest of saloons, glasses were raised in tribute and triumph as New Yorkers, particularly the
10 KANSAN Sept. 26 1969
In Manhattan, from the gen-
Tom Seaver
24-game winner