| An original Met watched them move into first place one September night. It was a pleasure to hear him reminisce.
September 12: Guess Who Came To Great Met Party Sometimes it's a delightfully small world. Sitting on the Montreal Expos' bench Wednesday night as the Mets surged into first place was Ken MacKenzie. The Ken MacKenzie who was an original Met. The Ken MacKenzie who went to Yale. MacKenzie is still at Yale. He is 35, the coach of the baseball team. He is also an active member of the Expos for the last weeks of this season because of a bit of kindness on the part of Expos general manager John McHale.
MacKenzie needs 27 more days on a big league roster to qualify for the pension that goes to any man who has been in the big leagues a minimum of four years. The minimum used to be five years. When the Players Association lowered it to four, MacKenzie wrote to the five big-league teams for whom he had pitched, volunteering his services. Montreal has nothing at stake so Hale, who had employed MacKenzie at Milwaukee, hired the old pitcher for the month of September to qualify him for the pension. MacKenzie pitches batting practice, but he's also on the regular roster wearing No. 17 and there may come a day when manager Gene Mauch might actually put him into a game. At Shea Stadium yesterday MacKenzie said, "Gene jokes about it. I'd never ask him to put me in there, but I'd love a crack at it. I've always been in good shape and I worked out for 10 days before joining the team so my legs would be all right." MacKenzie came to the Mets in the expansion draft from Milwaukee. Part of the reason he stayed was that he was one of the few lefties on Casey Stengel's first pitching staff. He had a 5-4 record with a 4.95 earned-run-average in that long ago of 1962 in the Polo Grounds. That was the only winning record on the team. He was traded to St. Louis in the middle of 1963. Two stories about MacKenzie have been carved into the scrolls of memorabilia. Once, when MacKenzie was having difficulties, Stengel is alleged to have gone out to the mound and told him, "Just make believe they're Harvards." And MacKenzie once said about being a Yaley, "I guess I'm earning less money than any other member of my class." MacKenzie smiled at the recollection. "I don't remember if Stengel actually said that to me on the mound or if he thought it or if he told it to the reporters afterward, but that was typical of him, wasn't it?" MacKenzie was always a serious fellow about his pitching. So were almost all the Mets. What made them so endearingly funny was that in their fashion they did try harder. MacKenzie said, "I'm proud of having been an original Met. If people want to think that I was a clown, that's all right. But I always remember what the old man said after I was traded. As we shook hands, he said, 'You always tried your best.' "We all tried our best. I still think that was a pretty good team. We were in a very strong league. The big difference, as with this Montreal team, was defense. I think guys like Jay Hook and Roger Craig would have done all right for anybody if they had a better defense behind them. Sometimes we'd have to get seven or eight outs an inning." He has lost the edge of waspishness he carried around with him when he was defensive about his pitching talents. Now his softness and sense of perspective fit right into the Yale scene. He is married to a Vassar girl and they have two boys. If MacKenzie is still the lowest-paid member of his graduating class, he also says, "I may also be the happiest. "It's nice at Yale. I mix with many of the fellows on the faculty; they're really sharp guys and it's a nice change from athletics. My wife is taking courses at Wesleyan to get her Masters in English so she can teach in the Connecticut schools. A lot of the kids from the football team play baseball for me. Brian Dowling was as much a winning baseball player as he was at football. Hank Greenberg's son, Steve, plays first base for us and he's a definite pro prospect." The living at Yale is comfortable, but the baseball pension thing is a chance to pick up $3,000 a year. "It'll come to $80,000 over a liftime," he said. On Wednesday night, while the Mets were doing a victory jig into first place, MacKenzie sat back and enjoyed them. "I've always thought of the Mets as my team," he said.
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Mets Show the World They'll Be Around 
