| At this time of Mets glory I conjured up the thoughts of a cynical fan who thought he had given up on baseball.
September 26: Mets Finally Hook This Prodigal Fan THE CONFESSIONS OF A NEW-OLD BASEBALL JUNKIE, as told to Stan Isaacs: All right, I admit it. I'm a baseball fan again. I didn't want to be. I came kicking and screaming, but the Mets won me over. They seduced me, the rogues. I swore off baseball in 1958, when the Booklyn Dodgers left New York. If I were a New York Giants fan, I would have sworn off them, too. For the same reasons, because those bandits left New York with as much greed in their hearts as the Dodgers. Walter O'Malley and Horaces Stoneham. What a pair. You could have them and you could have baseball. What was baseball to me anyway? I grew up in New York and lived and died baseball as a kid. I knew all the averages. I knew all the numbers the players wore on their backs. Dolph Camilli was No. 4, Dixie Walker was No. 11, Pete Reiser was No. 27. I knew everything. When I should have been doing my homework, I was standing on a street corner arguing that Pee Wee Reese was better than Phil Rizzuto. I even hung around the players entrance at Ebbets Field and walked to the subway--the Prospect Park stop on the Brighton Beach line--with guys like Mike Sandlock and Bruce Edwards. I liked Augie Galan because he was a nice guy. I made fun of Luis Olmo because I knew he was afraid to go against the left field fence for a fly ball. I even smoked Old Golds when I started smoking cigarets because Old Gold sponsored the Dodgers broadcasts. One year the Dodgers switched to Lucky Strike and it didn't seem to faze Red Barber; he went from a love of latakia to "Light up a Lucky" without dropping a superlative. It bothered me, though. Almost as much as it would bother me when the Dodgers would switch cities as easily as they dumped sponsors. Even before they blew town, I was beginning to wonder why I was so wrapped up in rooting for a ball team. Who were these ball players anyway? A bunch of mercenaries who came from the hinterlands and picked up sizeable paychecks for representing a team that happened to play in Brooklyn. What did they care about me, a kid trying to get good marks in high schools so that I could get into college? Oh, the reporters made Reese and Hodges and Erskine and Furillo out to be special guys. And then there was Jackie Robinson. For a time he was important. When Branch Rickey brought Robinson to the big leagues he gave baseball a meaning beyond fun and games. The first Negro big league ball player was a Dodger, and that made the Dodgers socially significant. For a young man beginning to be aware of a world beyond baseball, it was a source of special pride that it was the Dodgers--the Brooklyn Dodgers--who took the giant step forward. Then O'Malley took it on the lam. He reached hungrily for the filthy money beckoning to him from the Golden West. All the while he was packing bags to go he was saying he wouldn't go because his roots were in Brooklyn. Hah. O'Malley taught us for sure that baseball was a hard-bitten, cold cash business; scream your head off for the home team, but when it won, was there any extra money in your own pocket? What a sucker to offer a piece of your heart to these cold-blooded bankers. O'Malley took the Dodgers and Horace Stoneham took the Giants and Willie Mays with him. All the players went along, too. A ball player might have made a hero of himself in those days if he had said to O'Malley or Stoneham, "Hell no, I won't go." But you wouldn't really expect that of a ball player would you? So I chucked baseball. I didn't give a diddley-poo for the Yankees and their pin-striped arrogance. I was pleased to see Sandy Koufax, the old Brooklyn boy, making good, but he was working for O'Malley wasn't he? Football? Glorified war games for half-baked juveniles. It seemed more sensible to go to the race track and the trotters. You could take a date to the trotters. This way I was the one who was winning or losing, rather than getting vicarious thrills identifying with outlanders. The won-and-lost of your own wallet is a lot more real than checking the won-and-lost columns of the baseball standings. Then the Mets started and people began making a big thing of them. They said they were in the tradition of the Dodgers and Giants. I wouldn't buy it. These clowns were just a new set of mercenaries. They had Casey Stengel, the old charmer, but they were as much the Rheingold Mets as the New York Mets. Sell-sell-sell. All the talk from the management that this was the people's team was just so much more bull. It was a scandal to the taxpayers that the city of New York laid that new stadium in their laps. The city just about built the damn stadium for them and then handed them a lease that would make any businessman drool. Mrs. Moneybags Payson should have paid for that stadium herself, and the way the Mets kept packing them in she should have torn up that lease and cut the city treasury in for a part of the profits. No, I wasn't going to get caught up in the Mets. Not me. But then my son started growing up. And of course he became a Mets fan. "Let's go Mets, Let's go Mets." That was all right for him, a little kid, but not for me. And I vowed that if he ever didn't do his homework because he was spending his time arguing about some galoots, he'd get it from me, Dr. Ginott or no Dr. Ginott. And then, this year. . .this year. Me, who never would be accused of being a front-runner, who knew better about giving a piece of your heart to a bunch of outlanders. Me, I started getting with it when the Mets put it to the Cubs in Shea in June. By the time they really had it going in late August, I had joined all the good-time Charleys cheering them on. I started reading the batting averages again. I helped make a sign for my son when we went to the ball park together. We went the night they lost a doubleheader to the Pirates last week, wouldn't you know it. I know it's all silly. All my arguments about identifying with paid mercenaries hold true. But baseball is a thing of the heart, not the mind. I'm hooked, and I can't do anything about it. I don't want to do anything about it. The important thing now is that I think their pitching is strong enough to get them past Atlanta or San Francisco. Baltimore will be tough in the Series, though. But if Cleon starts hitting again. . .
I have long quoted the joke about old Brooklyn fans saying that the three worst people in the world were Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini. When I interviewed historian Doris Kearns Goodwin about her book on growing up a Dodger fan in Rockville Centre, she told me about the kicker to that joke. It went, "If you were in a room with Hitler, Stalin and O'Malley and had a gun with two bullets in it, what would you do?" The answer: "Shoot the two bullets at O'Malley."
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A Sentimental Journey to Nostalgia 
