Joke Is on Mets No More

It was the early 1960s. The New York Mets were an expansion team. Stengelese was still the unofficial language of The Big Apple. And Marvelous Marv Throneberry had yet to meet his first Lite beer.

In one of his infamous games as a Met, Throneberry smacked a triple and chugged into third. Upon retrieving the ball, the opposing pitcher flipped over to first and the umpire jacked his thumb up, ruling Throneberry out for missing the base.

Mets Manager Casey Stengel leaped off the bench and was about to bound out of the dugout to argue.

An assistant coach grabbed his arm.

“Don’t bother,” Stengel was told, “he missed second, too.”

Ah, the Amazin’ Mets. It’s hard to remember these days, with the team winning 108 regular-season games, the National League playoffs and playing in the World Series, that a quarter century ago, this team was nearly stillborn. The first Met squad, the 1962 edition, won 40 games, lost an incredible 120 and finished a mere 60 1/2 games behind the pennant-winning San Francisco Giants.

And at the center of all the chaos was Stengel, then 72 and only two years removed as manager of the New York Yankees, where he won 10 pennants and seven World Series, including five in a row.

Greg Goossen, who now works with his brothers in the Ten Goose Boxing Club of North Hollywood, was a catcher for the Mets for the better part of four years in the ‘60s.

It was of him that Stengel once said: “This is Goossen. He’s 19 years old and he’s got a good chance to be 29 in 10 years.”

Stengel, using Stengelese, his own unique form of communication, said a lot of funny things during his 55 years in the game as a player and manager. But it was during his 3 1/2 seasons with the Mets that his humor was most handy, helping to keep himself and those around him sane.

“We had this one pitcher named Rob Gardner,” Goossen recalls. “Stengel was sending him down to the minors and he was trying to be kind about it. ‘We’re sending you down to work on your fastball,’ Stengel said. ‘But I’ve got a great fastball,’ Gardner told him. ‘Well, we’re sending you down to work on your curve,’ Stengel said. ‘But, I’ve got a great curve,’ Gardner said. By now, Stengel was getting mad. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘why don’t you go down there and work on . . . your base-stealing!’ ”

Goossen remembers another occasion when a Met took a called third strike at the plate, sending Stengel into a fit.

“This guy came back to the dugout and Stengel asked him what the heck he was doing,” Goossen says. “ ‘I was guessing,’ the player told him. ‘You were guessing?’ Stengel said. ‘Yeah, I was guessing it was going to be a ball.’ ”

Goossen says Stengel used to tell people that on the Mets, “when the ball is hit, we have all nine men run after it and hope that one of them catches it.”

The Stengelese never stopped.

On the bottom five members of his roster: “You better be with them all the time because they may be plottin’ a revolution.”

Asked after an exhibition game in Mexico City whether the Mets had been affected by the altitude: “The altitude bothers my players at the Polo Grounds, and that’s below sea level.”

On his years in baseball: “There comes a time in every man’s life--and I’ve had plenty of them.”

On being let go by the Yankees in 1960: “I’ll never make the mistake of being 70 years old again.”

On whether he would manage past the age of 70: “How do I know? Some people my age are dead at the present time.”

Maybe he should have stayed retired. The Mets lost 111 games in 1963, 109 in ’64 and were on their way to 112 losses in ’65 when Stengel fractured his hip in July, a few days before his 75th birthday. He left the club and never returned, being replaced by Wes Westrum.

Stengel went back to Glendale, where he had lived since 1924 and was the vice president of a bank. He died of cancer in 1975 at the age of 85.

The losses are a lot fewer for the Mets these days. So are the laughs.

Asked about old age once, Stengel said: “I get a little hard of speaking sometimes.”

Nobody ever got tired of listening.