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Can't Anybody Here Play This Game? by Jimmy Breslin
The Dedication of this book reads "To the 922,530 brave souls who paid their way into the Polo Grounds in 1962. Never has so much misery loved so much company." The book itself is the story of the 1962 New York Mets, the worst Major League baseball team ever to take the field (The title is a quote by the Mets' manager at the time, Casey Stengel). The tale is told wittily and engagingly by well-known New York sports writer Jimmy Breslin.
Breslin casts the Mets, who lost 120 games out of a possible 162 that year, as an eminently lovable bunch of losers, a contrast to their powerhouse neighbours, the Yankees. He argues, furthermore, that not only were the Mets lovable, they were good for baseball, coming as a welcome antidote to "the era of the businessman in sports,...as dry and agonizing a time as you would want to see." [p. 17] Written though they were over 30 years ago, many of his comments will certainly strike a chord with today's sports fan; Breslin often decries the growing commercialism of baseball (in one passage which could have come right out of any newspaper today, he refers to baseball team owners as "arrogant, money-hungry people with a sense of loyalty only to a bank account." [p. 40]), and it is against this trend that he sets "Marvelous" Marvin Throneberry, Stengel, and the rest of the hapless Mets.
Breslin's style is easy to digest, and he splices his sections of commentary on "the state of the game" with accounts of the often-hilarious on-field antics of the 1962 Mets. It is only a pity that so many of his dire predictions about the future of baseball have come true.
In short, I would have to say that Can't Anybody Here Play This Game? is a touching, enjoyable, and interesting addition to anybody's sports reading list. Unfortunately, it may now prove rather difficult to find - some haunting of used-book stores may be in order.
Reviewed by Patrick Conway on January 25, 1997. Image from Absolutely Free Clipart.
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