2021
The ’69 Mets: A Time and Season to Remember geoffrey douglas
A
s a school-kid in New York City in the early 1950s—the years before the Giants and Dodgers both left town—the purity of your baseball loyalty was measured mostly by the size of your Topps collection. The Yankees’ and Dodgers’ cards were always the most available and easiest to trade for—Mantle and Berra were at their peak then, along with Peewee Reese and Duke Snider in Brooklyn—while the Giants, definitely the city’s caboose team, seemed (with the exception, of course, of Willie Mays) perennially short of stars. Most of the kids in my class were Yankees fans. I liked the Giants—loved them, really, was passionate about them, and would trade for any Giants card that came on our thirdgrade homeroom market. (I remember that I once traded several Dodger cards for a single Monte Irvin, a transaction that earned me weeks of scorn from the class’s in-the-know traders.) I can’t say for sure why I felt such loyalty toward this luckless team—maybe because on my only trip to the Polo Grounds to watch them, in 1952 or ’53, they’d beaten the Dodgers (which rarely happened), and a mid-game foul ball from one of their hitters had landed within a seat or two of me. Of such small moments, in the life of an unsure eight-year-old, is devotion built. But mostly, loving them was a pretty thankless affair. While the Yankees made it to the World Series eight times through the ‘50s, and the Dodgers four times (this was in the day of eight-team leagues), the Giants managed it just once, in 1954—then followed that with three years of losses. Fan interest waned; thousands of seats went unsold. Then in August 1957, a month after my 13th birthday, came the death knell: the Giants were moving to San Francisco, the Polo Grounds would be razed. I’d gone away to school by then, but had never stopped rooting, or traded away a single Giants card. For a long time after, I didn’t know what to do with my loyalties. The Dodgers had left the city too (transplanted to LA the same year the Giants left), and I couldn’t bear the thought of rooting for the Yankees, whom I’d hated at least since first grade. For a while I pulled for the Chicago Cubs, who’d signed an all-star outfielder named Bobby Thompson I remembered from his Giants days, but they never even managed a .500 season, so there wasn’t much future in that. Then in 1962, to huge fanfare, came the Mets. The League’s newest expansion club, they seemed to have been created as a kind of hybrid, a consolation prize to New Yorkers for their double-whammy loss of five years before. With team colors that combined the 150
The Lowell Review
