GUILFORD, Conn. — The magazine was slipped across the kitchen table. Ken MacKenzie picked it up and stared at it smiling and chuckling.
“We thought he was an old man,” MacKenzie said as craggy Casey Stengel stared back from the cover of the Sports Illustrated dated March 5, 1962. “Casey knew what was going on. There were no flies on Casey.”
Sixty years ago this week, MacKenzie reported to St. Petersburg, Fla., for spring training, the first ever for the new National League franchise in New York. Stengel, lured out of retirement to manage a collection of cast-offs, has-beens and never-to-be noteworthy ballplayers, lifted his bat and pointed to first base. The Mets’ pitchers and catchers followed.
“Them’s the bases,” he said.
“He was putting on a show,” MacKenzie said. “He took us to first base, and we went around, first base, second base. We got to third base, and he told us all the ways you could score a run. He gave us a lesson in baseball.
" ... And little did he know that he needed to give us a lesson in baseball.”
If not for this contemptable Major League Baseball lockout, pitchers and catchers would be reporting to Florida and Arizona this week. But baseball never had anything quite so joyful as the birth of the New York Mets, now celebrating their 60th anniversary.
No team has ever lost more games. The 1962 Mets finished 40-120, so deep in the cellar they might’ve been closer to the other side of the planet, yet they drew 922,530 to the wrecking-ball ready Polo Grounds. There have been more books, documentaries, anecdotes and one-liners written about the ‘62 Mets — who healed the wounds left by the removal of the Dodgers and Giants to California five years earlier — than most championship teams.
MacKenzie, 87, a native of Gore Bay, Ontario who graduated from Yale in 1956, was in the middle of all the good, the bad and, mostly, the laughable. A lefty who wore glasses, he was the only pitcher to post a winning record that season, 5-4 with a 4.95 ERA.
MacKenzie once told Stengel that, at $10,000 per year, he was the lowest paid member of Yale’s Class of ‘56. “But you had the highest ERA,” Stengel fired back with flawless timing.
“He was very friendly toward me,” MacKenzie said. “I had played for Chuck Dressen [with the Braves] and he would say, ‘I could see that, I didn’t have to go college.’ But Casey was just the other way. I was his ‘Yale man.’ He was happy to have somebody like me and Jay Hook [who went to Northwestern].”
George Weiss, the GM who built the Yankees postwar dynasty, and Stengel, his manager for 10 World Series appearances and seven championships between 1949-60, had both been pressured into retirement in 1960. When the Mets were created, Weiss was hired. He convinced Stengel, 71, to join him in the new venture. They acquired two dozen players left exposed by established NL teams in an expansion draft. The first two they acquired after the draft were Johnny Antonelli, an ex-Giants World Series hero, and MacKenzie, both lefty pitchers. Antonelli decided to retire.
“If he didn’t, it might’ve been he last you heard of me,” MacKenzie said. “They were trying to get as many old Dodgers and Giants as they could.”
One day, MacKenzie and his best buddy, infielder “Hot Rod” Kanehl, found themselves playing cards with a couple of aging ex-Dodger sluggers.
“Rod could see the humor in just about anything,” MacKenzie said. “One day we were playing bridge against Gil Hodges and Duke Snider, and Hot Rod just started laughing. I asked him what he was laughing about. He said, ‘MacKenzie, look around. What the hell are we doing here, playin’ bridge with two of the best hitters in the game?’”
There were also Hall of Famers on the coaching staff, including pitching coach Red Ruffing and hitting coach Rogers Hornsby, one of the greatest hitters and notoriously surly players of the century. One day, as pitchers took their hacks, Hornsby called MacKenzie over.
“He said, ‘you know, MacKenzie, you’re not a bad hitter, you put the bat on the ball,” MacKenzie said. “And usually, he didn’t talk to anybody. If he didn’t think you could hit, that was hit.”
MacKenzie got one hit in 11 at-bats, an RBI single in one of his wins at St. Louis on July 28.
The Mets first baseman, Marv Throneberry, was sarcastically called “Marvelous Marv,” because he was a so-so hitter, less than so-so fielder and prone to mistakes that drove Stengel crazy. MacKenzie remembered Hall of Famer Richie Ashburn, the lone All-Star on the ‘62 Mets, walking across the clubhouse to give Throneberry a pep talk.
“Marv was complaining one day about what they were writing about him, that he could foul up anything,” MacKenzie said. “And Richie said, ‘Marv, you don’t understand what’s happening here. They love you. Keep it up.' And he was right, they made a hero out of him.”
Decades later, Throneberry was still poking fun at himself in beer commercials and cashing checks.
Ashburn also had praise, sort of, for MacKenzie. “Richie told me once, ‘when I first saw you I said there goes the next Whitey Ford,’ ” MacKenzie said. “‘That shows you how much I know about this bleeping game.’ ”
Weiss looked for pull hitters, because the Polo Grounds had ridiculously short fences in the right- and left-field corners and a cavernous center field of nearly 500 feet. Those bleachers were unreachable during the decades the Giants played home games there, but against ‘62 Mets pitching, Lou Brock and Hank Aaron reached them on consecutive June nights. Two of MacKenzie’s pals, Hook and Al Jackson, gave up those rockets. Brock’s homer came in the first game of a double header on June 17, a game in which Throneberry was called for obstructing a runner in the first inning and called out in the seventh for missing first base on a would-be triple.
It was later determined he also missed second.
MacKenzie laments he might’ve been a better major leaguer if he hadn’t been so stubborn, relying so heavily on his fastball, which he threw with excellent accuracy. “I threw too many strikes,” he said.
He pitched 80 innings, walked 34 and struck out 51. Most of MacKenzie’s victories were what ballplayers called “vulture wins.” He entered the game at the right time, just before the Mets staged a rare comeback, and got the ‘W’ in the box score. After the season, he began negotiating with the tight-fisted Weiss and asked for a raise from $10,000 to $15,000.
“Weiss said, ‘you’ve got to say a lot of your wins were just lucky,’ ” MacKenzie said. “And I told him, when you have an infield like we have, you’re going to have a big ERA. They didn’t get close enough to the ball to make errors.”
He settled for $13,750. MacKenzie left he Mets in 1963, later pitching for the Cardinals, Giants and Astros before retiring in 1965. He has not watched much baseball since. He was planning on a career in farming in Ohio but came back to New Haven to coach Yale from 1969-79, and he’s lived in the same house near the Guilford Green for more than 50 years.
He is on the list of invitees for the Mets’ Old Timers Day next Aug. 27, a long abandoned event new owner Steve Cohen is bringing back. And MacKenzie is determined to make it Citi Field to join his former teammates that day. It’s a proud, exclusive club, even for a Yale man.
“You see my license plate there?” MacKenzie said pointing out the window. “It says ‘62 METS.”
