Can't Anybody Here Play This Game? Read Online Free PDF Page A

enough, you’ll come up to the Mets and make that pension. You can’t turn your back on this one. It’s too good.”
    It was, Miller’s boss told him to take it; the job would stay open. So with great resolve R. G. Miller reported to spring training with the Syracuse team of the International League and he got in shape.
    And on July 24 at County Stadium, Milwaukee, with his team locked in a desperate 4—4 game with the Braves that was now in the twelfth inning, Manager Casey Stengel waved grandly to his bullpen for a new pitcher. It was the same wave that in other years had brought forth a Joe Page or an Allie Reynolds. This time it produced R. G. Miller. He was wearing a spanking new Mets uniform. And he was now only seventeen days from a pension of $125 a month upon reaching age fifty.
    But sordid business was forgotten as Miller took the mound. R. G. was a pitcher now, not a man looking for a pension. He meant it. He took his eight warm-up pitches, then put the ball in his hand, looked down for the sign, and glared at Del Crandall, the Milwaukee batter. Miller had put everything he had into getting into shape at Syracuse. It had been a big gamble. But it was all worth it, because here was R. G. Miller picking up his leg and coming down with his first pitch as a New York Met.
    The pitch was a slider. Crandall hit it over the left-field fence for a home run. With his first pitch of the season, Miller had lost the game, 5-4.
    â€œThis is our kind of guy,” everybody on the Mets was saying. “He makes the club forever.”
    Now this, of course, can be misinterpreted as a blot on the record of Wid Matthews, the scout, George Weiss, the Mets’ general manager, and Manager Stengel. Well, it is meant as anything but. If there have been, in the history of baseball, three men operating at one time who had more baseball knowledge and success, it has been kept a secret. It is simply that everything about the Mets seems to run in a pattern, no matter what anybody tries to do.
    Last winter, for example, Weiss went to the trading markets in as big a way as he could. He sent Felix Mantilla to the Boston Red Sox in exchange for two players. One was Tracy Stallard, a right-handed pitcher, who is in the record books forever. Roger Maris hit his sixty-first home run off Stallard. The other player acquired was a Negro second baseman named Elijah (Pumpsie) Green. This one you have to love.
    You see, last September, at the end of a wearying day at Yankee Stadium, the Red Sox boarded a bus which was to take them over the George Washington Bridge and thence to Newark Airport, where they would catch a plane for Washington and the next set of games on the schedule. Pumpsie Green stepped on the bus, just like the rest of the players. The only trouble was, he happened to pick a seat next to Gene Conley, the six-foot-eight pitcher. Conley is not very good at sitting in buses.
    The bus pulled away from the park at 4:20. At 4:45 it was stuck in the middle of a whopping traffic jam at the entrance to the bridge. For five blocks nothing was moving. Nothing, that is, except Gene Conley. He strode up the aisle of the bus and told the driver to open the door.
    â€œI have to go to the bathroom,” he said.
    â€œI’m coming,” Pumpsie Green said. He was not quite certain why he was tagging along. But he sure was coming.
    Conley and Pumpsie hopped off the bus, wove their way through cars, and walked into a garage. Apparently they were overtaken by inspiration inside the garage. Anyway, a couple of days later Pumpsie and Conley, through hard, tedious travel, had made their way from the George Washington Bridge all the way down to a friendly inn on Lexington Avenue. They stayed there for some time, discussing New York’s traffic problems.
    After a while Conley decided on drastic action. He had money in his pocket and he said he was going to Israel.
    â€œUh-huh,” Pumpsie said.
    Then he looked around.