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

The fellow next to him at the bar had an afternoon newspaper, and the headline on the sports page said Gene Conley and Pumpsie Green had jumped the Red Sox and were liable to be finished in baseball. Pumpsie happened to glance at the headline. It shook him up a little. Now he wasn’t so sure about Israel.
    â€œWhat about it?” Conley was demanding.
    â€œI think we should be in Washington about now,” Pumpsie said.
    This offended Conley.
    â€œPumpsie, you gotta make up your mind. Are you going to Washington or are you going to Jerusalem?”
    â€œI believe I’m going to Washington, Gene.”
    Conley went out and stepped into a taxicab which took him to Idlewild Airport. El Al Airlines, however, had the nerve to turn him down for passage because he didn’t have a passport.
    Somehow, Pumpsie got to Washington. He arrived at the hotel and flopped into bed.
    â€œWhy didn’t you go to Israel?” somebody asked him.
    â€œI’m not Jewish,” Pumpsie said. Then he fell asleep.
    When he woke up he found he had been slapped with a heavy fine. The Red Sox, of course, had a still better way to reward Pumpsie for his wanderings. They sent him to the Mets.
    And this season, when Pumpsie Green takes the field for the Mets, anybody who does not stand up and root for him, and root hard, simply has no taste for the good life.
    As noted earlier, it took more than baseball people to create the Mets. One of the biggest culprits, for example, is a beer company called Rheingold. This company, based in Brooklyn, put up, on the advice of an advertising agency, $1,200,000 per year on a five-year contract to sponsor the Mets on television and radio. The bid was made and accepted in the fall of 1961. The Mets had not yet signed a player. By December, the Mets had signed players and the Rheingold account was taken away from the ad agency and placed with another organization, J. Walter Thompson. This was a blow to the original agency. One day last winter, in investigating this, we found why the account was shifted.
    â€œWe didn’t like losing the account at all,” one of the admen said over a martini.
    â€œHow come you lost it?”
    â€œSomebody gave the client a bad report.”
    â€œWhat was it?”
    â€œThey told the sponsor who was going to play third base for the Mets.”
    At J. Walter Thompson, the Rheingold account was placed in the hands of a real specialist. He is an adman who can give you the whole bit. Spot commercials, billboard ads, jingles, Miss Rheingold contests, you name it and this guy really knows the game. He also comes with guts. The first time the Mets played at night in Los Angeles, with that three-hour time difference from New York, the team, as if operating from a script, let the Dodgers score thirteen runs. They also took four hours to let this happen. So, long after midnight, the Mets’ radio and television outlets in the huge metropolitan New York area proudly presented, between innings, “The Rheingold Jingle” to an audience consisting at that hour mainly of professional housebreakers. But our man never took back. From the start this is a man who has been guilty of gross enthusiasm.
    â€œThe ratings were terrific all year,” he insists. “We were slightly behind Ballantine on television, but only by .03 or so. And we were ahead on radio. Now if you call Ballantine, they’ll probably tell you they whomped us. But they didn’t. We know they didn’t and they know they didn’t.”
    By Ballantine, the adman means the New York Yankees. The Yankees are sponsored on radio and TV by Ballantine beer. When news of the Rheingold man’s claim reached the Ballantine headquarters in Newark, it caused an explosion.
    â€œRheingold claims they topped us?” a Ballantine man shouted. “How could Rheingold top Ballantine when Ballantine had Mickey Mantle in center field? I mean, really. Even in Schaefer’s best