THE
MIRACLE METS
FROM MARVELOUS MARV TO A MIRACLE
ONE HOUR OF FUN, FANS, INTERVIEWS AND PLAY-BY-PLAY ACTION

This is a fairy tale. You are not asked to believe it. Just listen to it, and enjoy it.

The story begins...

Well, who really knows when a fairy tale really begins? Does the story of the Amazin' Mets start the day the Lords of the National League, in their infinite wisdom, decided to award an expansion franchise to New York? Does it go back beyond that, back to Bill Shea and the Continental League. To the day Walter O' Malley decided to move out of Brooklyn? Does it go back to the Bobby Thomson home run that capped a fairy tale of another time?

There are those who will tell you that anything which built the hard-core National League fandom of New York is part of the pre-natal Mets, from Jackie Robinson's obliteration of the color line, to The Miracle of Coogan's Bluff, to the demolition of Ebbets Field.

That is part of the nostalgia of this wonderful tale. Then came the Mets, with their true-sportsman ownership, headed by Mrs. Joan Payson, who turned to a newsman at the start and said, "Don't you think we have a chance to beat out anybody?"

Those early days: the blood, sweat and laughter of Casey Stengel... Marvelous Marv... Jay Hook... Rod Kanehl... would you Believe Elio Chacon?

Maybe they couldn't play championship ball in those difficult days, but they could fight. You get laughed at often enough, and you have to fight. And so, one night, Ron Hunt took on Ed Bailey and the whole Braves' tribe. That was the night Casey Stengel, in the middle of the melee, was knocked to the ground, and one of the Braves looked down aghast and said, "ohmygod! I've killed the Old Man!

Then the sudden end to the laughter, and the rise of the cheers. The gradual assemblage of the genuinely Amazin' Mets; Cleon Jones... Tom Seaver... Bud Harrelson...

...Jerry Koosman... and the addition of talent through shrewd deals: Tommie Agee, and Al Weis, and Jerry Grote and Ed Charles, and Donn Clendenon. 'This is a team effort, "said Gil Hodges when the champagne was raised to toast the Amazin' Mets, champions of the baseball world. A thousand times that tired phrase had been used by managers and coaches, and yet this time, perhaps for the first time, it had true meaning.

This team had no stars, and it had all stars. Each day, some struggling player did his thing, and the Mets won another game, and when they were all done it added up to 100, and another three in the divisional playoffs against Atlanta, and another four over the unbeatable Baltimore Orioles.

It is all inside these covers, within this fairy tale. Nobody knows where it all began, but it ends riht here, with the exciting telling of it.