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Affectionate Scorn for ’62 Mets

Jimmy Breslin assessed the Mets one recent afternoon, dressed in blue pajamas, red-and-green robe and black slippers.

“They got no one,” he said, slumped on a sofa in his Manhattan apartment.

To reach that conclusion, he first called Seymour Siwoff, who runs Elias Sports Bureau. Siwoff told him they were not very good.

He told Breslin to call Jay Horwitz, the Mets’ public-relations chief. “I call him on some bus down south,” Breslin said, “and I say, ‘Who do you got?’ He tells me about Wright, Murphy and Lucas Duda.” Breslin pronounced Duda DOO-doh.

Breslin jotted notes on a manila folder, homework for an interview with a reporter....

Breslin, now in his 80s, knows about bad Mets teams. “Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?” was his slim chronicle of the 1962 season, in which the expansion Mets lost 120 of their 160 games.

No team since 1900 has been worse. But to Breslin, the Mets were wonderful comic relief for a sport grown stagnant and a city that had lost the Dodgers and the Giants....

Read entire article at NYT