Opening Day

The New York Mets play their first game ever before 12,447 rain-soaked fans at the Polo Grounds on April 13, 1962. The Mets lost, 4-3, to the Pittsburgh Pirates, one of a record 120 defeats that season. Before long, however, the hapless, bumbling Mets would be called lovable and, most of all, amazing.

“Civic pride erupted in one lusty ovation after another at the Polo Grounds yesterday as 12,447 baseball fans hailed the return of the prodigal National League,” The Times reported on the opener. “However, what the crowd lacked in numbers it offset with enthusiasm, generously pouring out affection that had found no satisfactory outlet since the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers absconded to the West Coast at the close of the 1957 season.”

This photo by Times photographer Ernie Sisto captures the action in the fifth inning at the Polo Grounds, which first opened in 1911 in Upper Manhattan, but was now on its last legs. It had limited parking, cramped locker rooms and outdated concession stands. Maintenance and restoration work had all but ceased before the improbable new tenants moved in. The Mets’ opening day lineup included pitcher Sherman “Roadblock” Jones and catcher Joe Ginsberg, neither of whom would last into the warm weather. Ralph Kiner, who charmed millions of fans on “Kiner’s Korner,” his postgame show on WOR-TV/Channel 9, would recall, “The Mets lost their first nine games and were nine and a half games behind. Now you ask how that could happen? Because the Pirates won 10 straight.”

As the losses mounted, Mets manager Casey Stengel would ask, “Can’t anybody here play this game?” But the errors and misplays just made the Mets more appealing to fans.

“There was room for a lovable loser in sports in those heady days of J.F.K.’s Camelot, the Peace Corps and John Glenn orbiting the earth,” Robert Lipsyte wrote in The Times in 2012. “We could take a joke then. America was flexing its muscles, shaking off its ’50s flab as surely as winter-sodden ballplayers were groaning their way into shape for a fresh season.”