Sports of The Times: Mets Thank Troops in a Meaningful Setting

In a tasteful gesture to American troops in the wake of the mission against Osama bin Laden on Sunday night, the Mets’ management decided Monday morning to invite military personnel to see Tuesday’s game against the Giants.

“Four thousand tickets in 36 hours,” said Castleton, who has two sons and a daughter-in-law on active duty, often in combat. He serves by donating time and considerable energy to helping military people enjoy themselves in their off-hours.

Through his efforts, there was a modest military presence in the ballpark, which was still fairly desolate, despite the ultimate announced attendance of 32,288 for a game the Mets lost, 7-6, in 10 innings. The Mets and most other teams in baseball not drawing well because of the weather, the economy and perhaps the bloated prices of the luxury-box age.

Still, the 4,000 tickets were a nice touch, and so was the fact that the Mets had no intention of alluding to the daring mission that took out the nihilist responsible for the deaths of nearly 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2001.

“We just want to say thank you,” said David Howard, the Mets’ executive vice president and general counsel, referring obliquely to what he called “the events of Sunday night.”

In addition to the military presence, it was also Asian Heritage Night, with Chinese dancers performing in the outfield before the game and a few fans in Indian saris spotted in the parking lot — a perfect potpourri for the ethnic borough of Queens.

The Mets did not intend to whip anybody into a patriotic mood akin to the spontaneous rally of Sunday night after Bin Laden’s death was announced, when young people swarmed to Lafayette Park outside the White House, climbing trees, boosting friends on their shoulders, waving flags and chanting “U.S.A.!,” the ubiquitous response to gold medals at the Olympics.

In Philadelphia, in a tie game meandering past midnight, fans chanted “U.S.A.!” It mystified the players for a while, but they caught on.

The Mets have been in the middle of responses to the attacks of 9/11. In 2001, the Mets went back to work in a subdued Pittsburgh, and the first game back in New York was at funky old Shea Stadium. New Yorkers were starting to make noise again, particularly when Mike Piazza’s home run won the game.

Bravado was still needed for the first World Series game in the Bronx late that October, and President George W. Bush’s swagger to the mound and his hard strike for the ceremonial first ball was a perfect body-language moment.

Over the years, the legacy of 9/11 became a patriotic ritual before the home half of the seventh at Yankee Stadium — long enough to freeze relief pitchers who had already warmed up.

To their credit, the Mets played it low-key Tuesday, as five service members in uniform threw out the first ball. Greg and Valerie Jensen of Ridgefield, Conn., who had paid $10,000 in an auction to throw out the ball, graciously deferred to another night. And here and there, some military uniforms were seen.

Marine Sgt. Elizabeth Qui?ones sang “God Bless America” during the traditional stretch, and the fans cheered.

It is a fact that the Mets have extra tickets. Attendance is down all over the majors, and even the Giants, the World Series champions, are not a big draw on the road. The Mets have a history with the military. Fred Wilpon helped found ’Welcome Back Veterans, which provides services for returning military members and their families. The tickets were available — and the Mets put the tickets in the hand of Castleton, who runs an Internet consulting company, in West Islip on Long Island.

“This is a wonderful country,” said Castleton, who never served in the military and is proud of his three family members who do. He was raving about the mission in Pakistan. “Kudos to the Seals for having the guts to do it, and kudos to President Obama for having the guts to order it,” he said. “And I’m a Republican,” he added.

Castleton said one of his favorite sights at U.S.O. functions is Iraq veterans looking up to Vietnam veterans. “They revere them,” he said. As Johnny Cash put it in his classic song “Drive On”:

“He said I think my country got a little off track

It took ’em twenty-five years to welcome me back.”

Castleton and the U.S.O. and the Mets found one way to welcome troops back.

But tickets are not everything. Families are under terrible stress without an adequate support system, and veterans often have to virtually beg for care when they come home damaged in body and mind.

Not long after the strike against Bin Laden, an editorial in The New York Times discussed a shortages of judges, a result of political squabbling over appointments and said, “The bureaucratic logjam for veterans pursuing benefit claims has gotten so huge that judges — in Dickensian fashion — are having to work nights and weekends as they decide more than 600 cases each annually.” The first lady, Michelle Obama, has spoken up for more support for the families of veterans.

A trip to the ballpark — and Olympic-style chants over the death of a murderer — are nice, as far as they go. They are not quite the same as a grateful nation remembering how to take care of its own.

 

Sports of The Times: A Summer With Uncle Casey in the Town He Owned

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When Casey Stengel was putting his mark on all four New York baseball teams, he came off as many things. I have to admit I never thought of him as anybody’s uncle.

When he was managing old DiMaggio and young Mantle in 1951, he might have seemed like a lion tamer or a juggler but not an uncle. When he was creating the Amazin’ Mets in 1962, he may have seemed like a street magician but not exactly an uncle.

The writers who covered the team (“my writers”) called him Doctor because that is what he called them, putting that iron grip of a hand on your biceps and gritting, “Wait a minute, I’m trying to tell you something.” The best thing I learned from him was that if I was going to match drinks with him, I was not going to live to be his age. Tough old bird.

Turns out, he really had flesh-and-blood relatives (on his wife’s side) who called him Uncle Casey.

Here in the baseball spring of New York, when real life returns, one of the last of the children who knew Uncle Casey materialized. Toni Mollett Harsh, a great-niece of Edna Lawson Stengel, came to the Museum of the City of New York on Thursday for a symposium on her spirited uncle.

Attention must always be paid to Charles Dillon Stengel, the only man to have worn the uniforms of the Brooklyn Dodgers, the New York Giants, the New York Yankees and the New York Mets. Played for the first two, managed the first, third and fourth. Nobody is likely to duplicate this record.

When Toni visited in the summer of 1962, she was 15. She bought a pair of high-heeled shoes and “a cute little black dress,” which were not needed back home in Glendale, Calif., but were de rigueur at the Essex House on Central Park South, where the childless Stengels were ensconced.

It was the first season for the Mets, who had been formed in an expansion draft, and the Old Man had been resuscitated from the elephant boneyard to which the Yankees had consigned him after 1960.

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“Every night after the game, everybody else would go upstairs, but Uncle Casey would take a walk,” Toni said over lunch on Thursday. “He would go out the front door, turn right to Sixth Avenue, walk down to 58th Street, turn right on Seventh Avenue and turn right to the hotel. That doesn’t sound like a long walk, but it would take forever because everybody recognized him and would stop him to talk and ask for his autograph. He said that was part of his job.”

Stengel could not have done better with a sandwich board over his shoulders or a jazz band strutting in his wake. Summer in the city. Nineteen sixty-two. J.F.K. in the White House, Beatles on the way and Uncle Casey on duty, distributing copious winks and quips. Come see my Metsies. Check it out, check it out.

Howard Cosell and Jackie Robinson told the world that the Old Man was snoozing in the dugout, was out of touch with the game. But every morning, on her amazing summer vacation, Toni would tap on the door of Casey and Edna’s suite.

There was her uncle, lying on the couch, facing the huge picture window onto Central Park, and on his powerful chest was a sheaf of legal-size papers containing hitting, pitching and fielding statistics. With his writers, Casey would refer to himself as the Slickest Manager in Baseball; his niece is here to attest that he was working at it.

He stole the summer from a championship team in the Bronx. Mantle and Maris, afterthoughts. Uncle Casey did his job.

After breaking his hip in 1965 and retiring after that season, Stengel worked at the family bank in Glendale. Toni’s mother, Margaret Mollett, was his secretary, in an office filled with black and red furniture and ornaments from his trips to Japan. He would speak double talk — the famous Stengelese — but would never give his nieces and nephews the feeling he was too busy to listen to them.

He had always spoken of the Youth of America, that mythical band of talented children who would someday sign with the Mets. The Youth of America arrived in earnest in 1969, and Toni went back east with Casey for the postseason.

“He loved Tom Seaver,” recalled Toni, who graduated cum laude from Southern California, where Seaver had pitched for the legendary coach Rod Dedeaux, a close family friend. She understood her uncle’s bond with the pitcher they called the Franchise.

“Uncle Casey would stand by the bus just to make sure Seaver was on it,” she said.

Toni watched her aunt come down with Alzheimer’s disease, breaking her uncle, too. No longer able to drive, he would walk two and a half miles each way to her nursing home. Casey died in September 1975 — Billy Martin slept in his father figure’s bed the night of the funeral — and Edna died in 1978.

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Since then, Toni has raised her four children; remarried after a divorce; served on the city council in Reno, Nev.; and administered the memorabilia of Uncle Casey. She is establishing a mobile Casey Stengel Baseball Center, modeled on the successful New Jersey museum of Casey’s protégé, Yogi Berra.

The other night, she visited the Berras, and Yogi’s wife, Carmen, did a loving imitation of Edna wearing a red sheath gown during a trip to Asia. Yogi told how Casey allowed him to call every pitch, unlike some controlling managers of today, and if the pitcher was tiring, Yogi would rotate his right index finger while squatting behind the plate and Casey would never miss the signal.

People know Casey for his platoon tactics and his rubbery face and his salty and obscure language. Toni Mollett Harsh has added a new image of this man for all seasons: Uncle Casey.