The people began to line up outside the crumbling old baseball basilica around 7 in the morning, even if they knew the doors wouldn’t open for another 2 ½ hours. And they kept coming. It was May 30, 1962, Memorial Day, a Wednesday (it wouldn’t be permanently shifted to the last Monday in May for nine years). They all had the day off.
But this was a holiday of another sort at the Polo Grounds, at Coogan’s Bluff, 155th Street and Eighth Avenue in upper Manhattan.
The Dodgers were in town.
It was the first time the Dodgers would be in New York City since Sept. 24, 1957, the last day of business for Ebbets Field over in Brooklyn. It was their first time in the Polo Grounds — where once they’d been treated like infidels, like invaders, like outer-borough rubes — since 16 days before that, when they’d lost 3-2 to the Giants.
Soon thereafter, Walter O’Malley announced he would be taking the Dodgers to Los Angeles, and by doing so he broke millions of hearts and earned the eternal enmity of millions of his former New York neighbors. Now they’d be coming home again. This Memorial Day, they would play a doubleheader against the Mets, who’d been in existence for 39 games.
The Dodgers came in on an eight-game winning streak, the Mets on an eight-game losing streak. But it was the hottest ticket in town — even bigger than the two Broadway masterpieces that had recently opened, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” at the Alvin Theater, starring Zero Mostel, and “I Can Get it for You Wholesale” at the Shubert, starring a 19-year-old ingenue named Barbra Streisand.
Mets-Dodgers was bigger than both of them this day. By noon the bleachers were full. By 1, a half-hour before first pitch, it was announced that only standing room was left. The 55,704 was the biggest crowd of the baseball year to that point, the largest at the Polo Grounds since 1942, the largest in the two years the Mets played at the Polo Grounds.
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“Maybe if they’d come out like this before,” Leo Durocher, a coach of the ’62 Dodgers and previously a manager of both the Dodgers and Giants, quipped, “we never would’ve left.”
A few notable things happened that day. Gil Hodges, ex-Dodger, hit three home runs in the doubleheader, one of the final hurrahs in a career that ultimately landed in Cooperstown. Hodges was also the final part of the first triple play in team history: a Willie Davis liner that shortstop Elio Chacon snared out of the air, flipped to Charlie Neal to double Maury Wills off second, then on to Hodges to double off Jim Gilliam. Wills hit an inside-the-park home run.
It was a schizophrenic crowd. There were a lot of Dodgers fans in the house, and so they cheered for LA out of habit. But these were also charter members of what was being called “The New Breed” — Mets fans who’d pledged loyalty to a team that would set records for baseball futility that would last 62 years, and would lose twice this day.
But it was Post writer Leonard Koppett who alone was the one who noticed something late in the second game. The Mets and Dodgers were knotted, 5-5. And suddenly, spontaneously, those 55,704 gave birth to a chant that would still be heard in similar moments of Mets games for the rest of time, softly, at first, then louder, then deafening:
“Let’s go, Mets!”
“LET’S go, METS!!”
“LET’S GO, METS!!!”
Yes, that chant was hatched at a Dodgers-Mets game, May 30, 1962.
All these years later, there is no such ambivalence when the Dodgers return to New York. What few Brooklyn Dodgers fans remain have mostly all been fully converted to the Mets (or elsewhere). The Dodgers are no longer welcomed like conquering heroes. And if anyone actually remembers who Walter O’Malley was, there are very few left who still spit on the ground at the mention of his name.
The Mets and Dodgers will play Game 1 of the NL Championship Series Sunday at Dodger Stadium, still one of the sport’s showcase arenas, the onetime sparkle in O’Malley’s eyes.
This is the fourth time they will meet in the playoffs. And while there are still plenty of Mets fans who hunger for revenge for the upset that Kirk Gibson, Orel Hershiser and friends pulled off in the 1988 NLCS, the fact is the Mets have already evened the score and then some, sweeping the Dodgers in the 2006 NLDS and shocking them nine years later at the same point, winning Game 5 at Chavez Ravine.
The 98-win Dodgers won nine more games than the Mets this year, won four out of six head-to-head, and were witnesses to Mets rock bottom back on May 29 when Jorge Lopez was ejected from a 10-3 Dodgers win, chucked his glove into the stands, and later may or may not have called the Mets the “worst team in all of f–king MLB,” a statement that, in retrospect, may not have been wrong but was a wee inappropriate.
The Mets are 73-42 since, and they are coming in hot, dismissing the Phillies in four. The Dodgers are 65-45, and also coming in hot, having won two elimination games against the Padres. When they come to Citi Field on Wednesday, there will be no ambivalence in the building even if a few Dodgers fans sneak their way in.
There will be an omnipresent chant, though. It was heard in these parts for the very first time on May 30, 1962, Mets versus Dodgers, and it’s been with us ever since. And always will be.
