Breslin, Chronicler of "62 Mets, Recalls Their Appeal 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 weren't 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. "Horwitz tells me, "Tell him we're going to be better than we were," " Breslin said. 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. The Mets, he wrote, were "for the cabdriver who gets held up and the guy who loses out on a promotion because he didn't maneuver himself to lunch with the boss enough." Baseball's business, he wrote, was filled with "arrogant, money-hungry people with a sense of loyalty only to a bank account." "Can't Anybody ..." and nine other books by Breslin have been released as e-books by Open Road Media in time for the Mets" 50th anniversary. He has paid little attention to baseball or the Mets since "62 and would rather speak of Joan Payson, the original Mets owner, than Fred Wilpon. "She was terrific," Breslin said. Wilpon? Met him once. He's not my style. Breslin is working on a novel but is shopping for a manual typewriter because his computer is driving him crazy. He has stopped writing his recently resurrected column in The Daily News. Fifty years after "Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?" Breslin can't recall why he chose to write about the Mets. But he knows why they appealed to him. He has always loved losers, and those Mets were epic losers. Hobie Landrith, Ed Bouchee and Joe Christopher were not classically oppressed, like many of those he has written about seriously, but they qualified as the humorous downtrodden worthy of a 124-page book. They were a team that couldn't hit or field straight. Casey Stengel was manager of a roster that included Marv Throneberry, Rod Kanehl, the two Millers (R. G. and R. L.) and Gil Hodges in his twilight, playing at the Polo Grounds, enemy turf to a former Brooklyn Dodger like Hodges. "You had to be a sucker not to write about them," Breslin said. And I had a billion-dollar title. About that title. He quotes Stengel as saying the line during a conversation in which he laments that he has a defensive catcher (Chris Cannizzaro) who cannot catch the ball and lets runners circle the bases. "Makes you think," Breslin wrote. "You look up and down the bench and you have to say to yourself, "Can't anybody here play this game?" " It's a really good line. But it's not really the line. Breslin turned it into something better than it was. "He didn't say it alone," Breslin said, a smile on his face. I heard him say something in league with it. Breslin's fiction or his columns could not conjure up a character like Throneberry. Marvin the Torch might come close. But Marvelous Marv was something to behold. In a game against the Cubs, Chicago's Don Landrum found himself in a rundown between first base and second. Throneberry was part of a posse of Mets chasing him down "The only trouble," Breslin wrote, "was that Marvin did not have the ball." But he did not get out of Landrum's way and was called for obstruction. Then, in the bottom half of that inning, Marv whacked what appeared to be a triple. "As usual, Marv had that wonderful running action," Breslin wrote. But Throneberry didn't touch first; then he didn't touch second. He hitched his up his belt and listened to the crowd cheer for him. Ernie Banks called for the ball at first base, stepped on the bag, and Throneberry was called out. "I can still see his face," Breslin said. Stengel thought he was crazy. If the Mets were any good, Breslin's story would have been dead. After the team won 9 of 12 games in May to climb into eighth place, General Manager George Weiss suggested the possibility of vaulting into seventh place, which was a toxic thought to Breslin. "This was hoping for boring mediocrity," Breslin wrote, as if offended. Who would have cared about the Mets if they became a seventh-place club? Happily, the team would have none of this. They Mets lost their next 17, returned to 10th place and never left. "It was hell to play for them, but for anybody who watched them it was great," he wrote. "This was Bert Lahr in "The Wizard of Oz" or the Marx Brothers in "Room Service." " In his review of "Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?" in The New York Times, Charles Poore wrote: "Here is one of the most imaginative spoofs of the year. Jimmy Breslin has invented a fabulous baseball club he calls the Mets.