In New York we have multiples of everything – exquisite Indian restaurants or places where the roti is as heavy as a discus. The same applies to our sports teams – eight of them overlapping in the early spring.

The Devils vanished early, the Nets could not sustain; and the Islanders taught their doomed constituency to care again. The Red Bulls are in first place under my man Mike Petke. The Rangers won a seventh game on the road. And the Yankees are doing amazingly with replacements, showing that Brian Cashman is indeed a dandy general manager when he is not rappelling or sky-diving. Or maybe because he does. 

That brings us to the Mets, who are reaching the nether level that was preordained once the budget was shrunk. The Mets are squabbling over the temper tantrums of Jordany Valdespin. Rick Ankiel as the great center-field hope -- the ball clanking off his borrowed glove? Oy.

Then there are the Knicks, who managed to win a playoff series against Boston, but are the dysfunctional playoff team they always were going to become.

The great Harvey Araton – once labeled The Rebbe of Roundball – dissects the imperfections of Carmelo Anthony in the Wednesday New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/15/sports/basketball/knicks-one-man-play-still-needs-stage-hands.html?ref=sports&_r=0

Anthony is a point machine, which is fine for the regular season, when every night is Garbage Time. But he is not a player for pollen season, when defenses tighten up, when the Hibberts of the world assert themselves.

Anthony is the softest superstar you will ever see. The Knicks brain trust surrounded him with ancient guardians with the mobility of the Xi’an terracotta warriors. I could have sworn I spotted Wally Osterkorn, Bob Brannum and Al McGuire from the old elbow-wielding days of the N.B.A. But none of the imported tough guys could give Anthony the imagination of a true superstar.

Can I drop a name on you? I know Jeremy Lin did not have a great playoff round with Houston, but I still have the memory of him penetrating defenses and finding the open man in his wonderful Linsanity flurry a year ago. He made his teammates better – even Steve Novak – but Anthony demanded the ball early and often. This was always going to happen once the Knick ownership broke up a very decent developing team two years ago, to bring in Anthony for a sugar rush of points.

Now the Xi’an warriors are calcified; Anthony and J.R. Smith keep chucking away. It is mid-May and they are exposed. This was always going to happen in the playoffs. But it could be worse. The Knicks could be the Mets. 

 A few days early, the groundhog emerges,
Temperatures heading toward the 50’s.
The local ball field looks inviting
Maybe it is time for opening day.

How is A-Rod recuperating?
The Yankees, he is told, are looking into new allegations,
Trying to bust his contract, be done with him.
Is that nice R.A. Dickey ready to win another 20?
The Mets let him go, and dissed him on his way out the door.
Never mind, the groundhog says. I’m going back down.

Is there some impulse for self-destruction among New York teams? First the Jets willfully bring in Tim Tebow and pretty much blow up the Tannenbaum-Ryan era. For what?

Now the Mets’ Sandy Alderson is throwing around coy hints that he might trade R.A. Dickey for some younger talent.

Let me drop a few names, before Alderson's time, to be sure:  Joe Foy. Jim Fregosi. Mo Vaughn.

The Mets don’t have much – won’t have much for a long time – but the last time I looked they were using the golden images of David Wright and R.A. Dickey every half inning on television to thank the fans for their support.

Not only that, but whenever anything was happening around the Mets – good or bad – the visual of the dugout showed the 38-year-old knuckleballer right in the middle of it, the adult in the room, always positive, always there. A guy who played every fifth day is the heart and soul of this team.

Did I mention that Dickey won 20 games and the Cy Young Award with a pitch that he could conceivably still be floating toward home plate for three-four-five years?

And when he cannot pitch, and is doing all the family-religious-charity-academic-travel-writer things he wants to do, Dickey should be given a permanent position – chaplain, dugout coach, honorary uncle, spring-training guru, whatever he wants.

I understand the general manager’s tropism for negotiating contracts. It’s what they do. Feint a trade and save the House of Wilpon a few million. Fine. They need it. But the process is so undignifid that the Mets could actually botch their relationship with a very good pitcher who knows he will never have a better gig than in Queens.

I am confident the Mets could mess it up.
Two more words for them. Tim Tebow.

On May 12, 1962, Craig Anderson won both ends of a doubleheader in relief for the expansion team called the Mets. He had every reason to think maybe he and the Mets were going to be all right.

Instead, Anderson never won another game in the major leagues, losing 19 straight decisions over three seasons.

By doing so, Anderson became a legendary Met from the early years, along with Marv Throneberry and Choo-Choo Coleman and of course Casey Stengel.

Fifty years is a perfect time for gauging this franchise, built on hope and dreams and irrationality and humor -- the veritable human condition, one could say.

Those first weird days flavor everything fans feel about these current Amazing Mets, who are somehow over .500 under their pepper-pot manager Terry Collins.

Norman Craig Anderson, epic Met, born in Washington, D.C., now 73, follows the Mets from Dunnellon, Fla., where he is an occasional substitute teacher, to keep his head young. He does not mind recalling the hopes that rose when he actually won both ends of a doubleheader.

Anderson, a solid 6-2, 205-pound righty, was a college boy from Lehigh who had quite a decent debut with the Cardinals in 1961, as teams prepared to give players to the new teams in Houston and New York. In spring training of 1962, Stengel told the world the Mets could be contenders. Anderson looked around at Rich Ashburn and Gil Hodges and Roger Craig and figured, well, why not?

As every Met fan knows, the Mets promptly lost 10 straight games at the start of 1962, but then actually came back to win a game here and there..

“Nowadays they never schedule a doubleheader, but they had a doubleheader scheduled for Saturday,” Anderson recalled.
.
On May 12, 1962, he was in the bullpen as the gallant Craig held off Henry Aaron and the Milwaukee Braves for seven innings. Anderson pitched the eighth and ninth innings, but the Mets were trailing, 2-1, with three outs left against Warren Spahn. Then Hodges singled and the instant folk hero, Hot Rod Kanehl, ran for him, and with two outs Hobie Landrith pinch-hit for Ed Bouchee. (Don’t you just love all these 1962 names?)

Landrith promptly hit a fly ball that would have been an out in most ball parks but which became a classic Polo Grounds game-winning homer.

The two teams came right back for a second game and staggered into a 7-7 tie going to the ninth inning. Anderson was the sixth Met pitcher, following Bob Moorhead, Bob L. Miller (the righty Bob Miller, not the lefty Bob Miller), Ken McKenzie, Dave Hillman and Vinegar Bend Mizell. He dispatched three Braves and then watched Hodges, the weary beloved idol of the Brooklyn Dodgers – Ulysses home from the wars – plop a home run into the friendly confines for another game-ending home run.

“I was still in the dugout,” Anderson recalled by phone the other day. “Judy was in the stands. I came out and held up two fingers and she held up two fingers.” Then he began the trek to the clubhouse in deep center field.

Anderson admits he was a little surprised when no reporter spoke to him, or did more than briefly mention his winning both ends of the doubleheader. This feat was not all that rare back in those manly days when pitchers were not protected by pitch counts. However, the doubleheader ended late on a Saturday afternoon, with early newspaper deadlines and the PM papers of the day not even having a Sunday edition. So Anderson showered and joined Judy and a Lehigh pal for dinner.

“They next day I figured Casey wouldn’t use me,” Anderson recalled. But when Jay Hook gave up two runs in the eighth to fall behind, 3-2, Casey waved in Anderson for the ninth inning.

“Classic Casey move,” Anderson recalled. “He’s thinking, maybe I’m a lucky charm.” Anderson held the Braves, but the Mets did not score.

The next weekend in Milwaukee, Anderson saved two straight victories for McKenzie, out of Yale, and then Roger Craig saved a victory for Alvin Jackson, giving the Mets a 12-19 record. As of May 20, Anderson had a 3-1 record with a 2.38 earned-run average.

“At that point, I really thought we were going to be competitive,” Anderson said. “What you don’t know is, it’s a long season. I was a young player and we had a lot of older players. If you had told me we would lose 17 straight, I’d have said, ‘no way.’”

They did lose 17 straight, falling to a 12-36 record, and they maintained that .250 gait right through the end of the season, for a 40-120 record. By that time, Anderson had lost 16 straight, to finish with a 3-17 record and a 5.38 ERA. He started 14 games, completing two, but does not blame his slump on the irregular role.

Anderson seems to have ambivalent memories of Stengel. Casey and Edna were childless, and were fond of some young couples, but Casey also seemed to harbor some old-school suspicion of players with an education. More than once I heard him grumble about college boys who had “ann-oo-it-ies” – he enunciated the syllables – meaning, I guess, in Stengelese, that they were a tad too secure.

The Old Man was not easy to decipher. In one game, Stengel came to the mound to visit Anderson when the opponent was obviously going to bunt.

“You know what to do,” Stengel said cryptically, and stomped off. Anderson assumed he was talking about covering first base on the bunt. Turned out, Casey wanted him to pitch inside, to move the batter away from the plate. The players came to realize Casey communicated mostly with his writers.

The Mets sent Anderson to their Buffalo farm club in 1963 – Marvelous Marv was also exiled there – but recalled him often enough for two more losses, and then brought him back for an emergency start in the new Astrodome in 1964, and he lost that one, too. With a 19-game losing streak going, he retired from the minors in 1966 and went back to his alma mater, Lehigh University, where he served as pitching coach and assistant athletic director.

In 2001, Lehigh inducted Anderson into its hall of fame. The ceremony was held on May 12, the anniversary of his last victory.

When the Mets’ Anthony Young went on a losing streak in 1992-93 that would stretch to a staggering 27 games, Anderson sent him a letter urging him to hang in there.

He remains a supportive teammate. Over the past winter, as the 50th anniversary loomed, Choo Choo Coleman emerged from the mists. Most of us had not heard from him in decades. Anderson made a few phone calls and made sure Coleman became eligible for the recent payout for players with less than four years in the majors, who did not qualify for a pension  - a sliding scale of up to $10,000 a year for these two years.  

“A few weeks later I received the most beautiful note from Choo Choo, thanking me,” Anderson said, sounding touched.

He is looking forward to the 50th anniversary of his last victory, which falls on a Saturday, the same day as 1962. He and Judy have never let the losing streak affect their self-image.

“I reached the top level of my field,” Anderson said. “Better to be a has-been than a never-was.”

Craig Anderson is much more than a has-been. In this milepost season, he is part of the DNA of every fan who agonizes over the Mets.

Rusty Staub, Bud Harrelson, Ed Kranepool, Art Shamsky, Ed Charles, Skip Lockwood and Joan Hodges -- just to drop a few names.

A lot of early Mets history will be coming to Hofstra University on Long Island Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Then there are the writers (Stan Isaacs and Steve Jacobson) and broadcasters (Sal Marciano) and historians (John Thorn) among panel members, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Amazing Mets in a conference that figures to be both academic and fun.

I'll be moderating two panels at Hofstra, my alma mater, Friday afternoon.

In the spring of 1962, I was taking my one and, as it turned out, my only graduate course -- the novel, with a terrific three-week segment by Dr. Hull on Ulysses, about a very human being who spends a long day wandering but finally gets to go home. How fitting. .

In sleet and rain, on Friday, April 13, also fitting, I attended the Mets' first home game – as a fan -- at the Polo Grounds, along with my Newsday pal George Usher. By mid-season I was one of Casey Stengel’s “my writers,” standing by his side at his 72nd birthday party in St. Louis, when he most emphatically did not ask, “Can’t anybody here play this game?”

Never signed up for any more grad courses. Dr. Hull and Casey. Both great teachers.  

With my three grad credits, I get to run two panels Friday afternoon at the Hofstra conference.  

At 3:15 PM, I will introduce my long-time friend, Ed Charles, the heart and soul of the 1969 Mets, who promises to recite a new poem for the anniversary.

And at 4:15 PM, I will conduct a panel entitled: New Yorkers Recall the Dark Ages: Four Long Years Before the Birth of the Mets.

Panel members will include Joan Lombardi Hodges, Gil Hodges, Jr., Stan Isaacs, the landmark Newsday columnist known for his appropriately-named column Out of Left Field, and Marty Adler, head of the Brooklyn Dodgers Hall of Fame. 

Although a proud son of Brooklyn, Stan Isaacs promises to stick up for his dearly departed New York Giants.

We will be talking about the four lean years without the National League in New York,and then the bizarre early years of the Amazing Mets.

For information:

http://www.hofstra.edu/community/culctr/culctr_events_mets.html

 

I think I am old enough to recognize a stricken look.

That is what I have seen on the faces of Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz in the past two years. They are of my generation – although a tad more wealthy – and I think I can tell the look of two people who felt betrayed by a friend. They have seen ruin and even death up close, to people they know.

Now they have settled their case, and perhaps they and the Mets can move on. Or not. But I come to this stage still unconvinced that Wilpon and Katz “knew” Madoff was cheating.

My belief is not based on their including Sandy Koufax in the Madoff web. That’s just one small piece of it.

I have read documents filed by the trustee, listing all the accounts held by Wilpon and his brother-in-law, Katz. The accounts are in the names of Wilpons and Katzes and other people clearly related to these two partners. The next generations, living mostly in favored suburbs of New York.

Bernie Madoff would, and did, involve his flesh and blood in his evil. The sick creep gave up his wife and children and grand-children.

I have been around Wilpon and Katz over the years, not enough to say I really know them but just enough to believe that family is important enough that they would not involve children and spouses and grandchildren in something they knew to be illegal.

Were they arrogant, foolish, greedy, sloppy, hasty? Sure. Should you like or admire them? Up to you.

People who know much more about law and finances than I do say that Wilpon and Katz “had to know.” That was up to lawyers and the trustee to prove. They did not.

I’ll have more to say about the Mets in the next few days.

I just wanted to make the point about the stricken look I think I saw. 

Your comments are more than welcome; they are sought.