Ed Kranepool -- Home-Town Legend

Casey and Kid Kranepool, "Casey teaching: "Why wouldn't ya want to..."

Ed Kranepool died on Sunday – a legend from a team and a year of legends.
He was a late-season callup by the worst team in the statistical history of baseball – that is, unless the Chicago White Sox do worse this season.

The team that Kranepool joined in 1962 lost 120 of 160 games -- a vastly different creature from the White Sox of today, which is why I am sort of rooting for the Sox to have a hot streak.  
These White Sox are so raggedy, so anonymous, that they do not deserve the numerical shame that will follow them in years to come.

The aging 1962 Mets – including Kid Kranepool (I think tabloid legend Dick Young called him that) – had every reason to enjoy their record – more and more as the decades progressed. Those Mets brought joy and frustration and sarcasm and surprises to a city that had been chiseled down to only one major-league team, the Yankees of the Bronx.

(Addition Tuesday morning:  I forgot to properly salute the historic Polo Grounds, at the edge of Harlem, with its echoes of McGraw and Mathewson and Ott and Mays, also reviving old passions for the absent NY Giants. Fans brought their old friendships and enmities: the facing sections of the CF bleachers were dominated by two giants -- Looie Kleppel, a loud and opinionated retired piano mover, in the right-field side, and Mother of the Mets, a similarly opinionated granny type who knew everything about Harlem and its people and the new breed of Mets. Looie and Mother of the Mets had a grudge between them, dating back to a fund-raiser for a departing GIant hero -- Lockman? Irvin? Dark? -- when funds mysteriously disappeared. Or so somebody claimed. 
As a young reporter, I loved chatting with Looie or Mother of the Mets -- with the other giant heckling from the other side of the bleachers. Glory days. GV) 

Enter Edward Emil Kranepool, late in the first season, later a valuable member of the team that stunningly won the World Series in 1969. There are plenty of biographical memories of Kranepool going around at this moment;  I heartily recommend the obituary by Rich Sandomir in the Tuesday NYT.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/09/sports/baseball/ed-kranepool-dead.html

Kranepool was a product of the Bronx, from James Monroe High School, which had earlier produced Hall of Fame first baseman Hank Greenberg.  
That comparison with Hammerin’ Hank was looming over Kranepool, all of 17, when he took the bonus from the first-year Mets. The money came in handy, since his father had died in the Battle of the Bulge in World War Two.

Still a boy, with a major-league frame, Kranepool had a New Yawk way of working at being lackadaisical, knowing everything, that all New Yorkers affect. I was just 23 years old, having the time of my life covering the Mets (and Yankees) in that 1962 season.
 I distinctly remember Kranepool taking his time getting from the Mets’ AAA team in Syracuse in late September. Even if his lateness was a matter of hours, he managed to tick off Casey Stengel, the grizzled old manager. I remember Casey growling something like “He ain’t my kingdom,” but the manager played the kid in three games before the season mercifully ended.

The Mets had a record of 40 wins and 120 losses; (two games never took place, lost to rain or scheduling difficulties or just plain indifference. What the heck.) The Mets had an even .250 percentage, the making of a legend that endures today.

Why do we mourn Ed Kranepool – and tell Casey stories – and invoke the stumbles of Marvelous Marv Throneberry – and extoll genuine old pros with heart and head, like Richie Ashburn and Roger Craig and Gil Hodges and Alvin Jackson?
Because they filled a psychic gap in the New York lives of urchins like me, and old-timers who remembered the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants, of the 20s and 30s, villainously spirited away to California after the 1957 season?

Because New York was big enough to sustain three teams (if not enough income to satisfy the owners of the vanished Dodgers and Giants.) The gold rush in California produced a ghost town in New York. On half the days of the next four seasons, no major-league  baseball was committed in New York. Some of us remember them as the Dark Ages.

What followed in 1962 was a comedy, unintended, of course, with grand flourishes  of humanity and even occasionally mediocre glory. So many players helped. So many fans produced chants and banners – one of them, in 1963, asking the immortal question, “Is Ed Kranepool Over the Hill?”

What other city could nurture and love a terrible team like the Mets? Fellow sportswriters from around the country were totally baffled by Met mania, as many players, who once had dreams of glory, stumbled and bumbled and even had singular moments of success.

This season, as the White Sox fell below the .250 border, enterprising reporters have contacted survivors of the 1962 – gents like Jay Hook and Craig Anderson, two of Casey’s “university men” who won and lost with gallantry and insight. They remember losing as terrible but the rest of it mostly historic and rewarding. Fans cheered them – even if the fans would have preferred the lost years of Willie Mays and Sandy Koufax.
Oh, the cheers from the scuzzy corners of the ancient Polo Grounds, the fans greeting National League gallants like Aaron and Wills and Clemente and F. Robinson.

It was National League baseball. It was New York.  And Ed Kranepool grew from the ruins of that first year. He would never be allied with any other team. In retirement he would sometimes critique the Mets but then be welcomed back because he was a ’62 Original.
In his later years, Ed Kranepool gallantly battled illness. All of this is catalogued by Rich  Sandomir and other professionals who still write about sports in New York.

I wish the White Sox luck as they try to avoid the worst record in history. On Monday evening, as I typed this, the Sox had a record of 33-111 for a .229. percentage, and were losing, 3-0, to Cleveland.
​No matter what happens, it won’t be as epic as Ed Kranepool joining the Amazing Mets in 1962. He was a legend. They all were.
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