The New York Mets were created in 1962 for the mournful Dodger and Giant fans of New York City who were still crying that their teams ditched them for Cali in 1958. To really rub it in, the Dodgers and Giants were extremely good in their early years in Cali. The Mets utterly sucked.

The 1962 Mets may have been the worst Major League baseball team to ever take the field. In fact, I wonder how well they would have done in the Minors. Probably not too well. They finished in 10th place in the league, out of 10 teams. What's worse, they were way behind the 9th place team. The 9th place team was just 1 short of 60 wins. The Mets won only 40. They lost 120. Amazing! Imagine being basically 20 games out of 9th place.

This team had two 20-game losers! And a third guy who lost 19!. Roger Craig went 10-24. Al Jackson went 8-20. Jay Hook was 8-19. And it was because they sucked. Sure, they got little hitting support, but they also sucked. Don't start telling me that Roger Craig was good earlier with the Dodgers and that Jay Hook was pretty good with the Reds. These three guys were probably the three worst starting pitchers in the National League, and all on the same team.

They had two players who could hit. Frank Thomas was an established homerun hitter, and he hit 34 for the Mets this year with 94 RBIs. In other words, the guy would be getting a multi million dollar contract these days, like 10 mill a year. He was a star, but an aging star. Richie Ashburn hit .306 for the Mets and was a former star on the Phillies, also near the end of his career. Behind these two legitimate ballplayers, the team had nothing. Their most talked about player was Marvelous Marv Throneberry, one of the worst fielders to ever play first base, and not much of a hitter either.

In 1963 the Mets showed improvement. They ended up only 15 games out of 9th place. God did they suck! The 9th place team went 66-96. The Mets were 51-111. All you can do is laugh or cry. Their winning percentage soared from .250 all the way to the dizzying heights of .315.

There were three main reasons they sucked in 1963. Their hitting sucked, their pitching sucked, and their fielding sucked. Other than that they weren't too bad. They bring the word Suck to a new level.

Their top pitcher, Roger Craig, was 5-22. No, that must be a typo. Nope. Let me try again. 5-22. Yeah, that's it.

With Richie Ashburn gone and Frank Thomas showing his age with only 15 homers, what the hell did they have to brag about? They got Duke Snider! Former superstar of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Great. He hit .243 with 14 homers.

They had the immortal Choo Choo Coleman catching. He hit .178. What more can you say? They did have one or two guys with future potential, like 2b Ron Hunt and cf Jim Hickman. Hickman hit .229. Hunt was the worst fielding 2b in the league. These guys didn't ripen yet. Their 1b hit .211. Yeah, .211. Their shortstop hit .193.

You'd think that their third year would be a little better. They finished dead last again, 13 games out of 9th place. Can you picture this? For three years in a row they are so far behind 9th place. If it was a horse race, the Mets would be the horse way way way in the back who can't even see the ass of the horse in front of it.

Why were they so bad? Because they couldn't pitch and they couldn't hit. Otherwise, ok. They almost won half as many as they lost. They were 53-109.

Pitcher Tracy Stallard went 10-20. Pitcher Galen Cisco went 6-19. That's beautiful, isn't it?

They had one really good player, 2b Ron Hunt, who hit .300. They had one other guy who was a decent player with a hot year, Joe Christopher in right field hitting .300. Other than that, mostly guys hitting .250 or so, some a lot less.

1965. Does the futility end? The Mets finish 10th again, fourth year in a row, 15 games behind the 9th place team. So in four years they never come anywhere near anyone else in the league. They go 50-112.

Their offense scores the fewest runs in the league by far, not even close. Their pitching staff has the worst ERA in the league. They have two 20-game losers. Al Jackson is 8-20. Not to be outdone, Jack Fisher is 8-24.

The only guy on the team who hits .250 is the legendary first baseman Ed Kranepool. He hits .253 with a scary 10 homeruns. He's the best they got. Catcher Chris Cannizzaro, who their own manager calls Canzenerry, hits .183 with no power at all, no homers at all, and leads the league in errors despite only playing half the time.

On to 1966 and a brave new world. Something incredible happens. The Mets finish 9th!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Fantastic. They go 66-95. Could this really be? The New York Mets are awesome! They have a winning percentage of .410. Break out the champagne!

How? How could this have happened? The only reason was that the Cubs had worse pitching than the Mets, believe it or not. The Mets weren't any good but they had the 9th best pitching staff in the 10-team league. Nothing to brag about. They got outsucked by the Cubs. On offense all they really had was a good 2b in Ron Hunt hitting .288 and an up and coming cf named Cleon Jones hitting .275. Aside from that, crap.

It's 1967. The Beatles are in their glory days. The Mets are sure to build on their awesome success of 1966. What do they do? They finish dead last by 8 games, going 61-101, a mere 40 games out of 1st place.

How did they end up back in last place? Well, the Cubs now had a pitcher named Ferguson Jenkins, and a 3b named Ron Santo, and an outfielder named Billy Williams, and they were really good. The Mets were abandoned again, the suckiest team in the world.

Mets starter Jack Fisher was 9-18. Catcher Jerry Grote actually hit .195. But they did have two players on the team. They got a hold of former Dodger star Tommy Davis and he hit .300. And they had a new young pitcher. The future. The Golden Boy. The best of all the Mets. Tom Seaver showed up. On a team that was 61-101 this guy was 16-13. Holy shit! His 2.76 ERA was a hell of a lot lower than all the other Mets.

Tom Seaver shows up, and the Mets are not a joke anymore. A one-man turnaround, but still not enough to pull them out of 10th place.

1968. The Mets scratch and crawl their way out of 10th place. They finish 9th, 1 measly game ahead of 10th. But their pitching staff starts looking like something. The top two starters are named Tom Seaver and Jerry Koosman. They also have a guy named Nolan Ryan. Too bad they didn't recognize what they had in Nolan Ryan, because they ended up getting rid of him. Huh? The sucky Mets actually got rid of Nolan Ryan.

Now the hitting star of the team is outfielder Cleon Jones, hitting almost .300 with a little power. Next to him, in center field, Tommie Agee is only hitting .217, but he'll get better next year. Aside from Cleon and the two good young starters, this team has nothing going for it in 1968.

All baseball fans know what happened in 1969. The Mets beat out the powerful Cubbies to win the first NL East championship, then they upset Hank Aaron's NL West champion Atlanta Braves for the NL pennant, and then they shock the world by upsetting the heavily favored AL champs, the Baltimore Orioles led by Brooks and Frank Robinson and Boog Powell, kicking their ass in the World Series.

Did that really happen? Did the Mets go from horse shit to world champions in one year? Did America really launch a rocket to the moon? Well, maybe America launched a rocket to the moon, but that thing about the Mets being world champs in 1969 is too much to believe. That had to be a hoax. You don't go from Phyllis Diller to Marilyn Monroe in one year.