Rheingold Retro Radio Days No. 1: The First Game Ever

Every franchise has a first page. Ours was read aloud, on a cold night in St. Louis, by three men who had never worked a regular season game together in their lives.

“Hi there, everybody. This is Bob Murphy, welcoming you to the first regular season game in the history of the New York Mets, brought to you by Rheingold Extra Dry. Tonight, the New York Mets meet the St. Louis Cardinals right here in St. Louis. Lindsey Nelson, Ralph Kiner and I are on hand to bring you every bit of the action.”

That's how it starts. Not with a trumpet blast. With Bob Murphy, a can of beer, and a ballclub that had exactly zero wins, zero losses, and the whole summer in front of it. Welcome to Rheingold Retro Radio Days, where we dig the original Mets radio broadcasts out of the vault, dust them off, and play them the way your father heard them — commercials, rain delays, warts and all. Tuesdays and Thursdays, in chronological order, from the very beginning.

And the very beginning was almost the day before. The opener was supposed to be played on Tuesday, April 10, but St. Louis weather had other ideas and washed the whole thing out. So the Mets' first game came a night later than planned, on a soaked field at Sportsman's Park, 55 degrees, with 16,147 hardy souls in the seats. The field was still listed as “soaked” in the official record. Murphy, ever the pro, opened the pregame by advising everyone at home to put a Rheingold on ice. Priorities.

The sponsor is half the charm of these broadcasts, and we're not skipping a drop of it. Rheingold's 1962 campaign had a slogan built for exactly this moment: “New team, new girl, same great beer.” The girl was Miss Rheingold 1962, Kathy Kersh, who shared the era's most famous Mets advertisement with Casey Stengel himself — “Follow the Mets on Radio and TV!” The beer brought you the Mets on WABC, 770 on your dial. You'll hear the spots all through this broadcast, and friends, they are glorious. As the booth put it before the first pitch: “We are about to be witnesses to history in the making. The New York Mets become a reality.”

Then came the reality.

Richie Ashburn stepped in against Larry Jackson for the first pitch ever thrown to a Met, and on an 0-1 count he drove it to deep center — where Curt Flood ran it down. First batter, first out, and if you squinted, first moral victory: the kid (well, the 35-year-old kid) got a hold of one.

The Cardinals, who did not care one bit about history, scored twice in the bottom of the first. Stan Musial — forty-one years old, mind you — singled home the game's first run off Roger Craig, and a Craig balk and a Ken Boyer groundout made it 2–0. Musial would finish the night 3-for-3 with a double and two RBIs. The Man was not in a sentimental mood.

But here's the thing nobody remembers about the lovable, laughable '62 Mets: on the first night of their existence, they fought. Down 2–0 in the third, Ashburn — who'd flown out deep in the first — pushed a ground ball through the hole for the first hit in Mets history. Félix Mantilla walked. Charlie Neal singled Ashburn home for the first run in Mets history, and Frank Thomas lofted a sacrifice fly to tie the game, 2–2. For one beautiful half-inning, the New York Mets had never trailed for good, never lost, never been a punchline. They were simply a ballclub, tied in the third inning of the first game they ever played.

St. Louis scored three in the bottom of the third to go up 5–2, but the fourth brought the moment that still echoes. Gil Hodges, the old Brooklyn favorite, the conscience of the Dodgers, drove a Larry Jackson pitch deep into the left-field seats — the first home run in Mets history, in the franchise's fourth inning of existence. An inning later, Charlie Neal matched him, a solo shot that pulled the Mets within 5–4. Neal finished the night 3-for-4. For five innings, the expansion Mets went toe-to-toe with the Cardinals in their own park.

Then the sixth inning happened, and, well — welcome to 1962. The Cardinals hung four runs on reliever Bob Moorhead, aided by the kind of defense that would soon make the Mets famous for all the wrong reasons. Three Mets errors on the night. Final score: Cardinals 11, Mets 4. Roger Craig took the loss, the first of 24 he would absorb that summer on his way to becoming the most poetic hard-luck pitcher who ever lived. Larry Jackson went the distance for St. Louis.

The first game ever ended, as 119 more would that season, in defeat. But listen to the broadcast — really listen — and you won't hear a funeral. You'll hear three broadcasters falling in love in real time. Nelson, Murphy and Kiner worked this game having never called one together, and they would stay together for seventeen seasons, becoming as much a part of the Mets as the skyline on the sleeve. It all starts here, with a cold beer, a soaked field, and Bob Murphy saying hello.

Put a Rheingold on ice. Settle back. Here's where we came from.

LISTEN TO THE ORIGINAL BROADCAST

Broadcast: WABC (770) Radio, New York — Lindsey Nelson, Bob Murphy and Ralph Kiner. Recording via the Internet Archive's classic baseball radio collections.

Box score: Retrosheet via Baseball-Reference.

Next on Rheingold Retro Radio Days: the Mets come home to the Polo Grounds — Saturday, April 14, 1962, against the Pittsburgh Pirates, with Bob Murphy back behind the microphone.

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