Sunday School: Forgotten Faces of Flushing #77 — Coming in From the Bullpen
- Mark Rosenman
- 3 minutes ago
- 4 min read
Last week in Sunday School, we took a slight detour.
Or perhaps more accurately, a detour around the outside of Shea Stadium.
Instead of forgotten players, we talked about forgotten facades.
The giant orange and blue squares.
The wind.
The ramps.
And the strange truth that sometimes the things we remember most about being Mets fans aren't players at all.
Sometimes they're pieces of a ballpark.
Which brings us to this week.
Because if last Sunday was about the outside of Shea…
This Sunday is about what came rolling out from inside it.
Not Roger McDowell.
Not Jesse Orosco.
Not even Doug Sisk.
No.
We're talking about something far more glorious.
And far more wonderfully ridiculous.
The bullpen cart.
Because there was a time in baseball when teams collectively decided that asking a relief pitcher to jog 300 feet from the bullpen to the mound was simply asking too much.
So instead…
They gave him a ride.
And somehow…
It made perfect sense.
Today, closers enter to theme music.
Edwin Díaz has "Narco."
Trevor Hoffman had "Hells Bells."
Mariano Rivera had "Enter Sandman."
Back then?
The soundtrack was usually Bob Murphy calmly informing listeners:
"And here comes Skip Lockwood out of the bullpen."
As a giant baseball moved toward the mound with all the urgency of a Sunday driver looking for a parking spot at Roosevelt Field.
And somehow…
It was awesome.
Of course, the bullpen cart didn't simply appear overnight.
Like most things in baseball history, it evolved.
And by "evolved," I mean baseball owners spent decades trying to solve a problem nobody actually had.
"How can we prevent relief pitchers from walking?"
The idea first surfaced in the 1950s.
Cleveland experimented with a tiny vehicle.
Chicago became the first team to actually drive a pitcher to the mound.
Unfortunately, White Sox fans apparently viewed the car the same way they viewed some relief appearances.
By throwing things at it.
Which, come to think of it, may have been baseball's earliest version of social media.
Not to be outdone, the Milwaukee Braves introduced a Harley-Davidson scooter with a sidecar.
Complete with a chauffeur.
Wearing a bow tie.
Because nothing says "bases loaded in the seventh" quite like arriving as if Dick Dastardly and Muttley had entered the Wacky Races and taken a wrong turn onto the pitcher's mound.
Which, come to think of it, probably would have made for a more entertaining pitching change than some of the Mets' middle relievers of the early 1960s.
Then came golf carts.
And eventually, baseball crossed that invisible line separating practicality from complete insanity.
Thankfully.
Because insanity is where baseball does some of its finest work.
In 1967, the Mets introduced what may have been the greatest bullpen vehicle ever conceived.
Not a car.
Not a scooter.
Not a golf cart.
A giant baseball.
Complete with an oversized Mets cap on top.
Seats shaped like bases.
Nobody seems entirely certain how baseball made the leap from ordinary golf carts to giant rolling baseballs.
Even historians are still scratching their heads.
Apparently somebody looked at a regular golf cart and thought:
"You know what this thing needs?"
And much like Christopher Walken in that famous Saturday Night Live sketch…
The answer wasn't subtle.
The answer was:
"More baseball."
More baseball.
Not just a cart.
A giant baseball.
With a giant Mets cap.
Because somewhere, somehow, a baseball executive apparently channeled his inner Bruce Dickinson and declared:
"I've got a fever…
And the only prescription…
Is more baseball."
And just like that, the bullpen cart became less transportation and more performance art.
Which, come to think of it, pretty much describes the entire decade of the 1970s.
Rolling out from the Shea bullpen like a prop from a Saturday morning cartoon.
Which, if we're being honest, fit perfectly with the decade that brought us disco, leisure suits, polyester uniforms, and Oscar Gamble's hair.
Against that backdrop, a giant baseball carrying a relief pitcher didn't seem strange.
It seemed perfectly normal.
Which may be the strangest part of all.
By the 1970s, teams around baseball were joining the craze.
Some had giant baseballs.
Some had giant caps.
A few had glove-shaped fronts.
And the Seattle Mariners eventually unveiled something that looked suspiciously like a tugboat.
At some point, baseball had stopped designing transportation and started designing parade floats.
And nobody seemed particularly concerned.
Meanwhile, across town, the Yankees approached the assignment in a very Yankee way.
They used actual cars.
Pinstriped Datsuns.
Later, Toyota Celicas.
Practical.
Efficient.
Very Bronx.
The Mets?
They looked at the same concept and reached a very different conclusion.
The Yankees built a bullpen car.
The Mets built a giant baseball.
Which, come to think of it, pretty much explains the first sixty-plus years of the Subway Series.
For Mets fans, those rides became associated with some familiar names.
Skip Lockwood.
Danny Frisella.
Tug McGraw.
Jesse Orosco.
The funny thing was, bullpen carts solved a problem that nobody really had.
Relievers weren't commuting from Albany.
The bullpen wasn't in Nassau County.
Most were a couple hundred feet away.
But baseball has always understood something long before marketing departments invented the phrase "fan experience."
The game wasn't just about the action.
It was about atmosphere.
About memories.
About spectacle.
And yes…
Sometimes about a giant baseball delivering another baseball to the mound.
Eventually, the magic faded.
By the 1990s, players preferred jogging.
Owners preferred saving money.
And grounds crews probably preferred not having strange vehicles driving across their grass.
Besides, some pitchers thought the carts were goofy.
Which, frankly, feels like missing the point.
Because baseball has always been gloriously goofy.
This is a sport where people sing about peanuts and Cracker Jack.
Where giant apples rise from the earth.
Where mascots race sausages.
And where Ralph Kiner occasionally started stories in the fourth inning and finished them sometime around the seventh.
Compared to that…
A bullpen cart hardly seems strange at all.
And maybe that's why people still smile when they see one.
Because they represent something that's becoming harder to find.
Fun.
Baseball once wasn't afraid to be a little silly.
In fact, it embraced it.
Not everything had to be optimized.
Not everything had to be efficient.
Sometimes things existed simply because they were fun.
And perhaps that's why those giant baseballs still occupy a special place in our memories.
Not because they were necessary.
Not because they were practical.
But because they made us smile.
And because every once in a while…
Baseball should make us smile.
Even if it arrives at fifteen miles an hour.
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