The League playoffs are over, and after an amazing and unexpected run from the end of May my New York Mets finally lost to the Los Angeles Dodgers. However, I think that I can say with a bit more confidence this year that with Peter Cohen the wealthiest owner in major league sports and David Stern as President of Baseball Operations who built the Milwaukee Brewers into perennial winners, wait till next year.

I was raised in a Yankee hating National League family. We were New York Giants fans until they blew town in 1957 along with the Dodgers for what was then the glitz and glamor of Los Angeles and San Francisco. From 1958 until 1961 when Mrs. Joan Payson was awarded a new National League franchise and what was then officially the New York Metropolitan Baseball team came into existence we had lived in a sort of baseball wilderness following the Giants but with less and less passion with each year.

The year 1962 was a new beginning for us. Not only was the National League ball back in New York but through the magic of an early cable TV system in our part of the Mohawk Valley we got the Mets games that were then broadcast on WOR TV. The Mets were terrible that first season with a record of 40 wins, 120 losses, and one tie against the then Houston Colt 45s. That dubious record of 120 losses stood for 62 years until the Chicago White Sox lost 121 games this year.

The Mets played their first two seasons in Harlem’s Polo Grounds just across the Harlem River from Yankee Stadium. By then the Polo Grounds had seen better days. Also its dimensions with short right and left field lines and a deep center field wall 450 feet from home plate made it seem like a Roman venue for chariot racing. On Sept. 18, 1963, 1,752 fans went to see the New York Mets play their last game at the Polo Grounds against the Philadelphia Phillies with a 5-1 Philadelphia win. As I said, they were terrible.

The Mets slowly improved. Manager Casey Stengel gave way to Wes Westrum who gave way to the Great Gil Hodges who took the Mets to their first World Series in 1969. World Series games were still played in the daytime in those days but in Vietnam where I was the games started at midnight on the Armed Forces Radio Service. When I was out visiting the guns on our firebase I could hear the faint sound of the broadcast as the gun crews listened to the game. Unfortunately, one of the crews lost its radio down the hill into the wire when a nearby gun fired harassing and interdiction targets.

Back in my youthful days World Series games were all played in the afternoon, which I think is the best time to play and to watch baseball. In fact, the first World Series night game was not played until Oct. 13, 1971. On school days, we always missed the earlier innings of series games but in high school during the last period of the day the radio broadcast was fed into the classrooms and sometimes a television was set up in the auditorium. I still remember clearly listening in my homeroom to Pirate Bill Mazeroski’s home run in the bottom of the ninth inning that beat the hated Yankees in game seven in 1960.

If we left school before the end of the game, we could always pick it up again at the local Mercury dealership where the radio broadcast blasted through the front door of the showroom.

It was there that I heard the end of game seven of the 1955 series when the Dodgers won their first World Series beating the hated Yankees. It was also where the following year that I heard the end of Yankee pitcher Don Larsen’s perfect game in game five and had the feeling that the future was not looking good for the Dodgers. Indeed, they lost nine to nothing to the hated Yankees in game seven.

The 1957 World Series that pitted the then Milwaukee Braves against the hated Yankees was a notable World Series in our family because my mother and my aunt had grown up sisters in Milwaukee, so we rooted hard for the Braves who defeated the hated Yankees in seven games behind pitcher Lew Burdette’s three victories. In 1958 It was again the Braves playing the hated Yankees with the Yankees taking the series. By 1966 the Braves were gone to a larger TV market in Atlanta, Milwaukee proving to be but a way station between Boston and Atlanta.

My feelings toward this year’s series are best described as “disinterested.” I have never gotten over the fact that the Dodgers, whose original name was the Brooklyn Trolly Dodgers, left Brooklyn for what were then the glories of California. I will follow the series in the paper, but more important for me will be the beginning of free agency after the series and the Winter Meetings in December.