On Opening Day, the 1965 Mets  prominently featured two of the oldest-- as well as the most famous and accomplished (and most facially-challenged)-- men ever to play baseball for the team: pitcher Warren Spahn, age 43, and catcher Yogi Berra, age 39, had been the talk of spring training. Spahn started the season well, going 4-4, with one of his losses being a tough 1-0 complete game to the Phillies’ Jim Bunning. But Spahn then dropped 8 straight decisions, and the Mets released him in July. Berra’s playing days ended even more quickly, after only 4 games and 2 hits. Both players served the team  off-the-field as well as on it in 1965, Berra as batting coach, Spahn as pitching coach. With the even more facially-challenged and even more aged Casey Stengel retiring in mid-season,  after breaking his hip on July 24 celebrating his 75th birthday, the Mets would embark on a serious youth movement in 1965.

Even before April was over, youth had taken center stage in the person of rookie outfielder Ron Swoboda. Only 20 years old, the young slugger amazed the baseball world --and thrilled Met fans-- by  briefly vying with Willie Mays for the league Home Run lead, sparking speculation that the Mets had developed a powerful slugging outfielder for the next decade or more. As the year went on for the rookie, he started seeing more curveballs and liking them less. By mid-season of his rookie year, Swoboda had totalled 14 homeruns, a figure that  would represent more home runs that he would go on to hit in any succeeding year of his career and would establish a Mets’ rookie record. By season’s end, a somewhat humbled Swoboda had hit 19 HRs, for a rookie record that would stand until Daryll Strawberry’s rookie year.  Swoboda also gained a reputation as an inept fielder, committing 11 errors his rookie season, another lifetime high.

Swoboda’s defensive reputation would be one of utter ineptitude until his fielding exploits during the World Series of 1969, a year in which his two homeruns against  Steve Carlton would overshadow a magnificent 19-strikeout pitching performance; a similar turn came in 1965, when Jim Maloney would pitch a no-hitter against the Mets on June 14th, only to lose the game on a homerun in extra innings by Swoboda’s outfield mate Johnny Lewis. Maloney struck out 18 Mets in 11 innings, tying the National League record for an extra-inning game.

The Mets’ best player, All-Star second baseman Ron Hunt, had his season truncated on May 11th, when his left shoulder was separated in a basepath collision with St. Louis Cardinal  second-baseman Phil Gagliano.  By losing that game 4-3, the Mets would also fall into a tie for last place, where they would spend the remainder of  the year, as they finished in the National League cellar for the fourth straight season. Ed Kranepool, who would make the 1965 All-Star team, was off to a hot start, batting .348 on May 11th, among the league leaders in Batting Average and RBIs.

Hunt wound up the year with fewer than 200 at-bats, being replaced at second base by former Giant Chuck Hiller, known as “Iron hands” for his lack of defensive skills. Hiller’s DP partner was defensive specialist Roy McMillan, coming to the end of a distinguished career. Bud Harrelson, too, would play shortstop, albeit briefly, with Hiller, as Harrelson made his major league debut  in 1965.

The Mets looked to introduce some good rookie pitchers as well in 1965. One of the high points of the season came on August 26th, when rookie starter Tug McGraw defeated Sandy Koufax, marking the first and only time Koufax would ever lose to the Mets; up to this point Koufax had won 13 games against the Mets in 14 starts, completing 10, shutting the Mets out five times and no-hitting them once, averaging better than a strikeout per inning with a 1.15 E.R.A.  But on this night,  the Mets would score two runs in the first inning and never look back, adding insurance runs in the eighth inning off reliever Johnny Podres on home runs by Joe Christopher and Ron Swoboda. (Swoboda’s HR, his 19th, would be his last one for the 1965 season.) This win would be the Mets’ 6th in their last 8 games, as they took three out of four from the Dodgers, who would win that year’s World’s Championship, after taking  three out of four from the St. Louis Cardinals, the defending World’s Champions. McGraw, allowing the Dodgers two widely spaced runs, made the first of many notable major league performances.

His fellow rookie Dick Selma also excited Met fans on September 12th,  when he one-hit the Braves, winning 1-0 and setting a new Mets’ record with 13 strikeouts. Milwaukee manager Bobby Bragan remarked after the game that Selma had command of three pitches and was the Mets’ first pitching prospect to develop into a major league pitcher.  Other young pitchers gave Mets’ fans hope in 1965, as Gary Kroll, Gordon Richardson, Darrell Sutherland, Jim Bethke, Rob Gardner,  Selma, and Dennis Musgraves combined for 15 wins against 12 losses with an impressive 3.65 E.R.A. None of them would account for even one good major league season in their combined careers.  The best example of  dashed hope, Dennis Musgraves, never pitched in the majors again,  but his 1965  record showed a 0.56 E.R.A. in 16 innings of Major League work.

The Mets’ hitting in 1965 was generally feeble: despite Kranepool’s and Swoboda’s hot starts, the pair would combine for a year’s total of 103 RBIs between them. Amazingly, they would be near the team leaders, as seven Mets knocked in between 40 and 62 runs, with third baseman Charlie Smith leading the team. Veteran outfielder Jim Hickman set a team record when, on September 3rd, he hit three homeruns in a game.

The season ended in a bout of frustration, as the Mets scored five runs in their final six games, including an 18 inning scoreless tie against the Phillies on October 2nd  in their 162nd game. The season was not over, however, because they had played two ties, so the next day, they lost a pair of 3-1 games to Philadelphia, as Met veteran starter Al Jackson picked up his 20th loss of the season in his final start as a member of the Mets’ starting rotation.