When the New York Times came to Marion

It was a “charming break,” Robert Lipsyte said of leaving behind the hustle and bustle of New York City to spend a few days in the quiet mountains of Southwest Virginia, where he talked with and wrote about young ballplayers and the appreciative town folks who flocked to their games hoping to see the future in the present.

Lipsyte never was a full-time baseball writer, he said in a phone interview in January 2021, but he had covered the New York Mets spring training in 1962 for the New York Times and had written about the Major League Baseball’s newest franchise “off and on.”

For the most part, Lipsyte was a boxing reporter. In ’64, he covered the title bout between Cassius Clay and Sonny Liston in Miami because, as Lipsyte writes on his website, no one thought Clay could win so the paper sent didn’t send a real boxing reporter. His coverage impressed the Times editors, and Lipsyte became the paper’s boxing reporter.

Lipsyte’s story was syndicated in several newspapers around the United States, many of them using the cartoon above to accompany the article.

He was writing features back then, too, in the mid-60s, and was assigned to trek 550-plus miles from the Big Apple to Marion, Virginia, to report on the happenings with the Mets rookie league baseball team there. Lipsyte had seen enough of the big leagues to become vexed with the “arrogance and entitlement of ballplayers,” he said. Their fans weren’t much better.

“So, for a feature writer, it was kind of wonderful,” the then 83-year-old Lipsyte recalled more than five decades after visiting the Smyth County town. “They [Marion fans] thought it was a privilege to have these ballplayers in their midst and to have the dream that some of them would someday make it to the big leagues and they would remember when the players were just kids.”

Lipsyte’s article on the Marion team ran in the Sunday, July 31, 1966 New York Times on the same page with stories about the big-league Phillies beating the Pirates and the Cardinals topping the Dodgers and opposite a page that featured a photo of a smiling Mickey Mantle.

Under the headline “Players for Marion Mets Are a Long Dream From Shea Stadium,” Lipsyte led his story with an anecdote of a “chubby bank cashier” – that was public address announcer and team president Bob Garnett – speaking over a “crackling loudspeaker,” saying “Welcome to Marion Stadium, home of the Mets, where the stars of tomorrow shine tonight.”

“I think everybody in Marion took that to heart,” Lipsyte said, “which was lovely. The whole thing was really fun.”

Lipsyte reported on a particular game in which the Mets fell behind 4-0 to the Johnson City Yankees – 18-year-old pitcher Done Linehan had a rough first inning – but rallied to win 7-6, thanks in part to a 380-foot home run by 17-year-old Mike Jorgenson, one of the New York Mets top prospects.

If you’re not a baseball fan, but call Marion your home or know a little about the town, you’ll find plenty of interesting anecdotes in Lipsyte’s article, like the mention of swimming at Hungry Mother State Park or the photos of Mets players standing on the pitcher’s mound with the Brunswick Manufacturing Company puffing smoke in the background, beyond center field.

And if you’re ever been to Marion Senior High School’s baseball-slash-football stadium – that’s where the Mets played from 1965 to 1976 – you’ll likely empathize with the players in one photo climbing up the steps, now long gone, that lead from the baseball field to the locker rooms in the school.

“It was fun being at that rickety old ballpark and in Marion,” Lipsyte said, harkening back to time spent with the Mets and hanging out in places like Campbell’s Restaurant and chatting with players like Dave Rose and his family who were visiting from Ohio.

Some of the more interesting insights came from Lipsyte’s conversation with players Bob Yodice and Mike Minster, both 17, who were living together in a trailer about five miles from downtown Marion. Yodice did much of the cleaning because he learned those skills from watching his mother, but Minster admitted he was “helpless around the house,” Lipsyte wrote, and appeared “very proud that he now picks up his dirty underwear.”

A photo in the New York Times piece featured four players relaxing, the caption claims, at Campbell’s Restaurant. Second from the left in the picture is Jorgensen, “the $20,000 bonus first baseman from Bayside, Queens,” Lipsyte wrote of Jorgensen.

“He was a bona fide prospect, and they [New York Mets organization] knew he was going to be a star,” Lipsyte said. “I think he had a good career, but he didn’t have the big career. He was a Mantle-esque prospect.”

Jorgensen did go on to have a solid major league tenure, playing 17 seasons that began with the Mets, and included stops in Montreal, Oakland, Texas, the Mets again, Atlanta and St. Louis.

The ballplayers in Marion, Lipsyte recalled on the phone, “were mostly teenagers, just out of high school or early in college. Back in high school, they may have been prom kings, but there in Marion, they were just guys scrabbling.”

Before the game Lipsyte covered for the New York Times readers, Marion Mets manager Buddy Peterson tried to rev up his club, saying, “This is it boys. You’re professionals now. And, if you mess up here, there’s no place to go.” And on this day, when New York Mets Director of Player Development Bob Scheffing was in town to watch, the pressure was turned up higher than Molly’s Knob.

The players knew that already. They knew their time to shine was limited and a strike out here or a bobbled ball there could mean the end of their dreams and the beginning of finding employment elsewhere, a real job that didn’t involve a ball, bat and glove.

 For the most part, the ballplayers “were pretty honest about the fact that this was their first, last best shot,” Lipsyte said in our phone conversation. “Very few of them would move much up the minor league ladder, and they were just pitted against each other. They were not really a team so much as they were guys in competition who were, you know, in their private moments would admit they were hoping the other second baseman would screw up or strike.”

Barry Carter, who was a 19-year-old shortstop from Pennsylvania said as much, on record, to Lipsyte at the Marion ballpark. “I think it’s natural, and it’s nothing personal, Carter said. “And, then you feel guilty for feeling happy because he’s [teammate] is trying to make it just as hard as you are.

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