'Marx is dead and so is Engels, and I'm already feeling sick' was etched in to the bar table (also: 'Freedom for Greenland, off and away with the pack ice').
Ed Kranepool, who played with the New York Mets for 17 seasons, starting as a 17-year-old just out of high school, and helping the Mets win an unlikely World Championship in 1969, has passed away. He was 79, and the cause was cardiac arrest.
Kranepool's story is an original one, as explained in the New York Times obit:
"He is the fourth member of the Metsâ 1969 World Series championship team â the 'Miracle Mets,' as they were called â to die this year, following Jerry Grote, Bud Harrelson and Jim McAndrew.
"The Mets were nearly halfway to a 40-120 record in 1962, their first season as a National League franchise, when they signed Kranepool for a bonus of $80,000. A tall, left-handed batter, he had just broken the Hall of Famer Hank Greenbergâs single-season home run record at James Monroe High School in the Bronx. Ed was 17 and living at home.
"Kranepool brought a jolt of youthful promise to a team managed by Casey Stengel, the wizened former Yankees skipper, and stocked with mediocrities, castoffs, players past their primes and the inaccurately nicknamed Marvelous Marv Throneberry."
Kranepool, the Times writes, "never became a superstar. Rather, he was a line-drive hitter with modest power â he never had more than 16 home runs in a season â who turned into an elite pinch-hitter as his time as a first baseman and outfielder diminished."
And he was, as much as anyone on the 1969 championship team, symbolic of a more innocent time, when impossible dreams were possible.
I remember him well and saw him play a number of times throughout the years. He lasted a pretty long time in the league. A native New Yorker from The Bronx. RIP Ed...
Ed Kranepool, who played with the New York Mets for 17 seasons, starting as a 17-year-old just out of high school, and helping the Mets win an unlikely World Championship in 1969, has passed away. He was 79, and the cause was cardiac arrest.
Kranepool's story is an original one, as explained in the New York Times obit:
"He is the fourth member of the Metsâ 1969 World Series championship team â the 'Miracle Mets,' as they were called â to die this year, following Jerry Grote, Bud Harrelson and Jim McAndrew.
"The Mets were nearly halfway to a 40-120 record in 1962, their first season as a National League franchise, when they signed Kranepool for a bonus of $80,000. A tall, left-handed batter, he had just broken the Hall of Famer Hank Greenbergâs single-season home run record at James Monroe High School in the Bronx. Ed was 17 and living at home.
"Kranepool brought a jolt of youthful promise to a team managed by Casey Stengel, the wizened former Yankees skipper, and stocked with mediocrities, castoffs, players past their primes and the inaccurately nicknamed Marvelous Marv Throneberry."
Kranepool, the Times writes, "never became a superstar. Rather, he was a line-drive hitter with modest power â he never had more than 16 home runs in a season â who turned into an elite pinch-hitter as his time as a first baseman and outfielder diminished."
And he was, as much as anyone on the 1969 championship team, symbolic of a more innocent time, when impossible dreams were possible.
