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I remember seeing a picture of smiling old Walter O'Malley himself holding up that Daily News headline. Mr. Hinckley, however, needs to have his history straightened out on one small detail: the infamous Bill Terry wisecrack, "Is Brooklyn still in the league?", was pulled before the 1934 season, not the 1937 season. And, as it happened, Dem Bums (with Casey Stengel himself as their manager), mired otherwise in sixth place, finished the 1934 season by blasting the Giants right out of the pennant by sweeping two on the final weekend at the Polo Grounds, including a nail-driving game by star Dodger pitcher (you've got to love this name) Van Lingle Mungo - with throngs of Dodger fans screaming and holding of wisenheimer bedsheet banners as would become even more the custom when the Mets opened for business (the banners were a one-time thing, apparently, for the Dodger fans) - while the St. Louis Cardinals' Gas House Gang beat the Cincinnati Reds twice to clinch it. The Giants and the Cardinals had gone into that final weekend in a dead heat for first place, but then it was, as one of those Dodger fan banners had it, "Is Brooklyn still in the league? And How!"

Incidentally, it was Willard Mullin himself who was also responsible for the Cardinals earning the nickname the Gas House Gang in the first place: after a rather roughly-played series with the Giants, Mullin seized upon the Cardinals' gritty playing style and depicted them coming out of a shack on the wrong side of the tracks with a huge gas tank on the grounds, carrying their bats on their shoulders like union headknockers, and the image and the nickname stuck - to the delight of the Cardinals, whose shortstop Leo Durocher passed a remark about how the American League would think of them ("They'd probably think we were gas house ballplayers") that kicked off Mullin's cartoon fancy.

Customarily, though, Willard Mullin's character to represent the St. Louis Cardinals was a slick looking gambler type known as St. Louis Swifty. He drew a dark, gritty Indian with tomahawk to depict the Boston Braves (who took on a German accent and traded tomahawk for beer stein when the team moved to Milwaukee), a big dumb oaf to represent the New York Giants, po' white trash with a jug of corn squeezin's (thank you, Red Smith!) to represent the St. Louis Browns...Willard Mullin was one of a kind. When the Mets first came into operation, Mullin's image for them was an infant in a diaper, spiked shoes, and Mets cap, though in their second season he put the little fellow in a pinstriped Mets jumper (with the panel in the rear end, yes!)...

Hickley was also wrong about Willard Mullin's Bum "losing work" after the Dodgers went west. When the Mets came around, Mullin did indeed revive the Bum to represent the Dodgers, complete with sunglasses every once in awhile. One of his best cartoons in that era was a two-parter, in which the little Met was depicted hiding under the bed, peeking out from the darkness beneath the blanker, with the Bum lifting the blanket saying, almost comfortingly, "I know some people aren't afeared of me..."; then, in part two, Mullin writes, "The Mets had lost...and then what did they do? They went out and walked all over the league-leading Dodgers..in L.A....at night!" Beneath that, the Bum is flat on his back with the little Met sleepwalking over his front.

Mullin also drew an unforgettable front-page cartoon for Newsday, after the Miracle Mets won the 1969 World Series: the little Met is swinging madly and knocking all the other Mullin team symbols all over the place - including the Bum, flipping over with his legs in the air and his fat can bottom-down - saying, "Y'mean this is all there was to it all along?" An interesting image, especially considering the Mets' surreal Series win was as much a product of their stellar pitching and their acrobatic defencive work as their hitting...