Ed Kranepool, a Bronx-born first baseman whose long career with the Mets began in their first season, in 1962, when they were a comically awful expansion franchise, continued through their World Series championship seven years later and lasted long enough for their return to the cellar, died on Sunday at his home in Boca Raton, Fla. He was 79.
The Mets said the cause was cardiac arrest.
He is the fourth member of the Mets’ 1969 World Series championship team — the “Miracle Mets,” as they were called — 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 Greenberg’s 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.
When Stengel assessed Kranepool’s talent, he told The New York Times: “He don’t strike out too much and he don’t let himself get suckered into goin’ for bad pitches. I wouldn’t be afraid to play him. He don’t embarrass you.”
After playing briefly for the Mets at the end of the 1962 season, Kranepool struggled against major league pitching during the next two seasons. When he faltered in 1963, one fan raised a banner that asked, “Is Ed Kranepool Over the Hill?”
He was 18.
He was soon sent to the Mets’ top minor league team in Buffalo for parts of the 1963 and 1964 seasons.
And in 1970, when a batting average of .118 led to another demotion, the Times columnist Robert Lipsyte wrote, “Kranepool was the last player linked to the bad old days, and it might have been more than symbolic that the Mets rose into first place the day after he was cut loose, like a balloon freed of ballast … ”
