Apr. 12, 1962 - New York City had its first ticker-tape parade up lower Broadway today in which the honored guests stood up and threw things at the people. The guests were the New York Mets, the city’s new National League baseball team. The Mets threw sham baseballs — hollow plastic shells imprinted with signatures of their manager, Casey Stengel — into the crowd. About 40,000 spectators lined the mile-long route to City Hall. The Mets, whose record to date is 0-1, had done nothing to deserve this tribute except to redeem the city from its bereft estate as a National League widow. A welcoming parade was one of the enticements that Mayor Wagner had held out to any management that would restore National League baseball to New York following the departure of the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers for the West Coast at the end of the 1957 season. Today, the city made good on that pledge.
