A John Wayne Movie? Try Laurel and Hardy

NEW YORK — There used to be this stock scene in John Wayne movies where the grizzled, hard-bitten old top kick, played by Duke Wayne himself, would take over this demoralized platoon of foul-ups, misfits, mama's boys and crybabies and mold them into a formidable fighting force that would drive the Japanese Imperial Army out of Burma or the Nazis out of Sicily or whatever.

It was boffo entertainment, sure-fire box office. The plot was simple. Wayne would kick butt, snarl, bully, sneer and cajole until his men/boys hated him more than they did the enemy, but he would get them in such a rebellious mood, they would sit around, darkly thinking of mutiny.

In the meantime, they would turn into crack troops, exactly as he had planned it--resolute, defiant, the few good men the officer corps always wanted.

Well, the New York Mets' hierarchy must have caught a few old screenings of "The Sands of Iwo Jima," or maybe it was "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon," because they just replaced the squad leader of their faltering platoon, a gang of sad sacks known as the New York Metropolitans. This is a baseball team that kept shooting itself in the foot, players marching into a swamp, falling on their swords, looking around to see where to go to surrender. This is the most inept force this side of McHale's Navy.

You couldn't believe this gang of cutups could be nine games behind an expansion team--and 27 games out of the league lead--and it wasn't even summer yet. This was a team chopping a hole in the bottom of the lifeboat. The Mets would have to improve to be considered a disaster.

This was a scenario that called for John Wayne, all right, if not for St. Francis of Assisi.

So, the Met management, bless their little peaked heads, went out and got their John Wayne.

Dallas Green is the nearest thing to the Duke you will find in a baseball uniform. He should show up in a green beret. Physically imposing, as Wayne was, well over 6 feet, wrists like wagon tongues, temper of a mule-skinner and the vocabulary to match, he looked like the most perfect man this side of General Patton for this role.

In the movies, the plot moves along to where the GIs or Marines finally figure what their tormentor is up to. He's trying to make them men. One by one, they catch on (the roll call, by the way, was always "O'Brien, Winialski, Schmidt, Ginsberg, Mason, LeClerc, Flores and Luciano"). They go to the sarge finally and confess tearfully that they didn't know what he was doing, but now they realize it was all for their own good and he has saved their lives and incidentally won the war.