Back in the day, the Phillies/Mets rivalry was 18 games a year. That meant nine games at Shea Stadium for George A. King III, working for a newspaper in the Philadelphia suburbs, and nine times for the veteran baseball scribe to take great delight in driving his fellow members of the Phillies beat batty.
Every game in those years, the Mets would hold a scoreboard horse race. King picked a winner the first couple of times. And then the next couple of times. And then the next year, the first few races. The other writers became obsessed.
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Instead, game after game, race after race, King would keep picking winners. At some point there may or may not have been a few nickels and dimes thrown onto the table. Didn’t matter. King cleaned up every time.
