Universally credited to Stengel about the 40–120 New York Mets of 1962, and entirely consistent with how he talked that season. But the wording everyone repeats is the title of Jimmy Breslin’s 1963 book about that team — no contemporaneous 1962 record of Stengel saying it in exactly these words has been located, and his biographers give the remark in a different word order.
“Can't anybody here play this game?” attributed to Casey Stengel (1890–1975) on his 1962 New York Mets. The familiar wording is the title of Jimmy Breslin's 'Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?' (New York: Viking Press, 1963); Stengel's biographers record the remark with the word order reversed. Traced by Quotle.info
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In context
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Provenance
Where the line comes from
Work
Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?
Author
Jimmy Breslin, quoting Casey Stengel
First published
New York: Viking Press, 1963
Occasion
The 1962 New York Mets, who finished 40–120
This makes a man think. You look up and down the bench and you say to yourself, ‘Can’t anybody here play this game?’
The fuller form as Wikiquote gives it ↗, quoted from Breslin’s 1963 book and reproduced in Ray Rocene’s “Rocene’s Sport Jabs” column in The Missoulian, 21 April 1963, p. 11. No earlier printed record of these exact words has been located.
Wikiquote ↗ lists the line in its sourced Quotes section, citing Can’t Anybody here Play This Game? (1963) by Jimmy Breslin, reproduced in “Rocene’s Sport Jabs” by Ray Rocene in The Missoulian, 21 April 1963, p. 11.
The Wikipedia article on the book ↗ records it as a 1963 Viking Press title about the 1962 Mets, and says the title came from a remark by Stengel about the team’s ineptitude.
The SABR BioProject life of Stengel ↗ places the remark in the 1962 season narrative but words it “Can’t anybody play this here game?”
The Internet Archive catalogue record ↗ for a scanned Penguin reprint confirms the original imprint: “Originally published: New York : Viking Press, 1963.”
The wording quoted here reaches us through Jimmy Breslin’s Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?, first published by Viking Press in New York in 1963 ↗ — comfortably inside US copyright, so the book and its text remain protected. A short spoken phrase is not itself the kind of thing copyright protects, but we make no public-domain claim here, because the only documented text this wording can be traced to is an in-copyright 1963 book.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
The wording problem
Nobody seriously doubts that Casey Stengel said something like this about the 1962 Mets. What is genuinely unsettled is which words he used — because the version the world repeats reaches us through a journalist’s book jacket, and two careful accounts of Stengel’s life — Robert Creamer’s biography, as quoted by Wikipedia, and SABR’s BioProject life — put the words in a different order.
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The famous wordingJimmy Breslin’s 1963 book title Polished
The sentence everyone quotes is the title of Breslin’s book on the 1962 Mets ↗, which Wikipedia says took its title “from a remark made by Mets manager Casey Stengel expressing his frustration over the team’s spectacular ineptitude.” The title is a quotation of Stengel, not a transcript of him.
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What Stengel said“Can’t anyone play this here game?” Creamer’s version
Wikipedia’s biography of Stengel ↗ sets the remark in a pull-quote in this form, attributed to Stengel on his 1962 Mets and sourced to page 299 of Robert W. Creamer’s Stengel: His Life and Times.
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What Stengel said“Can’t anybody play this here game?” SABR’s version
The Society for American Baseball Research’s BioProject life of Stengel ↗, by Bill Bishop, writes: “The team’s ineptitude inspired Casey’s remark, ‘Can’t anybody play this here game?’”
✓So: a real Stengel complaint, from a real and genuinely dreadful season — but the crisp form you know is Breslin’s. The earliest citation Wikiquote can offer ↗ for the popular wording is Breslin’s 1963 book, not a 1962 report of Stengel speaking.
Context
Why it stuck
The 1962 New York Mets were an expansion team assembled largely from other clubs’ discards, and they were historically bad: 40–120–1, tenth in a ten-team National League ↗, playing out of the Polo Grounds under a 72-year-old manager who had just been let go by the Yankees. They lost their first nine games, briefly climbed to eighth in May, then lost seventeen in a row.
And New York adored them. Attendance was 922,530 — more than the departed Giants had drawn — because Stengel sold the team as a comedy rather than a tragedy, and because the sportswriters covering him had the best copy in baseball. A young Jimmy Breslin turned that season into a book, and the title he chose is now the standard English-language sentence for watching competent-looking people fail at something basic.
The line survives because it is funny about failure without being cruel about it.
How the phrase escaped baseball
Breslin’s book made the sentence portable. It gets used about politicians, football teams, corporate boards and government departments — almost always by people who have never read it and often by people who do not know Stengel managed anyone.
That portability is also why the wording drifted. “Can’t anybody here play this game?” scans better than the versions Stengel’s biographers record, and a better-scanning line is the one that gets repeated.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
Charles Dillon “Casey” Stengel was born in Kansas City, Missouri, on 30 July 1890 and died in Glendale, California, on 29 September 1975. He spent fourteen seasons as a National League outfielder before becoming the manager who won five straight World Series titles with the New York Yankees — and then, in his seventies, took charge of the brand-new New York Mets, who lost 120 games in their first season. His famously tangled, digressive way of speaking was known to sportswriters as Stengelese, which is exactly why the neatness of this particular line is worth a second look.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Cite this page
Breslin, Jimmy. Can't Anybody Here Play This Game? New York: Viking Press, 1963. (Earliest documented appearance located for this wording, which Breslin used as his title in quoting Stengel's lament over the 1962 New York Mets.)
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Can't anybody here play this game?’?” Last verified 8 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/cant-anybody-here-play-this-game/