History paints a desolate — but not impossible — picture for Mets

This is how bad it got in that awful, endless April: Leo Durocher took a vow of silence. As loss after loss mounted, as the New York Giants baseball team — picked by almost everyone to win the National League — descended instead into a national laughingstock, Durocher announced, “I’m not talking. To anyone. Not the writers. Not to my family. Not to anybody.”

Laraine Day, Durocher’s movie-star wife, quipped to a few inquiring reporters when told of her husband’s intentions: “Can you get that in writing for me?”

He wasn’t called Leo the Lip because most every opponent across his long baseball life wanted to fatten or bloody one of those lips (although that was true, too); it was because he could never stop talking, ever, not as a 19-year-old rookie with the Yankees in 1925, not as the 67-year-old manager of the Houston Astros in 1973. And not, until now, as the 45-year-old skipper of the Giants.

But 11-game losing streaks make a man do funny things.