THE 1969 MIRACLE METS
By STEVEN TRAVERS
Foreword by
The Globe Pequot Press
STEVEN TRAVERS
Copyright, 2009
FRONT AND BACK DUSTCOVERS
In the popular movie Oh, God! George Burns, playing the deity, is asked in a courtroom to prove His divinity by performing a miracle. Burns tells the attorney that miracles are too showy and should occur only on rare occasions.
“The last miracle I did was the 1969 Meets,” He says. “Before that, I think you have to go back to the Red Sea.”
Man has engaged in athletic competition at least since the ancient Greeks. Baseball has been played, according to legend, since Abner Doubleday invented it at Cooperstown, New York in 1839. Through the travail of ages, in the entire history of sports, the 1969 “Amazin’ Mets” remains the single most impossible, unbelievable, improbable and wonderful story of all times.
This books tells the tale of that incredible spring, summer and fall, but it does much more than simply recount how the worst sports franchise ever ascended to the very heights of greatness in a few short months. The Last Miracle: Tom Seaver and the 1969 Amazin’ Mets is the story of tumultuous times: the 1960s. Amidst the backdrop of the Vietnam War, the Mets remained the last, best hope of a city on the verge of bankruptcy. Through the lens of time we now can view them as a metaphor for a changing America, and in light of the Big Apple’s phoenix-like comeback over the years, the catapult for this battered-yet-unbowed Metropolis.
Somehow, while the Mets became the mods of baseball, the “new breed” athlete, Tom Seaver and his teammates are viewed herein as the final symbols of an innocent age; an age when the greatest icons in American culture – New York sports heroes – mounted the stage in awesome splendor; before Watergate, before free agency, before the mercenaries took over.
Here they are: Seaver and Harrelson; Hodges and Stengel; Grote and Swoboda; Jones and Agee; all the characters of the greatest comedy act ever performed, all the while upstaging a tempestuous mayoral race, President Richard Nixon’s “secret plan,” a Moonshot and Woodstock.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
STEVEN TRAVERS
(with photo)
Steven Travers is a USC graduate and ex-professional baseball player. He is the author of the best-selling Barry Bonds: Baseball’s Superman, nominated for a Casey Award (best baseball book of 2002). He is also the author of The USC Trojans: College Football’s All-Time Greatest Dynasty (a National Book Network “top 100 seller”); One Night, Two Teams: Alabama vs. USC and the Game That Changed a Nation (subject of a documentary and major motion picture); five books in the Triumph/Random House Essential series (A’s, Dodgers, Angels, D’backs, Trojans); The Good, the Bad & the Ugly Los Angeles Lakers; The Good, the Bad & the Ugly Oakland Raiders; The Good, the Bad & the Ugly San Francisco 49ers; and A Tale of Five Cities: New York, L.A., San Francisco, Washington & Moscow in October of ‘62. Steve was a columnist for StreetZebra magazine in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Examiner. He also penned the screenplay, The Lost Battalion. Travers coached baseball at USC, Cal-Berkeley and in Europe; attended law school, served in the Army, and is a guest lecturer at the University of Southern California. Steve has a daughter, Elizabeth Travers and resides in California.
Books written by Steven Travers
One Night, Two Teams: Alabama vs. USC and the Game That Changed A Nation (also a documentary, Tackling Segregation, and soon to be a major motion picture)
A’s Essential: Everything You Need to Know to Be A Real Fan!
Trojans Essential: Everything You Need to Know to Be A Real Fan!
Dodgers Essential: Everything You Need to Know to Be A Real Fan!
Angels Essential: Everything You Need to Know to Be A Real Fan!
D’Backs Essential: Everything You Need to Know to Be A Real
The USC Trojans: College Football's All-Time Greatest Dynasty
The Good, the Bad & the Ugly Los Angeles Lakers
The Good, the Bad & the Ugly Oakland Raiders
The Good, the Bad & the Ugly San Francisco 49ers
Barry Bonds: Baseball’s Superman
College Football’s Top 25 All-Time Greatest Traditions
The Last Miracle: Tom Seaver and the 1969 Amazin’ Mets
A Tale of Five Cities: New York, L.A., San Francisco, Washington & Moscow in October of ‘62
God's Country: A Conservative, Christian Worldview of How History Formed the United States Empire and America's Manifest Destiny for the 21st Century
Angry White Male
The Writer’s Life
Praise for Steven Travers
Steve Travers is the next great USC historian, in the tradition of Jim Murray, John Hall, and Mal Florence! . . . The Trojan Nation needs your work!
- USC Head Football Coach Pete Carroll
I knew you loved USC, but you really love USC!
- Fred Wallin, CRN national sporstalk host
Steve Travers combines wit, humor, social pathos and historical knowledge with the kind of sports expertise that only an ex-jock is privy to; it is reminiscent of the work of Jim Bouton, Pat Jordan and Dan Jenkins, combined with Jim Murray’s turn of phrase, Hunter Thompson’s hard-scrabble Truths, and David Halberstam’s unique take on our nation’s place in history. His writing is great storytelling, and the result is pure genius every time.
- Westwood One sports media personality Mike McDowd
Steve Travers is a great writer, an educated athlete who knows how to get inside the player’s heads, and when that happens, greatness occurs. He’s gonna be a superstar.
- Dave Burgin/Editor, San Francisco Examiner
Steve Travers is a phenomenal writer, an artist who labors over every word to get it just right, and he has an encyclopedic knowledge of sports and history.
- StreetZebra magazine
Steve Travers is a Renaissance man.
- Jim Rome Show
Travers' new book finally explains the phenomenon . . . the Bonds tale is spelled out in the most thorough, interesting, revealing, concise manner ever reached.
- Maury Allen/www.TheColumnists.com, Gannett Newspapers
Travers appears to have the right credentials for the task: He is a former minor leaguer who also penned screenplays in addition to a column for the San Francisco Examiner. He calls on that background in crafting a straightforward, warts-and-all profile that remains truthful without becoming a mean-spirited hatchet job . . .
- USA Today Baseball Weekly
This is a fascinating book written by a man who knows his subject matter inside and out.
- Irv Kaze/KRLA Radio, Los Angeles
Get this book. You've brought Bonds to life.
- Fred Wallin/Syndicated sportstalk host, Los Angeles
This promises to be the biggest sports book of 2002.
- Greg Papa/KTCT Radio, San Francisco
This cat struck out Kevin Mitchell five times in one game. I'll read the book for that reason alone. Plus, he hangs out with Charlie Sheen. How do I get that gig?
- Rod Brooks/Fitz & Brooks, KNBR Radio, San Francisco
. . . gossipy, easy-to-read tale . . . explores the sports culture that influences this distinguished slugger . . . entertaining.
- Library Journal
Warts-and-all . . . Travers explores Bonds' mercurial temper and place in baseball history.
- Novato Journal
… the first comprehensive biography of Barry Bonds.
- Bud Geracie/San Jose Mercury News
Travers thought he hit the jackpot . . .
- Furman Bischer, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Travers…hit the big time . . . Travers . . . established himself as a writer of many dimensions . . . a natural . . . You were ahead of your time with the Bonds book. I still think it is the best biography of him I've seen. It does more to capture his personality than all the steroid books and articles.
- John Jackson/Ross Valley Reporter
Travers is a minor league pitcher-turned-sportswriter, and therefore qualified to evaluate [Larry] Dierker's thought process in ordering all those walks regardless of the score or the situation.
- Stan Hochman/Philadelphia Daily News
. . . looks at all of Barry's warts, yet remains in the end favorable to him. Not an easy balancing act. This is not your average sports book. It is edgy and filled with laughs . . . and inside baseball. Good, solid reading.
- www.Amazon.com
It's a great read.
- Pete Wilson/KGO Radio, San Francisco
This a good book that really covers his whole life, and informs us where Bonds is coming from. His entire life is laid out. He is very qualified to continue to write books such as this one. Good job.
- Marty Lurie/Right off the Bat Oakland A’s pre-game host
. . . a quality piece . . . (Travers) uses his experiences in baseball . . . providing a humorous glimpse into the life of a player. Would I recommend this book? Absolutely . . . laughed out loud several times at Travers' unique way of explaining his experiences. This book is definitely worth the time.
- John Kenny/www.esportnews.com
Travers’ account mentions everything from cocaine to sex to car crashes to what Bonds said he would do to Roger Clemens . . . more than a “hit” piece.
- Johnson City Press
Travers' book does do a more well-rounded job of solving the mystery of who Bonds is . . . appealing . . . is the more inside look at Bonds in Travers' book.
- San Jose Mercury News
. . . Travers' work is every baseball aficionado's dream.
- Fairfield Daily Republic
You've created quite a stir here at the station, with the Giants, and throughout baseball.
- Rick Barry/Hall of Fame basketball star and sportstalk host, KNBR Radio, San Francisco
You've stirred a hornet's nest here, man.
- J.T. “The Brick”/Syndicated national sportstalk host
This is a controversial subject and a controversial player, but you've educated us.
- Ron Barr/Sportsline, Armed Forces Radio Network
A baseball player who can write . . . who knew? This one sure can!
- Arny “The Stinkin’ Genius” Spanyer/Fox Sports Radio, Los Angeles
You know baseball like few people I've ever spoken to.
- Andy Dorff/Sportstalk host, Phoenix, Philadelphia & New Jersey
Congratulations . . . a tour de force.
- Kate DeLancey/WFAN Radio, New York City
I can't stand Bonds, but you've done a good job with a difficult subject.
- Grant Napier/Sportstalk host, Sacramento
Steve's a literate ex-athlete, an ex-Trojan and a veteran of Hollywood, too.
- Lee “Hacksaw” Hamilton/XTRA Radio, San Diego
A great book about a great player.
- KTHK Radio, Sacramento
A gem.
- Roseville Press-Tribune
Here's the man to talk to regarding the subject of Barry Bonds.
- John Lobertini/KPIX TV, San Francisco
He's enlightened us on the subject of Bonds, his father, and Godfather, Willie Mays.
- Brian Sussman/KPIX TV. San Francisco
I hate Bonds, but you're okay.
- Scott Ferrall/Syndicated national and New York sportstalk host
One of the better baseball books I've read.
- KOA Radio, Denver
. . . .the "last word" on Barry Bonds . . .
- Scott Reis/ESPN TV
. . . a hot new biography on Barry Bonds . . .
- Darian Hagan/CNN
. . . one of the great sportswriters on the current American scene, Steve Travers . . .
- Joe Shea/Radio talk host; Bradenton, Florida and editor, www.American-Reporter.com
To a real pro.
- Jeff Prugh, former Los Angeles Times’ Atlanta bureau chief
It was a good read.
- Lance Williams/Co-author, Game of Shadows
You’ve done some good writin’, dude.
- KFOG Radio, San Francisco
A very interesting read which is not your average . . . book . . . Steve has achieved his bona fides when it comes to having the credentials to write a book like this.
- Geoff Metcalfe/KSFO Radio, San Francisco
Steve Travers is a true USC historian and a loyal Trojan!
- Former USC football player John Papadakis
Pete Carroll calls you “the next great USC historian,” high praise indeed.
- Rob Fukuzaki/ABC7, Los Angeles
You’re a great writer and I always enjoy your musings. . . particularly on SC football - huge fan!
- Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane
A's Essential: Everything You Need To Be a Real Fan offers a breezy history (with emphasis on the Oakland years), player biographies, Top 10 lists, trivia questions and more about the Athletics' franchise that has resided in Philadelphia, Kansas City and, since 1968, Oakland.
- Bruce Dancis/Sacramento Bee
To the great Tom Seaver A Christy Mathewson for our times
Photo captions Contents Photo captions
Foreword
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The glory of their times
The true New York Sports Icon The reincarnation of Christy Mathewson
If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere
“Can’t anybody here play this game?”
The eve of destruction
High hopes
In the “big inning”
Meet the Mets
The leaping corpse
The first crucial day
The birth of a true New York Sports Icon After the Pentecost: July 11 – July 16, 1969
The wrath of Gil
Resurrection
The march to the sea
David vs. Goliath The perfect game
The Promised Land
Fall from grace Plato’s retreat and subsequent comeback
The empire strikes back
Whatever happened to . . .?
Those Amazin’ Mets
A shining city on a hill
Notes Bibliography
Index
Foreword Acknowledgements
My thanks go to Gene Brissie at The Globe Pequot Press and my wonderful literary manager, Peter Miller of PMA Literary and Film Management, Inc. in New York City. Also to John Horne of the Baseball Hall of Fame, the great Tom Seaver, Matt Merola, the New York Mets, as always to my wonderful daughter, Elizabeth Travers, and my supportive parents.
Above all others, my greatest thanks go to my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, the source of all that is decent and true. I am proud to say that whereas I was once obsessed with Tom Seaver and the Mets, I am now obsessed with Jesus Christ. Furthermore, while this book may be titled The Last Miracle, I know that He performs a miracle every time a child is born.
INTRODUCTION
The glory of their times
“Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.”
- Jacques Barzun
There are baseball fans, and then there are baseball fans! I was a baseball fan! Growing up in California, I took to Our National Pastime like nobody else I know. I was obsessed. It was crazy, borderline insane. This . . . game! Oh, how I loved this game.
In those days, there was no ESPN, no Fox Sports, no cable TV. Teams usually televised about 25, maybe 30 road games a year. They never put home games on TV. In New York, most of the Mets and Yankees games were on the tube, but Dodgers’ owner Walter O’Malley did not want to give something away for free that fans otherwise were willing to pay for. Other West Coast teams – the Giants, Angels and A’s – followed his lead. California was a “car culture.” We drove the freeways instead of riding the subways. Our baseball appetites were wetted through great radio broadcasts, often heard in the car, courtesy of Vin Scully of the Dodgers, or Lon Simmons and Russ Hodges of the Giants
For a kid, often my only amusement was baseball on the radio. There was no Internet. We had one television in the house. I had no TV in my room. If I did not like what my parents watched, tough. I had no video games. Eventually, I got into the Strat-o-Matic baseball board game, playing an entire season in which I broadcast the games into a tape recorder, kept detailed records and typed up AP-style dispatches on an old Olivetti, but in the late 1960s that was still a few years away.
I could not wait to get home from school on Fridays, not because it was the weekend, but because that was the day The Sporting News arrived in the mail. I lapped up every word. I liked football, particularly the University of Southern California Trojans, and was also a fan of John Wooden’s UCLA basketball dynasty. I enjoyed track because my dad was into it, but all of that was just prep time for baseball.
I would listen to baseball on the radio. I do not mean it was on in the background while I did something else. I mean I would sit next to the radio and keep score. When the announcer said, “For those of you scoring at home that’s an error on the shortstop and therefore an unearned run,” he was talking to me.
In 1967, the All-Star Game was played at Anaheim Stadium. Tied at one, the game went into extra innings. Rookie right-hander Tom Seaver of the Mets came on to face the American League. The rule was that every team had to be represented, which was the only reason the Mets had a player in the game, or so I thought. Seaver was stocky, boyishly handsome, and threw heat. He sure did not look like a charity case, some kind of “affirmative action” All-Star meant to fill a “quota.” He belonged, demonstrating that by setting the junior circuit down to save the National’s victory. They said he had pitched college ball for coach Rod Dedeaux at nearby USC, which perked my ears up, that was sure. A Trojan!
In 1967, Seaver was as effective as any pitcher in the league. Sandy Koufax was retired by then. Don Drysdale had an off year. So did Juan Marichal. Bob Gibson was injured. Mike McCormick of the Giants won the Cy Young award. If Seaver had gotten more run support he would have won 20 instead of 16, and possibly the Cy Young as well as the Rookie of the Year honors that went to him.
I gravitated to Seaver. He was not on my hometown team. I had to scrape for any information I could find on the guy. The Sporting News was a big help. Sportswriter Jack Lang’s reports were great. If Sports Illustrated or Sport did anything on him, I cut out the articles and put it in a scrapbook, adding my own “editorials” in crayon. The Mets were so bad, though. The NBC Baseball Game of the Week, a staple of Saturday TV fare, usually featured champion teams of the era: the Red Sox, the Tigers, the Cardinals, but not the Mets. Seaver was like some kind of a legend; you heard about him, knew he was out there some place, like Geronimo beyond the horizon planning his next hit ‘n’ run, but I almost never saw the guy. If he was pitching against the local team on the radio, I was glued to it. Seaver.
I was not into the Mets. They were 3,000 miles away and terrible anyway. I rooted for California teams. My natural inclinations were towards things of a West Coast variety. I was not Motown or Harlem cool; I was more Beach Boys. Seaver’s USC connection was the original hook, but there was more to it than that.
In 1966 an NYU historian named Lawrence S. Ritter wrote a book called The Glory of Their Times. It may just possibly be the greatest baseball book ever written. Ritter went around the country interviewing old-time baseball players from the late 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, maybe early 1930s at the very latest. These guys now ranged in age from 65 to 90. The book was the fabulous “story of the early days of baseball told by the men who played it.” It was awesome. Just awesome. I still have my tattered, dog-eared copy with my mother’s inscription, “To our wonderful boy. Love – Mommie & Daddy. X-Mas 1967.”
I devoured that book. What this says about me, I do not really know. I was eight, nine years old, completely infatuated with a book that told the story of a game played 50 or 60 years prior to my birth. I was a freak, a hybrid. Who cares, I loved it. Then the record came out, with the actual interviews recorded. A cantankerous Rube Bressler said of pitcher Dazzy Vance, “You couldn’t him ‘im on a Mundy.” Vance (whose photos revealed a man who looked 60 when he was 30) would wear a white sweatshirt with a tattered right sleeve, causing the white baseballs to blend in with the white sheets flapping from tenements beyond the center field fence at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn on Mondays . . . laundry day!
The Glory of Their Times told the story of an East Coast game. There was no Major League ball in California in the 1900s. There were three teams in New York City – the Yankees, Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers – and the preponderance of the book’s stories revolved around the mythology of the Big Apple’s baseball heritage.
I cared about baseball and little else, but through baseball I came to understand America because the game was, as James Earl Jones said in Field of Dreams, something that stood the test of time, always something good, something resolute and unchanging even when America has “been erased like blackboard, re-built, and erased again.”
So a young boy in California learned about New York City; the hotels, the subways, the streets, the ambience of the town. The Polo Grounds, Bed/Stuy, Yankee Stadium. I was fascinated by all of it. The players all dressed in suits and ties, with starched collars and bowler derbies, when they were out of uniform. I came to love the concept of the well-dressed athlete away from the ballpark, especially since in my day by this time players were beginning to resemble anything from golf pros to ragamuffins in terms of their casual attire.
The thing I came to admire was the intelligent athlete. All the old-timers talked about Ty Cobb, who they mostly despised but nevertheless admired for his brains and competitiveness. Cobb was described as a “scientific hitter” who out-thought the opposition. The game itself was one of bunts, hit ‘n’ runs, and little ball. The players were contemptuous of baseball in the modern era – then the 1960s – because it was to their way of thinking a game of free-swinging “home run or bust” guys who eschewed the game’s more nuanced side.
Cobb came from Southern wealth. He was educated and knew Shakespeare, Greek philosophy, religion, mathematics and history. He dressed impeccably, like a Wall Street banker. Indeed he was an expert stock market manipulator who used “inside information” to buy and often sell short, just as Boston financier Joseph P. Kennedy had done. Cobb got in on Coca-Cola stock at the beginning. It made him rich beyond his dreams.
I was an O.J. Simpson fan when he was running wild at USC. I liked John Havlicek of the Celtics because he epitomized the hard-working athlete who was always in better shape than his opponents. Pete Maravich was like the circus coming to town. But football and basketball paled in comparison to baseball. Out west, I came along too late for Sandy Koufax and never got into Willie Mays. Tom Seaver was a baseball player, and more to the point, a pitcher. I was a budding Little League pitching star. Seaver seemed to resemble some of those old-time baseball players described in The Glory of Their Times. Photos of Tom more often than not showed him dressed in a three-piece suit, not the 13th hole look of his contemporaries, or worse the “Summer of Love” hair styles popularized a few years later by the Oakland A’s.
This guy was clean-cut, dressed for success, had a beautiful wife, and spoke the King’s English like a professor, not a ball player. He was a college man, of course, well read with political savvy and a social conscience. His interests included books like Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. He said self-deprecating things like, “I’m not perfect because I drink beer and I swear. There’s been only one perfect person and He lived 2,000 years ago.” He had served in the Marine Corps, so when he spoke about Vietnam he had credibility. He came from an affluent family, his brothers and sisters each having attended one of California’s great universities, California, Stanford and UCLA, with Tom’s USC pedigree making it four-for-four. His father was a Stanford man, a corporate executive. In his day he had been one of the countries’ finest golfers, the winner of the prestigious Walker Cup. Despite his well-rounded persona, Seaver was known to be the hardest-working player on the Mets, if not all of baseball. He was one of the first baseball players to benefit from weight training, which he had started doing with his USC teammate, a baseball player who also won the Heisman Trophy, Mike Garrett.
What was not to like?
But in keeping with The Glory of Their Times theme, Tom Seaver was not just an impressive baseball player and young man. He was, it seemed, a reincarnation. Seaver was Christy Mathewson! Cobb was an interesting character who fascinated the heck out of me, but in the end there were all these disturbing descriptions of his racism, his blind temper, the way his own kids abandoned him. There was an article written by Al Stump in Look magazine describing Cobb in the last year of his life, 1960-61; bitter, drunken rages, pure bile.
But Mathewson was utterly and absolutely larger than life. My grandfather, a journalist in San Francisco who also started a silent film magazine in Hollywood, gave me his fabulous collection of Lester Chadwick’s Baseball Joe series. Baseball Joe was a fictional character, but he really was not. He was Mathewson. The series included some 15 or 20 volumes following Baseball Joe from his boyhood to prep school, then on to Yale, and finally a sterling big league career with the New York Giants. Baseball Joe fit perfectly with my sense of admiration for intelligent, educated, well-rounded athlete-heroes. Chadwick wove fanciful tales of our hero resisting gamblers, winning 30 games, leading the Giants to the World Championship, and ascending to the heights of fan worship in New York City. He was handsome, had a beautiful wife, loyal friends, admiring teammates and the respect of opponents. Chadwick barely concealed the identities of the characters. Manager John McGraw was McRae. Rogers Hornsby was Mornsby. Grover Alexander was “the great Alec, stalwart right-hander of the Philadelphia nine.”
As heroic as Baseball Joe was, the real Christy Mathewson was just as admirable. In an age in which 25-year old athletes had the weather-beaten faces of Oklahoma mineshaft dwellers, Mathewson looked like a movie star. Baseball players were disreputable characters who drank, associated with gamblers, and could not be trusted with decent ladies. The good hotels and restaurants refused them service. None were college boys.
Matty was an All-American from Bucknell. Then there was his prowess on the mound. Many pictures of pitchers in his era reveal a guy seemingly shot-putting the ball off of one leg. It is difficult to conceive some of these men being able to break 80 miles an hour using such “styles.”
Photos of Matty show a pitcher with the kind of mechanics worthy of modern hurlers; the “drop-and-drive” use of his legs embodied by Seaver himself, an overhand delivery absent of any short-arming, and the full use of all his big muscles. Mathewson regularly won 30 games. He won 37 one year. He threw three shutouts in the 1905 World Series against the Philadelphia A’s. He won 373 games in his career and was the bulwark of McGraw’s Giants, one of the greatest dynasties in baseball before Babe Ruth’s Yankees.
Then there was his tragic demise. Mathewson volunteered for Army service during World War I and became an officer. He was exposed to mustard gas, which sickened and, some years later, killed him.
Tom Seaver had avoided mustard gas exposure during his Marine service, but when it came to his college education, looks, brains, integrity, and pitching ability, in 1968-69 at least, he looked to be Mathewson’s equal. The only problem was his team. He was a winner surrounded by losers. In 1968 Seaver was again brilliant, and again a sure 20-win season was reduced to 16 victories by virtue of poor run support. He pitched in the All-Star Game again, but it appeared that he would never attain the records of Koufax, Drysdale, Marichal or Gibson because he was doomed to toil in the cause of mediocrity.
In 1968, Jerry Koosman, who was at least as brilliant as Seaver, joined him in the rotation. It was around this time that an imperceptible transformation began to take place with the Mets. They had been incredibly bad for years. Under Casey Stengel and his successors, they were literally and actually a joke. Under new manager Gil Hodges, with Seaver and Koosman providing not merely credibility but genuine star potential, the Mets made the big leap from joke-bad to second division-bad. The only problem was that their “lovable loser” image seemed the only thing that drew fans. Just being another team with a losing record did not seem to fan the flames of fan passion, and in New York the Yankees set the standards impossibly high. Baseball seemed a dying sport. The chick’s dug Broadway Joe Namath and His Super Jets. Pro football was sexy. Baseball was boring.
Some time in May of 1969 I picked up the sports page and gave the standings a good perusal. Enough games had been played to begin an assessment of the season. The Cubs dominated in the new National League East, but the Mets, of all people, were genuinely competent.
“Hey Dad, do you believe the Mets are in second place?” I exclaimed to my father.
There was still plenty of season left for the Mets to descend to their natural place in the baseball hierarchy, but as the season wore on they kept winning. I was not a Mets fan, I was a Seaver fan. There was a difference. I did not care about them when Tom was not on the hill, but their story became so fascinating that I could not help rooting for them as well as my individual hero. What was really cool about it was that, since the Mets were a story, Seaver started to receive lots of publicity. Not having access to the New York Times or Mets broadcasts in California, I welcomed this attention. I was like a character in The Who’s mod anthem “5:15” who is . . . “sadly ecstatic, that their heroes are news.”
Well, what happened next is now history. The details are to be explored in minute description within the chapters of this book. Already hooked on Seaver, a kid who lived, breathed, lived and died for baseball, it was like a fairy tale for me; an extravaganza of sensory baseball pleasures.
For true fans, there is a time of life when the game means more than it ever would again. Wrapped around this is a sense of sorrow, partly explained by Jones’s Field of Dreams speech in which he talks of how fans are looking for “something good,” something they once had and will do almost anything to re-capture.
We all have some sense for what happens in life. Puberty hits, ravaging innocence. I began to notice a profound sense of shame if I did not read the box scores closely enough, did not memorize the stats, did not respect the game, revere it, and idolize it.
High school came around. Of course, I had my own career to think about. My suburban California prep team won the mythical national championship and I was good enough to eventually land a full ride college baseball scholarship. Later, I played a few years in the St. Louis and Oakland organizations. When I got a car in high school, it was like Bruce Springsteen says when he introduces audiences to “Pink Cadillac”: “This song is about . . . lust.”
I did not just have a car, I had a convertible. Driving to the beach with a bunch of guys and girls, it was like the Brian Wilson classic “I Get Around” come to life. There was this one girl who really caught my fancy. Let me just say she had a way of filling out her sweater. I remember hanging out with this chick and some other friends after school one day. I finally came home in the third or fourth inning of a 1976 World Series game between the Yankees and Cincinnati. I will never forget it. I was mortified with guilt that I had paid so little respect to the Fall Classic as to miss four innings of a Series game; like a wayward Christian having offended the Savior.
My parents were aghast that such an unheard-of thing could happen. It was surely the beginning of an unsavory future. I had found the world outside of baseball, taken a bite of Original Sin, and it would never be the same again.
Well, despite everything, baseball never got that far away from me. As a young player I enjoyed the way I could combine the pleasures of youth – bars, groupies, ribald teammate camaraderie – with the game itself. Partying and chasing girls was, just as Jim Bouton’s Ball Four informed my young mind, as much a part of minor league life as hits, hero worship and strikeouts.
Speaking of strikeouts, I enjoyed my best strikeout game at the expense of . . . the Mets. On July 30, 1981 at J. Fred Johnson Stadium in Kingsport, Tennessee I pitched a complete game victory for the Johnson City Cardinals, a minor league affiliate in the St. Louis organization, over the Kingsport Mets. I struck out 14 batters. I was told that it was a league record, but I could not verify it. What I can verify is that three of those Mets’ strikeout victims were no less an imposing opponent than Kevin Mitchell, a member of the 1986 World Champion Mets and the 1989 National League Most Valuable Player at San Francisco. Two of my Cardinal teammates went on to play in the Major Leagues. Curtis Ford had a brief run as a middle infielder. Danny Cox was a key pitcher on the St. Louis staff during the 1985 and 1987 St. Louis division championship runs; years in which the title was desperately fought over between the Cards and New York Mets. Chip Cisco, an infielder on that team out of Ohio State, was the son of 1962 Mets pitcher Galen Cisco.
Several members of that 1981 Kingsport team would be members of the famed Mets’ powerhouse of the 1980s. Mitchell hit .335 in 1981. Mark Carreon hit .289 for Kingsport. Lou Thornton was on that team and played in New York from 1989-90. Herman Winningham was a speed demon who came up for a 14-game “cup o’ coffee” in New York (1984). Me, I played two brief years of professional ball. In 1982 I was a teammate of Jose Canseco’s at Idaho Falls in the Oakland A’s organization. Perhaps it is a little self-indulgent to recall with such accuracy my inauspicious minor league career, but then again when that is all you have you tend to guard the memories with a certain amount of jealousy (particularly my three-inning scoreless stint in a 1982 big league exhibition game for Oakland against San Francisco at Phoenix Municipal Stadium, broadcast back to the Bay Area by Bill King and Lon Simmons).
When I wrote Barry Bonds: Baseball’s Superman (2002), one reviewer who heard about my striking Mitchell out three times went to Rohnert Park, California where Mitchell was then managing a minor league outfit called the Sonoma Crushers, trying to verify my story. Mitchell said he had never heard of me and certainly did not remember my dominance of him, but hey, as the wonderful Casey Stengel so famously put it: “You can look it up.” More specifically, in the Johnson City (Tennessee) Press and the Kingsport newspaper, July 31, 1981; in my handy Sporting News Official Baseball Guide – 1982 (Appalachian League, page 429; featuring Tom Seaver on the cover), also the 1983 edition (Pioneer League, page 469); and in the always-reliable Baseball Encyclopedia.
I have spent my life looking for those “reserved seats” of the Field of Dreams soliloquy. I think this is what makes baseball such a marvelous father-son affair. Some of New York’s greatest baseball scribes, the likes of Roger Kahn and Roger Angell, did their best writing describing the wonders of father, son and ballpark. It is when dad takes junior to the stadium and sees his youth again in those young eyes that he feels that magic. I know my own father experienced this with me.
My daughter never took to baseball. I found something close to it through USC football, since she is a big Trojan fan. The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and the Rose Bowl became those special family shrines, but it is not quite the same as baseball. As I say, the other sports were often just passing time in the off-season until baseball rolled around.
When I look back, when I really try to find those “reserved seats,” the year 1969 stands out above and beyond all others. I went to countless games with my dad in later years, loving every minute, but creeping adulthood by that time brought on incremental cynicism. 1969 was, for me, the final season of unfettered purity and innocence. Not being a New Yorker, I saw not one single Mets game in person that year, but it does not matter. I was there. I lived it, breathed it. I was as much of a New Yorker as Jimmy Breslin or Norman Mailer.
Color television was a relatively new phenomenon at that time. I saw an ESPN Classic replay of the 1965 Twins-Dodgers World Series. It was black-and-white, grainy, with bad camera angles. I watched a similar replay of the 1969 Mets-Orioles World Series, and it was quite clear and bright, a vast production improvement from four years prior.
TV sports were entering a golden age. The mystique of USC football, for instance, owes itself in large measure to the color image of the cardinal and gold-clad Trojans clashing with the blue and gold-colored UCLA Bruins; the Coliseum stands awash in exciting new styles so removed from the dreary image of Wall Street stock brokers staring out at 1950s Yankee games as if observing a Dow Jones ticker. In L.A.: pretty girls, sexy cheerleaders; a warm and inviting blue-sky November Saturday while the rest of the nation shivered.
The indelible images of the 1969 play-offs and World Series are just as startling. First there were the announcers, key among them such golden throats as Curt Gowdy, Dick Simpson, and Mike Walden, among others. These were the national broadcasters, and the sound of their voices meant only this: October baseball, the Fall Classic, the almost-taboo nature of a ball game being shown in the classroom. I felt like shouting to my classmates, all of whom lacked any of my baseball intelligence, “hey, I know about this stuff . . . I have inside info . . . that’s Tom Seaver and he won 25 games this year.” Here was a subject in which I possessed vastly more knowledge and credibility than the teacher. That does not happen every day, brother.
But the most indelible minds-eye image is of the green grass of Shea Stadium, the pretty-blue pinstriped uniforms of the Mets, that awesome “NY” insignia on the cap which, despite being a rip-off of both the Yankees and the Giants, nevertheless had a uniqueness all its own. Then there were those wonderful gray Baltimore road flannels, the black-and-orange ensembles and their own great symbol, the bird image on black cap.
But it was Shea Stadium that seemed to be a character in and of itself. A new stadium is finally going up in Flushing Meadows, but for years, decades really, Shea was thought of as a dump. In 1969, however, it was a baseball palace. Outside of Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, Busch Stadium in St. Louis, perhaps the wondrous Houston Astrodome – plus a few others - in 1969 most baseball stadiums were decrepit and old.
A series of “cookie-cutter” monstrosities in Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh and elsewhere would be built. All would need to be torn down to make way for real baseball parks. Over time, stadiums in Baltimore, Cleveland, Seattle and other cities would be done right, and in comparison Shea Stadium would not hold it own.
But Yankee Stadium was seven years from its renovation. With the Bronx becoming a gangland killing field, the Yankees a shell of their old selves, and the Stadium itself more than half empty, the “House That Ruth Built” did not have the 1969 imprimatur of Shea Stadium. Just four years old, Shea provided modern amenities in what was, by New York standards, a suburban atmosphere. It was easily accessible by freeway from the white enclaves of Long Island, Connecticut and Westchester County. Its Queens location was thought then to be a safe alternative for a generation of “Archie Bunkers” who had escaped the meaner streets of Brooklyn and the Bronx. It was the anti-dote to crowded, crime-riddled Brooklyn, which the Dodgers fled because their fans had mostly departed.
But what struck my young mind as most unusual were the Shea fans. Go to a library, or check your old baseball book collections, and look at one of those coffee table histories of the World Series. Look at photos of fans in the stands at: Yankee Stadium, 1962; Dodger Stadium, 1966; and Busch Stadium, 1968. It is startling and says much about why the 1960s were considered the time of greatest social upheaval in American history.
Yankee Stadium, 1962: men, all dressed in black suits, many wearing hats, smoking pipes, some in dark sunglasses that made them look like Sam Giancana. Very few women, but the ones seen are in mink stoles, sunglasses, bouffon hair-dos. Bored expressions all, little enthusiasm. These are not the regular season patrons, but rather the “fat cats” with money and connections to Series tickets unavailable to the average Joe.
Dodger Stadium, 1966: men in white, short-sleeved dress shirts and ties, sunglasses giving them the look of vice cops, many wearing visors on a hot day. More women than at Yankee Stadium, print dresses, sunglasses.
Busch Stadium, 1968: a black-and-white ensemble (most photos are not in color), the fans looking robotic in their sameness.
Shea Stadium, 1969: for the first time, the fans have character. A true ensemble. Far more women and a fair rendering of black people, almost non-existent in previous years. Enthusiasm, colorful, lots of placards exhorting their heroes. The fans do not all look like stockbrokers. This scene portends the extraordinary changes in fan behavior seen in the next decade, when the fans became wild, unruly, charging the field in post-game celebrations.
Then there was my uncanny predictive ability. Youth is a time of unbounded enthusiasm and surety. The odds do not matter nearly as much as what your heart tells you is true. Less than a year earlier, I had watched my favorite pro football team, the Oakland Raiders, take the lead with mere minutes left on the clock on a blustery December afternoon at Shea Stadium. Then Joe Willie Namath led the New York Jets on a clutch drive, resulting in the winning touchdown, giving the Jets the American Football League title. From there it was on to Miami and a Super Bowl III match with the 13-1 Baltimore Colts, who went through the NFL Play-Offs liked Patton’s Army in the early spring of 1945.
Baltimore was an 18-point favorite. Every prediction from all possible sources agreed with the assessment that it would not be a game, but rather a coronation for the Colts. Every prediction, that is, except from Namath himself, who claimed that his pre-game ritual was to go to bed with “a blonde and a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red” and “guaranteed” a New York win. In my young mind, the Jets could not lose. I was utterly positive they would win. When they did I was the least-surprised person in the country, except for Namath I guess.
The Mets faced the exact same kind of odds against another Baltimore opponent, the 109-win Orioles. This was the juggernaut of juggernauts. They were an even better baseball powerhouse than the Colts had been a football powerhouse.
I knew the Mets would win. There was no doubt in my mind. The exactness of youth replaced reason or bet hedging, equivocations. When they did, I was again completely unsurprised.
Then came the aftermath, and this was where it got really crazy for me. If I was obsessed before, I was now possessed by an overwhelming desire to read, to know, anything I could get my hands on concerning the New York Mets, Tom Seaver, and the 1969 baseball season.
First there was the record, The Amazin’ Mets 1969. This was a jazzy vinyl re-enactment of the season, with the recordings of Bob Murphy and Lindsey Nelson re-creating all those incredible moments that I had not heard because I did not have access to Mets’ broadcasts via radio or TV in those pre-cable, pre-Internet, pre-Syrius radio, pre-podcast days. I listened to that thing over and over again.
Then there were those back issues of Sports Illustrated and The Sporting News. I read and re-read them, committing it all to memory. In the spring of 1970 I found something that changed my life forever. The Sporting News Official Baseball Guide - 1970 was a complete re-cap of the 1969 season. Every single detail of the year – scores, chronology, post-season, stats, trades, attendance, everything – was found within its pages. I memorized it. Not just the stories, the team summaries and World Series highlights; I mean the minutiae, the statistical leaders, all of it. That dog-eared little paperback became the Holy Grail. It was an altar I worshipped at. It was a “baseball Bible.” I became the world’s leading baseball expert on the Year of Our Lord 1969.
Then Tom Seaver wrote a book called The Perfect Game, which got into his mind inning-by-inning as he beat Baltimore in game four at Shea Stadium. Later, Jim Bouton’s Ball Four was released. That was not a book about the Mets, but I must have read it, in whole or in part, 40 times over the years. I memorized it, too. Bouton went into great detail about his years playing in New York, so the result of reading Ball Four increased my acute knowledge of all things having to do with the Big Apple, even though it would be a decade before I ever visited the place.
I read these books, magazines and publications for years after the 1969 season. I would just pick one of them up, flip to a page, and read on. Frankly, it was unhealthy to be so into any one thing like that, but in looking back I can be thankful I was addicted to this, not drugs or alcohol. My parents, my mother in particular, were concerned at my single-mindedness of interest. She took me to the opera and plays to widen my horizons, but always my mind wandered back to Tom Seaver and the Mets.
Strangely somehow, my baseball obsession had an osmosis effect in that love of baseball and baseball history became love of history, period. In reading The Glory of Their Times, Baseball Joe and everything else associated with the game, I came to learn about America and the world. If Christy Mathewson and a lot of big leaguers were serving in the Army during World War I, I came to know about World War I. If Ted Williams missed several years flying for the Marines during World War II and Korea, I came to learn about World War II and Korea. If there was a controversy over Tom Seaver’s proposed public endorsement of a so-called “Vietnam Moratorium” in 1969, I came to learn about Vietnam. From there, it all expanded until I came to be a true historian and culturalist.
So, this book is not just about Tom Seaver and the Mets. It is about 1969. It was an amazin’ year not just because of the Mets, but rather it is a touchstone of American culture, a tipping point in world history; the end of much, the beginning of much more.
STEVEN R. TRAVERS
(415) 455-5971
USCSTEVE1@aol.com
The true New York Sports Icon
“Joe, Joe, you never heard such cheering.”
“Yes, I have.”
- Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio’s cold reply after she returned from Korea.
The rarest of the breed is the true New York Sports Icon. One of the greatest of this breed was “born” at 9:55 P.M. Eastern Standard Time at Shea Stadium in Flushing Meadows, Queens, New York City on Wednesday, July 9, the Year of Our Lord 1969. This was not the moment of his Christian birth, but rather the moment of his ascension into that most esteemed place in American society. His new “birth” in fact placed him in tricky territory not necessarily Christian in nature in that he now became a source of pagan idolatry, the kind that tests man’s ability to withstand the sins of pride of vanity.
****
Outside of a very few historical figures, the short list of which includes such names as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Charles Lindbergh, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Douglas MacArthur, George Patton, John F. Kennedy, John Glenn, Martin Luther King Jr., Neil Armstrong and Ronald Reagan; the true New York Sports Icon is the next-most exclusive in this great nation, and therefore probably the world.
Marilyn Monroe, an iconic figure of the first order, learned about the exclusive nature of this club when she returned from a USO tour of Korea in the early 1950s. Love-starved GIs baptized her in lust and adoration. Upon returning home she announced to then-husband Joe DiMaggio, “Joe, Joe, you never heard such cheering.”
DiMaggio was a cold fish, utterly self-absorbed, amoral in the manner of the Italian Mafiosi he hung out with despite press coverage that he did not. Writers said he was the clean Italian-American hero who changed the gumba image of a generation of first and second-generation immigrants from the Old Country.
DiMaggio was more like Don Vito Corleone, Marlon Brando’s character in The Godfather, who had a strict moral code about sex and drugs that did not extend to the mortal sin of murder. Okay, DiMaggio was not known to condone killing even if some of his social companions did. However, he viewed the sexpot Marilyn with a jaundiced eye, particularly when a blast of wind from a New City fire grate blew her dress to her head, revealing to the preying eyes of public spectators, paparazzi, cast, crew, and eventually the world via the magic of movie, her panties in what was at that time considered de facto pornography.
Marilyn’s breathless exhortation of Army lust aimed her way in Korea no doubt elicited in Joe D. disturbing images of his wife in various stages of carnal betrayal of their wedding vows. Several thousand horny young men in close proximity to his sex symbol bride, no doubt blowing kisses implicit with the “promise” of forbidden pleasures, brought out his nasty side. DiMaggio’s nasty side was both biting and regularly evident.
Now she was telling him had had “never heard such cheering.”
“Yes, I have,” DiMaggio replied.
Aside from probably being the beginning of the end for the famed DiMaggio-Monroe marriage, it was a lesson in true hero worship for Marilyn. Movie stars, rock stars, maybe a few models or even people who are “famous for being famous” often get the wrong idea about their own celebrityhood. They mistake the fawning love and fan obsession for them with heroism. Perhaps they have moments in which the cheers are louder, the spotlight brighter, than the attention paid to a General George Patton after running roughshod over the Nazi Wehrmacht, a Presidential motorcade when the polls are in his favor, or an astronaut after defying death and touching the Heavens.
But the actor, the rock god, the sex symbol is a tabloid spectacle, a public relations creation, a performer on cue. At any given time they may believe the hype, but true iconic status is reserved for the very rarest among them, and often death – like masters of art throughout history - must precede the full impact of their fame. Some who may have achieved this level of idolatry include Rudolph Valentino, John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor, Jimmy Stewart, Peter O’Toole, Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, Clint Eastwood, Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Jack Nicholson, Harrison Ford, Al Pacino, Tom Cruise, Bruce Willis, Tom Hanks, Arnold Schwarzenegger, John Huston, John Ford, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Jimmy Page, Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Cash, Steven Tyler, and David Lee Roth.
The greatest adoration is reserved for those “in the arena,” as Theodore Roosevelt exclaimed, but much of their fame comes from historians, often after their death, as was the case for Abraham Lincoln. The political hero is often a man who absorbs the “slings and arrows of outrageous” Shakespearean fortune, like the artist admired and revered only in the soft reflection of elapsed time.
There are others whose public persona stands the test of time: Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Howard Hughes, Stephen King, Tom Clancy, Rush Limbaugh. Some are unique to New York: Fiorello La Guardia, Rudolph Giuliani.
Then there are the sports heroes. To be sure, many of our greatest forged their names not on the Elysian fields of New York but elsewhere, as was the case for Michael Jordan in Chicago, Bart Starr in Green Bay, Sandy Koufax in Hollywood’s shadow, Joe Montana in South Bend and San Francisco.
A handful of non-Americans have achieved true worldwide notoriety that is not merely European hype or Latin madness. These would include Pele of Brazil, Daley Thompson of Great Britain, and Wayne Gretzky of Canada. David Beckham is a media creation more than a true on-field superstar.
Others, for reasons of fate, prickly personality, racial bigotry, character flaw or timing achieved the very heights of on-field greatness but sadly or even justifiably never quite saw the top of Mt. Icon. Jim Thorpe, Ted Williams, Jim Brown, Hank Aaron, O.J. Simpson, Pete Sampras and Barry Bonds are just a few whose abilities were unmatched but whose place in history is exceeded sometimes by those whose records do not compare.
Other sports legends include but are not limited to: Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, Tris Speaker, Lefty Grove, Jimmie Foxx, Roberto Clemente, Red Grange, Sammy Baugh, Emmitt Smith, Jerry Rice, Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, Vince Lombardi, Bill Russell, Jerry West, Elgin Baylor, Oscar Robertson, Magic Johnson, Shaq O’Neal, Bruce Jenner, and Carl Lewis.
New York City is the capital of the world, the epicenter of modern society, the New Rome. In recent decades Los Angeles has bid to match it, and in many ways even passed it, but for overall impact and gravitas, the Big Apple remains the king of the American Century, with a unique ability to elevate as well as destroy its heroes and villains. It is difficult to truly define the true New York Sports Icon. The sports god does not read from a script. He must face the stiffest possible competition and cannot hide his mistakes like a flubbed line. He is all-too human, and therefore all the more heroic when he performs at a superstar level. Many are called, few are chosen. In many ways, he is a thing of the past.
The criteria for membership is not a difficult description: long membership on a New York team or on the New York stage; in non-team sports some New York pedigree; greatness on the field resulting in Most Valuable Player award(s); ultimate title(s) won in the form of World Championship(s) with the Icon in question providing leadership, his best performance(s) when the heat of pressure is greatest; the kind of fan lovefest exuded upon him that exceeds the ordinary; and for good measure a Toots Shor personality embodied by the image of a guy who just might tell tall tales in a Manhattan sports tavern.
His true iconic stature must proudly be made and acknowledged while he is on the field during his prime years, unlike a Ted Williams, oft-vilified yet admired mostly in retrospect. He must be held in high esteem long after his career ends, unlike an O.J. Simpson, who had a free lunch complete with harem from one end of America to the other only to fall from grace in the most despicable manner possible.
Ultimately, the contenders are these:
Christy Mathewson
“Iron Joe” McGinnity
John McGraw
Babe Ruth
Lou Gehrig
Carl Hubbell
Bill Terry
Mel Ott
Joe Louis
Joe DiMaggio
Bill Dickey
Yogi Berra
Joe McCarthy
Jackie Robinson
Branch Rickey
Duke Snider
Roy Campanella
Willie Mays
Leo Durocher
Frank Gifford
Rocky Marciano
Casey Stengel
Mickey Mantle
Roger Maris
Whitey Ford
Billy Martin
Joe Namath
Tom Seaver
Walt Frazier
Red Holzman
Muhammad Ali
Thurman Munson
Reggie Jackson
Dave Winfield
John McEnroe
Don Mattingly
Darryl Strawberry
Dwight Gooden
Gary Carter
Bill Parcells
Lawrence Taylor
Phil Simms
Patrick Ewing
Derek Jeter
Mariano Rivera
Roger Clemens
Alex Rodriguez
Joe Torre
The list of those left off tells the story of the greatness of those who are on it. Weaning the truest of the New York Sports icons from this list is a difficult chore. Managers and coaches such as Joe McCarthy, Leo Durocher, Red Holzman and Joe Torre presided over moments of supreme joy, but somehow they do not quite make the cut of this ultra-competitive “team.”
Bill Dickey was at one time considered the greatest catcher in baseball history, or certainly on the short list with Mickey Cochrane; at least until the next generation of backstops came along to eclipse his star. Keeping a Hall of Famer like “Iron Joe” McGinnity (who starred for both the early Giants and Dodgers, then known as the Superbas) off a list like this is subjective, but then again so is omitting such mound stalwarts as Rube Marquard, Herb Pennock, Waite Hoyt, Dazzy Vance, Lefty Gomez, Red Ruffing, Don Newcombe, Sal Maglie, Allie Reynolds, Catfish Hunter, Sparky Lyle and Goose Gossage.
Roger Maris and Billy Martin fall short for various reasons. Maris of course is best known for doing just that; falling short, in the eyes of the New York sporting press and public, and in 1961 of Babe Ruth’s home run record within the 154-game schedule that would have saved him a big fat *. He was not a Hall of Famer. Martin was beloved, but he was not a great player. Personality is what keeps Maris out of the club and what is not enough to put Martin in it.
Thurman Munson was a guy who was difficult to like. He comes very close to inclusion on the list but ultimately is not viewed as being as great as Yogi Berra or Roy Campanella. Dave Winfield, Don Mattingly, Darryl Strawberry, Dwight Gooden, Gary Carter, Phil Simms and Patrick Ewing are “I love the ‘80s” characters who were part of great moments in New York sports history, but for various reasons must be left out.
What about the ice hockey stars? New York Rangers’ goalie Ed Giacomin was a fan favorite, to be sure. So was Denis Potvin of the Islanders, a team that went on a sustained run of excellence. Ultimately, however, inclusion in this exclusive fraternity means that the athlete or coach in question must not merely be a big name in New York, but a transcendent figure beyond the city, in some cases beyond his sport.
So who are the true New York Sports Icons?
Start with the boxers. Joe Louis was from Detroit, Rocky Marciano from Brockton, Massachusetts, and Muhammad Ali from Louisville. However, the city of New York is inextricably tied to the “sweet science,” sometimes nefariously (Mob connections). But all three of these champions won in epic bouts at Madison Square Garden, the Mecca of the boxing game.
John McEnroe is by no means the greatest tennis player who ever lived. Jack Kramer, Don Budge, Pancho Gonzalez, Rod Laver, Bjorn Borg, Andre Agassi, Pete Sampras and Roger Federer are all players who are better or probably at least his equals. But McEnroe was a New York kid who made good in the U.S. Open, the biggest of American tennis stages and of course the annual Big Apple spectacle. More to the point, he had the unique swagger of a New Yorker, took pride in rooting for other New York sports teams, and played matches against another “street hustler,” Jimmy Connors, and the silent Swede, Bjorn Borg, that were for the ages.
While New York fancies itself the “basketball capital of the world,” its fans the most passionate and knowledgeable, only Walt Frazier of the Knicks makes the cut on the hardwood. The greatest New York City high school player ever, Lew Alcindor, became Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and engendered animosity from the people in his hometown for the “treachery” of going all the way out to UCLA. “Clyde” Frazier was the epitome of Big Apple cool with his fedora, mink coat; a penchant for ladies and nightlife.
Two of the football stars on the list are there as much for image and off-field activities as for what they did on the green plains, although both Frank Gifford and Joe Willie Namath were all-time greats. Gifford is undoubtedly a true New York Sports Icon, and perhaps his inclusion demonstrates the unfairness of it. He was a terrific player, an All-American out of the University of Southern California, and a golden boy. He had every conceivable gift. As a player, he was great but many have surpassed him. Contemporaries Jim Brown and Johnny Unitas would be considered greater in the overall pantheon. But Gifford embodied Manhattan polish, a sex appeal that implies some sense of racial identity that, fair or not, made him a bigger name in the Big Apple in his heyday than even Willie Mays. Gifford’s career on Monday Night Football and place in the upper echelons of café society weigh as heavily in his favor as his on-field statistics, by a long shot.
Joe Namath’s place in the club is as indicative of the selective nature of this fraternity as any. Fairness has little to do with it. Namath, like Mickey Mantle, was damaged goods. His performance at the University of Alabama prior to a knee injury in 1964 conjured images of athleticism beyond mere quarterbacking skills, but he was hurt all the time, and it did reduce his career effectiveness. There is a long list of pro quarterbacks who are rated ahead of him. Nobody would offer Namath as quite equal with his contemporaries, Roger Staubach or Terry Bradshaw. But, oh, the times he presided over, the place of his exploits, and herein is the essence of what makes the true New York Sports Icon such a great figure in American society. He did it in New York!
Fans of the Pittsburgh Steelers might take exception to such a concept. They certainly viewed their heroes, the likes of Bradshaw and Lynn Swann, with as much fervent love as any town could love their guys. The way Cowboys players are worshipped in Dallas is legendary, to be sure. Just ask Troy Aikman, or consider the strip club world that embodied Michael Irvin’s life. But the New York superstar is a special breed. He is elevated above all others. It is a combination of New York historical sports greatness and the special nature of the cities’ fishbowl lifestyle. In many ways it cannot be adequately explained, but it is there, it is palpable and it is undeniable. He is bigger, more substantial than any other. Only histories’ largest figures, the greatest Presidents, the most noble astronauts and world-saving war heroes, ascend above the true New York Sports Icon.
Two members of the New York (football) Giants, as Howard Cosell (who may or may not make the list) liked to call them, are deserving. Coach Bill Parcells brought two Super Bowl championships to the Big Apple and embodied the picture of the tough, winning coach. Lawrence Taylor defined and changed the linebacker position. He is on a short list of athletes who truly revolutionized a position or a game. His off-field foibles were the stuff of New York tabloid legend, somehow reinforcing his identity. He played himself brilliantly in Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday.
Above and beyond all other athletic heroes, New York reserves its greatest worship for the baseball stars. This is Our National Pastime, and it is on the hallowed fields of New York where the game’s legend was forged, its popularity branded upon the conscience of a young nation. It was in Cooperstown where the game was mythologized, on the Elysian Fields of New York where the rules and foundations set forth. In two world wars, Americans determined that other Americans were not German spies more often than not by asking who won the previous year’s World Series, who led the American and National League in batting, how many home runs Babe Ruth hit. The answers more often than not engendered passionate battlefield discussions expressing pride or dissatisfaction in the doings of the Dodgers, Giants and Yankees. Japanese kamikaze pilots shouted vain expletives, using the name of Babe Ruth – not Red Grange or Bronco Nagurski – as they met their Maker in the smokestacks of our ships.
The first of the great American sports dynasties – before the Yankees; before Notre Dame and Southern California in college football or the Packers in the NFL; before the Celtics and UCLA on the hardwood; were the Giants. The first great, true New York Sports Icon was Christy Mathewson. Mathewson was everything a hero is supposed to be: handsome, an All-American from Bucknell (giving him a touch of Ivy League veneer), upright, easily one of the greatest pitchers of all time, a World Champion who did his best pitching in October, and a tragic figure who died young after serving his country.
His manager was John McGraw. McGraw forged the Giants into the greatest team in baseball in the 1900s, 1910s, and early 1920s. McGraw, known as “Mugsy,” symbolized the New York style. He was a street brawler, a tough guy who never gave an inch.
First baseman Bill Terry was the last National Leaguer to bat .400 and managed the 1933 World Champion Giants. His teammate, left-handed screwball artist Carl Hubbell, struck out five of the greatest players in baseball history (Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx, Al Simmons, Joe Cronin) consecutively in the 1934 All-Star Game. Mel Ott was the Giants’ answer to Babe Ruth, belting over 500 home runs over the short right field porch at the Polo Grounds. He eventually took over as the club’s manager.
Willie Mays may be the greatest all-around baseball player who ever lived. As a five-tool superstar (hit for average, for power; field, throw and run), none were his equal before or since. He was completely new and unique in the years immediately following the breaking of the “color barrier.” His persona of exuberant youth on the stick ball streets of Harlem epitomized the way he lifted his tired team to pennant glory twice (1951, 1954), creating innocent images never to be seen again.
Then there are the Dodgers. In a bottom line town of winners, they were Brooklyn’s Boys of Summer. Their fan base found an attraction to them in ways the Giants’ and Yankees’ followers never did. Their appeal was also as much social as it was victory-oriented. Countless Jewish fans assimilated via the Dodgers. When Branch Rickey signed Jackie Robinson, they became a team of underdogs off the field (they always had been on it). Rickey and Robinson are linked by fate, and both are true New York Sports Icons in good standing.
Duke Snider may have been New York’s “third center fielder,” but he was the “Duke of Flatbush.” Roy Campanella was a three-time Most Valuable Player and tragically courageous figure who overcame a crippling car crash injury to live a life of meaning.
With all due respect to the Giants, Dodgers, Jets and Knickerbockers, there would be no such thing as the true New York Sports Icon if it was not for the Yankees. The Yankees are the sports version of America: bigger, better, richer, more successful, utterly dominant over all competition. The very image of New York City itself; as the most important of all world capitals, is tied first and foremost to the Yankees. It is Washington, D.C. where the levers of political power are, but the longtime failures of two Senators franchises hung over D.C. the unfortunate moniker, “First in war, first in peace, last in the American League.” Despite all the grandeur of American supremacy, Washington is considered a backwater to the Big Apple, a town of “movers and shakers” like none other.
Perhaps this is an exaggeration, but there is the sense that if not for Babe Ruth, New York would be just another city, little greater in stature than, say, Boston or Philadelphia. He is a symbol of all that is greater, bigger and more magnificent about New York City. The Babe is the most larger-than-life member of the true New York Sports Icon club. Babe was in many ways the anti-Christy Mathewson. Ruth was a drinker, womanizer and reprobate. But despite this, despite his roly-poly visage, with all due respect for Jim Thorpe, Jesse Owens, Red Grange, Bob Mathias, Rafer Johnson, Jim Brown, Willie Mays, Wilt Chamberlain, Mark Spitz, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Muhammad Ali, Joe Montana, Bo Jackson, Wayne Gretzky, Michael Jackson or Barry Bonds, he was the Greatest Athlete of All Time.
To measure Ruth’s impact on the game, try and imagine Greg Maddux or Roger Clemens, some time in the early 1990s when both were established as the two best pitchers in baseball, holding a press conference announcing they were retiring from the mound to play right field. Then imagine one of them doing over the next 15 years what Bonds has done offensively. Nobody ever dominated his sport in his time as thoroughly as did Ruth in his. No athlete ever revolutionized his game, sports in general, or had the effect on society, like Babe Ruth.
Lou Gehrig was a later version of Mathewson: native New Yorker, Ivy Leaguer out of Columbia, the ultimate team guy, heroic and honest, perhaps the very best first baseman who ever played. He was a man who emerged from Ruth’s shadow to lead the Yankees to consecutive World Championships in 1936, 1937 and 1938 before ALS sidelined him in 1939, ending his “Ironman” consecutive game streak and later his life in tragic grace. He declared himself the “luckiest man on the face of the Earth” in one of the most transcendent moments in sports history. Pride of the Yankees starring Gary Cooper is still thought of as the ultimate sports movie.
Joe DiMaggio was the quintessential true New York Sports Icon. Interestingly, his statistics pale next to Ruth’s, Gehrig’s, his contemporary Ted Williams, Willie Mays and even Mickey Mantle. When Williams was risking it all as a fighter pilot he was playing on a Navy baseball team in Hawaii. When Italians were said to be either Mobsters or Fascists, DiMaggio gave them a heroic figure to cheer and emulate, even though he socialized with organized crime figures. Later biographers revealed his true nature, which was disturbing to say the least, but for some reason the press protected him with the zealotry of the Central Intelligence Agency. There had to be a reason for it. His aloofness was called grace, his imperial attitude called class. DiMaggio was the ultimate winner. He was the personification of a baseball idol. When he wedded Marilyn Monroe he defined the marriage between sports and entertainment that the true New York Sports Icon embodies.
Mickey Mantle is another of those tragic figures, but a legend whose place in the club is completely secure. As a player, he had few if any equals. Historians rate Ruth, Mays, perhaps Hank Aaron and Barry Bonds, above him. However, it was his drawbacks that are viewed as his strengths. The Mick is seen as a cripple, but implicit in this description is the notion that had he not had osteomyelitis, and had he not injured seemingly every part of his great body, Mick’s records would never have been surpassed. Mantle’s combination of awesome body strength and speed was greater than Mays. The Yankees were never going to risk further injury by running him, but absent his physical maladies Mick had the potential to steal 50 bases a year had he so chosen.
As a star performer on a winning team, Mick equaled and possibly even surpassed DiMaggio. Unlike Joe D. (who was respected) he was beloved by teammates. He was a drinker, the life of the party and hit more spectacular home runs that carried the Yankees to victory than DiMaggio.
Yogi Berra and Whitey Ford are two players whose places in baseball history are greatly enhanced by the fact that they were Yankees. A catcher like Ernie Lombardi of Cincinnati, for instance, was probably near Berra’s equivalent. A pitcher such as Detroit’s Jim Bunning was as effective as Ford. But they wore the pinstripes. It was Berra and Ford who made up the winning battery in countless World Series victories. They were the ultimate winners.
The manager of those Yankee teams was Casey Stengel. His body of work as a player and manager is extraordinary, but other than his perceived “clown act” in Brooklyn before and with the Mets afterward, he would be a nominal figure in the game’s history were it not for his 11 years at the Yankee helm. Among sports coaches, only Red Auerbach of the Boston Celtics and John Wooden at UCLA matches his record of dominance during this time.
Reggie Jackson is a player worthy of inclusion, even though he was a free agent superstar who made his name first in Oakland and again in Anaheim after his tumultuous New York years. There were the arguments with Billy Martin, another strange contender with pedestrian statistics, whose personal foibles are enough to deny him entrance. Reggie bad-mouthed Thurman Munson. He was somewhat overshadowed by Dave Winfield, a great athlete whose bid for inclusion fell way short. But Reggie had five years and shone brightly. He was a Hall of Famer who earned the moniker Mr. October with a 1977 World Series performance against the Dodgers that is unequaled before or since. He was larger than life, in all ways the ultimate true New York Sports Icon.
The Yankees of the late 1990s and 2000s have enjoyed one of their most impressive runs and in fact have had a host of superstars as impressive as their greatest teams. This is a result of the free agent era, in which Yankee riches have been able to purchase the best club money can buy. In the past, the Yankees settled for journeymen players, often in trades with Kansas City, who may not have been great stars (with a few exceptions, such as Maris) but were solid enough to give them the pennant-winning edge.
Are Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera worthy of inclusion? Yes. Each has played on four World Championship teams. Jeter has not won any MVP awards and it is arguable whether he pulled ahead of the other great shortstops of his era; Nomar Garciaparra, Miguel Tejada and Alex Rodriguez. However, he has been the team leader and symbol, as well as the ultimate class act in a place where it is not so easy to be classy.
Rivera is on the shortest list of those contending for the title greatest relief pitcher of all time; a list that includes Rollie Fingers, Dennis Eckersley and very few others. Alex Rodriguez and Roger Clemens are mercenaries, so calling them true New York Sports Icons is problematic, but in the free agent era we are faced with such conundrums and must deal with them.
Neither can be denied. One overriding factor stands out in analyzing both of them. Like it or not, each has the potential of consideration for being the very best at what he does who ever played the game; A-Rod the finest all-around player, Clemens the greatest pitcher. A healthy A-Rod will some day pass Barry Bonds as the number one home run hitter ever. He was one of the slickest-fielding shortstops in baseball until coming to New York, when he had to move to third base in deference to Jeter. Bonds stole more bases. Mays would be considered a better center fielder than A-Rod at either shortstop or third base, but the simple fact that Rodriguez was a shortstop - arguably the most important defensive position on the field, one traditionally handled by light hitters – works in his favor. He has never won a World Series, but neither has Bonds (or Ted Williams for that matter). UP-DATE
Clemens played on the 1999 and 2000 World Championship teams, although he was not at his most dominating. Those were his years were in Boston, Toronto and curiously Houston at an advanced age, but his overall records are beyond reproach. His 20-3 win-loss mark in 2001, however, requires some getting used to, as it is not a typographical error. Get The Baseball Encyclopedia or some other good reference source and start looking up pitching records with the express purpose of determining, Who is the greatest pitcher who ever lived? Clemens most definitely holds up.
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One other pitcher remains on the short list, the pantheon. He too is a member in good standing amongst the fraternity of true New York Sports Icons. He is the man whose “birth” into this elite fraternity occurred at precisely 9:55 P.M. Eastern Standard Time on the evening of Wednesday, July 9, the Year of Our Lord 1969, at Shea Stadium in Flushing Meadows, Queens, New York City.
It was at this moment that one George Thomas Seaver of the Fresno, California Seavers, USC, Bayside, Queens and the New York Metropolitans National League Baseball Club, approached home plate in the eighth inning of the Mets’ game with the Chicago Cubs.
His is the story before that moment and then after that moment. His team’s tale also is divided by this “tipping point” in Mets history. It was precisely at this time that a crowd of more than 59,000 fans, standing room only on what now was nothing less than a midsummer night’s dream, came to their feet as one, rocking the stadium for more than a minute while young Seaver soaked it all in. It was the kind of roar that Marilyn Monroe only thought she had heard in Korea; the kind Joe DiMaggio did in fact hear directed his way in another stadium, some 20 years earlier and10 miles to the north-east of where Seaver now stood. It was the kind of roar reserved only for the true New York Sports Icon, and once it has been heard it can never be forgotten!
The reincarnation of Christy Mathewson
“Seriously. There isn’t a person in the world who hasn’t heard of Tom Seaver. He’s so good blind people come out to hear him pitch.”
- Reggie Jackson
He was the “24-year old reincarnation of Christy Mathewson, Hobey Baker and Jack Armstrong,” according to sportswriter Ray Robinson. He was “so good blind people come out to hear him pitch,” said Reggie Jackson.
He was born George Thomas Seaver on November 17, 1944 in Fresno, California. He went by the name Tom, except for his wife Nancy, who called him George. He remains the only Met player to be selected a true New York Sports Icon. He is the greatest player in Mets history and the key figure in the most amazing event in the annals of sports. In his prime he was the best pitcher in baseball, and arguably the best either of all time or in the post-World War II era, depending upon how one analyzes the records and eras. He enjoyed several of the most spectacular single seasons in history and sustained a career built on consistent success over a long period. He transcends sports and New York City. In a rough ‘n’ tumble town, a town of Irish Catholics, of rough hewn neighborhood Italians, of Brooklyn Jews and Harlem blacks, Seaver was a Park Avenue, or to be precise, a Connecticut WASP.
“Even at USC, I was a six-pack-and-a-pick-up-truck guy, but Tom was a champagne-and-cigar-in-the-back-of-a-limousine guy,” recalled ex-Trojan and Boston Red Sox favorite Bill “Spaceman” Lee.
New York City likes it athletes to be regular guys. With Seaver it was as if they found somebody from the fanciest prep school, a best-selling author, a U.S. Senator or college professor; put a uniform on him, and discovered to their amazement that he could bring high, hard heat with the best of ‘em. Over time, Seaver’s singular impressiveness as a pitcher and a person wore thin with teammates and the press. He never suffered fools well, but over time it was demonstrated to be who he was. It was not an act. He was one of the rarest of the breed.
Other athletes have been smart. Moe Berg was an OSS spy. Bill Bradley was a Rhodes Scholar. Wilt Chamberlain was an intellect. But few if any were the complete package as was Seaver; a combination of looks, education, uprightness and unmatched athletic greatness.
Charles Seaver, Tom’s father, played football and basketball at Stanford University. He was also one of the finest golfers in the world at one time. In 1932 he competed for the United States in the prestigious Walker Cup, an amateur trophy named for the family of two Presidents: George W. Bush and his father, George Herbert Walker Bush. Famed radio broadcaster Ted Husing announced that Seaver defeated his British opponent, Eric Fiddian, thus securing for the U.S. their seventh Walker Cup title.
After winning the Walker Cup, Charles returned to Stanford and defeated a golf teammate named Lawson Little. When courting his wife, their dates more often than not were putting contests for nickels and dimes. After graduation came marriage, membership in the aptly named Sunnyside Country Club in Fresno, California and a rising executive career with the Bonner Packing Company.
This was the central California of John Steinbeck’s novels, but Charles Seaver was a successful businessman who protected his young family from the Great Depression. Fresno and environs were “America’s fruit basket” or “salad bowl,” providing grapes, figs, peaches, oranges, and vegetables to fruit stands and grocery stores.
Fresno is a town that gets very hot in the summer and is subject to strange “tule fogs” in the winter. Despite being in California, it a place with a passion for sports that more resembles Texas or Oklahoma. Charles raised a family in idyllic California suburbia. The family backyard included cherry, orange and fig trees. The streets were safe for the kids to ride bikes and get into mischief. The little league fields were well kept, supported by an enthusiastic community. He kept up his golf game, winning the Fresno city tournament six times. Weekends were spent at the country club. Charles and his wife watched their four children splash in the pool, play golf and whack tennis balls.
The kids included Charles Jr., who took to golf like his old man. Next was Katie, a swimmer in the manner of her aunt, who had surfed Hawaii’s wild rides. Carol was also a swimmer.
“There was good clean competition in our home, and you earned what you got,” said Charles. “The only thing provided for you was emotional security.”
George Thomas was the youngest. The Battle of the Bulge was about to get underway when he was born in the late fall of 1944. Victory in Europe came less than six month later; the conquering of Japan a few months after that. He would grow up in a post-war Baby Boomer environment that has been mythologized by such books as David Halberstam’s The Fifties: California barbecuing, drinks on the patio, socializing with neighbors, the kids’ fast friends. Capitalism had not just survived, it had thrived. The Great Depression, the New Deal; done, dead. These were the Eisenhower years and this was the middle class, the American Dream. But in this West Coast version of the Kennedys, being youngest meant fighting for everything you got.
“When you are the fourth child in a family, you probably have to be a little tougher to survive,” his mother told friends.
“His dad was Tom’s idol,” Charles Jr. said. “Our father was a perfectionist and he taught his boys to be the same way.”
For reasons that have never really been explained, he went by his middle name from an early age. Tom played in the back yard with imaginary friends, one of whom was his alter ego, “George.” He took to baseball over and above all other activities. The game was coming into its own as a televised sport. Tom imitated the players, sliding into “home,” declaring himself “safe,” arguing with the “umpire.”
Eventually he was allowed to leave the house on his own, to venture into a street past sprinklers watering lawns. The music of the era was Pat Boone, not Nirvana. It was the age of innocence, the last vestiges of a by-gone era before drugs, the anti-war protests of the 1960s, pornography, and the bone-chilling fear of child molestation.
Tom made fast friends with a neighbor boy named Russ Scheidt. They played baseball together. In 1953, with the Korean War coming to an end, eight-year old Tom Seaver showed up for little league try-outs. The coach, a high school teacher named Hal Bicknell, noticed that he was the smallest boy and told him he needed to be at least nine. He ran home bawling into the arms of his mother, but resolved to come back the next year. When the time finally came, he made the North Rotary team of the Fresno Spartan League.
Tom was immediately installed as a pitcher, the most important position on the field. One day an adult rooting for the opposing team shouted a stream of insults at young Tom, who cried but kept on pitching.
“He had this tremendous desire to succeed, to win,” recalled Bicknell. He “didn’t complain, didn’t quit, just poured it right in there.”
Charles Sr. went to the games but was never a “little league parent,” pushing his kids to be something they did not want to be. He encouraged his son as he did all his children, but always stressed education above everything else. Charles was a perfectionist and instilled that in young Tom, but the desire extended beyond baseball to all things he endeavored in.
Tom achieved the pinnacle of his little league world, batting .543 and throwing a perfect game. Getting back to that level of perfection would drive his pitching career well into the big leagues. Tom’s mother read him a children’s book called The Little Engine That Could.
“The lesson got through to me,” he said. “I grew to share my mother’s optimism, her feeling that everything would work out, that any goal could be achieved.”
For some reason he could not master golf as he did baseball. Angry and frustrated, his mother told him she would not play with him as long as he threw his clubs after bad shots, but he did follow Charles Sr. on the course, learning the art of quiet concentration.
“I’ve got the ability of self-control and discipline on the mound, and I certainly got that from my dad,” he said.
Fresno in the 1950s and 1960s may well have been the sports capital of America. It was a competitive environment, producing young kids who went on to great success on the diamond. Jim Maloney came out of Fresno to become one of the hardest-throwing strikeout pitchers in baseball, the ace of the Cincinnati Reds. Dick Ellsworth was another hard-throwing chucker who went to the Mets. The 1959 Fresno State Bulldogs made it to the College World Series.
The town did not merely produce baseball stars. Tom Flores was a quarterback hero who would star for the Oakland Raiders, later leading them to two Super Bowl titles as their coach. Daryle Lamonica followed Flores. After Notre Dame he became a two-time American Football League Most Valuable Player, quarterbacking the Raiders into the 1968 Super Bowl.
Little league ends at age 12. When the boys turn 13, they move on to Babe Ruth League play, which means making the enormous leap from small-field dimensions to a regular diamond; pitcher’s mound 60 feet, six inches from home plate, the bases 90 feet apart. It is the end of many a “career.” It almost was the end for Tom Seaver.
He had a friend named Dick Selma. He and Selma were rivals throughout little league, competing for star status, their teams for supremacy. It was an even rivalry until junior high school. Selma continued to grow. As he entered Fresno High School he was reaching six feet in height with a muscular build. Tom was still 5-6 and 140 pounds as a high school sophomore. On top of all else, Tom was by virtue of being born in November younger than most of his classmates, some of whom were born in January and therefore were almost a year older at a time when that year means everything in a kid’s development.
“He was the runt of our crowd,” Selma recalled.
Selma made the Fresno High varsity as a sophomore, a singular honor that separates a young man from the pack. Tom barely made the junior varsity. While Selma impressed the local prep media and professional scouts, Seaver remained a JV. To still be a JV in one’s junior year, as he was, invariably means that one lacks the skills to go beyond high school if indeed he makes the varsity in his last try as a senior. Tom did not throw hard, but he was smart. He learned how to set up hitters, to change speeds, developing a curve and even a knuckler.
“Tom was a hell of a pitcher, as contrasted to a thrower, even when he was on the JVs,” Selma recalled when he got to the big leagues. “He knew how to set up hitters, and him just in high school, I’m still learning now.”
High school sports success often dictates one’s place in the social hierarchy. Being a career JV was a comedown after little league stardom, but Tom had much more going for him. Despite his lack of size, he was a good-looking kid with an outgoing personality. Tom had easygoing charm and the gift of repartee. He was popular with teachers, with teammates, but most importantly with pretty girls. Above all other things, this is the prized attribute that determines a high school boys’ place in the pecking order. He was a good student who decided he wanted to become a dentist.
“He was a real happy-go-lucky guy,” Selma said. “He had a lot of friends and he always dated all the good-looking girls.”
In his senior year, Tom went out for basketball, mainly to stay in shape for baseball. He was determined that he would make the most of what looked to be his last year of athletic competition. He was a 5-10, 165-pound guard whose natural athleticism shone through. Surprisingly, he made the all-city team.
The scouts were out in force, but not to see him. Selma was on everybody’s radar and would eventually sign with the expansion New York Mets for $20,000. Tom did manage to make it into the starting rotation. Still lacking any heat, he was effective enough throwing off-speed pitches with control to win six games against five losses and a place on the all-city baseball team, “mostly because there wasn’t anyone else to choose,” he recalled. “When the professional scouts came around, looking over the local talent, some of the other kids got good offers. I didn’t even get a conversation; not one scout approached me.”
It was the beginning of the magical “summer of ’62,” the year depicted by filmmaker George Lucas, who grew up in nearby Modesto and would attend the University of Southern California with Seaver. The world Lucas showed in American Graffiti was the only one Tom Seaver knew. It was a unique central California culture of cars and girls. Tom Seaver’s Fresno was not quite The Beach Boys’ Southland surf magic, nor the brewing, dangerous mix of angry protest, harmful drugs and unprotected sex that would have such ultimately devastating consequences in the Bay Area.
Songwriter Stephen Stills wrote a famous line: “There’s something happening here; what it is ain’t exactly clear.” Indeed, in California something was happening there. It had been going on there for decades. Tom Seaver would come to symbolize what it was.
California’s political ethos can be traced back to the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln promoted the building of the Trans-continental railroad. He received his greatest financial backing from the railroad companies. A look at the map leaves one pondering why the line was built over the difficult terrain of the Rocky and Sierra Mountain ranges, to San Francisco, instead of the relatively flat lands of Texas, Arizona, Nevada, the Southern California desert, and on into Los Angeles. The reason is that had it been built over the “Southern route,” slaves would have built it. Lincoln could not condone that.
When the Civil War ended a large migration to California occurred. Northerners from Boston and New York who supported the Union tended to favor San Francisco. Former Confederates favored Los Angeles. Later, when the Rose Bowl became popular, Midwesterners flocked to the warm lands of Southern California. As a result, the north took on a more liberal, secular nature. The south became more conservative and Christian.
However, inter-mixing within California created a general mindset popular statewide. It became a progressive place, a trendsetter, a place of new ideas. In the north, a strong civil rights movement developed. Orange County and environs remained Right-wing, but on matters of race its white, Christian citizenry developed a sense of moderation unlike their Southern brethren, who thought like them on most other matters such as anti-Communism and small government.
Two Southern California political figures embodied this way of thinking. Both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan ascended to the White House in large measure on the strength of Southern support. Together, they husbanded the South “into the Union,” so to speak, by making palatable to the South the conservative-yet-racially-moderate views of Orange County and California in general.
So it was that in the 1950s and 1960s, a young white boy growing up in an affluent California suburb would feel free to choose as his sports hero a black man without thinking twice about it; with no repercussions from disapproving friends and family. When Tom Seaver was a young boy in Fresno, California, the Dodgers and Giants were still in New York. There were no Pacific Coast League teams near him. As a fan, he was a “free agent.” He was not pre-disposed to root for white stars like Mickey Mantle of the Yankees or Ted Williams of the Red Sox. Willie Mays of the Giants and Sandy Koufax of the Dodgers, teams whose fan bases he lived in, were not yet in the Golden State. He chose Henry Aaron, the smooth-swinging outfielder of the Milwaukee Braves who at that time was an emerging superstar.
In later years, Seaver said he was “prejudiced” growing up in Fresno; that to look down upon black people was accepted. Perhaps Seaver was correct, but what he considered prejudice in the 1950s and early 1960s was moderate by American standards. It did not stop him from admiring Hank Aaron; at least as an athlete. Inter-racial dating and full-scale integration may not have been subjects on his radar screen, but whatever pre-disposed social constructs he was raised with did not effect his view of black baseball stars.
“It mush have been his form that made me pick him,” he said. “I sat through entire ball games, just looking at Henry Aaron, nothing else, fascinated by him, studying him at the plate and on the bases and in the field.”
Seaver once expressed some question as to why he, a pitcher, chose as his “idol” an outfielder. Later, when he went to USC, he attended many Dodgers games on season tickets owned by his uncle.
“Sandy Koufax became my hero,” he said. “But he never really replaced Aaron.”
The choice of the Jewish Koufax is also emblematic. Tom Seaver became a race-neutral white man. As he matured and broadened his horizons, he chose his heroes, idols, associations, roommates and friends strictly on merit and personal commonalties. At USC his roommate would be Mike Garrett, a black running back on the football team (also a baseball outfielder who later played professionally for the Dodgers organization) from the inner city Los Angeles neighborhood of Boyle Heights. Seaver would bring his California attitude with him to New York. He would be part of the “new breed” of modern athletes in the late 1960s.
But that was all a long ways away in 1962. The dream of big league glory was gone. Tom had no reason to believe he had a chance, but his love of the game would never go away. There was also the matter of college. Coming from a solidly middle class family his father undoubtedly could have paid his tuition, but he had already put Tom’s three older siblings through school, interestingly enough each attending three of the four great California universities: UCLA, California and Stanford.
Tom had his heart set on the fourth college, USC, a private school with steep tuition costs and one of the best dental schools in the nation. He wanted to spare his father from fronting the money. A plan was hatched: instead of college after high school he would serve in the U.S. Marines. He would save and earn some money, getting some help from the GI Bill. That would only assuage a little bit of the cost. A tiny voice in the back of Tom Seaver’s mind would not go away.
What about a baseball scholarship?
This seemed to be a ludicrous proposition. USC had the best baseball program in the nation, led by legendary coach Rod Dedeaux. They had their choice of the best players. If a hot prospect did not wish to go directly into professional baseball, his college choices were basically USC, SC, Southern California or Southern Cal; at least it seemed that way. Dedeaux had no more interest in a junk-baller from Fresno than the pro scouts who ignored him did.
First things first. While waiting to report for Marine Corp basic training, Tom worked for the Bonner Packing Company. It was not an internship in his father’s plush office suites. Rather, he got up each day before dawn and spent the day wrestling enormous boxes of raisins along a loading platform. Two or three men were needed to lift the “sweat boxes.” The temperature in the un-air-conditioned warehouse was 100 degrees in the summer time. Sometimes snakes, rats and spiders slithered out of the boxes.
“After six months it was almost a relief to go into the Marines,” he stated. At night, Tom pitched for an American legion team. Something was already happening to Tom Seaver. As he approached his 18th birthday, he was getting taller, putting on weight, and was stronger after lifting “sweat boxes.” Tom could feel his clothes tightening on his body, his pants becoming too short. He could not help but think that he was throwing harder in July than he had in April. His baseball dreams would not die.
He joined the Marines with his boyhood friend, Russ Scheidt. First came three months at Camp Pendleton, the famed home of the so-called “Hollywood Marines” (as opposed to those who train in Parris Island, South Carolina) near San Diego.
“I hated the Marine Corps boot camp,” Seaver wrote in The Perfect Game, an autobiographical review of his 1969 World Series victory over Baltimore, written in collaboration with Dick Schaap. Caught with a dirty rifle, for three-and-a-half hours he had to do an exercise called “up-and-on shoulders, first holding out my rifle, which weighed 11 pounds, then lifting it over my head, then holding it out again.”
“No, no, no, you don’t stop ‘til I get tired!”” the drill instructor yelled in typical Southern-Marine voice cadence, when Seaver seemed too exhausted to go on.
The DI in fact did get tired and several had to take turns “supervising” Seaver, who “thought I was going to die.” After getting caught whispering to Scheidt, verboten during chow time, one DI jumped on the table, running towards him, food and plates flying everywhere. He took Seaver outside, kicking him over and over again. By this time Seaver had been in boot camp for 10 weeks. He was a “trained-to-kill Marine, and nothing could hurt me short of an M-14 rifle in the chest.” He had tears in his eyes . . . to keep from laughing!
Seaver graduated from boot camp, joined a Reserve unit, and by the fall of 1963 enrolled at Fresno City College. For more than a year since high school, he had eaten three squares a day, done countless push-ups, pull-ups and “up-and-on shoulders.” As he got older he had grown. In this period of time he had gone from 5-10, 165 pounds to 6-1, 195 pounds. He was a grown man, physically and mentally. He had not picked up a baseball since the summer of 1962, but he had a sneaking suspicion that when he did he would be able to throw it harder than ever, and if so . . .
Strolling down the street in Fresno, Tom passed a man he had known all his life. The man did not recognize him.
“Hey, remember me?” he called out to him.
“My God,” he said. “Is that little Tom Seaver?”
There still seemed no hope of that scholarship from USC, and none of Major League glory, but Seaver had the indomitable optimism of his mother.
The Little Engine That Could.
The Fresno City College Rams have one of the greatest J.C. baseball traditions in the country. Maloney, Ellsworth and Selma all pitched there before going to the big leagues. Scouts and college coaches paid attention to them. In September of 1963, a couple months shy of his 19th birthday, Seaver came out for what the coaches and players call “fall ball.” He was known for having made all-city pitcher at Fresno High, even if it had been “because there wasn’t anyone else to choose.”
But his new height, the 30 pounds of muscle, the newfound strength, gave Tom confidence that he could not help but be noticed by coaches and players alike. After the initial period of conditioning came the moment of truth: try-outs on the mound. After warming up, Seaver got set, went into his motion, and delivered a 90-mile per hour fast ball.
The ball sailed up and in, smacking into the catcher’s mitt with a loud thud. Suddenly, USC did not look like such a pipe dream. In the spring of 1964, freshman right-hander Tom Seaver was the ace of the Fresno City College team, compiling an 11-2 record against stiff competition, earning team MVP honors.
What was happening to Seaver was less a phenomenon and more common than many realize. The high school blue chipper is accorded great attention, but many times he has physically matured sooner than his peers have. Sometimes he peaks at the age of 17 or 18. Others, like Seaver, grow, gain strength, and mature in more ways than one. Few make the kind of transition that Tom Seaver would ultimately make, but many high school “suspects” in various sports go on to become “prospects” in college, in the minor leagues, and in their 20s. Some attain stardom. Scouting is a very tricky, unpredictable business.
The impossible seemed to have occurred. Seaver’s 11-2 record at Fresno City College earned the recruiting attention of Rod Dedeaux. He was a legitimate fastball artist. Dedeaux called him the “phee-nom from San Joaquin.”
But Dedeaux needed to know for sure that he could compete for the Trojans. “I only have five scholarships to give out,” the coach told him. Before the ride would be offered, Seaver would have to prove himself with the Fairbanks, Alaska Goldpanners.
Today, collegiate summer baseball is a well-known commodity. Many scouts place more credence on a player’s performance in one of these leagues than they do on their college seasons. The Cape Cod League uses only wooden bats, which proves to be a great equalizer for pitchers and a shock for aluminum-bat sluggers who find themselves batting .250 on the Cape. Summer ball has a long tradition in Canada, where American collegians test themselves in such exotic locales as Red Deer, Alberta, Calgary and Edmonton. The Kamloops International Tournament in British Columbia has attracted some of the fastest baseball for decades. The Jayhawk League, consisting of teams from Boulder, Pueblo, Colorado Springs, plus Kansas and Iowa, was once a leading destination for college players. The California Collegiate Summer League, consisting of teams from the Humboldt Crabs in the north to the San Diego Aztecs in the south, has produced many stars in its various forms over the years.
But the Alaskan Summer Collegiate League is the most legendary. Over time, the league became the Alaska-Hawaii League, with teams flying in for extended road trips on the islands and the “land of the midnight sun.”
“The team was put together by a man named Red Boucher,” said former Met pitcher Danny Frisella, who was a teammate of Seaver’s in Fairbanks. Boucher was the Mayor of Fairbanks. “He got all the best young ball players up there.” Andy Messersmith of the University of California became a 20-game winner with the California Angels. Mike Paul pitched for Cleveland. Graig Nettles played for Minnesota. USC quarterback Steve Sogge, a baseball catcher, played on that team. Rick Monday was an All-American at Arizona State, where he was a teammate of Reggie Jackson and Sal Bando in a program that captured the 1965 National Championship (also producing Mets’ pitcher Gary Gentry). In the very first amateur draft ever held in 1965, Monday became the first player chosen, by the Kansas City A’s.
“Monday was there the year I was and he couldn’t even make our team,” said Frisella. “I think 13 guys were signed off that team. It was semi-pro ball, and we played eight games a week. We didn’t get paid. Not for playing ball. But I earned $650 a month for pulling a lever on a dump truck. And I didn’t have to pull the lever too often.”
The man most responsible for the growth of summer collegiate baseball was Dedeaux. In 1963, when his Trojans won their fourth national championship, the press dubbed his team the “New York Yankees of college baseball.” He eventually retired with 11, having produced such stalwarts as Ron Fairly, Don Buford, Bill “Spaceman” Lee, Jim Barr, Dave Kingman, Rich Dauer, Steve Kemp, Fred Lynn, Steve Busby, Roy Smalley, Mark McGwire and Randy Johnson. His successor, Mike Gillespie, won the school’s 12th College World Series in 1998 (Texas is second with five) while producing such talented stars as Bret Boone, Aaron Boone, Jeff Cirillo, Geoff Jenkins, Jacque Jones, Morgan Ensberg, Barry Zito and Mark Prior.
If a young player wanted to test himself amongst the best of the best, he could find no more competitive environment than the USC baseball program. For Tom Seaver, having tasted real success for the first time in his life at Fresno City College, it represented the ultimate challenge. He needed that scholarship; not just to save his father from paying the steep tuition, but also to give himself imprimatur as opposed to “walk on” status.
Dedeaux had come out of Hollywood High School to become the captain of the Trojan baseball team. He had the briefest of Major League “careers” with the Brooklyn Dodgers, but befriended his manager, Casey Stengel. Later, Stengel brought his Yankees to Los Angeles for exhibition games against USC, giving college players the chance to play against Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford. After retirement from managing the Mets, he became a banking executive in Glendale, the L.A. suburb where Dedeaux lived. For years Casey was a regular at Trojan baseball games.
Dedeaux was a key figure in organizing and growing the popularity of the College World Series. The first CWS was held in Kalamazoo, Michigan and featured the University of California Golden Bears beating Yale for the national title. Yale’s first baseman was a war veteran named George H.W. Bush. Bush and Yale came back the next year, only to be beaten this time by Dedeaux’s Trojans. Eventually, the CWS found a permanent home in Omaha, Nebraska.
“He never looked like a ball player, but he had eyes in the back of his head,” said Bill Lee, who played four years under him from 1965 to 1968, earning All-American pitcher honors and a National title in his senior year. “He knew in the first inning what would happen in the fifth; in the fifth what to expect in the eighth.” The greatest teams Lee ever saw were “the 1975 Cincinnati Reds, any Taiwanese little league team, and the 1968 USC Trojans!”
“Dedeaux was the sharpest tack in the box,” recalled Mike Gillespie, who played on his 1961 College World Series champions.
An extraordinary amount of athletic talent flowed to the professional sports leagues from USC and California in general. Huge crowds watching Trojan football games at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum played a large role in luring the Dodgers and Lakers out west. Dedeaux modernized the collegiate game from a “club sport” to a pipeline for the pros. Utilizing the perfect California weather, he turned his into a year-round program. There was “fall ball” from September to Thanksgiving; followed by a full slate of 50-60 games in the spring instead of a paltry 20 or 25. But it was summer ball that Dedeaux turned into breeding grounds for diamond success.
A college player generally returned to his hometown after school let out and played on a pick-up team, or a ragamuffin semi-pro outfit. The competition was not good and players benefited little, returning to school without having progressed. Dedeaux wanted his players to experience something akin to minor league life; playing nightly games, traveling, and handling a fast brand of ball that prepared them for the college season, then a pro career.
In the 1950s he sent his players to Canada, where in addition to good baseball experience they enjoyed the educational aspects of life in an “exotic” locale far from home. When Alaska became a state, Red Boucher raised money to build a first class facility and began recruiting the best collegians to Fairbanks. Dedeaux and USC were his number one source. A league was developed with teams in Fairbanks, Anchorage (the Glacier Pilots and later the North Pole Knicks), the Palmer Valley Green Giants, and the Kenai Peninsula Oilers. Teams from Canada and the contiguous lower 48 states traveled to Alaska. The sun almost never set in the summer. Lights were not needed. On June 21 a “midnight sun” game starting at 11 P.M. was played without any lighting. The Alaskan teams also traveled, playing in an end-of summer tournament called the National Baseball Congress in Wichita, Kansas. The NBC featured all the best teams from across America. The Canadian teams generally played in the Kamloops International Tournament.
Years later, when Tom Seaver became a broadcaster even before his playing career ended, he told partner Joe Garagiola of his Alaskan experience during a World Series telecast.
“They play baseball in Alaska?” asked Garagiola.
“Really good baseball, Joe,” replied Seaver.
“Tell me about it,” inquired Garagiola, and Seaver did just that.
In June, 1964 Seaver boarded a plane for Fairbanks to join a team consisting of future big leaguers Monday, Nettles, Curt Motton, Ken Holtzman and Gary Sutherland of USC. They were All-Americans with national reputations. Seaver was immediately intimidated, wondering whether he, a junior college pitcher still battling the insecurities of a nothing prep career, could compete at this level. He had little time for contemplation once he arrived, however. Boucher’s wife met him at the airport.
“We’re playing a game right now,” she told him. “I brought a uniform with me. You can put it on at the field. We may need you.”
The beautiful stadium and the large crowd struck Seaver. In a town of 20,000, some 50,000 people attended Goldpanners games.
“I dressed in a shack near the field,” Seaver recalled.
There was no time for introductions when he arrived in the dugout, beyond Boucher’s handshake and orders to get to the bullpen to warm up right now. The score was tied 2-2 with the Bellingham, Washington Bells in the fifth inning as Seaver hurriedly got loose, was waved into the game and “met my catcher on the way to the mound.”
He proceeded to retire the side, then met his teammates in the dugout. That night, Seaver pitched effectively in relief, earning a hard-fought victory and the respect of his all-star mates. He was used mainly in relief, later rating himself the “third- or fourth-line pitcher” on the ‘Panners. He lived with the Bouchers. Aside from being a community leader, Red was a sharp baseball man who taught young Seaver important lessons on the psychology of pitching. He was very much like Tom’s optimist mother. Seaver came to understand that half the battle was believing in himself. Through psychology and the experience of successfully testing himself against the best, he was gaining invaluable confidence. Boucher told him that each morning he needed to wake up and say to himself, “I am a Major Leaguer.”
Dedeaux coached a summer team of USC players in Los Angeles that traveled to Fairbanks. Seaver pitched and mowed them down with high heat. When Boucher yelled at Dedeaux from across the field how it was going, the USC coached cracked, “How the hell would I know? I haven’t seen the ball since the second inning.” Seaver’s scholarship offer was seemingly secured that night, but there were still bumps in the road.
In August the Goldpanners made their way to Wichita for the NBC, stopping in Grand Junction, Colorado for a tune-up against a fast semi-pro outfit. Seaver started but was hammered off the mound. NBC rules required the roster be reduced to 18 players. Boucher had to decide between Seaver and Holtzman, an All-American at the University of Illinois. He visited Seaver in his hotel room to inquire of his confidence, but the young Californian just told him to “try me.” Boucher kept Seaver.
Against the Wichita Glassmen, Seaver was called on in relief with the Goldpanners winning 2-0. The bases were loaded in the fifth inning with one out. Boucher tried to steady his reliever, but Seaver just growled that he had “listened to you all summer long. Now it’s up to me. Give me the ball and get out of here.”
Confident or not, it took some doing for Seaver to steady himself. Two walks and an infield hit pushed across three runs and now the Goldpanners trailed, 3-2. A double-play kept the damage down. Over the next innings Seaver gained command. It was before the days of the designated hitter. In the eighth inning with the bases loaded Seaver came to the plate. Boucher saw something in the young man who had once batted .543 with 10 home runs in little league. He decided to let him hit. Seaver responded with a grand slam to win the game. He pitched and won a second game in the tournament, earning summer All-American honors from the National Baseball Congress. For the first time, professional scouts were evaluating him.
“We had a lot of players who could throw the ball harder than Tom,” Boucher recalled. “His fastball moved well, but he was no Sandy Koufax. His curve and slider were not much better than average by college standards. His greatest asset was his tremendous will to win. And he had this super concentration. He believed he could put the ball right through the bat if he wanted to.”
Dedeaux called Boucher and inquired of several USC players on the Fairbanks roster. Boucher interrupted him to say that Seaver would be “your best pitcher.” Boucher assured him that he would “bet on it,” to which Dedeaux replied that the Alaska manager was so high on the kid “I really don’t have any choice.”
Seaver had finally assured himself of the scholarship. He arrived at USC during a golden age on campus and in Los Angeles. That fall of 1964, quarterback Craig Fertig led the Trojans to a breathtaking comeback victory over Notre Dame, 20-17. USC’s running back, Mike Garrett, would go on to become the first of the school’s seven Heisman Trophy winners.
The actor Tom Selleck, a basketball, baseball and volleyball star out of Van Nuys High School, was on campus. A few years separated them, but Seaver and Bill Lee were in the program at the same time. It was a dominant age, under athletic director Jess Hill the greatest sustained sports run in college history. Aside from Dedeaux’s perennial champions, John McKay’s football team won two national titles and two Heismans in the decade. The track, swimming and tennis teams won NCAA titles with regularity.
Cross-town, John Wooden’s UCLA basketball dynasty was just heating up that year. Big league baseball was in full swing on the West Coast. The Los Angeles Angels were an expansion team. The Giants and Dodgers had continued their rivalry in California. Sandy Koufax and the Dodgers sold out the beautiful new Dodger Stadium and won the World Series twice in three years.
The famed USC film school also became world class at that time. Two of their most famous students were in school when Seaver was there. George Lucas would create the blockbuster Star Wars series. John Milius wrote the screenplays Dirty Harry and Magnum Force; then directed The Wind and the Lion and Red Dawn, among many others. He would become known as the most conservative filmmaker in notoriously liberal Hollywood. Another aspiring film student was turned down by USC. Steven Spielberg had to settle for Long Beach State, but as friends with Lucas and Milius, Spielberg was hanging around the campus so much he seemed to have matriculated there.
Those three became friends with Francis Ford Coppola, who was attending film school at UCLA along with future Doors’ rock legends Jim Morrison, Ray Manzarek and John Densmore. Together, Lucas, Milius, Spielberg and Coppola hatched a hare-brained scheme to go to Vietnam with actors to film a “docu-drama” in the style of Medium Cool, which was half-movie, half-footage from the 1968 Democrat National Convention in Chicago. The Vietnam idea was nixed (for some odd reason) by the Pentagon, but eventually became Apocalypse Now, featuring the haunting music of Morrison singing “The End.” All of it was detailed in a fabulous 1998 Hollywood book by Peter Biskind called Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and in the documentary Hearts of Darkness.
The USC campus has always been conservative, fraternity-oriented and traditional, but even more so when Seaver arrived. That fall, Republican Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater energized a conservative movement based in nearby Orange County, embodied by Republican student politics at USC. Numerous USC (and UCLA) graduates made up the campaign and later administration staffs of Richard Nixon. Among them were Watergate figures H.R. Haldemann, John Erlichman, Dwight Chapin, and Donald Segretti. In the 1976 film All the President’s Men, the Segretti character tells Dustin Hoffman, playing Carl Bernstein, about the so-called “USC Mafia” of that era.
Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy was received like a conquering hero when he toured for his autobiography Will, on campus in 1983. When Democrat Presidential nominee Walter Mondale campaigned at USC in 1984, he was met by the resounding chant, “Reagan country” in favor of the incumbent President. According to student accounts, controversial filmmaker Michael Moore was booed off stage when he screen Fahrenheit 9/11 on campus, leading him to start wearing a UCLA cap.
Bill Lee got a taste of the stuck-up nature of social life on campus, which he described in his riotous 1984 autobiography, The Wrong Stuff. Lee was dating a beautiful sorority sister until movie star “Alan Ladd’s kid snaked her away from me,” presumably with a show of wealth.
Seaver enrolled as a pre-dental student, joined a fraternity, and quickly made friends with Dedeaux’s son, Justin. His Marine experience immediately separated him from the silly frat boys. He also befriended Garrett. This arrangement came to symbolize all that is righteous about college sports. Here was Seaver, the white middle class son of an affluent business executive, “prejudiced” while in high school, paired with Garrett, the black inner city son of a single mother. Had they not been teammates at USC, these two never would have found each other. Instead they became the best of friends.
Garrett was an introspective young man bound and determined to make the most of his opportunity. He had been an All-American at Roosevelt High School in Los Angeles and of course made his name on the football field, winning the Heisman Trophy in 1965 and helping the Kansas City Chiefs win the 1970 Super Bowl. Eventually, he graduated from law school and became USC’s athletic director, where he hired the great Pete Carroll in 2000. Garrett was serious about baseball, too. He even took some time off from his NFL career to pursue the game in the Dodgers’ organization before returning to the San Diego Chargers in 1971.
“Mike was serious about things,” said assistant USC football coach Dave Levy. “One time he and I got into a big discussion and he expressed frustration that he could not rent an apartment in Pasadena because he was black. I just told him he needed to understand there were white folks of good conscience and that you had to let people change. I had discussions with black kids at USC and I said they needed to take advantage of the educational opportunities that sports provided them. Mike came to agree with me."
“If you’d told me that a black kid from Boyle Heights would win the Heisman Trophy,” Garrett said on the History of USC Football DVD (2005), “I’d have just said, ‘You’re crazy.’ ”
Seaver and Garrett were both intensely dedicated. They worked out together. Justin Dedeaux was amazed that Seaver could keep up with Garrett stride-for-stride running wind sprints. The Garrett-Seaver relationship also directly marks the beginning of a revolution in sports training, with profound consequences. Baseball players were told not to lift weights; that to do so would “tie up” their muscles, making them unable to throw and swing the bat. But Seaver had seen how much better he had gotten when he got stronger lifting boxes and later doing push-ups, pull-ups and rifle exercises in the Marines.
Jerry Merz, a friend of Seaver’s who studied physical education, recommended that Seaver lift weights to increase his strength. Garrett lifted weights for football and Seaver asked him to help start a regimen, which he did. Seaver’s stocky body responded to weight training, with immediate good results on the field. He would take his weight training routine with him into professional baseball, influencing a change in the perception of weights in the 1970s. Over time, all baseball players would bulk up on weights, and eventually this led to the rampant use of steroids.
Seaver’s casual, open relationship with Garrett was an eye-opener for him. Despite idolizing Henry Aaron from a young age, he had met few blacks. He had adopted the country club racism accepted by whites of that era, probably without fully realizing it. Charles “Tree” Young was a black track, basketball and football star at Edison High School in Fresno a few years after Seaver came out of Fresno High. He became an All-American tight end on the 1972 USC football team generally considered the greatest in history; later a star with the 1981 World Champion San Francisco 49ers before entering the Christian ministry.
“I most certainly knew all about Tom Seaver,” Young said. “He was from Fresno, had starred at USC, and made good with the New York Mets. But the Fresno of the 1960s was a place where you needed to know your place.”
Young lived in the “black section” of Fresno. It was not a segregated society, certainly not like the South. Edison High was integrated and Young a popular student-athlete.
“If you are good in athletics, you can go places and do things unavailable to others,” Young said. “When I arrived at USC, my first question was, Where’s the blacks? I quickly discerned that there was double meaning in the term Southern California. But through sports, black brethren and white brethren became one. It took some doing, and on our football it did not happen overnight.”
Young was a member of the 1970 USC football team that traveled to Birmingham and, behind running back Sam “Bam” Cunningham defeated Alabama, thus effectuating great racial change in the South. The Trojan team he played on, ironically, was racially divided as a result of the playing of black quarterback Jimmy Jones over white hotshot Mike Rae.
Young, a strong Christian, helped organize fellowship meetings in order to bring the team together, against some resistance. After a “revival” meeting in 1971, the 2-4 Trojans traveled to South Bend and beat 6-0 Notre Dame. That team never lost again, going on to an unbeaten National Championship the next year.
The nature of USC - its conservatism and traditions – has been credited by those who were there at the time with allowing such a thing to freely occur. By contrast, social angst and war protests dominated life at rival campuses Cal-Berkeley and Stanford. According to John McKay, the supposedly “enlightened” Stanford student body directed “the most vile, foul racial epithets I ever heard” at his team, one in which McKay had “provided more and greater opportunities for black athletes than any in the nation,” when they made their way onto the Stanford Stadium field.
A few years prior to that, Tom Seaver brought a certain amount of white conservatism with him. After all, his father ran a large company and he had never been exposed to radical politics. But USC was a place where ideas could flow more easily than at a segregated Southern campus, yet be tempered by the kind respect for tradition that seemed to have been lost at Berkeley. The Cal campus was allowing itself to become the de facto staging grounds of American Communism in the 1960s.
In the hierarchy of Trojan sports, Mike Garrett towered above a junior college baseball transfer like Seaver. But as teammates they gravitated to each other, finding their similarities more compelling than their differences. Garrett was considered undersized, and Seaver – at least until his recent growth spurt – had always identified himself as “the runt of our crowd,” as Dick Selma put it. He felt only admiration for Mike, who forged success for himself without the kinds of physical gifts of a later Trojan superstar, O.J. Simpson.
In 1965, Seaver worked hard to make it onto USC’s starting rotation. Oddly, it was a down year for the Trojans, who finished 9-11, in fourth place behind conference co-champions Stanford and California, and one game back of cross-town rival UCLA. But Seaver was excellent, winning 10 games against only two defeats with a 2.47 earned run average, establishing himself as the undisputed staff ace. He was named to the all-conference team along with Garrett and Justin Dedeaux. A major boost in his confidence came in an alumni game when Seaver got Dodgers first baseman Ron Fairly, a former Trojan, to pop up on a slider. As Fairly ran past Seaver on the mound he said, “Pretty good pitch, kid.” Seaver had retired a big league hitter, and allowed himself to dream big league dreams (three years later in the Major Leagues, Fairly connected on a Seaver slider for a home run).
In June 1965, the very first Major League draft was held. Rick Monday, an All-American outfielder for National Champion Arizona State, was the number one pick. Because he had not gone into the Marines his first year after high school, the sophomore Seaver’s college class was in its third year, making him eligible for the draft. Already, the strategy behind obtaining maximum signing bonuses meant that college juniors would get more, since they had the bargaining leverage of returning for their senior year. A graduated senior had to take whatever was offered him or go home, his eligibility gone.
His favorite team, the Los Angeles Dodgers, drafted Seaver. He and his USC pals regularly went to nearby Dodger Stadium on his uncle’s tickets to watch the great Sandy Koufax pitch. Scout Tom Lasorda came around to negotiate. If Seaver had lacked any confidence before, making All-American at the National Baseball Congress, retiring Fairly, and compiling a 10-2 mark for Troy took care of that. Lasorda offered $2,000. Seaver came back with $50,000, arguing that Selma had received $20,000 from the Mets out of junior college and he was a seasoned Trojan star. Lasorda came up to $3,000, but that was that. The tantalizing possibility of Tom Seaver forging a career on the great Dodgers teams of the 1970s would be only that, tantalizing.
“Good luck in your dental career,” Lasorda told him.
It was a real-world business lesson Seaver was not going to learn in any economics class. It also meant a return to Fairbanks in the summer of 1965. This time Seaver did not arrive in Alaska as an unknown, dressing in a shack and introducing himself to his catcher on the mound. There was sense of hierarchy on the Goldpanners, and the ace pitcher at the University of Southern California was tops on that hierarchy. It was as talented a team as any in the country, the “all-star” concept of picking the best collegians from around the nation making the Goldpanners better than most college teams and probably better than a lot of minor league clubs.
The “pitching staff was so deep and talented – Andy Messersmith, Al Schmelz, Danny Frisella and I were the starters . . .” recalled Seaver. As can happen when a young athlete achieves success, a sense of overconfidence – some call it “senioritis” – can effect his performance and often requires some “negative feedback” in order to right the tilting ship. The Goldpanners again made it to the NBC in Wichita, but the plethora of talented pitchers, all vying for mound time to gain experience, strengthen their college resumes, and of course get visibility for the scouts, meant that Seaver’s toughest competition came on his own team. In Wichita, “I had a chance to win only one game before we reached the semi-finals” against the Wichita Dreamliners.
A big crowd and lots of scouts came out for a ballyhooed match-up between the hotshot Trojan hurler and a semi-pro outfit consisting of four recent big league performers; Bobby Boyd, Jim Pendleton, Charlie Neal and Rod Kanehl. Neal and Kanehl had played for the New York Mets. Neal led off the game with a triple, Boyd added three hits, and Kanehl stole home as the Dreamliners defeated Seaver, 6-3. Seaver probably could have pitched around some of the ex-big leaguers but challenged them instead, paying the price. He hated walking hitters even if it meant giving them a pitch they could hit. After getting knocked from the mound, Boyd approached him.
“Kid, you got a great future ahead of you,” he told him. “You’re going to be a big league pitcher.”
Seaver felt the veteran was mocking him. That night, Tom and some teammates went out for beers. Kanehl joined them, repeating what Boyd had said. Fairly had expressed admiration for his ability, too.
Maybe they’re right.
Schmelz and Frisella both signed with the Mets instead of returning to school. Seaver came back to Southern Cal and immediately noticed a bevy of scouts at the “fall ball” games. He attended a number of Dodger games that September, focusing on Koufax as he pitched his team to the World Championship. The consensus among the scouts was that Seaver was one of the top young prospects in amateur baseball, and that the Dodgers had blown it by not signing him in the summer.
While Seaver’s baseball future was developing, so too was his personal future. In 1964 he sat in a class at Fresno City College a few seats away from a pretty blond named Nancy Lynn McIntyre. His smooth repartee and way with the girls deserted him, and he never said “two words to her the entire semester.”
At the end of the spring semester before heading north to Alaska, Seaver and some pals blew off steam drinking beers and playing softball when he spotted her. Impulsively he ran towards her and, in what had to be one of the most awkward “first dates” in history, was unable to stop himself, ran into her, knocking her flat. He then picked her up and asked if she wanted to go to a softball game.
“No,” she replied.
Seaver then, for all practical purposes, kidnapped her. She endured the softball game and agreed to a second “date” if it would be less violent. Over the next year and a half, the relationship faced challenges with Nancy in Fresno, Tom in Alaska for two summers and in Los Angeles going to school. She occasionally came to visit. He saw her on vacations back to Fresno. Their casual agreement was that they would see other people. In Los Angeles, Tom knew that a pretty girl like Nancy would have no trouble finding a guy. He had always been popular with girls. Dick Selma expressed amazement at how, despite being a JV pitcher, he dated all the best-looking girls in high school.
Now he was a “big man on campus,” best friends of the Heisman Trophy winner, star of the baseball team, rumored to be a bonus baby when the draft came around. Girls at USC were plentiful and he dated his share of them. Perhaps his Marine experience, or the up-and-down nature of baseball, had matured him beyond his years, but for whatever reason he did not want to “play the field” anymore. He and Nancy agreed to be exclusive, and after some initial difficulties both realized that they wanted marriage, a family and stability.
“Nancy and I,” he wrote in The Perfect Game, “seemed . . . to realize at the same time that life wasn’t about all parties, that we could be serious about ourselves and about other things without being pretentious or somber.” They both wanted to “live in a real world.”
They decided to marry, and more importantly, never to hurt each other; easier said than done. Tom’s prospects were certainly excellent. If baseball did not pan out, he would have a USC degree, followed by dental school and a nice practice back in Fresno. The only friendly glitch in the relationship was the fact that Nancy’s father argued the merits of Notre Dame football while Tom supported his Trojans. The Tom-Nancy partnership would prove to be a remarkable love story.
In January, 1966 a winter draft was held. Because of what eventually happened to Tom Seaver, the rules of the winter draft were later changed, but despite being in school he was selected number one by the Milwaukee Braves, who were that year in the process of moving to Atlanta. Braves’ scout Johnny Moore, who had seen ‘em all in Fresno, arrived at the Seaver household in a Cadillac. When he left Tom was $51,500 richer. He was a hot young prospect ticketed for the big leagues, where his teammate would be the great Henry Aaron!
No sooner did he sign with the Braves than he discovered the contract was invalid. USC had played a few early season games. A player could only sign prior to the playing of games on the spring schedule, and the Trojans always got off to an early start. Seaver would have to wait until the June draft, but he was not disappointed. He would pitch for Southern Cal. Then the NCAA declared he was ineligible since he had signed a pro contract. He was like Ko-Ko in The Mikado, caught in the middle of a “pretty state of things,” wrote his biographer, John Devaney.
Finally, the commissioner’s office got involved. It was decided that a “lottery” would be held. Any team willing to match the Braves’ offer could enter it. Three teams – Philadelphia, Cleveland and the New York Mets – did just that. The Dodgers wanted in, too, but general manager Buzzie Bavasi was so consumed in contract talks with Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale, both holdouts that spring, that he forgot to get the team’s name in. For the second time, the Dodgers passed up a chance to get Tom Seaver.
The Mets were selected and Seaver reported to Homestead, Florida, where their minor leaguers were well underway for Spring Training. The experience was extraordinary for him. Four years earlier, he had been less than a “suspect”; a warehouse “sweat box” lifter and a lowly Marine recruit with drill instructors screaming in his face. Year by year things had gotten better for him: junior college ace, proving himself with the Alaska Goldpanners, “big man on campus” at USC; now a bonus baby; and a few months later, married to the beautiful Nancy Lynn McIntrye.
The guy who could not make the Fresno High varsity until his senior year found himself trailed by curious glances and murmurs at Homestead. “That’s the guy from USC.” “That’s Seaver, they paid him over 50 grand.” Bud Harrelson, Jerry Koosman and Nolan Ryan were all in camp, but Seaver was singled out for the special treatment accorded to the most important prospects. It was dizzying, but Seaver had “class” according to Harrelson, who said that despite his place at the top of the totem pole, the bonus baby did not put on airs or try to show anybody up.
Most players start out at class A ball and have to fight for years to move up the ladder. The combination of Seaver’s college record, bonus money and the team’s lack of success meant that he started at triple-A Jacksonville, Florida. Manager Solly Hemus, who had seen a few in his long baseball career, declared him, “the best pitching prospect the Mets have ever signed,” and then paid him the ultimate compliment: “Seaver has a 35-year-old head on top of a 21-year-old body. Usually, we get a 35-year-old arm attached to a 21-year-old head.”
Seaver was teammates with Dick Selma at Jacksonville. Immediately he had success and was ticketed as a “can’t miss” prospect who would be in the Major Leagues soon, maybe even in September. He led the team in victories and strikeouts. He was given the nickname “Super Rookie,” or “Supe” for short. His future was secure when Hemus said he reminded him of Bob Gibson. When most minor league pitching prospects get hit, they are removed so as to protect their gentle psyches. Hemus realized Seaver had the mental toughness of . . . a 35-year old. When his rough patches came, as they always do, he kept him in to gain from the experience.
The roughest patch came off the field, when the “wizened” wives and girlfriends of the Jacksonville players set the naïve California girl Nancy “straight” on the notorious sexual habits of ballplayers. Tom assured her of his commitment to her, but her mind was filled with dreadful thoughts.
After a heavy workload at Jacksonville, the Mets decided not to call him up in September. Seaver and his new bride returned to Los Angeles, where he was now just another student at USC. Suddenly Seaver saw a new future in baseball, and began to think about broadcasting on the side. He transferred his major from pre-dentistry to public relations. Instead of living near campus, notorious for being near a high crime zone and at that time only a year removed from the nearby Watts riots, they lived in upscale Manhattan Beach.
In 1967, Seaver entered Spring Training amid speculation that he would be a starting pitcher. Had Seaver not been with the lowly Mets, he probably would not have made it to “The Show,” as the Majors are referred to, as quickly. He would have started out at singe-A or double-A, then worked his way up. Instead, he did start as a rookie in 1967. In truth, he was as ready as can be. Manager Wes Westrum not only put him in the starting rotation at the beginning of the season, he was talked out of starting him on Opening Day only out of caution.
The Mets were as bad as ever in 1967, only now they were just terrible, not funny. The old Casey Stengel stories, the wacky “Marvelous Marv” Throneberry antics, were gone. Now they just lost. Seaver was appalled.
“I was not raised on the Met legend,” he said. He had no affinity for any of that stuff. Despite being a rookie, he quickly ascended to a position of leadership on the club. When teammates laughed at their ineptitude, he refused to let them get away with it. Once, when Mets players were fooling around in the dugout during a game, Seaver found some spiders nesting in a corner. He scooped them all up and threw them at the offenders, telling them to wake up and pay attention. His attitude would have been taken exception to, except that he was so shockingly good. It earned him immediate respect.
Seaver’s work ethic was legendary, his concentration and seriousness unprecedented in Met history. He was immediately successful. When his brother, Charles Jr., a New York City social worker, visited a client he saw a poster of his brother hanging in his tenement apartment. It was an era before ESPN and the lowly Mets were not on national TV very much. Cincinnati’s Pete Rose openly wondered who “the kid” was at Gallagher’s, a New York steak house, when he saw an out-of-place Seaver sitting at a table by himself. Told whom he was, Rose then made the connection. This was the guy who beat his Reds, 7-3, on June 13.
He sure looks young but the kid’s got a helluva fast ball.
Against his hero Henry Aaron, Seaver induced the slugger into a double-play, but was almost in admiration of his opponent when Aaron adjusted later and hit the same pitch over the fence. Henry told him he was “throwing hard, kid.” He “stalked” Sandy Koufax at the batting cage when the now-retired legend was in town as a broadcaster. When Koufax recognized who he was, Seaver was taken aback but pleased.
Seaver earned a spot on the National League roster for the All-Star Game, played near his college stomping grounds, at Anaheim Stadium. This meant more embarrassed mistaken identity. Cardinal superstar Lou Brock thought he was the clubhouse boy and asked him to fetch a Coke. Seaver dutifully did that, but Brock had to apologize when he was informed who he was.
In the game, Seaver came on in extra innings to retire the American League, saving the National’s 2-1 victory. On the season he was 16-13 with a 2.76 earned run average, easily garnering Rookie of the Year honors. His 16 victories came with little offensive or defensive support from the 10th place Mets. He easily could have won 20 games in a year in which the great pitching aces of the era – Koufax, Don Drysdale, Bob Gibson, Juan Marichal – were retired, hurt or slumped. Mike McCormick, a journeyman southpaw with the Giants, won the Cy Young award, but in truth did not pitch better than Seaver.
The Tom Seaver of 1967-68 was still developing. In the beginning, he was considered a sinker-slider pitcher whose fast ball was excellent but not nearly at the level of such heaterballers of the time as “Sudden Sam” McDowell or Bob Gibson. But the late maturation process that began when he entered the Marine Corps had not reached fruition. His hard work and weight lifting paid off, and by late 1968 Billy Williams of the Cubs told teammates “he brings it” after being set down by him.
Seaver was honest with his manager when asked how he felt. Whereas most pitchers lied, Seaver put so much into pitching that by the eighth inning he was worn out. He and Nancy took to the New York scene feet flying. If ever a “sports couple” was seemingly born for the Big Apple, it was the Seavers.
“Nancy and I love this town,” Seaver told sportswriter Maury Allen. “We walk around Manhattan, up Fifth Avenue, past Carnegie Hall, down Broadway. We want to get to the Museum of Art and the Museum of Natural History on our next day off.”
Seaver felt a natural intellectual curiosity, fueled by his surroundings. The literary nature of New York society did not escape him. He read books by John Steinbeck, who had written of the central California that they both grew up in. Steinbeck’s vision of California was much different from Seaver’s easy affluence, but Tom had an inquiring mind and absorbed all of it. He read books about politics, satire and the classic baseball history book The Glory of Their Times, which allowed him to realize that he was part of something bigger than himself; that being a New York baseball star was special over and above playing in other cities. He had respect for the game and its traditions, and to Mets fans number 41 began to represent the sort of idol Whitey Ford and Mickey Mantle meant to Yankee supporters. They chanted “Seav-uh” as he mowed hitters down at Shea Stadium.
Seaver studied opponents and maintained detailed scouting reports. His dedication was total, but he also smiled and joked around. He was the quintessential “fan” living the fantasy of playing in the Major Leagues. Almost all big leaguers were high schools superstars who took their ability for granted, strutting around like they owned the place. Seaver was still pinching himself. Not only was he privileged to wear the uniform, he was the ace of the staff! On a bad team he was a “stopper” whose victories ended losing streaks.
“There was an aura of defeatism about the team, a feeling of let’s get it over with,” Seaver recalled. “I noticed that the team seemed to play better when I pitched but . . . that wasn’t right and I said so. I probably got a few people mad, but I went around and told the guys that if they did that for me and not for somebody else, it was wrong.”
“When Seaver’s pitching, these guys plain work a little harder,” noted catcher Jerry Grote.
“You notice his concentration out there on the mound when he’s pitching,” said Bud Harrelson. “And playing behind him, you try to match it.”
His performance in the All-Star Game filled him with not just pride and confidence, but inspired him to try and instill that same attitude in his teammates. He became the undisputed leader of the young Mets. After one dismal game he stood on a stool and announced: “Gentlemen, after watching that performance, I would like to take this opportunity to announce my retirement from the game of baseball.” If he pitched well but lost for lack of support he took the weight of defeat on his own shoulders.
“I just don’t feel I’m pitching as well as I can,” he lamented. “A mistake here . . . a mistake there . . . they add up. You wonder when you’re going to come on and start eliminating the mistakes.”
He was a perfectionist, a trait he inherited from his father. It applied to every aspect of his life; the way he dressed, the way he conducted his marriage, his life. He expressed admiration at brother Charles’s sculptures, since he could attain a sense of perfection in the work that seemed impossible in the messy, up-and-down competition of baseball. Still, each game he came out hoping for a perfect game, something Sandy Koufax had done. Koufax once said that he wanted a perfect game until the first man reached base; a no-hitter until the first hit; a shutout until the first run . . .
He made no excuses just because he was a rookie. He handled every aspect of his business, not just pitching well but fielding his position, showing some pop with the bat, and cheerleading on days he did not pitch. The older Mets were replaced more and more by youngsters who emulated Seaver’s professionalism.
“For the first time maybe,” Seaver told a Sport magazine reporter years later, “we realized that we had guys who cared deeply whether we achieved, that we had pitchers who could hit occasionally and who wanted to win so desperately. Looking back I think it was the first time in my experience with the Mets that we believed in each other, the first time I felt that that I wasn’t here to lose.”
Pitching coach Harvey Haddix marveled that Seaver absorbed his lessons, did not need to be told something twice, and analyzed his performances thoroughly. On road trips, he sat with Mets broadcasters Lindsey Nelson and Ralph Kiner, figuring he someday would be doing that, too. He never tailed off, as so many young hotshots do when the league figures them out, or they lose the psychological edge. In fact, Seaver in 1967 established a trait he maintained throughout his career: a strong finish. After winning the Rookie of the Year award, he said it was “nice,” but added the unthinkable: “I want to pitch on a Mets’ pennant winner and I want to pitch the first game in the World Series. I want to change things . . . the Mets have been a joke long enough. It’s time to start winning, to change the attitude, to move ahead to better things. I don’t want the Mets to be laughed at anymore.”
In the off-season Seaver continued his studies at Southern Cal. Years after achieving superstardom, wealth and worldwide fame, he continued going to school in the fall, finally earning a degree from USC in the mid-1970s. He was accorded celebrity status first by his hometown of Fresno, who gave him the “key to the city,” then by the USC baseball program. Working out to stay in shape in the off-season with a team led by Bill Lee (which would win the College World Series), he was one of their own who had made it. The up-and-coming Trojans were eager to hear tall tales of big league life. Seaver was good at weaving a yarn. Buoyed by a double in salary, happily married, he was sitting on top of the world.
In 1968, Gil Hodges took over as manager and the complexion of the Mets began to change. Some of those youngsters who Seaver first met during Spring Training in 1966 were breaking into the big leagues. Jerry Koosman, Tug McGraw, Bud Harrelson and Nolan Ryan were the face of the “new Mets.” An incredible amount of optimism surrounded the club throughout the winter and then Spring Training. Considering how bad they had been it seems to have been misplaced. Considering what they did just a year later, maybe not so much. The ultimate optimist was Seaver, but Hodges was a winner as a Brooklyn Dodger star; a fan favorite and one of those guys who were not so far from earning status in the true New York Sports Icon fraternity. He expected to win, too.
On Opening Day against Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Juan Marichal and the San Francisco Giants at Candlestick Park, Seaver took a hard-earned 4-2 lead into the bottom of the ninth inning. Exhausted, he was removed and watched in despair as his bullpen blew the lead in a 5-4 loss.
Same old Mets.
In his next start he shut out Houston for 10 innings but came away with a no-decision in a game lost by New York, 1-0 in 24 innings, when second baseman Al Weis let a groundball scoot under his glove.
Same old Mets.
After some early bumps in the road, however, the Mets rebounded and by mid-June were near the .500 mark, a remarkable record for this franchise. Hodges and Seaver developed a professional reputation based on mutual respect. Seaver’s on-mound demeanor was very intense, but one game he was laughing and grinning with catcher Jerry Grote during a game he won. Hodges advised that he should maintain a more disciplined presence, but was surprised to hear – and accept – Seaver’s explanation that in a game he lost he was “too tight,” and decided to loosen up in order to pitch better. Everything Seaver did had a method behind it. Hodges had seen many players over the years, and in Seaver he recognized a “new breed” of highly intelligent, motivated professionalism. The game was changing and Seaver was changing it.
But Seaver was in many ways an old-time baseball man. Despite his three-piece-suit, briefcase-carrying, Wall Street Journal-reading reputation, he was fun-loving, chewed tobacco and loved a few laughs over beers with the boys after the game. His teammates loved him. He was one of the guys, only more so.
1968 was a strange season. Known as the “Year of the Pitcher,” it was a season in which the Most Valuable Player in both leagues was a moundsman. In the American League, Detroit’s Denny McLain was the last 30-game winner. In the National League, Bob Gibson of St. Louis was even better, if that can be believed, hurling 13 shutouts, posting 48 straight scoreless innings, and a record earned run average of 1.12, a mark that may never be broken. Gibson struck out 17 Tigers in the World Series, but Detroit’s Mickey Lolich was the hero with three wins to earn the MVP. The National League won the All-Star Game, 1-0. Only one American Leaguer, Carl Yastrzemski of Boston (.301), batted over .300. Only five did it in the senior circuit. The combined ERA of both leagues was 2.99. Don Drysdale of Los Angeles set the all-time consecutive scoreless innings streak with 58. Oakland’s Catfish Hunter hurled a perfect game. Gaylord Perry of the Giants and Ray Washburn of the Cardinals threw no-hitters against each other’s teams on consecutive nights at Candlestick Park; a feat never equaled before. With scoring and by extension, attendance down, Major League Baseball decided to lower the height of the mound beginning in 1969. Baseball was dead, a casualty to pro football’s sexy image. Or so it seemed.
For Tom Seaver, 1968 was another year of great success matched by frustration. Outside of the superhuman Gibson, he pitched as well as anybody else in the league, but if the 1967 Mets had failed to support him, they looked like the “Murderer’s Row” Yankees compared to the 1968 version. Seaver said they owed the rest of the staff as much as they had given him but did not mean that they metaphorically skip town on his day to pitch.
He again appeared in the All-Star Game. In August his desire for perfection almost came to fruition when the Cardinals’ Orlando Cepeda broke up his bid in the seventh inning. It served to whet his appetite for one. He won 16 against 12 losses, with a sterling 2.20 ERA and 205 strikeouts. There was a distinct improvement in his velocity as his body grew in strength. Seaver dominated the opposition and could have won 20 or even 24 games in 1968, but the Mets were abysmal behind him.
They hit .228 as a team, but gave Seaver even less. Over one 11-game stretch, his ERA was 1.91 but opposing pitcher’s were 1.72 against New York bats, when they scored a mere 19 runs overall. Seaver’s record during that period was 2-5.
Off the field, Seaver visited Vietnam vets in the hospitable. Nancy was a self-confessed “liberal,” opposed to the war. Seaver still had the Marine experience drummed into his being, but he questioned America’s involvement. On the one hand, he read enough and understood history, so he realized that appeasement fails. In 1968 the world did not quite realize the horrors of Communism, although they certainly knew enough. But Mao Tse-Tung’s “Cultural Revolution,” then in its third year, and the 55 million murdered in Red China, were not fully revealed yet. But for now, Seaver was aghast at the loss of American life, the suffering of the wounded.
He gave his time to crippled kids, leaving the hospitable with tears streaming down his face. Seaver was a Christian, but kept his religious views private. He had a deep social conscience, understood that he was a role model, and knew from having admired hero-ballplayers himself what an impact he had on their young lives. Unlike Joe DiMaggio, a man of amoral self-interest, Seaver was happy to give of himself. Over the years, as he saw how those he thought were his friends really just wanted to get something from him, he would shut down somewhat, become wary, but in 1968 he was still a wide-eyed idealist who thought he could change the world.
Despite the Mets’ batting woes, there were hopeful signs. Rookie of the Year Jerry Koosman got the support Seaver did not. He also made the All-Star Game, winning 19 against 12 losses with a 2.08 ERA. The southpaw from Minnesota threw almost as hard as Seaver. Jerry Grote also made the All-Star team. With good young pitching, New York finally lifted themselves from 10th to ninth with a 73-89 record, which despite a second half slump was reason for celebration amongst their supporters. But Seaver, Hodges and the young team found no reason to jump for joy over a below-.500 season. They had their hopes set on bigger and much better things. However, Hodges suffered a late-season heart attack in 1968. His availability was in doubt when the season ended. Somebody wished Seaver luck the next year; hopefully more run support.
“So much depends on number 14,” Seaver said of 1969. 14 was Hodges’s number.
If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere
“Go west, young man.”
- New York publisher Horace Greeley, who stayed east and made a fortune
The story is a well-worn one: Manhattan Island purchased from local Indian tribes for a few beads. From there, it was developed by the Dutch into a trading colony. Its location made it a strategic city of importance to the American Revolution, the young U.S. economy, and then the government, which made it the capital until a settlement was made with the Southern states to turn a swamp in Washington into the Federal city.
It never needed to have the White House or Congress in its midst. New York was the most important of all American cities. As time wore on and the United States grew into the greatest, most powerful empire in the annals of human existence, it replaced the old seats of power: Athens, Rome, Byzantium, Paris, London.
Every form of human endeavor needed to be given its imprimatur there; that is, if it was to be given legitimacy, stamped with greatness. Art, literature, theatre, academe, finance, trade, even film and political power, supposedly centered in Hollywood and D.C., respectively, needed its NY stamp of approval.
Then there are sports, which were practically invented there. Of all the things considered important in and by New York, perhaps nothing matches the fervor for sports. Baseball came to America from English soldiers, who played cricket and a crude game called “rounders.” An Army officer named Abner Doubleday may or may not have taught his troops how to play baseball in Cooperstown, a small upstate New York village, in 1839. There are some reports that Doubleday was not even there at the time. Never mind. He eventually became a famous general and a Civil War hero. With a little good public relations, the story of Doubleday inventing baseball stuck. Soldiers on both sides of the lines were popularizing the game when they were not shooting at each other during the war.
It was in New York City where the landscape, the rules, and the dimensions of baseball were formulated. Some green plains were chosen and a “base ball diamond” was carved into the Elysian Fields, named after the mythical resting place where Roman soldiers went after they died.
Teams were formulated, fan bases established, the newspapers wrote it all up. A man named Jim Mutrie owned one franchise, which he admiringly called “my giants.” The city was giant. The team became the Giants. An organization, calling itself the National League, started in 1876. Next to Manhattan was a borough called Brooklyn.
Americans did things, accomplished things, built things that other countries never dreamed of. In Russia, a railroad was built in Siberia on flat ground. It took decades, was fraught with peril and mishaps. In the United State, the Trans-continental railroad connected the East Coast with the West Coast. It was built over both the Rocky and Sierra Mountain ranges, and as historian David Ambrose said in the title of his book, there was Nothing Like It in the World.
Americans erected tall buildings, eventually calling them “skyscrapers.” They defied nature, such as in the forging of the Erie Canal. They built great structures, and in 1883 the Brooklyn Bridge connected the borough to Manhattan. It was therefore brought, in some cases kicking and screaming, into official annexation with New York City. Immediately and forever after, Brooklyn had an inferiority complex.
The New York Giants played at the Polo Grounds and were the most successful organization in baseball. Brooklyn had a team, but it was always in search of an identity. The team never knew what to call themselves. They were the Atlantics, the Superbas and the Robins. Their fans arrived at their games via a precarious trolley car system in Brooklyn. They required a certain amount of dexterity in order to avoid being run over by the trolleys, and soon came to be known as “Trolley Dodgers.” Eventually, the team came to be known simply as the Brooklyn Dodgers. They played at Ebbets Field, a bandbox ballpark in the Bedford-Stuyvesant (Bed/Stuy) section of Flatbush, Brooklyn.
The Dodgers featured a player and later a manager named Casey Stengel. He was considered a “clown act” despite being a fine player and first class baseball man. Stengel reportedly missed one season because he had gotten a dose of venereal disease. On another occasion, Stengel doffed his cap and a sparrow flew out. As a manager, he presided over losing teams.
Wilbert Robinson managed Brooklyn to two losing World Series appearances (1916, 1920). The 1920 loss to Cleveland was marked by Brooklyn victimized by the only unassisted triple-play in Series history. A roly-poly, comic character, Robinson once tried to catch a baseball dropped from an airplane. Instead of a baseball, the aviatrix dropped a grapefruit, which splattered all over Robinson. Feeling the warm juice and pulp all over himself, Robinson’s first reaction was that he had been struck by the baseball and was bleeding to death. He called out to his “lads” to come to his aid, like a soldier taking his last breath on the Somme.
In the 1920s, Brooklyn’s baseball identity was considered part-carnival act. Columnist Westrook Pegler dubbed them the “Daffiness Boys.” Pitcher Dazzy Vance was a Hall of Fame hurler, but his reputation was that of a clown. Old photos of Vance reveal a man who looked to be 60 when he was 30 or 35. He looked . . . daffy. Photos of ball players in those days reveal extraordinary faces; hollowed cheekbones, ears sticking out like a cab driving down the street with both doors open, sunburns, bad skin, haunted eyes.
Life was difficult. Diets and training regimens were not what they are today. They drank heavily but had to play all day games with hangovers. Hygiene was a problem. Amenities like air conditioning were non-existent. They traveled by train, breathing soot along the way. Diseases like VD, polio, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, pneumonia and mumps cut people down. In 1918, a worldwide influenza epidemic killed millions.
Nicknames were freely given in those early years. There were the “Thundering Herd” USC Trojans out west, the “Galloping Ghost,” Red Grange of Michigan. George Herman Ruth was “Babe,” the “Sultan of Swat,” and the “Bambino.” Lou Gehrig was the “Iron Horse.” Christy Mathewson was known as “Big Six.” His mound partner was “Iron Joe” McGinnity
Everybody, it seems, was named “Rube.” There was Rube Marquard, Rube Bressler and Rube Waddell. Charles Stengel got “Casey” because he was from Kansas City (K.C.). Chris Berman would have had a field day with the Dodgers of that era, who featured “Uncle Robbie” Robinson, “Chick” Fewster, “Babe” Herman, “Jigger” Statz, “Watty” Clark, “Sloppy” Thurston, “Jumbo Jim” Elliott, “Lefty” O’Doul, “Pea Ridge” Day, “Ownie” Carroll, “Boom Boom” Beck, “Curly” Onis, “Whitey” Ock, Maximillia Carinus (Max Carey), “Buzz” Boyle, “Rabbit” Maranville, “Snooks” Dowd, and “Frenchy” Bordogaray.
Why not? The alternatives were Hollis, Walter, Manuel, Ralph, William, Raymond, Francis, Harold, Wilson, Clyde, Owen, Arnold and Clarence (Dazzy).
“What baseball fan of sound mind and body would choose to root for Hollis and Clyde and Clarence when offered the option of cheering for Sloppy and Pea Ridge and Dazzy?” wrote Glenn Stout in The Dodgers: 120 Years of Dodgers Baseball. Then there was Van Lingle Mungo, whose actual lyrical name inspired jazz ballads.
Many players wore white, long-sleeved undershirts. Vance took the white undershirt and sliced it up with scissors so that it hung in strands off his right arm. Wilbert Robinson often saved him to pitch on Mondays at Ebbets Field. Why?
“You couldn’t him ‘im on a Mundy,” said Rube Bressler in The Glory of Their Times. He pronounced Monday Mundy. “On a clear Mundy the batter never had a chance.”
Vance applied whited lye to his torn undershirt and pitched straight overhand. Between the bleached sleeve waving and flapping white sheets hanging from clotheslines out of Flatbush apartment houses behind the center field wall, “You couldn’t hit ‘im on a Mundy . . . diapers, undies, sheets flapping on clotheslines – you lost the ball entirely,” said Bressler. “He threw balls by me I never even saw.”
Vance was involved in the play that defined the “Daffiness Boys.” With Babe Herman at bat, Hank DeBerry on third, Vance on second and Chick Fewster on first with no outs, Herman hit a ball to right that hit the wall, scoring DeBerry. Vance held up to see if it was caught. He then rounded third but was too slow to score, so he headed back to the bag. Fewster, running with his head down, arrived at third at the same time as Vance. Herman, running fast and also not looking, stretched out a “triple.” With Fewster standing on third, Vance slid back into the base just as Herman slid into it from the other side!
The third baseman, not knowing what to do, tagged all three of them. The umpire was confused and brouhaha ensued amongst Fewster, Herman, the third baseman, the umpiring crew, the third base coach, and both managers. The crowd hooted with laughter while the sportswriters immediately thought of wild adjectives to describe the hilarity.
Vance lay on the ground observing it all in bemused silence. Finally he lifted up his head and began to speak in the manner of a be-wigged English barrister. Silently, all eyes fell on him as he stated: “Mr. Umpire, Fellow Teammates, and members of the Opposition, if you carefully peruse the rules of Our National Pastime you will find that there is one and only one protagonist in rightful occupation of this hassock – namely yours truly, Arthur C. Vance.”
He was right. Herman had “tripled into a double play.” It was a “clown act,” an image of lovable boobs that would be repeated by the New York Mets of the 1960s. But the concept of clowns and losers, while humorous in Brooklyn perhaps, was overshadowed by the excellence of the other two New York baseball franchises.
John McGraw managed the Giants from 1902 to 1932. At 5-7, 155 pounds in his youth he was known as “Little Napoleon” and even resembled the French dictator. To this very day, if an “all-time all-star team” is chosen by truly knowledgeable baseball historians, McGraw may very well be considered the finest manager of all time. He was voted just that when the game celebrated its 100th year of professional baseball in 1969.
McGraw’s Giants won the 1905, 1921, and 1922 World Series. They were the class of the National League. In his early years, the Giants featured one of the finest pitching combinations in baseball history. Christy Mathewson was a four-time 30-game winner who achieved 37 victories in 1908. Mathewson’s performance in the 1905 World Series may be the greatest in history, compared to only by Sandy Koufax in 1963 and Bob Gibson in 1967. Mathewson pitched three shutouts against the Philadelphia Athletics. Over the course of his career, “Matty” won 373 games. His pitching partner was “Iron Joe” McGinnity, a Hall of Famer who won more than 30 games in the 1903 and 1904 seasons.
Twice, McGraw’s Giants met strange fates that cost them ultimate glory. In September of 1908 at the Polo Grounds, the Giants and Chicago Cubs were tied in the ninth inning with two outs and the bases loaded. Al Bridwell singled the winning run in from third. Rookie first baseman Fred Merkle of the Giants, the runner at first base, did not run and touch second. The crowd descended on the field, as was the custom of the day, since they exited through an open center field gate that led to the subway station. Chicago second baseman Johnny Evers saw that Merkle never touched second. Amid the confusion, he tried to retrieve the ball so he could touch second base, but McGinnity saw what was going on, “intercepted” the ball and threw it out of the stadium. Evers went to the ball bag, pulled another baseball out, got the attention of umpire Hank O’Day, ran to touch second, and O’Day declared Merkle out. The crowd was unaware of what had happened and of course McGraw was apoplectic when told, but the call stood. Instead of a 2-1 Giants victory, the game was declared a tie to be replayed only if it effected the final standings at season’s end.
The schedule ended in a flat-footed tie so a play-off had to be held at the Polo Grounds. Cubs Hall of Famer Mordecai “Three-Fingered” Brown defeated Mathewson and Chicago went on to win the last World Series in their history! Fred Merkle’s failure to touch second remains the legendary “Merkle boner.”
In 1912, the Giants battled the Boston Red Sox in the World Series. It was the first year the Sox played in Fenway Park. Their “boy wonder” ace, “Smoky Joe” Wood won 34 games. John F. Kennedy’s grandfather, John F. Fitzgerald (known colloquially as “Honey Fitz”) was the Mayor of Boston, popular in large measure because he jumped on the Red Sox bandwagon (when not handing out “walking around money” as bribes to Irish voters).
The Series went to the seventh game, with Matty battling Wood in a classic for the ages. The Red Sox won when New York center fielder Fred Snodgrass dropped an easy fly ball. It has forever been known as the “Snodgrass muff.”
On June 3, 1932, Lou Gehrig of the New York Yankees hit four home runs. He was forever being overshadowed, first by Babe Ruth, and on that day by John McGraw, who chose it to announce his retirement after three decade managing the Giants. Hall of Fame first baseman Bill Terry took over as skipper of the Giants, and in 1933 they won the World Series. Hall of Fame pitching sensation Carl Hubbell led New York throughout the decade. In 1934, Hubbell struck out five straight future Hall of Famers (Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Fox, Al Simmons, Joe Cronin) in the All-Star Game. Outfielder Mel Ott was the home run sensation of the National League.
To the extent that there had up until that time been a rivalry between the proud Giants and the lowly Dodgers, it kicked into gear in 1934. The Giants and St. Louis Cardinals were locked in a tight struggle for the pennant when New York played Brooklyn late in the season. Asked his concern about the Dodger series, Terry replied with rhetorical sarcasm, “Are they still in the league?” Brooklyn beat New York and St. Louis went on to win the World Series.
New York is a baseball town, but much of its legend is steeped on the gridiron. Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne built a dynasty. In the 1920s, a Christian revival movement swept America, particularly the South and the Midwest. It had dark overtones of white supremacy, giving rise to the long-dormant Ku Klux Klan and strong anti-Catholic sentiments, which Rockne and his team faced on the road. Rockne determined to play a schedule in large metropolitan stadiums, where he knew a “subway alumni” fan base of Irish, Italian and Polish Catholics rooted for Notre Dame.
An invitation to play Stanford in the Rose Bowl was accepted, followed by Southern California in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and at Soldier Field in Chicago. But among the most memorable “barnstorming” Notre Dame games were those played in New York; first and foremost the 1924 battle with national powerhouse Army.
Led by the wondrous backfield of Elmer Layden, Harry Stuhldreher, Don Miller and Jim Crowley, Notre Dame defeated Army, 13-7 on October 18, 1924. The next day, New York Herald-Tribune sportswriter Grantland Rice’s column said, “Under a blue, gray October sky, the Four of Horsemen of Notre Dame” rode on the “green plains” of the Polo Grounds, comparing them to the Biblical “Hour Horsemen of the Apocalypse” as described in The Revelation. The legend was made.
Four years later in 1928, this time at Yankee Stadium, Notre Dame was a considerable underdog against Army. Trailing at halftime, Rockne told his team that eight years earlier All-American back George Gipp, dying of strep throat, told him that some day when “the boys are up against it” to go out there one last time to “win one for the Gipper.” It was blarney; Rockne made up the story, but when the Irish rallied to beat Army it made the newspaper accounts and was embellished into pure legend.
In 1944 and 1945, Army under coach Earl “Red” Blaik featured some of the greatest national championship teams in history. A “teammate Heisman Trophy” duo of Doc Blanchard and Glenn Davis (“Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside”) led Army to two straight blowouts of the Irish by the combined score of 107-0. On November 9, 1946, with World War II won and unbeaten Army symbolizing American superiority, underdog Notre Dame held them to a 0-0 tie. Future Irish Heisman Trophy winner Johnny Lujack tackled Blanchard in the open field to save the day, and the Irish were rewarded with the National title.
Great broadcasters described astounding sports action to a breathless, sports-crazed nation in the 1920s and 1930s. Ted Husing and Graham McNamee’s staccato deliveries characterized the early style. Later, Red Barber, Mel Allen, Russ Hodges and Vin Scully became like family friends to millions of New Yorkers.
The New York Times, the Herald-Tribune and numerous other major dailies provided vivid sports descriptions, making legends out of such talented scribes as Grantland Rice, Ring Lardner, Red Smith, Jimmy Cannon and Jimmy Breslin.
Under the ownership of the Mara family, the New York Giants became one of the leading franchises in professional football. In the 1950s, the simply-named “New York Giants Defense” was orchestrated by assistant coach Vince Lombardi and defensive back/captain Tom Landry. In December of 1958 the Giants squared off against the Baltimore Colts in a game some still call the best in pro football history. It is certainly credited with making the National Football League popular at a time in which baseball dominated.
The Giants and Colts battled it out at Yankee Stadium in front of a national television audience. Baltimore’s legendary quarterback, Johnny Unitas, led the Colts on a comeback drive forcing the game into overtime, then propelled them to the World Championship in the extra period. In 1986 and again in 1990, coach Bill Parcells led the Giants to Super Bowl championships led by the virtuoso defensive play of the great Lawrence Taylor.
The open-air Madison Square Garden saw great boxing matches in the 1920s and 1930s. Such stalwarts as Gene Tunney, Jack Dempsey, the Cinderalla Man (Jim Braddock), Joe Louis, Max Schmelling, “Sugar Ray” Robinson, Rocky Marciano, Jake LaMotta, Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, George Foreman, and Mike Tyson were part of the colorful fight scene in New York.
The U.S. Open, played for years at Forest Hills in Flushing Meadows, became the most exciting of the major tennis tournaments. New York crowds tended to be more raucous, and the nighttime matches gave a sense of drama and spectacle. Such stars as Rod Laver, Arthur Ashe, Jimmy Connors, Bjorn Borg, Pete Sampras, Andre Agassi, Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Billie Jean King, Chris Evert, Martina Navratilova, Steffi Graf, and Venus Williams have lit up the action. John McEnroe grew up near Forest Hills and attended high school in Manhattan before heading off to Stanford. When he turned professional, he became a fan favorite at the U.S. Open. His matches with Connors and Borg are the stuff of legend.
The New York Rangers were popular in hockey-savvy New York, but later the Islanders had one of the great dynasties in NHL history (winning four straight Stanley Cups).
The New York Knickerbockers were, prior to the 1969-70 National Basketball Association campaign, average at best. However, New York is a big basketball town and fans at Madison Square Garden, located in mid-town Manhattan across the street from Toots Shors, followed them closely. High school basketball, and the strange hybrid of playground hoops, had always permeated the New York conscience. The great Connie Hawkins came out of Brooklyn, a legend as much for his outdoor exploits as for what he did in regular games. Lew Alcindor (later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) was probably the greatest high school basketball player of all time at Power Memorial Academy, an all-boys Catholic school (that is not there anymore) on Amsterdam Avenue on the West Side between 1962 and 1965.
The period between 1968 and 1970 remains one of the most golden in New York sports memory; and there have been many golden moments. First there was the Jets. Then, in 1969, the Mets and the Knicks. As the Mets were shocking the world in the fall of 1969, the Knickerbockers were embarking on a surprise campaign. For years, Bill Russell and the Boston Celtics had dominated the NBA. More often than not, the Celtics found the road to the championship ran through Los Angeles, where the Lakers featured Jerry West and Elgin Baylor.
The Philadelphia 76ers were the only team to break up Celtic hegemony when Wilt Chamberlain led them to the 1967 crown. When Chamberlain joined the Lakers in 1968, all bets were off. The Lakers were felt to be the best team ever assembled. By 1969, there seemed no obstacle to a Lakers championship. With Russell retired, Boston was a non-factor.
But then Chamberlain was injured and as the season played out, the best team in the NBA was Red Holzman’s surprise Knickerbockers. Led by powerful center Willis Reed, “Dollar Bill” Bradley, the brilliant Rhodes Scholar-forward from Princeton, and the legendary Walt “Clyde” Frazier at guard, the Knicks dominated league play. They overcame Alcindor’s Milwaukee Bucks in the Eastern play-offs. This set up a showdown with Los Angeles, where Chamberlain had recovered from his injury and the Lakers were clicking on all cylinders.
The seven-game masterpiece between the Knickerbockers and Lakers of 1970 remains one of the true hoop classics. Passionate Madison Square Garden fans chanted “DE-fense,” and the glitterati came out to cheer their heroes from courtside seats. The odd dynamic of the Jets-Mets-Knicks ascension of 1968-70 was in the enthusiasm of the crowds; a paradigm shift from longtime Yankee Stadium fans, who took their victories in the manner of Caesar eating grapes while the prisoners from Gaul were paraded before him.
Screenwriter William Goldman wrote such classics as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, A Bridge Too Far, All the President’s Men and Marathon Man. He was so enthralled with the New York Knickerbockers that he missed the 1970 Oscar ceremonies, when he won the Academy Award for Butch Cassidy, in order to watch them play.
At the Garden, Jerry West threw in a desperation 62-foot heave at the buzzer to force overtime, which was won by New York. Reed later endured an excruciating deep thigh tear. Chamberlain dominated game six so thoroughly that, without Reed, game seven seemed hopelessly lost. At the Garden, Bradley and Dave DeBusschere pleaded with Reed to suit up. There was virtually no hope that he could actually play, but they felt that simply having the big man in uniform might be a lift.
All that day, New Yorkers pessimistically predicted a Knicks loss, while hoping against hope that Reed could play. By game time, it had become an urban legend, with wild rumors of Reed’s condition spreading from the East Side to the West Side, from uptown to the docks. The crowd filed into the Garden, slightly subdued. The teams warmed up. No Reed. Murmurs filled the arena.
In the Knickerbockers’ dressing room, Reed faced the biggest needle he had ever seen. According to reports, the injury was so deeply embedded within his leg, and his thighs were so huge, that the doctor needed to plunge the needle until his fist was touching Reed’s skin. Reed found God or something; whatever it took to endure the pain. It was like Sandy Koufax, who claimed the treatments for his sore pitching arm were more painful than actually pitching.
Then, with the game minutes away, a single figure emerged from the Knicks’ dressing room: a hobbling Willis Reed. Chamberlain and the Lakers stared at him from across the court, like Apollo Creed when Rocky picks himself up from the canvas.
New York sports fans are notoriously loud, but to those who there, the sound accorded Reed as he ambled onto that court was off the hook, electric like nothing heard in the Garden before or since, which is saying something. Chamberlain and the Lakers tried to play it off, told themselves Reed was just there for show, but they were doomed.
At the tip-off, Reed told Chamberlain, “I can’t go to my left.” Wilt just stared at him. Reed never went to his left, ever. The game started and Reed hit a medium-range shot. The Garden went ballistic. As the game went on, Reed was not much of a factor, certainly not on offense, but it did not matter. He had inspired his team. The game was all over but the shouting by halftime, with the Knickerbockers cruising to the NBA title. They repeated the feat in 1973, again beating Chamberlain, West and then-defending NBA champion Los Angeles.
In 1919, eight members of the Chicago White Sox “threw” the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds at the behest of gambling interests. The first Commissioner of Baseball, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, banned the “Black Sox” from ever playing baseball again.
In the first two decades of the American League, the Boston Red Sox were the class of the junior circuit, winning the 1903, 1912, 1915, 1916 and 1918 World Series. Their greatest player was George Herman “Babe” Ruth, a recalcitrant reform school dropout from the streets of Baltimore. Ruth was the best left-handed pitcher in baseball.
In the years in which the Red Sox dominated, the New York Yankees were an also ran. At first, they called themselves the Highlanders. They did not have their own stadium. In 1919 they rented the Polo Grounds from the Giants.
After the 1919 season, Red Sox owner Harry Frazee needed money to finance a Broadway play called No, No Nanette. In order to do this, he sold to the Yankees not merely Babe Ruth, but future Hall of Fame pitchers Herb Pennock and Waite Hoyt. Later, he traded excellent catcher Wally Schang and stalwart third baseman Joe Dugan to New York. Thus was born the “Curse of the Bambino.”
Ruth had demonstrated so much power-hitting ability that the Red Sox turned him into an outfielder in 1919. After the “Black Sox scandal,” baseball needed something to regain its popularity. The baseballs were tightened, replaced with a livelier core, allowing for it to travel longer distances. Umpires were instructed to use new, shiny white baseballs instead of keeping old, scuffed-up balls in the game. Spitballs were outlawed with the exception of a handful of known “spitball specialists.” The results were revolutionary.
America had entered a stalemated World War I in 1917, giving victory to the Allies a year later. Suddenly a major world power, the American economy exploded under Republican leadership in the “Roaring ‘20s,” its populace taking to sports like never before. People moved to the cities, radio was popularized, silent movies were all the rage, new heroes emerged; Charles Lindbergh flying solo over the Atlantic, Rudolph Valentino on the silver screen.
The National Football League was born in 1920. Harold “Red” Grange electrified college crowds at Illinois, then did the same with the Green Bay Packers. Notre Dame and Southern California started their rivalry and become idols of collegiate football. New sports palaces emerged across the Fruited Plain. Crowds of 75,000 watched the Irish and Trojans at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum; upwards of 120,000 at Soldier Field in Chicago. The Rose Bowl was erected in Pasadena, California, drawing spectacular crowds and making college football a national game.
“The Swamp” in Florida, the “Big House” in Michigan, the “Horseshoe” in Ohio; Stanford Stadium and Memorial Stadium in California; and Notre Dame Stadium, were all built over the next decade.
Ruth was beyond anything seen before or since. No athlete has ever dominated his game as Ruth dominated baseball in the 1920s. To put it into perspective, it would have been as if, when Barry Bonds hit 73 home runs in 2001, the next-highest total would have been 25 instead of Sammy Sosa, who hit more than Roger Maris’s old record, 64! When Ruth hit 54 home runs in 1920, the next man in the American League was George Sisler (19). In 1921 Ruth hit 59 followed by Ken Williams and Bob Meusel (24).
In 1923, Yankee Stadium was built in the Bronx. It was immediately dubbed the “House That Ruth Built.” That season, the Yankees defeated the Giants for their first World Series title. Shortly thereafter, Lou Gehrig joined the Yankees off of the campus of Columbia University. The Ruth-Gehrig home run duo became the greatest in history, the core of the famed “Murderers Row” line-up that captured the 1927 and 1928 World Series. The 1927 Yankees under manager Miller Huggins are still thought of as the best baseball team of all time, at least in many circles.
Ruth retired with 714 lifetime home runs, a record since broken by Hank Aaron and Barry Bonds, both of whom took season’s worth of at-bats more to do it. Many arguments have ensued, and in 2000 ESPN even did a poll that said Michael Jordan was the greatest athlete of the 20th Century. Muhammad Ali has his supporters, and there are other contenders.
Babe Ruth is not only the greatest baseball player who ever lived, he is the greatest athlete of all time.
After Ruth retired Gehrig took over. He played in a record 2,130 straight games, spearheading the Yankees’ World Championship teams of 1936, 1937 and 1938. In 1939 the Yankees won their fourth straight World Championship under manager Joe McCarthy. Led by the great Joe DiMaggio, the Yankees won the World Series again in 1941, 1943, 1947, 1949, 1950 and 1951.
Casey Stengel took over and led them on a stretch even more dominant than before: five straight World Championships between 1949 and 1953, then two more in 1956 and 1958. Superstars Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford were giants of the game. They were corporate, Wall Street pinstripers, as unstoppable as George Patton’s Fifth Army on the march. Rooting for them, it was said, was like “rooting for U.S. Steel.” The most popular Broadway play of the era was Damn Yankees, the premise being that the only way to beat the Yankees was to do a deal with the devil.
Ralph Houk became the Yankees’ manager in 1961, the year right fielder Roger Maris broke Ruth’s single-season home run record of 60, set in 1927. Under Houk, the Yankees won the American League championship four straight years (1961-64) and the World Series in 1961 and 1962.
After a dormant period, owner George Steinbrenner took over and manager Billy Martin’s Yankees won the 1977 World Series. Reggie Jackson hit three home runs in the game six clincher against Los Angeles, a total of five for the Series. New York repeated in 1978, coming from 14 games back to beat Boston, then going on to beating the Dodgers in the Fall Classic again. Great pitchers of the era included Catfish Hunter, Ron Guidry, Sparky Lyle and Goose Gossage. Third baseman Craig Nettles was a glove standout, and the late Thurman Munson starred behind the plate.
Manager Joe Torre led the Bronx Bombers to four World Championships in five seasons between 1996 and 2000. Overall they have won 26 World Championships. There are other obscure records, such as Southern California’s 26 NCAA track titles, but it is the most awesome record in sports. Other great dynasties – Notre Dame and USC in college football; UCLA in college basketball; the Boston Celtics’ 16 NBA championships; the San Francisco 49ers and Pittsburgh Steelers with five Super Bowl victories; the Packers, Canadiens, the U.S. Olympic team being medals winner in 17 Summer Games – all pale in comparison.
The Yankees are the ultimate symbol of American superiority, and therefore represent all that is bigger, better, richer and more successful about New York City. They, like America, are viewed much the same way: loved, hated, admired, emulated, fought for, and when fought against, usually in futile manner.
When Bill Terry asked the rhetorical question, “Are the Dodgers still in the league?” in 1934, it heated up the natural Giant-Dodger rivalry in that Brooklyn knocked New York out of the pennant chase. The rest of the 1930s were still dominated by the Giants, although they found themselves at the mercy of the Yankees in both the 1936 and 1937 World Series.
A power shift occurred in 1941. The Giants entered a period of stagnation in which they became a victim of their ball park; left-handed home run hitter-heavy, no speed, mediocre pitching. Leo Durocher took over as the manager of the Dodgers. He wanted nothing to do with the “Daffiness Boys” image, instead urging pitchers to “stick it in his ear.” Led by the fabulous Pete Reiser, the Dodgers won the 1941 National League championship, but found themselves up against the Yankees in the Fall Classic.
Yankee history includes no “Merkle Boners” or “Snodgras Muffs.” Their highlight tapes feature no pinstriped Bill Buckners letting easy grounders under his glove, or Yankee fans interfering with key pop flies, as in the Steve Bartman incident at Wrigley Field in 2003.
This being the 21st Century, we now know that after “waiting ‘til next year” for 14 years, in 1955 the Brooklyn Dodgers finally won the World Series. But before the Red Sox’ “Curse of the Bambino,” before the White Sox finally got there, before the century-old drought of the Cubs; before tales of the long-suffering fandom of the Raiders, Cowboys, Rams, Lakers, Angels and other sports teams, the Brooklyn Dodgers were the kings of disappointment.
Herein we have the unique connection between the New York Mets and the Brooklyn Dodgers. When the Dodgers and Giants left New York in 1958, they ceded it to the Yankees. The Yanks won a war of attrition. It was like terrorists who keep blowing themselves up until one day there are not any more left to detonate. The stronger unit, rich and powerful enough to withstand the whole mess, “wins.”
But when the New York Mets came into existence, there was an immediate connection not with the Giants (even though they played at the Polo Grounds for the first few years), but with the Dodgers. It was that Dodgers image; lovable losers, a little wacky, a little “daffy,” colorful, eccentric; that they saw in the Mets. The Mets reached into New York’s baseball past, and when they did they went mostly for old Dodgers – Duke Snider, Gil Hodges, Charlie Neal, Don Zimmer, Roger Craig - not old Giants. There was little connection between the Mets and the Yankees. The Casey Stengel who managed the Mets from 1962 to 1965 bore more resemblance to the Stengel who produced a sparrow from his cap, the “clown act” who managed lowly Dodgers teams, than he did to the manager of the lordly Yankees.
The “Daffiness Boys” image might have been replaced by serious baseball when “Leo the Lip” took over, but the succession of frustrations, disappointments, “close but no cigars” and “wait ‘til next years” had the same comical, we’re-Brooklyn-so-laugh-it-off flavor to it that inculcated early Mets fandom.
“I am not superstitious, but I do think it is bad luck to bet against the Yankees,” said writer Ring Lardner.
So it was in the 1941 World Series, with Brooklyn trailing New York two games to one. Dodgers pitcher Hugh Casey struck out the Yankees’ Tommy Henrich to win the game . . . except that the ball got by catcher Mickey Owen. Owen went after the ball “in a vivid imitation of a man changing a tire, grabbing monkey wrenches, screwdrivers, inner tubes, and a jack, and he couldn’t find any of them,” according to the New York Herald-Tribune. Henrich made it to first, and from there “the roof fell in,” according to sportswriter Tommy Holmes. Casey got two strikes on Joe DiMaggio, who had hit in 56 straight games that year. Every patron of Ebbets Field knew he would get a hit prior to his accomplishing the act. The rest is quite desultory; a story of Yankee efficiency and Brooklyn clumsiness, the result being a 7-4 New York win en route to a five-game Series championship.
In the 1940s, Brooklyn was in the pennant chase almost every season, usually with the St. Louis Cardinals, Boston Braves, and in1950 with the Philadelphia Phillies. They won some, lost some. In 1946, Brooklyn general manager Branch Rickey took the unprecedented step of signing the first black player, Jackie Robinson.
Robinson had been a football star at UCLA. His Bruins featured other black stars such as Kenny Washington and Woody Strode (the black gladiator who dies so Kirk Douglas can live in Spartacus). Their battles against integrated USC teams in front of packed L.A. Coliseum crowds already had a major social effect on the West Coast. Like the California collegiate programs, the East Coast had been the scene of integrated football as well. Fritz Pollard of Brown and Paul Robeson of Rutgers were All-Americans.
Robinson was an Army officer during World War II, a Christian family man. After having won a war against the deranged, racist ideology of Adolf Hitler, Rickey felt now was the time and New York – specifically Brooklyn – was the place to break the “color barrier.”
Robinson broke into the big leagues in 1947, earning the Rookie of the Year award while leading his team to the pennant. He developed into a major American hero for his courage under racial fire, paving the way for so many minorities who followed. Robinson and the social progress he represented came to symbolize the Brooklyn Dodgers and the borough itself.
The Yankees were viewed as Wall Street “fat cats,” but Brooklyn and the Dodgers were a true “people’s team.” Brooklyn was a melting pot of Jews, Irish, Italians, Polish and blacks. It was a place that always fought for its own identity, a place for underdogs with an inferiority complex. Oddly, it was the success of these underdogs that drove Brooklyn out of Brooklyn, at least in a roundabout way. As more and more Brooklynites assimilated, achieving the “American Dream,” they moved into the suburbs of Long Island and New Jersey, leaving low attendance and a crime problem in Brooklyn.
Robinson was the National League’s Most Valuable Player in 1949. His black teammate, catcher Roy Campanella, was the MVP in 1951, 1953 and 1955. Another black Dodger, pitcher Don Newcombe, was the 1956 MVP (as well as Cy Young award winner). Between 1947 and 1969, 16 National League MVPs were black (including the Puerto Rican Roberto Clemente in 1966). No black American Leaguer won the MVP award until Elston Howard of the Yankees in 1963.
The term “National League baseball” came to represent the aggressive style of the “Negro League ball player” who stole bases, went for the extra bag, and made things happen. Yankee money was enough to keep them dominant while “waiting for the long ball,” but overall the American League was inferior for decades. The real “Red Sox curse” really has nothing to do with Babe Ruth. It stems from their failure to sign Willie Mays after a try-out because he was black.
In 1951, the pennant race between the Dodgers and Giants was a thoroughly integrated affair. New York featured the rookie Mays and the veteran black slugger Monte Irvin. Durocher, fired (or let go, depending on the interpretation) by Branch Rickey essentially because he was an amoral man (technically his gambling associations, but it went well beyond that) had taken over the Giants. Manager Charlie Dressen’s Dodgers of Rickey, Campanella, Newcombe, Carl Erskine, Duke Snider, Carl Furillo, Gil Hodges and Pee Wee Reese, got out to a huge lead of 13 1/2 games by August 11.
The Giants of Mays, Irvin, Sal Maglie, and Bobby Thomson made an amazing comeback, catching Brooklyn on the last day of the season. A play-off ensued. In game three at the Polo Grounds, the Giants may or may not have been aided by a “spy” giving them Dodger signals from the left field scoreboard. Trailing 4-2 in the ninth, Thomson hit the “shot heard ‘round the world” off Ralph Branca, breaking Brooklyn hearts.
Brooklyn won pennants in 1952 and ‘53, losing the Series to the Yankees both times. In 1954, Willie Mays returned from the Army to power the Giants to the last World Championship in that franchise’s history, a four-game sweep of Cleveland in the Series. Finally, “next year” came in 1955 when Johnny Podres pitched the Dodgers, led by manager Walt Alston, to a 2-0, seventh-game victory over the Bronx Bombers.
“White flight” drained Brooklyn of much of its fan base by 1957. The Harlem neighborhood where the Polo Grounds was located had turned dangerous, too. The Dodgers and Giants chose to move to California in 1958.
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Frank Sinatra’s most famous song may be “New York, New York,” which is the signature tune played at the end of Yankee games.
“If I can make it there, I can make it anywhere,” crooned “Ol’ Blue Eyes.”
The song tells the story of wanderlust, of any young man or woman whose “vagabond shoes are longing to stray,” to reach out and find what he is made of, test himself, go up against the best; and if one can go to New York, succeed there, then indeed they can succeed “anywhere. It’s up to you . . . New York, New York.”
Sinatra’s song is about himself, a kid from nearby Hoboken, New Jersey who stared out at the Manhattan skyline every day, which despite its physical closeness represented a world a million miles away from all he had known. It is about singers, songwriters, actors, models, playwrights, directors, novelists, journalists; all with the dream of accepting the challenge of New York, and making good.
There was symbolism in the Dodgers and Giants moving to the Golden State. This event gave official sanction, if you will, to the great rivalry that always existed between New York and California. This rivalry had been in full swing at least since the 1920s, but New Yorkers provincially denied it until the Dodger-Giant move made it impossible to ignore.
Hollywood was built, in large measure, by New Yorkers. Los Angeles is a city with a strong East Coast flavor to it; its business dealings, its show biz ethos. San Francisco has always modeled itself on New York, with its skyline and fashions. The two states are the most important in the country. When Dwight Eisenhower chose Richard Nixon as his Vice-Presidential running mate in 1952, it demonstrated the electoral power of California and the West. Nixon himself moved to New York in 1963 specifically to “prove himself to the Wall Street crowd,” which is credited with his winning the Empire State (and thus the White House) in 1968. Nixon and Ronald Reagan symbolized growing California political power. No campaign in either party succeeds without winning the financial battle for California’s political dollars.
The two states compete for attention and influence in all aspects of American and international politics, culture, society, finance, entertainment, literature, and athletics. There are several reasons for this. The fact that both have large populations makes it, in some respects, a mathematical equation, but does not entirely explain it. There is a sense in both places that each is the “place to be” if one is to succeed, to reach for the stars. So, many people come to New York and California, but just as many come from there. For obvious reasons, New York has a “head start” over California, but the two states far out-number all others when it comes to producing famous people; celebrities, stars, movers, shakers in all walks of life.
For every world famous political, literary or financial figure from New York, California matches it with an equally famous actor, athlete or rock star. There is great co-mingling of the genres. New York may lay claim to a larger preponderance of writers, but California “answers back” with the likes of Jack London, Gertrude Stein, John Steinbeck. New York would like to think they have the market on film directors – Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola – but then one recalls the likes of George Lucas and Ron Howard from California. For every brooding Robert DeNiro of “Little Italy” there is a Santa Monica beach boy type like Robert Redford.
It is in sports where California holds an enormous edge over the rest of the world. Again, population explains much of the reason. Excellent year round weather is an obvious factor. Many have theorized that the hardy, Darwinian genetic survival mechanism of settlers made for physically gifted offspring. Others have speculated that more physically attractive men and women came to Hollywood for the movies, married and produced children with greater sports gifts.
The New York-California rivalry is accentuated in large measure by the fact that many of the greatest, most iconic stars in the hallowed history of New York sports came from California, to New York City, to test themselves. Stars of the great Southern California high school leagues, the legendary California collegiate programs, the Pacific Coast League; they yearned to be more than regional stars, but rather, nationally recognized heroes.
The San Francisco Bay Area and the San Francisco Seals were, for all practical purposes, became a breeding grounds, a farm system, for the Yankees. The San Francisco-Yankee connection is seemingly endless, and quite extraordinary. San Francisco and the Bay Area at one time was the greatest producer of baseball, and all-around athletic talent, in the United States. It starts with the great “Prince Hal” Chase of Los Gatos. Chase was said to be the greatest defensive first baseman of his time. Then there was San Francisco’s Ping Bodie. Two San Franciscans played on the “all-time greatest” 1927 Yankees: excellent shortstop Mark Koenig and slugging second baseman Tony Lazzeri. In addition, the ’27 Yankees featured power-hitting outfielder Bob Meusel (born in San Jose) and capable pitcher Dutch Ruether of Alameda (who previously pitched for Brooklyn).
In the 1930s a new crop of San Franciscans came along. The legendary Hall of Famer Joe DiMaggio played at San Francisco’s Galileo High School. He was born in a little fishing town on the Carquinez Straits, an extension of San Francisco Bay that winds all the way to Stockton, at 90 miles the most inland “sea port” in the world. Martinez is right next to another tiny little town called Rodeo, which was the birthplace of his Hall of Fame Yankee teammate, pitcher Lefty Gomez (who played high school ball in the East Bay town of Richmond).
Shortstop Frank Crosetti, out of San Francisco’s Sacred Heart High School, was a Yankee mainstay on those teams. Babe Dahlgren (also of San Francisco) replaced Lou Gehrig when the “Iron Horse” retired.
The Bay Area connection continued into the 1940s and 1950s with shortstop Joe DeMaestri of Marin County’s Tamalpais High School and the feisty Billy Martin of Berkeley High (manager of the 1977 Yankees World Champions). From San Francisco: Charlie Silvera, Gil McDougald, Jerry Coleman (now the San Diego Padres’ broadcaster) and Dr. Bobby Brown (who became President of the American League). Casey Stengel was not from the Bay Area, but the Yankees hired him after leading the Oakland Oaks to the 1948 PCL title. His star second baseman was local hero Billy Martin.
In the 1970s: pitchers Rudy May (Oakland) and Dick Tidrow (Hayward). In the 1980s: Dave Righetti (San Jose’s Pioneer High) and future Hall of Famer Rickey Henderson (Oakland Tech). In the 1990s: two players from the University of California, Kevin Maas and Matt Luke, plus ace reliever John Wetteland (Santa Rosa). In the 2000s: future Hall of Famer Randy Johnson (Livermore and USC).
Central and Southern California have been well represented at Yankee Stadium, too. Norm Sherry (Los Angeles Fairfax High) played for the1963 Yankees. Bobby Bonds (Riverside) wore pinstripes in 1974. First baseman Chris Chambliss (Oceanside, UCLA) hit the momentous home run that clinched the 1976 American League pennant. His teammate, Gold Glove third baseman Craig Nettles, was a San Diego product who played at San Diego State. Bob Lemon, who managed New York to the 1978 World Series title, hailed from Long Beach. Pitcher Andy Messersmith (Anaheim’s Western High, University of California) was a star with the Angels and Dodgers, as well as a member of the 1978 World Champion Yankees. Infielder Steve Sax (Sacramento) was the Rookie of the Year in Los Angeles and played for the Yankees from 1989 to 1991. Pitcher Tim Leary led the Santa Monica American Legion team to the 1976 national championship, was an All-American at UCLA, and an ace on the 1988 World Champion Dodgers’ staff before spending three years (1990-92) with the Yankees.
Outfielder Jason Giambi (West Covina’s South Hills High, Cal State Long Beach; brother of Jeremy Giambi) was the 2000 American League MVP with Oakland and a key member of the Yankees since 2002. Third baseman Aaron Boone (Villa Park, USC; brother of Seattle’s Bret Boone) was a Yankee for a brief time, but his home run to beat Boston in the 2003 American League Championship Series gives him a special place in Yankee lore. It also meant that two of the most famous home runs in Yankees history – Chambliss’s in 1976, Boone’s in 2003 – were hit by a rival Bruin (Chambliss) and Trojan (Boone). Pitcher Mike Mussina led Stanford to the 1987 and 1988 national titles (his Stanford teammate was Chicago’s Cy Young award winner, Jack McDowell).
But in all cases of California players who have made their mark at Yankee Stadium, there is perhaps no greater example, if not fluky coincidence, than that of Don Larsen and David Wells. Larsen threw the only perfect game in World Series history, over Brooklyn in 1956, when the Yankees captured the World title. In 1998, Wells tossed a perfect game there for the Yankees. New York went on to win the second of four World Series victories in five years, and are marked by history as one of if not the best single-season team ever assembled.
The coincidence comes from the fact that both Larsen and Wells graduated from Pt. Loma High School near San Diego, but does not end there. On the May day in which Wells tossed his perfecto, Larsen was featured in a pre-game ceremony and was in attendance, but it still does not end. Larsen and Wells were both “wild children,” considered unique California hybrids; they both loved to party, drink beer, stay out late, chase women, and raise hell. Wells was the motorcycle-driving baseball version of the Marlon Brando character from The Wild One.
The New York Giants featured Irish Meusel (born in Oakland; brother of Bob Meusel). He also played for the Dodgers. Dick Bartell (Alameda) was an All-Star shortstop over an 18-year career. Bill Rigney (Alameda) was a journeyman second baseman in the 1950s, later managing the Giants, Los Angeles Angels and Minnesota Twins. Pitcher Mike McCormick (Los Angeles) played in New York briefly before the team moved to San Francisco.
The Brooklyn Dodgers’ California connection was also strong. It starts with the great Lefty O’Doul (San Francisco), who hit .398 in 1929, later managed the San Francisco Seals, and is credited with making baseball popular in Japan. General Douglas MacArthur said no single diplomat did more to heal U.S.-Japanese relations after World War II than O’Doul did. Rod Dedeaux (Hollywood High, USC) had a very short “career,” but befriended his manager, Casey Stengel. Dedeaux became the most legendary college baseball coach of all time at Southern California. The long tradition of big league teams playing exhibitions against colleges started when Stengel’s Yankees played Dedeaux’s Trojans. Later the Dodgers played USC at Dodger Stadium every year before heading to Spring Training.
Jackie Robinson (Pasadena’s Muir High, Pasadena City College) was of course a UCLA football hero whose place in the pantheon of baseball and American heroism is approached by few, if any. Cookie Lavagetto (Oakland) broke up the Yankees’ Bill Bevens’s no-hitter in the 1947 World Series. Infielder Gene Mauch (Los Angeles Fremont High) later became the manager of the Phillies, Expos, Twins and Angels. His nephew, Roy Smalley III, was an All-American at USC and an All-Star with Minnesota. Dick Williams (Pasadena City College, where Jackie Robinson went), later managed World Series teams at Boston, Oakland and San Diego.
Bill Sharman (Los Angeles Narbonne High, USC) sat on the Dodgers’ bench the day Bobby Thomson hit the “shot heard ‘round the world” before becoming a Hall of Fame basketball star with the Boston Celtics, and coach of the 1972 NBA champion Lakers.
Duke Snider (Compton High) was one of the three legendary center fielders in New York during the “golden age” of the 1950s (the others being Willie Mays of the Giants and Mickey Mantle of the Yankees). A Hall of Famer, he also played for the Mets. Gino Cimoli (San Francisco) was a power hitter. Pitcher Don Drysdale was a teammate of Robert Redford’s at Van Nuys High, where Natalie Wood was also a student at the time. He turned down a scholarship to Stanford to sign with Brooklyn and was their staff ace before the team moved to L.A., where he won the 1962 Cy Young award, set the record for consecutive scoreless innings (58, 1968), and made it into the Hall of Fame.
The New York (football) Giants have a strong California connection. Running back Frank Gifford (Bakersfield High) was an All-American and a “golden boy” at the University of Southern California before forging a Hall of Fame career in the Big Apple. He was a staple on the Monday Night Football broadcast team for years. Defensive end Fred Dryer (Lawndale High, San Diego State) started with the Giants before becoming an All-Pro with the Los Angeles Rams. Wide receiver Amani Toomer (Concord’s De La Salle High) played in the 1990s. Defensive back Jason Sehorn (Mt. Shasta High, USC) starred for the Giants and became a cause celebre for his model good looks and personality. Giants coach Jim Fassel was from Anaheim and USC.
Californians with the New York Jets include placekicker Jim Turner, known as the “Crockett Rocket” because he hailed from the tiny town of Crockett. Incredibly, this tiny place, along with neighboring Martinez and Rodeo, is home (or birth place) to such athletic figures as Joe DiMaggio, Lefty Gomez and football coach Norv Turner. Defensive back Mike Battle played at Lawndale High and USC. Defensive back Ronnie Lott (Rialto’s Eisenhower High, USC) came to the Jets after winning four Super Bowls in San Francisco. Wide receiver Keyshawn Johnson (Los Angeles Dorsey High, USC), was the number one pick of the 1996 draft by the Jets and an All-Pro in New York. Pete Carroll (Larkspur’s Redwood High, University of the Pacific) coached the Jets for one year and is now in charge at Southern Cal.
The western state Buffalo Bills featured such stalwarts as Jack Kemp (Los Angeles Fairfax High, Occidental College) and two star-crossed childhood friends who went to San Francisco’s Galileo High, City College of San Francisco, and Southern Cal together (before a tragic June 1994 night in L.A.): O.J. Simpson and Al Cowlings.
At Army, in West Point, New York: Heisman winner Glenn Davis out of LaVerne’s Bonita High School. Then there are the other Californians who have ventured to New York City’s Downtown Athletic Club, claiming the Heisman: Southern Cal’s Mike Garrett, O.J. Simpson, Charles White, Marcus Allen, Carson Palmer, Matt Leinart and Reggie Bush; UCLA’s Gary Beban; Stanford’s Jim Plunkett; plus Golden Staters John Huarte of Notre Dame, Gino Toretta of Miami, Rashaan Salaam of Colorado, and Ricky Williams of Texas.
California tennis players who have shined at the U.S. Open include three from Palos Verdes Estates: Tracey Austin, Pete Sampras, and Lindsay Davenport. Stan Smith hailed from Pasadena; the Williams sisters, Venus and Serena, from Compton. John McEnroe played collegiately at Stanford.
Just for good measure, Richard Nixon (football player at Whittier High and Whittier College; his wife Patricia, USC) carried New York four times; twice as Vice-President on Dwight Eisenhower’s ticket (1952, 1956) and twice when he won and was re-elected to the Presidency (1968, 1972). California Governor Ronald Reagan won New York twice (1980, 1984).
Then there are the New York Mets. One of their first prospects was Tom Seaver’s boyhood pal from Fresno, Dick Selma. Jim Fregosi of San Mateo’s legendary Serra High (Barry Bonds, Tom Brady, John Robinson, John Madden) was traded by the Angels to the Mets prior to the 1971 season for Nolan Ryan. Another Serra product was Gregg Jeffries, who played for New York in the 1980s. Danny Frisella also came from San Mateo. All-Star first baseman Keith Hernandez grew up just up the road from San Mateo, in neighboring San Bruno.
Southern Californian Mets have included Dave Marshall (1970s), born in Artesia, power-hitting Dave Kingman (USC), the great catcher Gary Carter (Fullerton’s Sunny Hills High), star outfielder Darryl Strawberry (Los Angeles Crenshaw High), slugger Kevin Mitchell (San Diego), feisty Lenny Dykstra (Garden Grove), reliever Jesse Orosco (Santa Barbara), Billy Beane (San Diego’s Mt. Carmel High, now general manager of the A’s) and outfielder George Foster (Lawndale’s Leuzinger High), an All-Star with Cincinnati.
Mike Scott of Santa Monica, a star at Pepperdine, came up with the Mets before going to Houston in the early 1980s. Pitcher Bret Saberhagen (Reseda’s Cleveland High) was a Met in the 1990s after winning the Cy Young award at Kansas City. Second baseman Jeff Kent (Huntington Beach’s Edison High, University of California) started with the Mets before an MVP stint in San Francisco. Eddie Murray (Los Angeles Locke High) was one of the all-time greats in Baltimore and a Met for two years. Third baseman Robin Ventura (Santa Maria’s Righetti High) was a star with the Mets. Pitcher Bobby Jones was another Fresno guy, an All-American at Fresno State University. Third baseman Todd Zeile was a teammate of Erik Karros at both UCLA and with the Dodgers before coming to the Mets. Shaun Green starred at Tustin High School.
In 1969, four Northern Californians all would play for the Mets. The former Alaska Goldpanner Frisella only pitched three games for New York. The three others all played a key role in the team’s fortunes. Relief pitcher Tug McGraw hailed from Vallejo, shortstop Bud Harrelson from Hayward, and Tom Seaver from Fresno and the University of Southern California.
They, like so many like them, would “make it there.”
****
In 1960, the American Football League was formed. The AFL was given true imprimatur in 1964, when the two biggest names in college football signed with the New York Titans, who played at the Polo Grounds. Quarterback Joe Willie Namath was the number one pick in both the AFL and NFL drafts, setting off a “bidding war” for his services. The prospects of success in New York, on and off the field, were too great a lure and he went with the unproven AFL. New York paid him a then unheard-of bonus package totaling $427,000.
Namath had been the best college player in 1964, a surefire Heisman Trophy favorite on the nation’s best team, when he injured his knee in the seventh game of the season. With Namath sidelined, Notre Dame pulled into the lead for the National Championship. Their quarterback, John Huarte went on to win the Heisman Trophy Namath otherwise would have garnered. Huarte, a product of Mater Dei High School in Santa Ana, California (one of only two high schools to produce two Heisman winners; Matt Leinart also went there), spent summers working on pass routes with a fellow Californian, receiver Jack Snow on the Orange County beaches. Snow went from Notre Dame to the Rams. His son, J.T. Snow, was a 1992 Yankee from Los Alamitos, California and the University of Arizona.
In 1964, Huarte and Snow led the Irish to an unbeaten record until the final game of the season, when Southern California rallied from a 17-0 deficit to beat them, 20-17. The National title was lost. The Titans chose Huarte. Bidding for his services was almost as heavy as for Namath. He had Notre Dame polish and New York paid him an enormous bonus, reportedly in the $200,000 range. He never panned out.
Namath was the hotshot quarterback with bedroom eyes from the University of Alabama. His college coach, the legendary Paul “Bear” Bryant, always called him the greatest athlete he ever had. Namath had been a sparkling baseball shortstop growing up in western Pennsylvania, with Major League scouts throwing big numbers at him to go that route, but his football ability was over the top. When he came to ‘Bama, Bryant alternated between pro sets and the option, taking advantage of Namath’s ball-handling and running skills.
As a pure drop-back passer, he had no equal. His athleticism was extraordinary, his arm strength outstanding. All the talk in 1964 centered on how much he would get after the dust cleared in a battle for his services between the two competing pro leagues. His winning the Heisman was considered a fait accompli until he went down with injury, which at first jeopardized his draft status.
The Crimson Tide continued to win and at the end of the regular season were ranked number one by both the Associated Press and the United Press International, who in those days for some reason awarded the National Championship prior to the bowl games. Alabama played Texas, the defending champion, in the Orange Bowl. Held at night for the first time, it was a television ratings bonanza, in many ways the beginning of the bowl frenzy that now exists.
Despite already having won the National Championship trophies awarded by the wire services, everybody knew that in order to be considered a legitimate winner, Alabama would have to beat Texas. Unbeaten Arkansas defeated Nebraska, 10-7 in the Cotton Bowl earlier on New Year’s Day 1965. If ‘Bama lost the Razorbacks would not only garner some of the National titles awarded by lesser-known services, but despite AP and UPI imprimatur, the legitimate consideration by the country as that year’s number one team.
As if there was not enough riding on the Alabama-Texas Orange Bowl game, it was the return of Joe Namath. He had rehabilitated his knee since injuring it over two months earlier, but it had been a difficult road. Namath actually missed only one full game, but the injury recurred. Each time, he was able to come back. A week before the Orange Bowl, he went down again.
Great debate swirled around Namath. Injury or no injury, he had already been picked by New York, as the draft was held immediately after the regular college season ended, but before the bowls. The huge bonus package was already negotiated and agreed to between Namath and New York owner Sonny Werblin. However, in order to maintain his amateur status, nothing was yet signed. If he were to hurt himself in the Orange Bowl it would throw a major “monkey wrench” into the works.
Should Bryant play Namath? If the Orange Bowl were merely a glorified exhibition, the National title already won, then it seemed illogical to jeopardize his pro career against Texas. But, of course, it was not a glorified exhibition. The polling system was a joke and everybody knew that if Alabama wanted to actually call themselves the champion, instead of hiding the trophy in a broom closet, they would need to win this game.
Namath was tentative. When he showed up on the field he wore tennis shoes. When the teams kicked off Namath was on the bench. Then Texas began to dominate. Bryant knew what everybody else knew, what his screaming fans were urging him to do: earn the National title. Play Namath.
Joe Willie was put in the game and responded with heroics, driving Alabama back into the contest. Trailing 21-17 with minutes left, he orchestrated a patented final drive. With the ball on the Longhorn one, Namath tried a quarterback sneak but was held, giving Texas the victory. History therefore accords legitimate 1964 National Championship status not on Alabama, but on Arkansas.
Photos of Namath dejectedly leaving the field show a young man who called it the “greatest disappointment” of his career. Disappointing or not, it was a winning day for the young quarterback from the perspective of his future. A friend said to Sonny Werblin, watching the game, “You’ve just got the benefit of the greatest pilot film in history.”
Namath not only starred in heroic manner, he had not been injured. The television ratings made him a national star. It actually increased what the team paid him when the signing eventually was finalized.
The 6-1, 195-pounder was born to star in New York. While the 1958 Giants-Colts game was credited with popularizing pro football, the signing of Namath made the AFL legitimate, turning the pro game into a spectacle. The fact that he was drafted and signed by a New York team was almost too perfect, as if manipulated in the manner some have accused the NBA of doing in order to put marquee players in New York, Los Angeles and Boston.
It was as if the gates of the town were opened for him. Namath joined a team that had just moved from the rickety old Polo Grounds to the gleaming new Shea Stadium, located next to La Guardia Airport. They appropriately changed their name from the Titans to the Jets. The sound of 747s roaring into the skies above became a perfect backdrop for Namath’s aerial heroics.
Namath was a longball artist whose spectacular successes were interspersed with untimely interceptions. The class teams in the league were the Kansas City Chiefs (featuring Tom Seaver’s old USC pal, running back Mike Garrett) and the Oakland Raiders, who were led by the “Mad Bomber,” quarterback Daryle Lamonica (from Seaver’s hometown of Fresno). These teams met the great Green Bay Packers in the first two Super Bowls. Both times the AFL champion went down to resounding defeat.
With his bonus, Namath became well known for his off-field antics. Always a skirt-chaser, Manhattan was like an adult Disneyland for him. He opened a bar called Bachelors III. It was a swinging sports hangout with go-go dancers and beautiful girls. It was the late 1960s; there was the “Summer of Love” in San Francisco, “swinging London,” and the “Sexual Revolution.” Playboy magazine made sex mainstream. Hollywood jumped on the bandwagon.
In New York, the old was being replaced by the new. Namath was definitely the “new breed.” His kind was something nobody had ever quite seen before. Babe Ruth was a libertine, but his exploits were mainly covered up by the sporting press. When a naked Ruth was seen running through the team’s train chased by a knife-wielding woman, one writer cracked, “Too bad we can’t write about that.”
Rocky Marciano had apparently been a sexual superman, but nobody knew it outside his circle. President John F. Kennedy set carnal records, using the Secret Service as cover for his pool parties, but the media protected him.
Bo Belinsky, a journeyman pitcher for the Los Angeles Angels, became a singular sensation for his love of the ladies when he dated the likes of Tina Louise, Ann-Margret, Mamie Van Doren, and married Playmate of the Year Jo Collins. But after a brilliant start, his career flamed out. Namath had the potential to be a Hall of Famer, but engendered great criticism from the establishment types who said he was wasting his talents on wine, women and song.
Bachelors III was a real problem, too. It became a haven for well-known sports gamblers. Rumors swirled around Namath, especially when he threw ill-timed fourth quarter interceptions, which was all too often. But whether the Jets went all the way was seemingly immaterial. Namath packed Shea Stadium, sold out road games, and made the TV ratings roar. He and his style were made for television, with the instant replays and close-ups of the suave Namath; hair tousled, eye black smeared on his sweaty face, making women sigh.
Namath apparently had the kind of metabolism that allowed him to consume whiskey, entertain his lady friends, get little sleep, yet still handle the requirements of a pro quarterback. Ed Marinaro, a bonus rookie, once hit the town with Namath. At the end of the evening, Joe Willie left with a girl Marinaro thought was well below his high standards. He confronted Joe about it.
“It’s four o’clock in the morning,” Namath told Marinaro. “Miss America’s not gonna show up.”
Eventually, NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle gave Namath an ultimatum: give up his share of Bachelors III, or give up football. Namath retired from football . . . for about 10 minutes, then gave up his ownership share in Bachelor’s III.
In 1968, the Chiefs and Raiders again dominated the AFL. In November, the Jets traveled to Oakland for a key nationally televised game on NBC. The Jets forged a late lead. It was 4:00 P.M. in California, 7:00 P.M. on the East Coast. NBC had a decision to make. The children’s classic Heidi was scheduled for seven. Thinking the Jets had their game won, they switched from the game to the girl, who lived with her grandfather in the Swiss Alps.
Back in Oakland, Lamonica drove the Raiders to a touchdown. For good measure, they recovered a fumble on the ensuing kick-off and scored again. New Yorkers who went to bed thinking their team had won were shocked by newspaper, radio and water cooler accounts of the Raider comeback. It has forever come to be known as the “Heidi game.”
Namath and the Jets got their revenge a month or so later in the AFL championship game. After a late drive, Oakland led 23-20. This time it was Namath’s turn. On a cold, windswept afternoon at Shea, he led the Jets down the field for the winning score in a hard-fought 27-23 win.
The victory put the Jets into Super Bowl III, to be played at the sight of Namath’s memorable New Year’s Day, 1965 loss to Texas: Miami’s Orange Bowl. The opponent: the 13-1 Baltimore Colts, considered by some to be the greatest pro football team ever assembled. Baltimore was installed as an 18-point favorite.
Namath immediately ruffled feathers, stating that Baltimore quarterback Earl Morrall was no better than any number of AFL signal-callers: Lamonica, Kansas City’s Len Dawson, San Diego’s John Hadl, Houston’s Pete Beathard, or himself for that matter. Then he said the unsayable. Asked whether he thought the Jets would win, he replied, “I guarantee it.”
The Colts were a high strung group. The bulletin board bravado was over the top. Normally this kind of thing would fire up the opposing team, but the Colts were so heavily favored and the comment so outrageous that it had the effect of swinging momentum to the brash Broadway Joe and His Super Jets.
Baltimore indeed was as tight as a drum. Namath played superbly, engineering a spectacular 16-7 victory, giving the Jets a Super Bowl title and respect for the AFL. In the entire history of professional football, it is considered the signature moment, defining the game’s popularity. In 1970, the merger of the two leagues was completed when inter-conference play began with the creation of the American and National Football Conferences.
Namath wrote a book called I Can’t Wait Until Tommow . . . ‘Cause I Get Better-Looking Every Day. His outrageous, controversial comments about going to bed with “a blonde and a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red,” and preferring “my women blonde and my Johnnie Walker Red” became catch phrases of the American Zeitgeist.
He was unlike anything seen before in his mink coats, Fu Manchu moustache, long hair, and rock star persona, but Namath was a team leader, respected by teammates. They understood that he played in great pain. In truth his career was derailed by constantly re-injuring his knee.
In 1968, Namath helped to elevate football to the pinnacle of its popularity. Baseball, beset by a lack of offense in the “Year of the Pitcher,” had poor attendance. It was considered an article of faith that football had replaced it as Our National Pastime. In New York City, the Yankees were no where to be found and the Mets were a joke.
1968 turned into 1969. The Mets prepared for Spring Training amid the glare of excitement over the Jets. They had no reason to believe they could approach the fever that the city, indeed all of America, felt about Broadway Joe and His Super Jets (the moniker attached to them and also the name of a book by Larry Fox).
Tom Seaver and his teammates had watched and rooted for the Jets. For the Californian Seaver, he may well have favored Fresno’s Lamonica and the Oakland Raiders in the AFL championship game, but he and his mates were all for Namath and the Jets against Baltimore, even though they had set an impossible standard for them to live up to.
Nevertheless, it was the standard that Frank Sinatra wrote songs about. Seaver was on a world stage, and would soon feel the hottest glare of fame on that stage.
“Can’t anybody here play this game?”
“You can play for the Mets. If you want rapid advancement, play for the Mets. We’ve got the bonus money. We’ll even buy you a glove. So join us. Take the bonus money. Play a year or two. Then you can go back to school.”
- Casey Stengel
It all happened so fast. In 1955, unmitigated joy in Brooklyn when the Dodgers won the World Series. In 1956, a pennant was successfully defended, but a series of bizarre incidents foreshadowed later events. Sal Maglie became a Dodger. Jackie Robinson was traded to the Giants.
Walter O’Malley, one of those strange characters of history, owned Brooklyn. Certainly Brooklynites find little in O’Malley’s memory to praise, but through luck, design, or both (“Luck is the residue of design,” Branch Rickey said), O’Malley’s amorality’s are generally viewed as vision . His knife-in-the-back contrivances are, to Los Angelenos at least, acts of grace. His ruthless greed resulted in the best move baseball ever made.
The Dodgers move to the West Coast has the feel of Manifest Destiny. The dead bodies left behind, the broken promises, the lies and deceptions, like America’s inexorable expansion, was for the greater good by a long shot; an act that had to happen because if it had not it would have created a vacuum for those less worthy to fill.
O’Malley was almost a Hollywood caricature of a “bad guy,” something out of a Frank Capra movie. Think of the banker “old man Potter,” who holds Jimmy Stewart’s and a whole town’s future over their heads in It’s a Wonderful Life. O’Malley actually was a foreclosure specialist during the Great Depression. It was not unlike Joseph P. Kennedy, the financier who made millions from illegal bootlegging and insider trading, “selling short” on other people’s misery. O’Malley became wealthy kicking folks out of their homes.
He bought his way into the Dodgers’ ownership. Branch Rickey found himself an uncomfortable partner. Rickey was of course the baseball genius of the operation, but lacked the financial wherewithal to call all the shots. Rickey was a truly moral man, a devout Christian. As a college baseball coach years earlier he coached a black player. Seeing the prejudice he was forced to endure Rickey vowed to do something for the cause if he ever could. He saw it as his destiny, his calling. This was the essence of his decision to sign Jackie Robinson.
O’Malley had no moral obligations to the cause of social justice, but he liked the fact that Robinson would attract black fans, especially since the Giants played in a growing black-majority area (Harlem). They otherwise would have garnered that segment of the paying public.
Rickey’s morality did not always play well in the rough-hewn baseball world. His relationship with manager Leo Durocher – a drinker, gambler, womanizer and liar – was a true “odd coupling.” Durocher was suspended for a year in 1947 for gambling and Rickey used it as the excuse to get rid of him. When Rickey hosted his daughter’s wedding, no alcohol was served. Rickey told complainers that if they desired to imbibe “there’s a bar down the street.” The moral clash between O’Malley and Rickey came to a head eventually, with O’Malley eventually making the power play that ended Rickey’s association with the team in 1950.
O’Malley despised Rickey so much that he fined any employees for mentioning his name. He kept “Rickey men” only if they were indispensable to the running of the baseball operations. His hatred of Rickey was the core of his bad relations with Jackie Robinson, who revered the “savior.” In later years, the Dodgers were criticized for not suspending play the day of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1968 assassination. To the credit of O’Malley’s son, Peter, he was a good man, but Walter was a caricaturized villain, the perfect guy for Brooklynites to blame.
In 1956, the Dodgers played seven games in Jersey City, New Jersey, ostensibly to put the powers that be on notice that O’Malley was looking for a new ballpark at the corner of Flatbush and Atlantic, or somewhere else.
After losing a seven-game World Series to the Yankees, the Dodgers made an exhibition to Japan. After the hard loss to the Yankees nobody wanted to go. Robinson refused, reportedly the “last straw” in his stormy relationship with the man who kicked Rickey out of Brooklyn. Jackie was traded to the hated Giants. Robinson never played for them, taking an executive job with the Chock Full o’ Nuts company, a well-known billboard sponsor of the era (along with Yoo-Hoo chocolates).
On the way to Japan, the plane stopped in Los Angeles. O’Malley met with Los Angeles City Councilman Kenneth Hahn, who had been at the World Series trying to get Washington Senators’ owner Clark Griffith to move to L.A. Only a few years earlier, the Boston Braves made a successful move to Milwaukee; the Philadelphia A’s a less-successful one to Kansas City. When Chuck Yeager broke the “sound barrier” over the skies of Southern California in 1947, it opened the door for jet travel and thus West Coast expansion.
In Japan, O’Malley was impressed with Tokyo’s Korakuen Stadium, which featured lower-level luxury boxes for celebrity ticket-holders, not unlike the concept of “courtside seating,” later a staple at Madison Square Garden and the “Fabulous Forum.” Negotiations ensued. In 1957 O’Malley secretly committed to Los Angeles. O’Malley told Hahn he did not need the city to build him a stadium. All he wanted was land. He would do the rest himself.
While O’Malley is viewed as the man everybody in Brooklyn loves to hate, a great deal of blame is rightfully attached to Robert Moses, New York City’s “building czar.” His political power was almost totalitarian in the Big Apple. Moses said no to all of O’Malley’s stadium plans, particularly any in Brooklyn. He was absolutely bound and determined that a stadium be erected in Queens, where La Guardia Airport was built and the World’s Fair would be held.
For Brooklyn, any move outside of the borough was a betrayal, even if it was to a neighboring New York City enclave. The team’s entire identity was tied up in its Brooklyn image. O’Malley portrayed himself as trying to defend Brooklyn’s fan interest. He made a strange proposal for a “geodesic dome,” an early concept of the later Houston Astrodome, to protect from “inclement weather.” But Brooklyn had no freeways, no parking, and very little available land. The future was in Queens. Half of Brooklyn had already moved out there anyway, or to nearby Long Island. O’Malley is vilified, but there was no practical future in Brooklyn and no way to keep playing forever at Ebbets Field.
Moses wanted what eventually would be Shea Stadium. O’Malley found in Moses a political player who held more cards than he did. The layers of bureaucracy disgusted him. O’Malley endeavored to design the building of a stadium with his own money, therefore controlling his own destiny. This was impossibility in New York, not with Moses involved. It became the key bargaining point with Councilman Hahn. When it was agreed to, the deal was sealed.
O’Malley sold Ebbets Field to a commercial developer and the cat was out of the bag. A competing interest had promised to keep the team in Brooklyn or on the available land out by La Guardia Airport, but O’Malley spurned the offer. He continued to “negotiate” with New York, but went to L.A. and found the most perfect site for a baseball stadium then imaginable. Chavez Ravine sat on a hilltop overlooking downtown Los Angeles, criss-crossed by a modern freeway system accessible to every part of city and growing suburb alike. O’Malley bought the Cubs’ L.A. franchise in the Pacific Coast League, completely undercutting the man who originally had the region for the picking, Philip K. Wrigley.
In 1973, Martin Scorsese made a Mob movie based on his youth in Little Italy. In the final scene of Mean Streets, Robert DeNiro and Harvey Keitel made a suicidal drive, settling an old score with a bad end that was metaphorically seen by the camera, capturing the passing sign, “Last Exit in Brooklyn” (a bitter 1950s novel-turned-into-a-movie was called Last Exit to Brooklyn).
The Dodgers’ last exit from Brooklyn plays out in the minds of their fans like the Zapruder film, as if in showing the footage over and over somehow the result will be different this time. The Dodgers had a poor season in 1957, leading to poor attendance, which O’Malley used as his excuse when in fact fans knew the team was gone. That was the real reason they stayed away from Ebbets Field.
O’Malley got New York Giants’ owner Horace Stoneham to agree to move to San Francisco so the rivalry would be kept alive on the coast. On May 29, 1957 the league approved the moves. The Dodgers took much treasure with them. Brooklyn-born Sandy Koufax would be a matinee idol in Hollywood instead of his hometown. California-born Don Drysdale would be a Hall of Famer in L.A., not a true New York Sports Icon.
California was a magnet, drawing not just the Dodgers but an entire post-war, suburbanized, car-crazy nation to the growing Sunbelt. If New Yorkers had refused to acknowledge the power and influence of the Golden State, they had to now. Gladys Gooding played “Auld Lang Syne” on the Ebbets Field organ. Dick Young wrote scathing columns. O’Malley was unmoved. He had harnessed the future.
Between 1958 and 1961, fans of the Dodgers and Giants were like parents who had lost their children to a terrible disease. They were heartbroken. Something had been torn from the very fabric of their souls. They reacted in different ways.
Some went out to Yankee Stadium to heckle the Yankees, which was like booing an F-16 as it bombs the enemy into submission. The Yankees won the 1958, 1961 and 1962 World Series. But as great as they were, the loss of the Dodgers and Giants was a void they could not fill. Very few really and truly switched allegiance to the Yankees. The Yankees “did not benefit from having the city all to themselves,” said longtime New York baseball scribe Jack Lang. They failed to fill the vacuum, maintaining a sense of complacency.
Dodgers and Giants supporters were “staunch National League fans.” Some rooted for the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Francisco Giants; some hated them. Despite everything, rooting for the Dodgers and Giants was made slightly palatable because both teams were strong. The Dodgers, with many ex-Brooklyn players, won the 1959 World Series. By 1963 they were in Dodger Stadium and had established a strong Los Angeles identity, but they still had Koufax and Drysdale. Sweeping the Yankees in four straight in 1963 created “mixed emotions,” as Michael Douglas, playing Gordon Gekko in Wall Street says, “like <rival> Larry Wildman driving over a cliff . . . in my new Ferrari.”
If that was strange, the 1962 season was even stranger. The Dodgers and Giants re-enacted the 1951 dramatics complete with three-game play-off won again by the Giants. That might have been described as two ex-wives fighting it out . . . over the guy you lost both of them to.
“I was a little disgusted with Giant and Dodger fans who remained fans of the teams that had left,” said Stan Isaacs of Newsday. “They were traitors. I could see rooting for Pee Wee Reese and Sandy Koufax. But not for O’Malley’s Dodgers.”
“The three most hated people in the history of the Universe, were Adolf Hitler, Genghis Kahn, and Walter O’Malley,” columnist Pete Hamill said. He somehow left out Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung. (“Fellow travelers” of the era apparently found tacit agreement with Stalin’s breezy equivocation: “You need to break a few eggs in order to make an omelet.”)
No sooner had the Dodgers and Giants departed than talk began of replacing them. There was mixed reaction to this. These time-honored traditions could not be replaced, but then again something had to be done. The concept of franchise shifts and expansion was obviously in the air. Four teams – the Braves, A’s, now the Dodgers and Giants – had switched cities. The West lay open for modern Lewis’s and Clark’s. Two teams could survive in one city; or in New York, three teams. Los Angeles would get the expansion Angels in 1961. The Washington Senators moved to Minneapolis and became the Twins, an inevitable move that Horace Stoneham says he would have made had California not opened up. A new expansion Senators franchise filled their place.
Pro basketball would move out to L.A., with the Lakers leaving Minneapolis. Pro football was at the forefront, first with the Los Angeles Rams and San Francisco 49ers; the merger of sorts between the National Football League and the All-American Football Conference; and then the creation in 1960 of the AFL. Teams rained like Manna from Heaven on Los Angeles (then San Diego), Oakland, and other virgin territories.
In 1958, New York City Mayor Robert Wagner formed a study group called The Mayor’s Baseball Committee, a “blue ribbon” panel of political heavyweights. One of its members was a leading New York powerbroker named William A. Shea. A partner in a major Manhattan law firm, he was considered Mayor Wagner’s top advisor. Shea’s circle of influence was as “blue blood” as it gets. There was New York’s Republican Governor Nelson Rockefeller, one of the wealthiest men in the world, with ambitions for the Presidency.
Then there was U.S. Senator Prescott Bush (R.- Connecticut). Bush lived in tony Greenwich, the place to live in the 1950s (if not still today). He was a member of the “old money” Bush-Walker clan, a distant relative to British and Dutch royalty. His family founded the Walker Cup golf tournament that Tom Seaver’s father had won in 1932, and ruled over the oldest, most prestigious Wall Street stock brokerage firm, Brown Brothers Harriman. The Bush family would be part of the ownership group of the team that eventually came into being. Bush’s son, George H.W. Bush, had been a World War II flying ace and eventually President of the United States from 1989 to 1993. His son, George W. Bush, would occupy the White House eight years later.
The Republican Senator Bush reached across the aisle and got the support of the Democrat Senate Majority Leader, Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas, and Democrat House Speaker Sam Rayburn, for a New York franchise. The quid pro quo was reciprocal support for a second franchise in Houston, where Senator Bush’s son George was a millionaire oilman, planning to run for Texas’s U.S. Senate seat in 1964.
Shea himself was not from money. His family was hit hard during the Great Depression, but he married well, worked hard, and his Irish wit stood him in good stead. He worked his way through law school and to a job with the state of New York. He wanted to enter politics but his wife insisted he not, so Shea resolved to always be a “mover and shaker” behind the scenes. His clients and contacts included the Brooklyn Dodgers and urban planner Robert Moses. When Larry MacPhail left the Dodgers, ostensibly to join “Wild Bill” Donovan’s famed OSS, the pre-cursor of the Central Intelligence Agency, a “sweetheart deal” to buy cheap shares of Dodgers stock was made available. In the end, Walter O’Malley got the Dodgers, but it allowed Shea to maintain a broader political scope. When O’Malley and the Dodgers departed, they left all their power and influence in New York City. Shea filled that vacuum.
Shea knew sports, having played football and lacrosse in college. He cultivated the press, but had an obstacle to overcome. Commissioner of Baseball Ford Frick did not want another team in New York. The Yankees’ ownership influenced him on this issue. But the powerful New York media, led by Red Smith, Dan Parker, Dick Young, Barney Kremenko and Jack Lang, created a steady drumbeat of interest in getting a team.
There were eight teams in the National League. It was not considered plausible that an American League franchise could shift. Only three clubs, Philadelphia, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh, were doing poorly enough to consider New York, but each remained out of loyalty to their traditions. But the expansion of pro football and basketball was already happening. The focus went to this avenue.
Then Shea came up with the idea of a whole new baseball organization, called the Continental League, to be run by none other than Branch Rickey. This gambit was probably just a ploy, a form of “blackmail” to force the issue in his favor. Also, being a lawyer by trade, Shea went with his best pitch: the law. He brought up Constitutional issues and court cases; anti-trust laws that previously exempted baseball from standards others had to uphold; a 1922 court Supreme Case he said could be overturned; and the question of the game’s business monopoly.
“Bill Shea looked to Senators and Congressmen from states that didn’t have teams,” said his law associate, Kevin McGrath. “He became allies with the most powerful people at that time in Congress, Lyndon Baines Johnson and Sam Rayburn, who were from Texas. No baseball team there. He made allies with men from Washington, D.C. <who lost their team> . . . From Florida, no baseball team.”
Minneapolis. Dallas/Ft. Worth. Houston. Atlanta.
“Shea knew if they put teams in those towns, they would get the politicians to back him,” said McGrath.
Between Shea and the highly respected Rickey, an attorney in his own right, they were well received in Washington. Shea is obviously credited with creation of the New York Mets. In so doing he also deserves some credit for creating the Houston Astros, the second Washington Senators, the Minnesota Twins, the Texas Rangers, and the Atlanta Braves.
Shea put together a consortium of rich, powerful people that included Edward Bennett Williams, and Jack Kent Cooke from the ownership standpoint; then such baseball men as Bob Howsam. The Continental League had financing and was planning to open for business in 1959 or 1960 with proposed franchises in Denver, Dallas/Ft. Worth, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Buffalo, and Houston; with more to follow in New Orleans, Miami, Indianapolis, San Diego, Portland, Seattle, and San Juan, Puerto Rico.
At the heart of all this maneuvering was one primary motivation: a team in New York. It was the “jewel in the crown.” Pete Davis, one of the creators of the Davis Cup tennis competition, was approached. He in turn recommended the wildly wealthy heiress, Mrs. Joan Whitney Payson. Mrs. Payson did not need to invest in a second rate baseball league. She and Rickey already understood that the Continental League would be just that. They were doing it all to force Major League Baseball’s hand. Rickey explained this to Mrs., Payson, who admired the art of the deal. She consequently brought her wealthy circle into the game: Dorothy Killiam, William Simpson, and Senator Prescott Bush’s nephew, G. Herbert Walker. Mrs. Payson and Davis then bought Dorothy Killiam’s shares. At $4 million she owned 80 percent of the stock in a “New York baseball franchise,” which is like a movie producer who buys an unproduced screenplay, paying $4 million for “120 pieces of paper.” M. Donald Grant and Herb Walker owned the remaining 20 percent.
There was virtually no chance that the CBL would be a competitive league that could dilute the two established leagues. The Shea/Rickey group, however, had created momentum, particularly in the form of two of the most powerful political figures in American history, LBJ and “Mr. Sam” Rayburn. Both lined up with them. Major League Baseball decided “if you can’t beat ‘em, let ‘em join you.” On August 17, 1960 the owners met with Branch Rickey at the Hilton Hotel in Chicago, agreeing to add Denver and Minneapolis to the American League in 1961; New York and Houston to the National League in 1962.
None of this pleased Walter O’Malley, but it was nothing compared to the eventual decision to switch the American League franchise awards; the Senators to Minnesota, an expansion team to replace them in D.C., and to his consternation, Gene Autry’s awarding of the Los Angeles Angels.
Shea got several other balls rolling. Naturally a new team would need a new stadium. Robert Moses’s plan for a state of the art facility next to the airport in Queens was fast tracked. With that, Harry Wismer came on board to bring an AFL franchise to New York. They would share the stadium with the baseball operation. Many pro football teams had previously played in New York, including teams called the Yankees and Bulldogs. None had survived in the wake of New York Giant dominance. The Jets would succeed.
The football team proved to be a major part of the baseball investor group, working hand in hand. Eventually, this led to the New York Nets of the American Basketball Association (now an NBA team) and the New York Islanders’ ice hockey team on Long Island.
Tom Deegan, the public relations head of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, began a campaign to name the stadium after Bill Shea. Shea did not agree. No stadium had ever been named after a living person. Stadiums were named after teams, after cities, or they were memorials to war dead. With America having won two world wars in the previous four and a half decades, there were more than enough monumental figures to choose from outside of Bill Shea.
Robert Moses tried to get it named after him, which might have paved the way for a million canned lines about the “Promised Land” and the “parting of the Red Sea” after beating Cincinnati, but thankfully it did not “come to pass.” Most felt that Shea Stadium was properly named. Bill Shea brought the team to New York and made it possible to erect it. Moses unquestionably was the one who actually built the structure.
With the benefit of 45 years hindsight, this accomplishment is viewed for what it was and is. At the time, it was a feat of engineering, a trendsetter in that it was built outside the downtown inner city (although the same could be said of Yankee Stadium). San Francisco’s Candlestick Park, completed in 1960, was also outside the downtown corridor, but it was most definitely not in the suburbs. Shea Stadium was in Flushing Meadows, Queens, obviously a part of New York City proper, but especially back then considered safe; a suburban enclave absent the kinds of problems that plague urban cores.
This hopeful view of the neighborhood did take a major body blow in 1964, the year of Shea Stadium’s opening. A woman named Kitty Genovese was brutally, repeatedly attacked outside a Queens housing complex. Despite her anguished pleas for help, nobody came to her rescue or even called the police in a timely manner. People they said they “didn’t want to get involved.” That became a catchphrase for detached big city life; a portent for things to come. Despite this, Queens did have a neighborhood quality. It was a place firemen and cops raised their families, the home of the mythical Archie Bunker of All In the Family fame.
Moses “made over his city as dramatically as Caesar transformed Rome,” wrote Peter Golenbock in Amazin’: The Miraculous History of New York’s Most Beloved Baseball Team. Moses in fact fancied himself a modern Caesar, calling his West Side commerce center The Coliseum, and designing Shea to be an up-dated version of the ancient edifice. Ambitious as this was, Moses failed to achieve what builders of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and the Forum were able to do. At a cost of $20 million, financed through the issuance of city bonds, Shea did draw raves in the beginning. As recently as the early 1970s it held up as one of baseball’s better facilities. The building of “cookie cutter” monstrosities in Cincinnati, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia did not make it look bad. Busch Stadium in St. Louis, Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, and the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, all built at roughly the same period, were not substantially better. Candlestick was worse. But the stadium by which all baseball parks were judged and to a large extent still is, Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, was head and shoulders better.
Over time, Shea was referred to as a “dump,” a place of many conspicuous faults. Baseball palaces in Baltimore, Cleveland, San Francisco and many other cities just made it worse, while Dodger Stadium continues to hold up, eliciting no complaints. Shea’s original plusses became minuses. Being next to the airport seemed a good idea, in that teams could get to and fro easily; fans could fly in; hotels were close by. But the roar of jets during games became a bad joke.
It had what seemingly all new stadiums of the 1960s seemingly had to have: lots of parking; 20,000 spaces worth. This was the new frontier; the car and the freeway were gods to be worshipped. Horace Stoneham chose an abominable location for Candlestick for this reason alone. Lack of parking was cited as the reason for the Dodgers’ exit. But Fenway Park has thrived without it. Many modern stadiums in downtown centers have limited parking and do just fine, partly because the game has changed.
In 1964 it was a family affair, affordable for a husband, wife and two kids. Today, prices are so high that big league crowds are often as not corporate types. They come one or two at a time, a client outing. Many come to the stadium from a nearby, accessible office instead of from a home, children in tow, which is a sad statement.
Shea was also right on the subway lines, but they targeted an audience that drove in from Long Island, Westchester County and Connecticut. It was the same upscale constituency of people from Manhattan Beach, Pasadena and Sherman Oaks that Walter O’Malley had in L.A.
Its building in conjunction with the 1964 World’s Fair made it a place of great celebration. Few stadiums have ever opened in a timelier manner. Its first five to six years, Shea Stadium was conspicuously modern and preferred over Yankee Stadium, located in the increasingly unlivable Bronx. By the end of the 1960s, the Bronx was becoming a war zone. A movie called Fort Apache, The Bronx, depicted the situation in stark detail. But Yankee Stadium renovated in time for the 1976 season. With the Yankees returning to glory, against all odds the Stadium, as they call it, stood tall and proud until its final sold-out game.
The Mets were trendsetters in a number of ways, not the least of which was majority ownership by a woman. Joan Whitney Payson’s father, Payne Whitney, was the third richest man in America during the era of the Rockefellers and Carnegies. A minority shareholder in the New York Giants, she loved baseball dearly. Hers was the lone dissenting vote cast to keep the team in New York in 1957. She then offered to buy the team from Horace Stoneham before selling her interest.
Her sister married legendary CBS chairman William Paley. Her circles included the famed Harriman clan, the Astors, the Bush’s of Greenwich, Connecticut; and others who made up a modern version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s vision of Hamptons society. She bought her way into an 80 percent ownership share and agreed with the writers who said the team should be called the “Mets.”
“Okay, let’s go, Mets,” someone responded Mrs. Payson said she liked the name.
Mets seemed to make sense. It was shortened from Metropolitans, which symbolized what New York City and the tri-state area of New York, Connecticut and New Jersey truly was. Of course, it was what the civic opera house was called, the Metropolitan, known far and wide as “The Met” (old and new). The team’s color scheme, orange and blue, was a combination of both the Dodgers and Giants. Its pinstripes resembled the Yankees. The “NY” insignia was similar to both the Giants and Yankees.
Branch Rickey’s involvement in the team changed when it became an expansion club in the National League instead of a linchpin of the Continental League. Rickey had been the “selling point,” the imprimatur of respectability convincing owners to avoid a “war” with the CBL like the one the NFL was embarking on with the AFL. They simply accepted expansion instead.
Mrs. Payson wanted Branch Rickey to be the general manager. At 80 years of age Rickey was very old and asked for an enormous amount of money and control. It was his way of begging out of a job beyond his years, since he correctly assumed the terms would not be met. He was involved in the early Mets before returning to the St. Louis Cardinals, the team he built more than 30 years earlier. Rickey set up his nephew, Charles Hurth, to be the GM. Then George Weiss was fired by the Yankees. It was irresistible and he was brought on instead of Hurth.
Weiss developed a first class organization. While mistakes were made, and the team floundered with veterans instead of youth in the early years, it is important to note in light of later success that it was not all such an accident as it has been portrayed. Branch Rickey, George Weiss, Johnny Murphy, then Casey Stengel; scouts like Rogers Hornbsy, Red Ruffing, Cookie Lavagetto, minor league managers like Solly Hemus; brilliant baseball men built the New York Mets!
Weiss was, like all the Bushies, a Yale graduate who came from money, which he used to buy his way into a minor league ownership position. From there his business acumen, flair for promotion, and baseball eye elevated him from being an “owner” into being a “baseball man,” a distinct difference. Weiss joined the Yankees. His name and reputation grew. It was the Yankees. Anybody associated with them was gold. But Weiss earned his reputation not by riding on the success of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio, but by building the team into the most efficiently run organization in the game.
After the departure of DiMaggio, the Yankees were not as talent-laden as in the “Murderer’s Row” years, but they won just as consistently. Weiss was a big reason. The roster turned over quite a bit. He was a trader, a “wheeler-dealer” and a farm system developer. Weiss always stocked the club with key players who could replace others just as they were going downhill just a little bit. It was ruthless but that was the Yankee way.
Branch Rickey developed the first farm system in St. Louis and later brought his organization to Brooklyn. Weiss perfected it, mainly because the Yankees had the economic ability to do what other teams could not. The club did not pay players high salaries, preferring to tout their World Series shares, New York connections and endorsements. They developed young players, sold them for profit, then bought them back for less. He bought Joe DiMaggio, Tommy Henrich and a handful of others for a total of $100,000, but sold players for $2 million. He bamboozled other general managers the way Billy Beane of the A’s is said to have done in the 2000s. Weiss’s conscience never bothered him. He would have made a great Roman Caesar, more Octavian than Julius.
Arthur Richman, after having worked for William Randolph Hearst, was hired as the Mets’ director of promotions. A first class organization was in place. They would play at the Polo Grounds for a year then move into Shea Stadium in 1963 (a bog was discovered while building, pushing back the opening to 1964). They had solid ownership and a top-notch front office. All they needed was a field manager.
Charles Dillon “Casey” Stengel was the perfect choice. He was New York baseball. He had played in the World Series with both Brooklyn and the New York Giants. An outfielder for John McGraw, he batted .400 in the 1922 World Series victory over Babe Ruth’s Yankees. He was a fan favorite and showman, with sparrows flying from his hat, always a practical joker.
Stengel managed the Dodgers from 1934 to 1936 and the Boston Braves from 1938-43, but failure at both led him to the minor leagues. He managed at Kansas City, part of the Yankees’ chain, then led Oakland to the Pacific Coast League title in 1948. His second baseman was a fiery kid from nearby west Berkeley, Billy Martin.
In 1949 the Yankees hired him, causing howls of protest. Casey Stengel was antithetical to the Yankee image, although Babe Ruth had never been a Wall Street type himself. But after Ruth the players, managers, even their fans, became “company men.” Manager Joe McCarthy instilled in the team a “Yankee way” of doing things; of carrying themselves, that covered the way they dressed, the approach to practices and games, the conducting of interviews and inter-action with the public. A Yankee was like a Republican political candidate. Players like Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio performed majestic feats on the field, showing little in the way of emotion. It was expected. Their fans cheered in polite arrogance.
Now a “clown,” a Dodger reject, a minor league outcast, was brought in to manage the Yankees. It was a tough year to make a good showing, too. The 1949 Boston Red Sox were a powerhouse led by the great Ted Williams at the height of his career. The Yankees had faltered down the stretch the previous season, losing out in a tight three-team race won by Cleveland over the Red Sox and New York. Joe DiMaggio suffered a painful bone spur in his heel and was out indefinitely. It was a transition period; the great stars being replaced by untested youth. The New York catcher was a St. Louis rube named Yogi Berra, of all things.
The Red Sox got out of the gate fast. But New York hung tough. In June, DiMaggio returned in a four-game series at Fenway Park that will be lauded over as long as men speak of baseball. The Bronx Bombers beat out Williams and the Bosox for the 1949 league pennant, then knocked off Jackie Robinson’s Dodgers for the World title. They repeated in 1950.
A typical example of the Yankee machine came in the 1951 World Series against the Giants. The Giants had momentum like no team before after coming back against Brooklyn, winning the pennant in a play-off on the Thomson “walk off” homer. In the minds of many, it seemed impossible they could be beaten. They were a team of destiny. The Yankees dispatched them in six with the ease of a corporation buying up a competitor, all while transitioning from the retiring DiMaggio to the rookie Mickey Mantle. In 1953 they won a record fifth straight World Series, a mark that still stands today. Stengel’s teams won nine World Series between 1949 and 1960. It was the most dominant run in baseball history, even greater than the Ruth-Gehrig or Gehrig-DiMaggio Yankees of the 1920s and ‘30s.
The Yankees of the 1950s were certainly talented, featuring superstar pitcher Whitey Ford and mega-superstar center fielder Mantle, but the dominance they displayed was beyond their abilities. It must be attributed to Stengel. Stengel and Weiss did not play a pat hand. The line-up changed. Kansas City became their de facto “triple-A club.” Young players replaced old with little regard for a veteran’s prior service. When the National League was integrating wholesale, the Yankees did so in small steps and with a particular “kind” of player: Christian, family man, make no waves. Read: Elston Howard.
Stengel revolutionized the platoon system, using righties against southpaw pitchers, lefties against right-handed hurlers; late-inning defensive replacements, pinch-runners, pinch-hitters, double-switches. The old “starter goes nine” mentality made way for a functional bullpen of middle relievers, set-up men and closers. As great as the New York Yankees were, they won more than they should have. A comparison of the Dodgers’ and Yankees’ line-ups and pitching staffs in that decade very well may favor the Dodgers in terms of talent, but Casey’s Yankees beat them over and over again. Weiss kept costs down. The platoon system reduced players’ statistics, which was used against them in contract negotiations.
“You didn’t hit 30 homers.”
“You didn’t drive in 100 runs.”
Whitey Ford’s record was less than it could have been. Stengel used him in a specific manner, mainly at Yankee Stadium where the left field “death valley” allowed him to get away with mistakes against right-handed sluggers. His World Series appearances were timed for games at the Stadium, not Ebbets Field. Once the pennant was clinched, Ford was held out of the rotation to “rest up” for the Series. This often occurred with a couple weeks left in the regular season. The practice cost him 20 wins on numerous occasions, which of course was used as the excuse to keep his salary down. The refrain always was, being a Yankee meant the Series money, plus endorsements and ad hoc Big Apple advantages. Nobody rocked the boat.
Looking at Stengel’s career as a player, failed manager in Brooklyn and Boston, then his Mets years, there seem to be two Caseys. When he came to the Mets, he reverted back to the “clown” he had been before his Yankee tenure. In truth, Casey was always the same. The imprimatur of Yankee pinstripes and glory, however, made him an elder statesman; his “double talk” words of wisdom, his rubbery on-field antics suddenly works of genius as he led the “corporation” to record profits. He loved to drink, regaling writers with wild stories well into the evening. He may have been the most colorful, quotable figure the game has ever known. Eventually, his age, his “un-Yankee” persona, and maybe even his popularity, made him vulnerable.
He personally admitted mistakes that cost New York the 1960 World Series in seven games to Pittsburgh; mainly a failure to have Ford available in the final game because of the way he used Whitey. Casey was unceremoniously let go. The success of the Yankees continued for several more years, with new manager Ralph Houk using Ford in a manner that allowed him to enjoy his best years ever. This casts some doubt on Stengel, but Houk was unable to sustain the run as Stengel had. In the end, credit for such a long showing of dominance must be given to the “Ol’ Perfessor.”
No sooner was Stengel fired than Weiss, also fired by the same team, decided he would manage the New York Metropolitans. Stengel’s wife, Edna urged him not to do it. He had other offers, including a lucrative memoir in the Saturday Evening Post and a cushy banking position out in California. The allure of baseball and maybe even proving the Yankees’ wrong in New York was too great. His hiring made the Mets’ “good guys” and the Yankees’ villains.
Stengel had no pretense whatsoever. He loved everybody and gave his time to fans and old acquaintances. Once the team arrived at two in the morning to their hotel in San Francisco where the Women's Republican Club of California was holding a convention.
“. . . These old dowagers had waited up for him,” recalled beat writer Jack Lang. “They were standing in the lobby, and he stood there regaling them with stories for another hour. He was a charmer with everybody. He really was.”
“All the kids in New York are growing up, and they want to see the Metsies, the Metsies, the Metsies,” he told interviewers. He put out an “invitation” to the “youth of America” to come “try out” for the Mets, an unprecedented approach that seemed to say that the club was so bad they would accept scrubs, walk-ons, unknowns, since few players ever really “try out.”
That term is a misnomer, at least in the modern era and especially since the institution of the draft in 1965. People who said they had “a try-out” with some team or another use the term loosely. It is a sure indication the “player” knows not what he speaks of and never was a prospect. “Try-outs” are occasionally held for all comers, but these events are jokes, PR stunts in which 500 hopefuls show up and one or two is signed, if any. Half the time a player signed from one of these events is the guy who ran the fastest 40-yard dash. If a legitimate player is signed out of such a try-out, he is not a guy “discovered” there. Rather, he is probably a known quantity, recently released by another organization perhaps; or a local college player of some recognized ability who for various reasons (injury, grades, quit the team?) was not drafted or signed. Modern scouting is a sophisticated process in which few players go “under the radar.” Some clubs sponsor “winter league” teams called the “Phillies rookies,” “Dodgers rookies” or some such thing, but many scrubs exaggerate their claims to professional or “prospect” status based on nebulous “semi-pro” affiliations. But Stengel seemed to indicate that all comers were welcome and actually had a shot. He knew better but the PR value was terrific.
“The Mets is a very good thing,” said former Brooklyn pitcher Billy Loes. His statement seemed to reflect the comedy of those early Mets in a way that nobody talks anymore. “They give everybody a job. Just like the WPA.” The WPA was the Works Projects Administration, a New Deal construction outfit started by President Franklin Roosevelt (which as the Venona Project later revealed was rife with Communist espionage).
Hobie Landrith was made the first Met ever picked in the 1961 National League expansion draft. “You gotta start with a catcher or you’ll have all passed balls,” Stengel explained. This of course is true, but somehow Stengel had a way of talking as if to a six-year old child.
“Stengel was a comedian, and he was bright, and he had total recall so there wasn’t anything that didn’t happen that Stengel couldn’t refer to, one way or another,” said sportswriter Stan Isaacs.
Stengel could see through phonies. He immediately determined that Howard Cosell was just that, but if a reporter was honest Stengel liked them and gave young writers attention, feeding egos. According to Robert Lipsyte of the New York Times, one of the reasons so many of the early Mets’ stories had a comic angle was because the Times de-valued sports. They decided to make the Mets more of a feature than a legitimate sports story, and nobody wanted to miss a thing the “Ol’ Perfessor” said.
“I couldn’t drink along with him, obviously, but I didn’t want to leave early, just in case he said something,” Lipsyte said of Stengel.
Weiss and Stengel decided to go for veteran talent instead of youth, for several reasons. In 1961, the Los Angeles Angels used veterans with some success, which carried over to actual pennant contention in 1962. The Mets wanted to satisfy the old Dodgers’ and Giants’ fans by bringing back some of the names from the past, in the hopes that they might have a little magic left and would sell tickets. The magic was gone but they did sell tickets. The other National League expansion franchise, the Houston Colt .45s, went for youth.
Among players selected after Landrith in the original draft were Don Zimmer, Roger Craig, and Gil Hodges. Others included Jay Hook, Bob Miller, Lee Walls, Gus Bell, Ed Bouchee, Chris Cannizzaro, Elio Chacon, Choo Coleman, Ray Daviault, John DeMerit, Sammy Drake, Al Jackson, Felix Mantilla, Bobby Gene Smith, Jim Hickman and Sherman Jones. Richie Ashburn, Frank Thomas, Clem Labine and Charlie Neal, all talents, were also included. Ashburn and Thomas still had some juice left.
The 1962 Mets were a force of nature. If there is any possible truth to George Burns’s statement in Oh, God! that the1969 Mets were his Last Miracle, then the ’62 version was somehow struck by supernatural forces, too. It was a comedy of errors, of flukes, of crazy plays, players and situations, almost defying logic, therefore lending credence to the notion that the deity got involved. Never has a team played so badly, and never has failure been so loved.
Certainly the “Daffiness Boys” were popular, but Dazzy Vance was a Hall of Famer, Babe Herman a line drive impresario. It seems completely improbable that a bad team could be received so well in New York City. Today it would not happen. This is a town built on excellence. The George Steinbrenner mentality, the Donald Trump way of thinking, has completely overshadowed the old concepts. But with the Dodgers and Giants gone, with the Yankees resembling a shark in a tank full of minnows, somehow the whole thing played.
That spring, Stengel’s explanations of his team were classics of baseball humor, even though it seems the “Ol’ Perfessor” was deadly serious in his analysis. After announcing that “Chacon” was batting second, he got into this tete a tete with New York Post columnist Leonard Schecter and a few others:
“Chacon?” asked Schecter.
“Mantilla,” said Stengel. It sounded liked like scintilla. “I mean Chacon. I mean I said Chacon, but I meant Mantilla . . . I don’t know who to hit third. If it’s a right-handed pitcher, which it is, I might go with Bell in right field . . . You asked me for a line-up and I can’t give it to you . . . I got two center fielders. Christopher and Smith.”
Christopher was in the minors.
“Christopher?” inquired Schecter.
“Ashburn,” said Casey. “Smith and Ashburn. Whichever one I play I’ll put leading off.”
This contradicted previous Stengelese about Neal leading off, Mantilla hitting second . . .
“Didn’t you say that Neal was going to lead off?” asked Schecter.
“Well, put Neal third and Mantilla second,” as if Schecter was making the decisions and Casey now just offering advice.
From there: “Let’s see. You can put Hodges fifth. No, put Bell fifth. Hodges sixth.” He looked at a reporter’s notebook. “Better write it down so I’ll remember it.” Now the scribes were his secretaries. “And put <Jim> Marshall along with Hodges. Maybe I’ll put Hodges in for a while and then Marshall.”
Batting fourth?
“Thomas. That’s right, Case?” a writer inquired. “Thomas in left field batting fourth.”
“That’s right,” assented Casey, followed by some discussion of Don Zimmer hitting seventh and playing third.
Schecter: “One more thing. Who’s the catcher, Landrith or Ginsberg?”
“It’s Ginsberg or Landrith,” replied Casey. “Ginsberg caught him <it turned out to be Roger Craig> pretty good. I’ll decide when I get there.”
“This was the process by which Casey Stengel made up his line-up every day,” Schecter, whose bright idea became Ball Four in 1970, later recalled.
Perhaps Stengel talked like this when he was with the Yankees, maybe even made out his line-up that way – although when you have Mantle, Berra, Howard and the like it tends to make itself – but the Mets, as Robert Lipsyte pointed out, were a feature story, not a sports story. The press coverage looked for this angle and played it up. Still, there were comedies that went beyond seeming coincidence. The names of players certainly had a ring.
There was “Butterball” Botz, who apparently was one of the “youth of America” Casey invited to try out . . . and fail. It was like the old Dodgers of the “Daffiness” era, up-dated now to “Choo Choo” Coleman and “Marvelous Marv” Throneberry.
The opener told the whole story in a nutshell. According to legend, nine Mets got stuck in an elevator, making them late for the first game in St. Louis, an 11-4 loss. They dropped their first nine games and celebrated the first win, behind Jay Hooks at Pittsburgh, as if the Series had been won.
Casey on Don Zimmer, who had a plate in his head after having been beaned: “He’s the perdotius quotient of the qualificatilus.”
??
Stengel told Zimmer he would “love the left field fence.” He meant the left field fence at Cincinnati’s Crosley Field, where he had just been traded to, only Zim had not been told that part yet.
In May, Stengel got back on the “try-out” bandwagon. There was a little more reasoning behind his invitation for young folks to come out and play for the Mets because you “can play for the Mets. If you want rapid advancement, play for the Mets. We’ve got the bonus money. We’ll even buy you a glove. So join us. Take the bonus money. Play a year or two. Then you can go back to school.”
It was like an Army enlistment commercial, but old Stengel was smart despite his contortions of language. His enticement of college money applied to pitcher Jay Hook, an engineer out of Northwestern University who certainly was academically inclined. It would later resonate with the likes of Tom Seaver, who signed with the Mets based on specific guarantees that they would pay for him to continue at USC. Then there was his Fresno High teammate, Dick Selma, in 1962 being scouted by everybody. The draft was a few years away. A high school or college prospect like Selma was a free agent who could choose the team he might sign with, rather than subject himself to the vagaries of a wide-open draft. Selma had choices within the pro and college ranks, but went for the Mets because he could advance, which he did, all the way to the big leagues. When Seaver was waiting to see whether the Phillies, Indians or Mets would draw his name out of a hat in 1966, he rooted for the Mets for the same reason: rapid advancement.
The lyrical stories of the early Mets did not become so famous by accident. They were in New York, the media capital of the world, and the writers in that city were the most talented. Aside from Jimmy Breslin, Jimmy Cannon, Red Smith, Maury Allen and many others, a self-professed “non-professional” named Roger Angell was assigned their version of the “baseball beat” by The New Yorker. A highbrow arts and leisure magazine, it seemed the last place great baseball writing would come from, but it was.
A huge baseball fan who mourned the loss of the Dodgers and Giants, Angell viewed the Yankees from a pedestrian’s point of view. He wanted color, humanity; the essence of the “Bums” from Brooklyn, of Willie Mays’s cap flying off. The Yankees just shut everybody up, like the time at Ebbets when the crowd hooted and hollered at Mickey Mantle incessantly. Then Mick hit a gargantuan home run which mockingly bounced and caromed and broke windshields and dented car doors belonging to Dodgers’ fans outside the park.
Angell resisted the Polo Grounds in April and May of 1962 despite frequent invites to see “those amazin’ Mets.” But by late May Angell was fascinated with the team’s strange habit of actually leading in late innings before blowing games. The Mets are thought to be the worst team of all time, but despite the numbers, this may not be accurate. They lost by a landslide often enough, but not every time. They often lost in crazy ways. Among their 40 wins in 1962 were some impressive performances, including a series of come-from-behind efforts. After they actually swept Milwaukee in a double-header on May 20, Angell made it to the Polo Grounds for five days until June 2.
He bought his seats instead of taking a press pass, sitting in the stands with his then-14-year old daughter and 197,428 fans who came to see the Mets take on the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants. The villains had returned to the scene of the crime.
The Dodgers utterly destroyed the Mets. It was like O’Malley was a Roman general ordering his legions to crush the rebellion. Angell’s daughter compared it to the “fifth grade against the sixth grade at school.”
Old Dodgers were wearing “LA” caps, and some old Dodgers were wearing “NY” caps, plus there were a few new stars in the Los Angeles constellation. Amid everything the stomping fans started to chant, “Let’s go, Mets! Let’s go, Mets!”
Angell was stunned to find goodwill in the air, not bitterness. The next day the Dodgers had to scrape for a win, but New York pulled off a triple-play. After Los Angeles completed the sweep, San Francisco ran New York’s losing streak to 15 with a lopsided four-game explosion of power and pitching. The losses to Los Angeles and San Francisco surprised nobody; after all, the 1962 Dodgers and Giants, respectively, were two of the best in each team’s storied history. The Giants eventually won the league championship. Both clubs won over 100 games before San Francisco captured a play-off.
But Angell fell in love with the Mets. Apparently so did “The ‘Go! Shouters,” the name of his New Yorker piece, later published in one of the finest baseball books ever written, The Summer Game.
“The Mets’ ‘Go!’ shouters enjoyed their finest hour on Friday night, after the Giants had hit four homers and moved inexorably to a seventh inning lead of 9-1,” wrote Angell. “At this point, when most sensible baseball fans would be edging towards the exits, a man sitting in Section 14, behind first base, produced a long, battered foghorn and blew mournful blasts into the hot night air. Within minutes, the Mets fans were shouting in counterpoint – Tooot! ‘Go!’ Tooot! ‘Go!’ Tooot! ‘GO!’ – and the team, defeated and relaxed, came up with five hits that sent Billy Pierce to the showers.”
It was all “exciting foolishness,” of course, since San Francisco did win the game going away. Angell thought about the demographical possibility of New York City producing “a 40- or 50,000-man audience made up exclusively of born losers – leftover Landon voters, collectors of mongrel puppies, owners of stock in played-out gold mines - who had been waiting for years for a suitably hopeless cause.”
This was a Friday night in June, with the sensory pleasures of the New York bar scene beckoning in “a city known for its cool,” but these people had no place they would rather be. Angell wanted to know what was going on. Two apparent Yankee fans sitting next to him derided the Mets in snide tones, going over the line-up and announcing that each was a player who would not even make the Bronx Bombers. Angell determined that it was not bitter, anti-Dodgers or anti-Giants sentiment. Rather, these people and this team were the anti-Yankees, who Angell had no love for.
The Giants won, their impressive stars – Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Juan Marichal – all shining, but Angell observed that the Mets were “like France in the 1920s,” with a “missing generation between the too-old and the too-young.” He determined to see the Mets “as a ball team, rather than a flock of sacrificial lambs,” calling Stengel “an Edison tinkering with rusty parts”; noting the receding star of Felix Mantilla, Charlie Neal, Frank Thomas, Richie Ashburn and Gil Hodges; the eager, opportunistic, oft-dumb baserunning antics of Rod Kanehl and Choo Choo Coleman; Stengel’s “bowlegged hobble” walking style; Elio Chacon’s hesitancy costing an out; a pitching staff of Hook, Jackson, Anderson and Roger Craig (“the Mets’ own Cyrano”), delivering glimpses of competence, even brilliance, before falling apart.
San Francisco won a Sunday double-header. Angell departed to write what was not merely a brilliant story, but perhaps the most telling explanation of the early Mets and their fans. There was prescience in it, too, in describing some youth with promise that seven years later made him a small-time prophet of sorts.
On June 17, Marv Throneberry was at first base when the Mets caught a Chicago base runner in a rundown between first and second. Throneberry ran into the runner without the ball in his possession and was called for interference. Chicago scored four times after that. When Marv came to bat in the bottom half of the inning, he hit a drive to the right field bullpen, pulling into third with a “triple” just as the umpire called him out at first for having missed the bag. Stengel came out to argue but was rebuffed by news from his own bench that Throneberry also missed second. In July the Mets were 6-23.
Throneberry had some power and four times hit a sign for a clothing company, who awarded him a $6,000 sailboat. Richie Ashburn was also given a boat for winning the team MVP award. Judge Robert Cannon, legal counsel for the Major League Baseball Player’s Association, told Throneberry not to forget to declare the full value of the boat.
“Declare it?” Throneberry asked. “Who to, the Coast Guard?”
“Taxes,” Cannon replied, as in the IRS. “Ashburn’s boat was a gift. He was voted it. Yours came the hard way. You hit the sign. You earned it. The boat is earnings. You pay income tax on it.”
At season’s end, Jimmy Breslin visited Throneberry in his hometown of Collierville, Tennessee.
“In my whole life I never believed they’d be as rough a year as there was last season,” said Throneberry, who believe it or at one time was considered a prospect with the Yankees. According to most accounts of his career he was, if not a really good player, not a terrible one; not the “worst player who ever lived,” or whatever moniker has been attached to him.
The “worst ball player” never made the Major Leagues, or even signed a professional contract. If such a player existed in the big leagues he lasted one day, one inning, like the midget Eddie Gaedel. He did not pick up big league paychecks for the better part of a decade, as Marv did. “Terrible” Mets pitchers like Roger Craig (10-24), Al Jackson (8-20), Jay Hook (8-19) and even Craig Anderson (3-17) were not that terrible. Roger Craig was in fact a very food pitcher, Jackson a genuine talent. The truth is, a man cannot last long enough to lose 20 games if he is that bad; he would be drummed out of the corps long before given the chance to compile such a record.
Throneberry’s home in Collierville was at least 100 miles from anything resembling a sporting waterway, and the man was never going to be part of the “skiff off the Hamptons crowd,” wrote Breslin.
“And here I am, I’m still not out of it,” said Marv. “I got a boat in a warehouse someplace and the man tell me I got to pay taxes on it and all we got around here is, like, filled-up bathtubs and maybe a crick or two. I think maybe I’ll be able to sell it off someplace. I think you could say prospects is all right. But I still don’t know what do about the tax thing.”
It was that kind of year.
“We get to the end of the season, and I might need a couple of games to finish higher and what am I going to get?” Stengel said. “Everybody will be standing up there and going, whoom! Just trying to win theirselves a nice boat while I’m sittin’ here hopin’ they’ll butcher boy the ball onto the ground and get me a run or two. I don’t like it at all.”
??
Hall of Famer Rogers Hornsby, an irascible sort who could not stay hired in his post-playing gigs, was hired by Weiss to scout Major League games, looking for players the Mets could use. Hornsby lived in Chicago and attended White Sox games, played at night in Comiskey Park. He spurned Wrigley because their day schedule interfered with his horse track pursuits.
“They say we’re gonna get players out of a grab bag,” he said. “From what I see, it’s going to be a garbage bag. Ain’t nobody got fat off eating out of the garbage, and that’s just what the Mets is going to have to be doing. This is terrible. I mean, this is really going to be bad.”
Stengel celebrated his 73rd birthday in a private party room at the Chase Hotel in St. Louis. He ordered a Manhattan.
“I’ve seen these do a lot of things to people,” he said of the Manhattan. He smoked cigarettes and let his hair down, so to speak, with Jimmy Breslin. He spoke with trepidation of the Mets’ initial visit to the brand new Dodger Stadium. “We’re going into Los Angeles the first time, and, well, I don’t want to go in there to see that big new ballpark in front of all them people and have to see the other fellas running around those bases the way they figured to on my own pitchers and my catchers, too. <Maury> Wills and those fellows, they start running in circles and they don’t stop and so forth and it could be embarrassing, which I don’t want to be.
“Well, we have Canzoneri <catcher Chris Cannizzaro> at Syracuse, and he catches good and throws real good and he should be able to stop them. I don’t want to be embarrassed. So we bring him and he is going to throw out these runners.
“We come in there and you never seen anything like it in your life. I find I got a defensive catcher, only he can’t catch the ball. The pitcher throws. Wild pitch. Throws again. Passed ball. Throws again. Oops! The ball drops out of the glove. And all the time I am dizzy on account of these runners running around in circles on me and so forth.
“Makes a man think. You look up and down the bench and you have to say to yourself, ‘Can’t anybody here play this game?’ ”
Hours later, “the bartender was falling asleep and the only sound in the hotel was the whine of the vacuum cleaner in the lobby,” wrote Breslin. “Stengel banged his empty glass on the red-tiled bar top and then walked out of the room.”
Casey walked to the lobby, stopping to light a smoke
“I’m shell-shocked,” he told the guy working the vacuum cleaner. “I’m not used to gettin’ any of these shocks at all, and now they come every three innings. How do you like that.”
No answer.
“This is a disaster,” he continued. “Do you know who my player of the year is? My player of the year is Choo Choo Coleman, and I have him for only two days. He runs very good.”
“This, then, is the way the first year of the New York Mets went,” wrote Breslin, an old-time scribe whose clipped style was reminiscent of Ring Lardner (and Mark Twain before that), in Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? “It was a team that featured 23-game losers, an opening day outfield that held the all-time Major League record for fathering children <19; “You can look it up,” as Casey would say>, a defensive catcher who couldn’t catch, and an overall collection of strange players who performed strange feats. Yet it was absolutely wonderful. People loved it. The Mets gathered about them a breed of baseball fans who quite possibly will make you forget the characters who once made Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field a part of this country’s folklore. The Mets’ fans are made of the same things. Brooklyn fans, observed Garry Schumacher, once a great baseball writer and now part of the San Francisco Giants management, never would have appreciated Joe DiMaggio on their club.
“ ‘Too perfect,’ said Garry.”
Bill Veeck announced that the 1962 Mets were “without a doubt the worst team in the history of baseball,” claiming that he spoke with authority since his St. Louis Browns were the previous “title holders.”
Technically, statistically, and by the record, he was right, but the ’62 Mets were not the worst. Veeck’s Browns had no name players, nobody worth remembering. The Mets had former big names like Ashburn, Hodges, Craig, Gene Woodling and Frank Thomas. Over the hill, yes; but there is something not quite right about saying a team with so many one-time stars was the worst ever assembled. Sometimes, not so bad. Ashburn batted .306; Thomas hit 34 homers and drove in 94 runs. Then again, sometimes they sure looked terrible. In June, Sandy Koufax struck out the first three Mets on nine pitches, finished with 13 Ks, and a 5-0 no-hit win.
Certainly no team nearly that bad has been analyzed and talked about so much. Being in New York was part of that. Casey Stengel was part of it. But it went beyond these obvious factors. Sportswriter Leonard Koppett said it was part of a larger social revolution, embodied by the new, youthful President John F. Kennedy; the young taking over from the old.
“The times they are a-changin’,” sang Bob Dylan.
The players poked fun at each other. There was much self-deprecation in the Mets’ clubhouse. When Ashburn won the team MVP award, he said, “Most Valuable on the worst team ever? Just how do they mean that?”
He made fun of Throneberry, but the big ol’ country boy took it in stride. The fans picked up on their humble, comical ways and ate it up. Strange, confusing things happened to that team that somehow did not happen to others. They had two pitchers named Bob Miller: Robert G. Miller, left-handed and Robert L. Miller, right-handed. Robert L. made 21 starts with an 0-12 record and was preferred among the two.
One day Stengel called to the bullpen.
“Get Nelson ready,” he told the bullpen coach.
“Who?” was the reply.
“Nelson,” Stengel said. “Get him up.”
The bullpen coach looked around. There was no Nelson. Nelson was broadcaster Lindsey Nelson. But Robert L. Miller knew that when Casey called for Nelson, he meant him, so he warmed up and went in the game. Later the Miller’s appeared on the TV quiz show To Tell the Truth. When the MC called, “Will the real Bob Miller please stand up?” both did so to confused delight.
Stengel would occasionally call on some past star of the Yankees or Giants to go into the game. He confused Jim Marshall with John Blanchard, a Yankee reliable of the 1950s. In a strange twist of coincidence, when his protégé, USC’s Rod Dedeaux (who played for Casey at Brooklyn) got old (sometimes showing up late for games after attending a cocktail party), he reportedly would call out, “Lynn, get your gun,” or “Seaver, get loose.” These were references to past Trojans like Fred Lynn or Tom Seaver who had graduated 10 or 15 years earlier.
Banners and placards made their appearance at the Polo Grounds, possibly for the first time. Certainly, the existence of this kind of fan signage began a trend. “Marv.” “Marvelous Marv.” “Cranberry Strawberry We Love Throneberry.” “MARV!” “VRAM!” (“Marv” spelled backwards). The Mets responded with a team sign of their own: “To the Met Fans – We Love You Too.”
Stengel called it all “Amazin’.” “Come out and see my ‘Amazin’ Mets,’ ” he said in an open invite to the public. “I been in this game a hundred years but I see new ways to lose I never knew existed before.”
Stengel got into a taxi with several young writers and inquired whether they were ballplayers. They said they were not.
“No, and neither are my players,” said Stengel.
Of the Northwestern engineer Jay Hook, Stengel said, “I got the smartest pitcher in the world until he goes to the mound.”
When Yale’s Ken MacKenzie entered a game Stengel advised, “Now just make believe you’re pitching against Harvard.”
Throneberry was “Thornberry.” Casey never came close to Cannizzaro’s proper pronunciation. Gus Bell was an established player but Casey never got a handle on who he was.
“And in left field, in left field we have a splendid man, and he knows how to do it,” Stengel said. “He’s been around and he swings the bat there in left field and he knows what to do. He’s got a big family <six children, including future big leaguer Buddy Bell> and he wants to provide for them, and he’s a fine outstanding player, the fella in left field. You can be sure he’ll be ready when the bell rings – and that’s his name, Bell!”
“About this Cho Choo Coleman,” Casey told Dan Daniel of The Sporting News. “Is he a catcher or an outfielder? . . . Watch this carefully.”
Other bits of Stengelese:
· “I don’t mind my ballplayers drinking, as long as they don’t drink in the same bar as me.”
· “We have a great young outfield prospect. He’s 22 and with a little luck he might make it to 23.”
· “I was the best manager I ever saw.”
· “I was fired more times than a cap pistol.”
· “I want to thank all these generous owners for giving us those great players they did not want.”
· “If I was winning I’d play five games a day because you tend to keep winning when you are winning. But I had a chance to call this game, so I did. You tend to keep losing when you’re losing, you know.”
· “Everybody here keeps saying how good I’m looking. Well maybe I do, but they should see me inside. I look terrible.”
First baseman Ed Kranepool, a native of nearby Yonkers, spend most of 1962 in the minor leagues but got called up and hit .167 in his brief stint. He was only 17 years old.
Infielder “Hot Rod” Kanehl, a one-time Yankee prospect, hit .248. Married with four kids, he was one of those “record breaking” fathers of multiple kids, supposedly something the ’62 Mets did better than anything.
“He can’t field,” George Weiss told Casey.
“But he can run the bases,” Stengel replied.
“But Weiss always wanted to get rid of me, and now he couldn’t because I had become a hero in New York,” said Kanehl. “All of New York was asking, ‘Who is this guy?’ and the front page of the Daily News had a picture of Stengel pulling me out of a hat like a rabbit.”
Kanehl was one of those strange hybrids of baseball; a Yankee farmhand who never made it there, but became a household name, still fondly remembered, because he played for the Mets. It did not last long. A few years later he was playing for the Wichita Dreamliners against USC’s Tom Seaver, then pitching for the Alaska Goldpanners.
“Even though we lost, we were still upbeat,” said Kanehl. “And so was Casey, who was leading the parade down Broadway. A lot of people identified with the Mets – underdog types, not losers – quality people who weren’t quite getting it together.
“In May we beat Cincinnati, and we beat the Braves at home, we were playing well, but then we went on the road and lost 17 games in a row. We sure could dream up ways to lose.”
When the Mets were mathematically eliminated from the National League pennant the first week of August, Casey called a meeting.
“You guys can relax now,” he told them.
The season ended, appropriately enough, with a triple-play and a worst-ever 40-120 record. More than 900,000 fans attended Mets games at the Polo Grounds, a significant improvement over the attendance of the New York Giants, a team featuring such stalwarts as Willie Mays, playing at the same park in their last year (1957).
“It’s been a helluva year,’ Casey remarked.
****
The 1963-68 New York Mets gradually morphed from the “lovable losers” of Casey Stengel’s 1962 team to just plain losers. Stengel lasted until 1965, and when he finally departed the team’s image changed. Fans began to expect more out of them. Young, promising players were brought in. This had a double-edged effect. On the one hand, talented youth raised hopes. On the other, when the team still lost some frustration began to occur.
Still, the essential nature of the team never really changed. They were losers. The Mets were synonymous with the concept of losing. Looking back, it was a seven-year period, but it seemed to have lasted forever and nobody really conceived of a time in which this club would not be cellar dwellers. It was the reverse of the UCLA basketball dynasty under John Wooden, which occurred during those same years. The Bruins won 10 NCAA titles in 12 seasons (1964-75), but in the mind’s eye it lasted forever. It was inconceivable that they could lose, or at least it seemed that way. The Mets eventually winning almost has a Biblical quality to it, which plays to the theme of George Burns’s Oh, God! statement that they were The Last Miracle. The Bible is filled with constant references to seemingly endless diasporas and bondage, but eventually it all “came to pass.” But when it is going on, it seems like hell; despair, hopeless, begotten.
When Shea Stadium was built in 1964, it seemed that now was a time to begin expecting improvement, but there was none. When Casey left the next season, the clown act would end in favor of professional baseball, but that did not happen, either. At least the clown act might have been diminished, but it was not replaced by competence. Perhaps it was because the sportswriters did not note such things, or look for it as much, but the funny quotes, the comic plays, the crazy ironies of 1962 never quite repeated themselves. With the “Ol’ Perfessor’s” retirement that part of the team was replaced only by raw numbers: 40-120 (1962), 51-111 (1963), 53-109 (1964), 50-112 (1965), 66-95 (1966), 61-101 (1967), and 73-89 (1968).
They were dead last in a 10-team league (prior to division play in 1969) in each of their first six seasons, but in 1966 the Mets did move the boulder an inch or so up the hill. It was their first year without 100 losses and they finished ninth, not 10th. That “honor” went, ironically, to Leo Durocher’s Chicago Cubs. The fact that the old Dodger and Giant manager took over the Cubs; that the Mets beat him in his first year; and that it was Durocher’s Cubs, representing the “Second City” that has always competed for status with New York (who the Mets battled it out with in 1969); it all adds up to a bundle of ironies. But the Mets’ 73-win finish under Gil Hodges in 1968, again good for ninth place, for the very first time ahead of their expansion rival and nemesis Houston, represented a paradigm shift in Mets fortunes.
Two new faces arrived in 1963, and both were appropriate Mets. Jimmy Piersall was once run out of baseball, literally, for being crazy. After climbing the backstop at Fenway Park he was institutionalized, all of it depicted in a bad movie called Fear Strikes Out. Psycho’s Anthony Perkins played Piersall. Piersall “hated it,” which was understandable. Who would want Anthony Perkins playing you?
Piersall recovered to become one of the finest defensive center fielders in baseball, but his tenures were short-lived with various non-contending clubs. He was controversial, snubbing fans, running the bases backwards, and later as a broadcaster for the Chicago White Sox declaring baseball wives to be “all a bunch of horny broads.”
Casey could not stomach him and Piersall was gone after 40 games, but Duke Snider was a welcome addition. The “Duke of Flatbush” was a huge favorite in Brooklyn, who jealously defended him in arguments over who the best of the New York center fielders were in the 1950s; Mays, Mantle or The Duke? Duke was a huge power threat at little Ebbets Field, built in the “dead ball era.” A Los Angeles native he seemingly would have been pleased, as Don Drysdale was, to be going home. But Drysdale was still a young player. Snyder and another veteran Californian, Jackie Robinson, knew where their bread was buttered. Robinson chose retirement instead of becoming Willie Mays’s teammate in New York and later San Francisco, after O’Malley traded him to the Giants. The whole winter of 1957-58 was star-crossed, with Roy Campanella’s paralysis in a car accident preventing him from taking his big right-handed swing to the L.A. Coliseum’s short left field porch.
But the Coliseum was “disaster city” for poor Duke. His power was to right. The Coliseum was and is a famed football stadium, chosen by O’Malley for baseball because 90,000 paying customers put more moolah in his pocket than the 20,000-plus at L.A.’s minor league Wrigley Field. The dilemma of the field’s baseball dimensions was “solved” by a high fence in left field, which was only about 250 feet from home. It meant legitimate line drive homers bounced off the screen for singles while lazy pop-ups were home runs. Wally Moon hit 19 that way in 1959.
The distance increased as the fence lengthened towards center fielder. From center to dead right, Snider’s power alley, it “made up the difference” for left field by spreading out in an expanse of green acreage, the fence miles from home plate. The Giants came for their first game and Willie Mays approached Snider.
“They just killed you, man,” he told Duke.
Snider was like two later Dodgers, Eric Davis and Darryl Strawberry. They were all superstars in other cities who returned to their hometowns after the magic was gone. Snider played on the Dodgers’ 1959 World Champions and the 1962 almost-champions, but the likes of Tommy Davis, Willie Davis and Maury Wills replaced him as vital cogs in L.A.’s machine. The building of Dodger Stadium, in those days no hitter’s paradise but much better than the Coliseum, came too late and he was sent packing to the scene of triumph, New York (and the Mets). He was cheered lustily, which fed his ego, bruised by Los Angelenos who were not enthralled by the former Compton High School football sensation. But Snider was way past his prime in 1963, nobly supplying 14 homers at the Polo Grounds (whose right field line was even more inviting than Ebbets had been).
Roger Craig lost 18 straight and 22 on the year.
Ron Hunt and Al Jackson became, perhaps, the first legitimate Mets baseball players in 1963. Hunt was just plain good; not funny, not quirky, just a hustling second baseman who played to win. Jackson was 13-17, which on the 1963 Mets was 20-win good.
Shea was supposed to be ready in 1963 but in building it, a bog was discovered. This pushed its opening back to 1964. Shea Stadium was now the draw. 50,312 showed up for its first game, against the Giants in 1964. On Memorial Day weekend, the Giants again came to town for a memorable 10 1/2-hour double-header. Mets fans were enthusiastic, many staying to the end, filling the air with hopeful shouts and artificial noisemakers; placards and signs of encouragement dotting Shea.
San Francisco won the opener but the second game went 23 innings before the Giants pulled it out for the sweep. Mets fans were just happy to be part of it. It was joyful. In that game, a young Gaylord Perry, struggling to make his way as a big league pitcher, was called on in desperation by manager Herman Franks of the Giants. Franks had nobody left.
With runners all over the sacks Perry found himself in deep trouble. He had practiced a “spit ball” in the bullpen but never dared throw it in the game. It was now or never. He used his “spitter” to pitch his way out the jam and hold New York scoreless for 10 innings. He credited that game with launching his Hall of Fame career.
Rod Kanehl, Ron Hunt and the Mets also got into a full on “pier six brawl,” according to broadcaster Bob Murphy, with Ed Bailey and Milwaukee. Hunt was the team’s standout performer. Kranepool took over at first base. The old names – Choo Choo, “Marvelous Marv,” Elio Chacon, both Bob Millers - were for the most part replaced by a utilitarian group of marginal big leaguers, some of whom would have (or had) legitimate careers in other places. They included Roy McMillan, Jim Hickman, and pitchers Jack Fisher, Tracy Stallard, and Galen Cisco. But on the final weekend of the 1964 season, for the very first time, the New York Mets played meaningful, important baseball games.
The final home game was on a Sunday. Kanehl was married but, as one wedded player told an inquiring groupie in Jim Bouton’s Ball Four, he was “not a fanatic about it.” Rod brought one of his girls into Jilly’s on 50th Street. His former Yankee teammate John Blanchard, also married, was in the back room with a woman, not Mrs. Blanchard. Blanchard told him that, “Mickey is so envious of you.”
Kanehl was known to be a major bon vivant and man about town, but the media never exposed his antics. Mickey Mantle, a complete libertine, was a tabloid superstar who could not go anywhere because “Dorothy Kilgallen will write about him,” Blanchard told Kanehl.
Blanchard, Kanehl and the girls went to Mantle’s hotel suite at the Essex House, where he was entertaining an airline stewardess. The reader must only fantasize to imagine what all happened. These guys were such men-children, however, that instead of an orgy it was more likely Mantle, Blanchard and Kanehl acting like overgrown boys than studs, while the girls stared at them with bored, what-about-me? expressions.
Kanehl left, still drunk, at six in the morning, ran to his apartment, gathered his belongings, and barely caught up with his team in time to fly out for their final road trip.
“Little did I know it was going to be my final day in New York,” he told writer Peter Golenbock.
Kanehl had little reason to save his energy, or so he thought. The Mets would fold in Milwaukee and St. Louis, then lick their wounds in the off-season. But 1964 was one of the all-time doozies of a pennant race, ever. Gene Mauch’s Philadelphia Phillies dominated all season and had a four-game lead with 10 to play. Mauch then decided to get things wrapped up early, so the club could concentrate on the World Series. He decided to pitch his aces, Jim Bunning and Chris Short, exclusively in order to clinch it. Both aces were exhausted, mentally and physically, and fell apart. The Phillies lost 10 straight games.
Fred Hutchinson’s Reds and Johnny Keane’s Cardinals had battled Philadelphia all season, but both seemed out of it until the Phillie collapse. Given new life, both moved right into the thick of things as the season’s last games were played. St. Louis edged out to a slight advantage, and as fate would have it that advantage was thought to be ace point, since they finished at home with the lowly Mets. On top of everything, longtime Cardinals general manager Bing Devine had been fired by owner August Busch and hired by the Mets
In the first game, Al Jackson beat the great Bob Gibson, 1-0 in a shocker that, considering Jackson’s fine, unsung work over the past years, was not so shocking. Jackson was a ground ball pitcher who induced opponents to hit into perfect double-play balls, messed up and mangled in all possible ways by Mets infielders. On that day they defended like the Yankees. The Reds and Phillies remained alive.
On Saturday, all bets were off when New York exploded for a 15-5 win in front of the St. Louis faithful. By Sunday, the Cardinals were a shell of their normal, confident selves. 18-game winner Curt Simmons started and was staked to a 10-0 lead, but he got knocked out. Keane made a desperation move, bringing Gibson in on short rest to shut the door. The Mets got to him.
The big crowd was restless, fidgety. The Cardinals were a bundle of nerves. Anything could happen. In the ninth, Keane had ace reliever Barney Schultz, a knuckleball specialist, in the game. His dancing knucklers started scooting around. Catcher Tim McCarver struggled with them. St. Louis was like a bunch of zombies, begging for the last outs in a terrible, drawn-out game that resembled an episode of The Twi-Light Zone.
Kanehl pinch-hit and congratulated McCarver, who gave him the evil eye.
“We haven’t won yet,” he said.
“Those guys were so ready to choke they could hardly even speak,” said Kanehl. Kanehl’s base hit drove in two more runs and Kranepool came to bat.
“I went down to first, and <Cardinals star first baseman> Bill White was the same way,” said Kanehl. “He can’t hardly talk. After I congratulated him, he said, ‘We haven’t got the last out yet.’ ”
Finally, Kranepool popped up and every eye was on McCarver, circling under the thing, probably dizzy from handling Schultz’s knuckler. Gravity did its thing and McCarver secured it for an 11-5 win, propelling St. Louis into their first World Series since 1946. Some have said their 18-year drought was a “curse” brought on by a failure to change with the times and bring black players on board after the Robinson signing. This 1964 team, put together in part by Branch Rickey in his “last hurrah,” was one of the most integrated ever, the subject of David Halberstam’s October 1964.
“There was bedlam in St. Louis,” said Kanehl. “It was just crazy.”
The Mets drew a fabulous 1,732,000 fans, more than the American League champion Yankees. The Yankees fired manager Yogi Berra despite making it to the seventh game of the World Series before bowing to Gibson. Yogi would be an integral member of the Mets’ family over the next decade.
The Mets had pushed the champion Cardinals to the limit, but it was a temporary fit of competence, not repeated in 1965. With the club at 31-64, Casey Stengel called it quits. He had suffered a broken hip after a late-night drinking spill at Toots Shors. His replacement, former Giants catcher Wes Westrum, finished up at 19-48. The old character of the team was now gone. Similarly, out in Los Angeles the Angels, one of baseball’s most colorful cast of characters, was in the process of moving to the Orange County suburbs. With that they lost all their personality. Youth began to be served. The Mets’ excellent front office had laid the foundation and it was finally beginning to show; the old veterans, signed to maintain fan interest, replaced by prospects such as Ron Swoboda and Tug McGraw. But there were exceptions. Warren Spahn, who had won a Silver Star for gallantry during World War II’s Battle of the Bulge before a Hall of Fame pitching career in Milwaukee, was one of those old-timers. Seemingly pushing 50, he did not know when to quit. His performance for the 1965 Mets was a shell of his once-proud self.
1966 was a pivotal season. Under Westrum the Mets evaded the 100-loss mark for the first time and finished ninth (66-95), ahead of Durocher’s Cubs (59-103). Both teams were young and featured a fair number of key names (some of whom would be traded by one team to the other) who would emerge in the memorable pennant race three years later. Nobody predicted it in a million years, not in New York or Chicago, although the Cubs featured some very good young talent.
Durocher looked over the roster and announced that they were not an “eighth place team.” He was right, they were a 10th place team, but one that included Ernie Banks, Glenn Beckert, Don Kessinger, Ron Santo, Billy Williams, Adolfo Phillips, and Randy Hundley. Then there was the “Seaver connection.” Fresno’s own Dick Ellsworth was a Cub. Dick Selma was a Met (later a Cub). Ken Holtzman, the All-American Tom beat out for the last Alaska Goldpanner roster spot in Wichita’s 1964 NBC Tournament, was a Cub. So was Ferguson Jenkins and Billy Hands. Cal Koonce was a Cub, later a Met. Based on what we now know about some of those Chicago players, it seems hard to believe they finished in last place, but they did.
The beginnings of the 1969 Mets were shaping up more in 1966, although there were still touches of nostalgia. Ken Boyer, the National League’s Most Valuable Player when he led St. Louis to the World Championship just two years earlier, was now a has-been at third base. There was Eddie Bressoud, Jack Fisher, Bob Shaw, Bob Friend and Jack Hamilton. Hunt was gone to Los Angeles. But Ed Kranepool was firmly ensconced at first base. Cleon Jones, who had debuted three years earlier, hit .275 in left field.
Swoboda was in right. Young hotshot catcher Jerry Grote took over behind the plate (he was definitely not one of those “defensive catcher’s who can’t catch or throw,” as Casey said of his predecessors). On the hill Nolan Ryan joined McGraw for a brief big league debut. Down in the minors, Tom Seaver was “the next big thing,” but close behind him was Jerry Koosman. Shortstop Buddy Harrelson was impressing people, too.
But if 1966 brought high hopes, 1967 showed everybody the meaning of being a Mets fan. Attendance was still good. The club first broke a million at the Polo Grounds in 1963. After the 1,732,597 in 1964 outdrew the champion Yankees, the Mets were the established New York favorites of the 1960s. It was quite “amazin’ ,” something the Dodgers and Giants had not been able to do, with all their success. This losing team clearly separated themselves as the “people’s team” in the Big Apple at the time.
In 1965 1,768,389 passed through Shea’s turnstyles. In 1966 an astounding (for that time) 1,932,693 showed up. Furthermore, in both 1965 and 1966 New York drew a million on the road, a major benchmark of the era.
The record tells us that Tom Seaver arrived in 1967. Met lore has always revolved around the manifest truth that all of the club’s history must be divided between what they did before (H)his arrival, and after this “savior” ascended into the pantheon of true New York Sports Icon status.
Yes, Seaver arrived in 1967. He was sensational from the beginning; an All-Star, 16 wins, Rookie of the Year, leader; a young man among boys. But it was a setback season. From 66-95, good for ninth place, to 61-101, another century mark-low, league-cellar year. Despite the exciting Seaver, attendance dropped 367,201 to 1,565,492. Road attendance fell below 1 million. Westrum was fired with 11 games to play.
The 1969 line-up formed some more. Kranepool at first base hit .269, but seemed to go through the motions. He was the New York kid, the bonus baby, playing for a bad team, and had it made. He delivered little. Harrelson took over at shortstop. Veteran Ed Charles from the Kansas City A’s took over at third. Swoboda hit .281. Jones hit .246. Grote could catch but was anemic at the plate (.195). The pitching staff was still veteran, outside of Seaver. Oddly, McGraw and Ryan, who came up before him, found themselves shuffled back into the system while Koosman still wowed ‘em down on the farm.
Despite finishing five games south of the previous season, Seaver and some of the young Mets had changed the culture of losing; or were on the verge of it, at least. Seaver made it clear he had little use for it. In 1968, Gil Hodges was hired after a stint with the Washington Senators. While Seaver had been sensational in his rookie year, the Seaver-Koosman duo of ’68 was absolutely outstanding. Factoring in run support, it can be argued that they were as good a one-two pitching combination as there was in baseball, a mighty strong statement indeed, especially in the “Year of the Pitcher.” The Cardinals featured Bob Gibson, who was inhuman in ’68 (1.12 ERA) followed by (take your pick): Nelson Briles, Steve Carlton (not fully developed yet) and Ray Washburn. The Giants featured Juan Marichal and Gaylord Perry. Suddenly the Cubs were worldbeaters with Ferguson Jenkins, Billy Hands and Ken Holtzman. The Dodgers had Don Drysdale, but “Dandy Sandy” was long gone. In the American League: Denny McLain-Mickey Lolich (Detroit), Luis Tiant-Sam McDowell (Cleveland), and Mel Stottlemyre-Stan Bahnsen (resurgent New York, 83-79 in Ralph Houk’s second act). A thorough evaluation of all the win-loss records and ERAs, and a comparative analysis of each of the teams these pitchers were on, indicates that the Mets had the best, youngest, hardest-throwing knockout punch in the game. Their fans and the New York media; all of inside baseball knew it. It was apparent that to simply discount the Mets as the Mets for no other reason would be to do so at one’s peril.
1,781,657 came to Shea that season. It was not considered a good year for baseball. The pitchers dominated, leading to a lowering of the mound in 1969 (and the designated hitter in 1973). It was a tough year for the country, the year of Tet, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, riots in major cities. Many ballparks were dilapidated, still in the urban centers. Suburban fans were not comfortable going there, especially at night. Yankee Stadium and Griffith Stadium in D.C. (later re-named after RFK) were dead zones.
It was still a year of Yankee improvement after three awful seasons, but their standards were so high their fans could care less. They stayed away in droves. The Mets were the thing now. But what really turned people on was pro football, Broadway Joe and His Super Jets. Shea was in a safe environment, the place to be for both Jets and Mets fans. The football Giants were dismal in this period of their history.
But excitement over the Mets made them an exception. The Dodgers, record-breakers in attendance, had not kept up with the times and suffered a reduction (although they were still among the league leaders). The Giants, very popular when they first came to San Francisco, saw a bad drop in fan support. Across the bay, the new Oakland A’s diluted the Giants’ fan base but still drew only mediocre numbers. Houston’s Astrodome, a big draw at first, was less interesting now, and the new team finished dead last. Baltimore: bad neighborhood. Cleveland: blah. California: Gene Autry’s suburban venture had yet to take off. There were no divisions, no wild cards, and races in both leagues were decided early with little excitement outside of Detroit and St. Louis. In Boston, the days of mega-excitement over the Red Sox had not hit, at least by today’s standards, although they were defending league champions and drew well for the times. Roger Angell wrote that baseball’s 1968 demographics were old people and “Negroes. Bad, bad image.”
In New York, everybody was gaga over the Jets. They were new, sleek, sexy, and with-it. Namath paraded around town in a mink coat, grew a Fu Manchu, hung out at the Playboy Club. They were a mixture of black and white players from all over the country. In those days it certainly looked that whatever social experiment a pro football team is, this one sure had succeeded. Women had never been a major part of the sports audience, but with Namath’s Jets they were. Everybody wanted a part of them.
Comedian Johnny Carson, whose Tonight Show was a New York staple for years, featuring numerous Jets’ guests during their heyday, jumped on the bandwagon with both feet. After they beat the Raiders in the AFL championship game, “I helped the players celebrate the victory at their private party in Joe Namath’s new bar, Bachelors III,” he recalled. “It’s a good thing they didn’t have to play the Colts the next morning . . .” After beating Baltimore in Super Bowl III, Namath told reporters, “I just want to thank all the broads in New York.”
Namath was “the personification of the new sports star,” sportscaster Bob Costas said in The Magnificent Seasons: How the Jets, Mets, and Knicks Made Sports History and Uplifted a City and the Country by Art Shamsky with Barry Zeman. “Long hair, flashy clothes, brash persona, and lots of cash ($400,000 was a lot of money in the sports world of the ‘60s). But stylish and charismatic as he was, there was something decidedly old school about Namath . . . Namath and the Jets raised the banner of a new league and a new time in sports, although much of what they were would have rung true anytime.”
When the team returned to New York City from Miami, scene of the upset, Mayor John Lindsay, an embattled moderate Republican, gleaned onto them at a ticker-tape confetti parade down Broadway to city hall. The parade route was filled with screaming young girls every bit as exuberant as those who had turned out for The Beatles when they “invaded” America in 1964.
“When was the last time New York had anything like this?” asked coach Weeb Ewbank. The answer was 1962, when astronaut John Glenn was feted after becoming the first man to orbit the globe in space before a death-defying return through the Earth’s atmosphere when his heat shields threatened to malfunction. But Ewbank was right. The Yankees never got this kind of reception. Dodgers celebrations were Brooklyn affairs. This was the kind of thing reserved for Charles Lindbergh, Dwight Eisenhower, and Douglas MacArthur.
“The political climate, lack of trust and confidence in many of our leaders, and unresolved social issues, all combined to put citizens of our country and New York City in a continual state of turmoil,” Namath recalled. Despite being born on the “wrong side of the tracks” Namath, the kid who hung out with black kids in the pool halls of Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, had a true social conscience.
Sylvester Croom grew up black in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He later played for Bear Bryant after the color barrier was removed, largely as a result of the 1970 USC-Alabama game, when the Trojans’ black fullback, Sam “Bam” Cunningham ran wild and helped convince the landed gentry that the Crimson Tide needed some integratin’. He was about 13 when Namath arrived at ‘Bama.
“Namath would come down to the black neighborhoods by himself,” recalled Croom. “I heard some at ‘Bama didn’t like it but he was gonna do what he wanted. He’d mingle and we just looked at him in amazement. We’d never had some white man, a local celebrity, come down to our neighborhood. He was sooo cool, man, like a cool jazz singer.”
Namath had predicted, in fact guaranteed, victory despite being 18-point underdogs to Baltimore. Teammate Dave Herman echoed the sentiment of everybody when he said, “If Joe told me right this minute there was a lion standing behind me . . . I’d jump.”
Seaver recalled being in the middle of finals at USC when the Jets won the Super Bowl. “I’m sure the thought of the 1969 Mets accomplishing the same thing was light-years from my mind,” he recalled.
“I have been told many times over the years that the Jets, and then the Mets and Knicks, helped people emotionally deal with all this adversity,” Namath recalled. “As sports figures, we were important to our society as a whole, not only for what we did, but how we did it. The Jets of that season were known as underdogs, the working man’s team; an unselfish and cohesive unit that never gave up. Our fans have never forgotten.”
“Time seemed to stand still in 1969 as the world moved forward,” Seaver recalled of the ebullient atmosphere.
“In a time when New York City needed something to lift its spirits, the Jets, Mets and Knicks were able to do that,” recalled former U.S. Senator Bill Bradley (D.-New Jersey), a member of the Knickerbockers and later a candidate for President. “All three teams found a common ground as they captured the hearts and minds of their fans. The exploits of these three remarkable teams had an important and positive impact on the sports of the city when people needed it most. Their legacy endures today.”
The theme of a team, or in this case three teams, helping a community overcome difficult social circumstances was relatively new in 1968-70, but that very year (’68) the Tigers were credited with keeping Detroit together after riots roiled the city the previous season. In 2001, the Yankees, of all people, took on the role of underdogs. Their remarkable three-game sweep of Arizona at home less than two months after 9/11 will some day be seen as the moment when the War on Terror was won. In 2005, Louisiana State’s football team played out a successful schedule to keep up the hopes of fans devastated by Hurricane Katrina. The New Orleans Saints did a similar thing the next year.
Sportswriter Bill Gutman: “In times like these, people often look for an escape, no matter how ephemeral it might be, and one of the most popular modes of escape has always been sports. When things appear bleak, it always helps to be able to hang your hat on a favorite team, especially if it’s winning, and ride it through troubled times . . . The city needed some excitement, but in 1968 finding it among the city’s professional sports teams seemed like a lost cause.”
After the Jets came through, the Mets were only a glimmer in their 1968 shadow, but they still benefited from association with them. They shared the stadium, their names rhymed, and each team had its share of young, single guys who enjoyed hanging out together in Manhattan.
At 73-89, New York beat out the Astros by a game in 1968. Ever since the beginning, Houston had their number. In 1962, when they were the Colt .45s (the Astros’ name came with the building of the Astrodome, in conjunction with NASA’s moving its operation to the Johnson Space Center in Houston; LBJ’s all-time gift to his home state), Houston was competent using young players. They had a respectable expansion franchise. When they moved into the ‘Dome Houston built their club around strong pitching in the notoriously difficult-to-hit-in facility. They continually held the upper hand, year after year, over the Mets, not just in the final standings but in head-to-head games. Finishing ahead of them in 1968 was a big boost for New York.
Being in New York had some benefits that by 1968 were beginning to manifest themselves. They were becoming something of a cultural icon. Playwright Neil Simon had a Broadway hit about a slob sportswriter who rooms with a neat freak. It was made into a film, The Odd Couple, in 1968. Walter Matthau was Oscar Madison. Jack Lemmon played Felix Unger. In one famed scene shot in the press box at Shea Stadium, Madison stands between Heywood Hale Broun and Maury Allen as Bill Mazeroski steps up to bat.
Broun: “Bases loaded. Mazeroski up. Ninth inning. You expect the Mets to hold a one-run lead?”
Oscar: “Whatsa matter? You never heard of a triple play?”
Felix Unger then calls the press box to tell Oscar not to eat any hot dogs at the game because he is planning “franks and beans” for dinner. The call diverts Oscar’s attention from the field.
Broun: “A triple play! The Mets did it! The greatest fielding play I ever saw! And you missed it, Oscar. You missed it.”
Oscar goes ballistic at Felix for wasting his time over such a thing as that night’s dinner menu. It begins a series of tirades over Felix’s pesty, neurotic ways.
The Mets scored for Seaver as if they were allergic to home plate, reducing him to 16-12, but his 2.20 earned run average was among the league leaders. Koosman was at least as good and a little more fortunate at 19-8 with a 2.08 ERA. Don Cardwell was 7-13. Dick Selma was 9-10 with a 2.75 earned run average but was traded to the Chicago Cubs after the season. Nolan Ryan was 6-9 with a 3.09 ERA. Cal Koonce was effective out of the bullpen. Jim McAndrews’s ERA was 2.28 and Ron Taylor’s was 2.70. It was a fine pitching staff.
The offense was mostly anemic (with some bright spots) for all the pitchers, not just Seaver. Kranepool hit all of .231, Harrelson .219, Charles .276 with a team leading 15 homers. Swoboda led in RBIs with a mighty 59. Tommie Agee came over from Chicago and swung the bat as if it was a wet New York Times: .217. Cleon Jones came into his own, missing .300 by three points with a little pop. Jerry Grote improved light years from 1967 to hit .282 and made the All-Star team with Seaver and Koosman. Art Shamsky, Ken Boswell, Al Weis and J.C. Martin made up the bench.
The eve of destruction
“Don’t trust anyone over 30.”
- Common refrain in the 1960s
In the 1960s, a singer-songwriter named Barry McGuire hit it big with a song called “Eve of Destruction.” The premise of the song was that America was not a good country because we were in Vietnam. We were embodied by the fighter pilots bombing North Vietnam. McGuire appealed to their conscience, as if they were simply cold-blooded killers or murderous automatons, dropping bombs without a care for the loss of life below. The fact that the people, politics, armies, strategies, ideologies and enemies of America on the receiving end of those bombs were Communists; and that Communists were responsible for the murder of more than 100 million human beings in the 20th Century (and now 21st; North Korea has starved over 2 million to death since 2000); breathtakingly escaped McGuire’s judgment. The title of the song suggested that unless America changed its ways, we were on the eve of “doom,” of “destruction.” They might have used the word “Armageddon,” although that would require a strict interpretation of Biblical Christianity, which was not the preferred way of 1960s radicals or rock stars.
It was that kind of decade.
In American history, and maybe in all human annals, there has probably never been a decade that looked more different at the end than it did in the beginning than 1960-69. In January 1960, moderate Republican Dwight Eisenhower was the President. Conservative, anti-Communist firebrand Richard Nixon of California was his Vice-President and the favorite to succeed him in the November elections. Communism and control of space were the dominant themes of the era.
When the Communists ousted the French from Dien Bien Phu, Indochina in 1954, Nixon advocated the use of battlefield nuclear weapons, but Ike did not follow the advice. When Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschev banged his shoe on his desk at the United Nations, telling America, “We will bury you,” and when Cuba went Communist under Fidel Castro, Nixon was the point man of the debate.
The Soviets launched a satellite called Sputnik into outer space in 1957. By 1960 Ike and Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson (D.-Texas) were the front men in the “space race,” with plans to launch the Mercury program the following year.
“The Roman Empire was powerful because they built roads,” LBJ told Eisenhower. “The British controlled the seas because they built ships. Later we were powerful because of our air force. Now, the Soviets got control of outer space, and can drop nuclear bombs on us, like kids droppin’ rocks from a freeway overpass, and all I wanna know is, how in the hell did they ever get ahead of us?”
In the South, segregation was the law of the land, despite the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision and Eisenhower’s 1957 decision to use Federal troops to enforce the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. The civil rights movement was getting underway, led by a charismatic young black preacher named Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. When King was jailed in Birmingham, Alabama, Democrat Presidential candidate John F. Kennedy courageously intervened in his release. Nixon chose not to, fearing that it would enflame white opinion against him. JFK’s move resulted in the appreciation and support of Dr. King and his grateful wife, Coretta Scott King. But more important, it swung Jackie Robinson, now a Connecticut Republican in retirement from baseball but very active in the struggle, away from his friend and fellow Californian Nixon, towards Kennedy.
It was the closest election in American history, decided by two states, Illinois and Texas. In the Cook County wards of Chicago controlled by demagogic Mayor Richard Daley, thousands of Democrats voted twice if not more in JFK’s favor.
“Vote early, vote often,” they were told.
In Texas, Vice-Presidential candidate Johnson controlled the “tombstone vote.” It was precisely how he had stolen the 1948 Senate election and he was expert at it. Millions of dead Texans “voted” Kennedy-Johnson. A common joke of the era concerned a little girl crying. When asked what brought about her tears, she replies that her grandfather came to town but did not see her.
“But your granddaddy’s been dead three years,” she is told.
“I know, but he came back to vote for Lyndon Johnson,” she replies.
All of the “fixed vote” shenanigans, managed from on high by JFK’s brutal father, Joseph P. Kennedy (a one-time Nazi appeaser who said of Adolf Hitler, “We can’t beat him, we might as well do business with him”), was known by key people at the Washington Post. Publisher Katherine Graham and editor Ben Bradlee were both friends and supporters of JFK. They chose not to use the paper to investigate. 13 years later, opposed to then-President Nixon, they did choose to use the Post to investigate Watergate, resulting in Nixon’s 1974 resignation.
The events that separate Kennedy’s stealing of the 1960 election and Nixon’s resignation 14 years later are nothing less than a star-crossed Shakespearean tale of “what ifs?”; of “what comes around goes around”; of redemption and crazy twists of fate; of a “Kennedy curse” that lends one to the prevailing notion that there is a God – and a devil - and that these forces most definitely have a hand in the affairs of man.
Eisenhower warned of the “Military Industrial Complex” in his January 1961 farewell address, one of the most prescient speeches in history, but the country Kennedy inherited was innocent, at least in retrospect. Civil rights, Communism in Southeast Asia, the “space race” and “arms race” had not yet bubbled to the surface of the American conscience. The United States was still essentially a “Christian nation” of church-going nuclear families, children raised in growing suburbs, our economy humming along in affluence while the rest of the world still struggled to recover from World War II. Music, movies and culture still resembled the 1950s. The encapsulation of America at that time was the Fresno neighborhood where Charles Seaver raised his brood. It was the America of George Lucas’s American Graffiti; a Beach Boys sound track, not Jimi Hendrix; The Ten Commandments, not Easy Rider.
Our military was considered invincible, the conquerors of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. But there were fissures. Los Angeles and California looked to be the future. New York was falling apart; the Dodgers and Giants were gone, lost in large measure because the neighborhoods they played in were crime-riddled, devastated by “white flight.” The old school Yankees and their country club ways were on their last legs.
In 1961, the CIA launched an ill-fated attempt to oust Fidel Castro at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba. Kennedy met Kruschev at the Vienna summit. Kruschev sized up the young President, determined he was a “rookie,” on his heels after the Bay of Pigs disaster, and endeavored to engage in rampant adventurism in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and everywhere else. It was an international Cold War of ideas that, at that time, the Communists looked to be winning.
If Nixon were President in 1961, he almost surely would have ordered the U.S. planes providing air cover at the Bay of Pigs to protect the invasion. JFK’s decision not to do so is unquestionably the reason the operation failed. Had air power been used, the invasion surely would have succeeded, Fidel Castro would have been ousted, and the historical ramifications would have been incalculable; seemingly all too the good.
That summer, the Communists erected the Berlin Wall, dividing the totalitarian East from the free West. Kruschev may not have gone forward with the wall if Nixon had been in office; obviously he never tried it with Ike at the helm.
The following year, they installed nuclear weapons in Cuba. Kennedy did not let it stand, and America prevailed in the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was a major victory for JFK, his greatest legacy. 1962 was the last vestige of American political innocence. Still, Kruschev would not have tried such a bold move had Nixon been his counterpart.
In 1963, Dr. King took the civil rights protest to the streets. Truncheons, firehoses, snarling dogs and hatred met them. Television cameras captured it all. The focus was now on the South, where Alabama’s Democrat Governor George Wallace vowed to impose “segregation now, segregation forever.” Army troops had to protect blacks students trying to enroll at the University of Mississippi and the University of Alabama.
In the fall, JFK gave tacit approval to a South Vietnamese coup d’etat resulting in the murder of President Ngo Dinh Diem. Historians differ on whether Kennedy was planning a withdrawal of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, at that time still limited mostly to advisors and the CIA. After the coup, however, the situation became tenuous and America had little choice but to try and right the situation.
On November 22, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. To this day conspiracy theories postulate any number of scenarios, but the “lone gunman” theory that Lee Harvey Oswald, a Communist, killed Kennedy because he opposed Castro is the closest thing to an “answer” available. The eventual opening of archives may or may not shed truth on the tragedy.
Lyndon Johnson took over as President and in 1964 launched full-scale war on North Vietnam. It was the demarcation point in American history. There is America before this event, and all that flows from it. It further begs the “what if?” question surrounding the Kennedy-Nixon rivalry. Had Nixon been President, Kruschev would have likely considered him a hard-line anti-Communist not to be trifled with. Aside from refraining from building the Berlin Wall and installing nukes in Cuba, he probably would not have escalated Communism into South Vietnam in such wholesale manner.
Assuming that the Communists did escalate their activities, in 1964-65 a President Nixon may well have launched an all-out assault on Communist forces that might have ended the conflict with American victory and freedom for the entire country. On the other hand, it might have started World War III with Russia and China, which President Harry Truman had endeavored to avoid in Korea.
Kennedy’s younger brother Robert, who as Attorney General authorized wiretaps of Martin Luther King Jr., was elected to the U.S. Senate from New York in 1964. His younger brother, Teddy, was now the Democrat Senator from Massachusetts. The crazy quilt of possibilities revolving around Nixon and the Kennedy family was only beginning to take shape. Old man Joe, the Machiavellian string-puller who had orchestrated each political maneuver in his son’s political careers, was forced to watch everything in tortured silence. He was muted, seemingly by God, when he suffered a stroke that left him in a near-vegetative condition.
The Democrats looked to be all-powerful, sweeping to total victory in 1964 elections for the Presidency, the Senate, the House, and state legislatures. LBJ initiated the Great Society in 1964-65, a series of welfare, affirmative action, and civil rights acts. The ultimate irony was that it brought millions of black citizens into the Democrat fold, yet the party still had the Jim Crow vote! Dixie had been all Democrat since Republican Abraham Lincoln won the Civil War. But Johnson saw fissures.
“We’ve just handed the country to the Republican Party,” he told aide Bill Moyers after signing the Civil Rights Act.
The man Johnson beat so handily in 1964, U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater (R.-Arizona), started a revolution that indeed would make LBJ a prophet: conservatism. It found its base in the Sunbelt; the suburbs of Orange County, California; the wide-open spaces of the Southwest; and eventually the Bible Belt. Goldwater supporter Ronald Reagan made a memorable TV address known simply as The Speech, launching his political career. It would be the palatability of Nixon and Reagan, in backlash to the Civil Rights Act, that would have the ultimate, strange effect of husbanding the South, as Los Angeles Times Pulitzer Prize-winning sports columnist Jim Murray later wrote, “back into the Union.” This meant the unforeseen, improbable scenario in which Southern blacks would find equality not under Democrats but under Republicans. The ironic beneficiary of the civil rights movement, probably the greatest, most noble liberal effort of the 20th Century, would be conservatism!
In 1964, the painful crumbling of New York City was symbolized by a citywide blackout. During that long, hot summer, crime and racial animosities boiled over in Harlem and the Bronx. A militant Black Muslim, Malcolm X advocated a split from the peaceful, non-violent methods of the Christian King.
David Halberstam wrote a book called October 1964, which used that year’s Cardinals-Yankees World Series as a metaphor for a changing America. The Cardinals represented the winning Democrats; young, urban, hip, of varying colors and ethnic diversities. The Yankees were the Republicans; country club Wall Streeters, mostly white. The Cardinals, like the Democrats, won that fall. The Yankees, like the Republicans, went into a slump. Like the GOP, the Yanks made a huge comeback years later, establishing dominance.
In the summer of 1964, LBJ purportedly manufactured a reason for going to war with the North Vietnamese Communists. A disputed Naval battle took place at the Gulf of Tonkin. Johnson used the event to drum up support for escalation. Communism was on the rise and threatening freedom on a global scale. Red China had split with the Soviet Union in 1957, but their brand of Communism was every bit as virulent if not worse. It was assumed that the Chinese were calling the shots in Hanoi, in concert with Soviet handlers. During this period of time, the Pentagon put forward a report on the larger issues of Communism and Vietnam.
Years later, a turncoat Defense Department advisor named Daniel Ellsberg would distribute it to the New York Times. Dubbed the “Pentagon Papers,” it blew the lid on the Gulf of Tonkin and shed doubt on the threat of Communism. It developed the course of Ho Chi Minh, a “freedom fighter” who worked with U.S. forces against the Japanese in World War II and asked President Harry Truman to help his small country earn post-war freedom instead of French colonization. Truman chose to side with the French allies, and Dien Bien Phu resulted. The French bugged out, leaving America to battle Red forces in the region.
A “domino theory” was established, beginning with the “Truman doctrine,” advocated by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamera. This posited the notion that if one nation (Vietnam) went Communist, the next nation (Cambodia, Laos) would go Communist, until a whole region (Southeast Asia) fell. Long range strategists saw an endgame in which the most important of all Third World countries, India, teetering in between Democracy and Communism, would fall with disastrous global consequences.
The Chinese exploded their first atomic bomb in 1964 and launched their first nuclear missile two years later. In 1966 Mao Tse-Tung instituted a 10-year reign of terror known as the Cultural Revolution. It is estimated that some 55 million human beings were murdered during this period. The full scale of Communist crimes against humanity was not fully known in the mid-1960s. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, their archives were opened up. The Venona Project, which determined that many of the people thought to have been wrongfully accused of Communist affiliation and outright espionage – including high-ranking Franklin Roosevelt aide Alger Hiss, the man Nixon went after – were indeed guilty. Estimates vary, but this is where the widely held figure of100 million dead came from.
While the reasons for going to war in Vietnam may have been nebulous, self-serving and based upon narrow political considerations of the era, the general consideration of Communist dangers, later confirmed, was well understood by many Americans. This was the overriding motive of President Johnson and Republican Congressional hawks. The mistakes that followed have been blamed on many of these people, with justification, but the essential reason for fighting the war was, as President Ronald Reagan insisted long after most called it a mistake, “noble.”
In the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debate, Richard Nixon had pointed out that some 800,000 people (going on a billion-plus) lived under Communism and only 550,000 under freedom, with a huge Third World considered the great prize in between. Latin America threatened to go Communist, with the Argentinean-turned-Cuban-revolutionary Che Guevara leading a series of rearguard terrorist actions against all forms of capitalism and Democracy in the region. The Communists were on the march in Africa and in Asia. They controlled Eastern Europe behind what Winston Churchill called an Iron Curtain. The U.S.S.R. was making deals with France and India. They established legitimate political parties in Italy, Greece and other liberal European countries. The Soviets continued to use what Vladimir Lenin called “useful idiots” to push their cause in the American and Western media.
1964 was a seminal year in this regard, although it had started earlier. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, an increasing number of films sympathetic to Communism appeared, usually depicting “peasants” or “farmers” who, only after “collectivizing,” could save their land. Films like Song of Russia and Mission to Moscow made no attempt to disguise their pro-Communist messages. Even such actors as Gregory Peck, one of the most respected stars of all time, lent themselves, wittingly or unwittingly, to the “cause.” Peck once allowed himself to be filmed in a cartoonishly bad scene with a beautiful woman and a bearded old man, all fighting the Nazis. In between firing shots, they spout off the most hackneyed possible Communist phraseology; as if in fighting desperately for one’s life in freezing conditions, such things would cross their minds!
Ayn Rand, a fiercely anti-Communist woman who had escaped Stalin’s Russia, landing in Hollywood in the 1930s, led a vanguard conservative movement pointing out its hold on the film industry. Her magnum opus novel, Atlas Shrugged (reportedly under film development with Angelina Jolie), depicted a futuristic alternative world; one that seemingly would have existed had World War II not been fought. The United States, now a second rate power never recovered from the Great Depression, can be saved only by a handful of “men of the mind,” conservative excellencies representing the “thin red line” between anarchy and freedom. Conservative and Christian icon Whittaker Chambers, however, found it elitist, stating that each page screamed, “”to the gas chambers” for all but the most gifted amongst us. Ronald Reagan, William F. Buckley and Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan all considered it a seminal influence on their political ideologies.
It took years, but after the U.S. won the Cold War and the archives were opened, it was confirmed that many of the Hollywood filmmaker’s accused of Communism were Communists. However, in the 1950s McCarthyism became a dirty word. In truth, it was not Wisconsin Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy’s accusations, often wild and misleading but not always, that got him in trouble. Despite revisionism, McCarthy had little if any interest in Hollywood, which is why movies depicting the era use fictional characters with “McCarthyite characteristics” instead of the real thing. McCarthy only became unpopular when he seemingly went crazy; crazy enough to go after former World War II military chief of staff and Secretary of State George C. Marshall, and even Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower! These are two icons of world history, men whose visage sits astride the annals of man more proudly than perhaps any with the exception of the living Christ. On top of that, Marshall – even though he kept his politics private – was almost assuredly a conservative Republican, albeit an international pragmatist.
After the election of Kennedy in 1960 and the Democrat sweeps of 1964, the Left was feeling confident and ready for revenge. Aside from McCarthyism, they had been humiliated by Nixon when he backed Whittaker Chambers and proved that Alger Hiss, a leading Roosevelt aide, had been a Soviet spy.
In 1957, Sweet Smell of Success starred Burt Lancaster as a thinly disguised Walter Winchell, a redbaiting radio and newspaper personality who had attacked numerous Communists (and some who probably were not). His staccato voice was the narration for the TV show The Untouchables, starring Robert Stack. In the film, the Winchell character is thoroughly disgraced: a liar and for good measure an incestuous sibling!
The old religious fare – The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur – was replaced by social angst, revolution, and “blame America” movies. In 1960, “blacklisted” screenwriter Dalton Trumbo – after writing under a pseudonym for several years - was allowed to write Spartacus for Kirk Douglas and director Stanley Kubrick. The story of a slave rebellion against the Roman Empire was a veneer for a social re-ordering against America.
In 1962, John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate depicted a bumbling, alcoholic McCarthyite Senator (James Gregory). Producer Frank Sinatra (at that time in the process of becoming a Republican for two reasons: the Kennedy’s snubbed him, and he suspected them in the murder of Marilyn Monroe) always insisted it was an anti-Communist film. The fact that a presumably Republican society woman (Angela Lansbury) turns out to be a Soviet spy who has an incestuous relationship with her son (Laurence Harvey) while turning him into a robotic assassin of a Presidential candidate creates murky questions as to who is evil; the Communists for orchestrating such a plot, or the Republican society woman for carrying it out?
That same year, Advise & Consent offered a similarly convoluted message. The Chambers-Hiss affair is fictionalized with Henry Fonda (the Hiss character) discrediting Burgess Meredith (the Chambers character). Later it turns out Fonda did attend Communist meetings, which are said to have been relatively harmless. The film does not benefit from the Venona archives 30 years’ hence, which showed Hiss was a paid spy.
In 1963, Frankenheimer returned with Seven Days in May, based on the true story of Republican industrialists who plotted a military overthrow of FDR in 1934. The film did not show that it was a presumably Republican Marine, Smedley Butler, who foils the plot. In the film, the Marine is now an “ACLU type” played by Kirk Douglas, who thwarts the overthrow plotted by Burt Lancaster, playing a character similar to Right-wing Air Force Commanding General “bombs away with” Curt LeMay, JFK’s “rival” during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
In 1964, several movies put forth the message that nuclear weapons were bad, and that American aggression or mistakes would be our undoing because of them. Fail-Safe told the story of a mistake that launches a strike against the Soviet Union. Dr. Strangelove was Kubrick’s darkly comic turn, which does the same thing. In both movies, the poor Soviets are the victims at no fault of their own.
Other films had a social edge to them. Cool Hand Luke was a sympathetic view of prisoners in a brutal “chain gang” system. To Sir With Love was banned in Alabama because it showed a black teacher (Sidney Poitier) in charge of white working class English students. In the Heat of the Night featured Poitier as a sophisticated big city detective who comes down to Mississippi and shows the “dumb crackers” some real police work. The Graduate rejected middle class values; parents were alcoholics, liars, cheats and sexual libertines. Easy Rider glorified drug use, at least until a white Southern “redneck” kills a peaceful, dope-smoking hippie for no good reason. Midnight Cowboy explored the seamy world of hustling with homosexual themes on the dirty streets of New York City.
While conservatives can find much to fault in all of these and many other films of this and later eras, nobody can deny one essential fact: they were great movies, artistically and financially. To the extent that one could quantify such a thing, great filmmaking had changed hands from such conservatives as Frank Capra, John Ford and Darryl Zanuck to liberals like Stanley Kubrick, Dalton Trumbo and John Frankenheimer.
1964 was also a seminal year in music, an art form that like Hollywood leaned to the Left. Early rockers like Elvis Presley, The Righteous Brothers and The Beach Boys ranged from conservative to apolitical. The “British rock invasion” began to change that. The Beatles introduced new hair and clothing styles that resulted in the “long-haired hippie” look. Controversial front man John Lennon declared that the group was “more popular than Jesus Christ.” Time magazine’s April 8, 1966 cover asked the question, “Is God Dead?” Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby did not ask that question, it declared it to be a fact while depicting the birth of the anti-Christ in a New York luxury apartment building.
The Rolling Stones became the symbol of hedonism, their “Sympathy for the Devil” raising the question of Satan worship. Jim Morrison of The Doors seemed to take that a step further, exploring dark themes of life after death that rejected Christianity with such works as “When the Music’s Over,” which included the lyrics “Cancel my subscription to the resurrection . . . send my credentials to the House of Detention.”
Only The Who, a group of kids from middle class British backgrounds, maintained the slightest vestige of traditional values. Their rock opera “Tommy,” while no revival meeting, did explore guitarist Peter Townshend’s quest for the meaning of Christ (parabled by the miraculous “deaf, dumb and blind boy” from “Pinball Wizard”) in his hard-to-understand young life.
In the late 1950s, the Beats were San Francisco poets who endorsed counter-culturalism. Their seminal work was Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. The Beats’ voice became Allen Ginsberg, who transported the movement from the West Coast to New York. He was said to have “homosexualized” it by “forcing himself” on several otherwise-straight members of the Beat generation, Kerouac allegedly among them. According to rumor, novelist Gore Vidal did the same thing to other young men. The theory behind this was that, through the use of alcohol and psychedelic drugs, they were able to convince reluctant men to try this activity; that it was merely a “lifestyle choice,” an “alternative” that was neither worse and maybe even better than traditional male-female sex.
Further rumors spread that Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones, although straight, engaged in such activity out of hedonistic, drug-inspired boredom. To the extent that Ginsberg and Vidal inspired such a thing, the “gay liberation movement” took shape in the 1960s. In 1969, a riot/protest at Stonewall, a gay bar in New York, made headlines. The movement attempted to make homosexuality mainstream, but AIDS took a terrible toll on gay people. Drug use via dirty needles also spread AIDS. Other sexually transmitted diseases increased tremendously, partly as a result of rampant homosexuality, but also because of “free love” among straights.
The American Civil Liberties Union became a powerful legal force in the 1950s, ostensibly strengthened by liberal reaction to McCarthyism. The goal of the ACLU, which has evolved over the years, was to fight traditional precepts thought to be restrictive, paternal, and stifling. Criminal rights, racial and gender victimization; all aspects of individual liberty have been its staple, with much attendant controversy since, like most good things, it can and has been badly overdone. The concept of class action lawsuits and an overly litigious society are its legacy, again with some legitimate success, and with many unfortunate results. Among the unfortunate results have been the ability of special interest groups, especially of minority races, to extract huge monetary awards and, more often than not, “payoffs” (often orchestrated by such “race peddlers” as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton) from legitimate corporations. Enormous jury settlements orchestrated by the ACLU have driven the cost of goods and services provided by corporations, but its most egregious influence has been on the health care industry. Doctors and hospitals have been forced to “value add” huge costs to medical care in order to off-set the terrible threats, awards and pay-offs extracted by these legal off-shoots.
Then there is the issue of drug use. The “high priest” of psychedelic narcotics was Dr. Timothy Leary, a highly publicized Harvard professor who encouraged young people to “drop acid.” Acid was LSD, allegedly invented or manipulated by the CIA as a Cold War tactic to get defectors, spies and turncoats to talk. It was “perfected” by a Berkeley chemist named Owsley Stanley. A “good trip” reportedly made people “commune with God.” Bad trips were most Satanic in nature. It had devastating consequences on millions of people, its affects felt today in an on-going drug epidemic. Marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine, pills (uppers and downers) all entered the culture full bore.
“Tune in, turn on and drop out,” Leary advised his disciples, who did just that by the hundreds of thousands, with terrible ramifications. Perhaps hardest hit were black people. By 1965, they had made enormous strides in social and economic progress. The average black family was still a relatively cohesive unit in the mid-1960s. Their collision course with the “hippie movement” and the drug culture was a devastating blow to them. Many middle class white children, destroyed by drugs, were able to return to the support system of families. They could afford rehabilitation, generally absorbing loved ones back into the home, thus effectuating recovery. Many blacks did not have this advantage and, once hooked, found themselves living on the streets with no place to go. When they “dropped out,” they never came back.
The entire “tune in, turn on and drop out” movement was symbolized by the “Summer of Love,” which officially lasted from May until September of 1967 in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. As an idea, a concept, it embodied most of the country – particularly the two coasts – lasting roughly between 1966 and 1970. Sociologists differ on how big or small it really was. As an overall societal revolution, it encompassed free speech, anti-war protest, civil rights, gay rights, the environment, free love, the “sexual revolution,” and women’s rights; connecting hippies, “flower children,” Eastern religious concepts, transcendentalism, and a host of isms into a melting pot called the 1960s.
All of it morphed with the rock ‘n’ roll music of the era, resulting in enormous “love-ins” and concerts, many free. The two most famous of these were events held on each coast, one in California and the other in New York state. The Monterey Pop Festival featured radical, African-American guitar impresario Jimi Hendrix (ironically a former member of the Army’s famed “screaming eagles’ ” 101st Airborne Division) “going electric.” The second occurred in 1969, just as the New York Mets were making their stretch run on the National League’s East Division. Woodstock was the touchstone event of a generation. The next year, its “death” was symbolized when The Rolling Stones tried to duplicate Woodstock in California, only to see the Hells <ED: Hells is proper grammar per group’s stylized spelling> Angels murder an African-American fan at the Altamonte Motor Speedway.
An Ivy League intellectual with a touch of Irish wit, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was appointed by President Johnson to study growing societal problems in the mid-1960s. Moynihan’s controversial report was that government intervention, “affirmative action,” social programs designed to help; along with drugs, alcohol and relaxed social mores, had broken up the black family. The result was that black children were increasingly growing up without fathers. Crime, academic stultification and a host of other bad scenarios now marked urban life. The Democrats, tied to the policies of FDR and LBJ, did not accept Moynihan’s report even though he was one of their own, for to do so was to tacitly admit their greatest “contributions” - the New Deal and the Great Society – had gone haywire. History demonstrates without question that Moynihan was right. Richard Nixon and the Right picked up on Moynihan’s themes and have espoused them as the Holy Grail, albeit with much self-serving political manipulation, ever since.
In 1964, a University of California student named Mario Savio stood on top of a police car when cops tried to break up a demonstration on the Berkeley campus. Thus was born the “free speech movement.” As the Vietnam War escalated between 1964 and 1966, the free speech movement morphed into the anti-war movement, epicentered in Berkeley – the campus and the city – with “branch operations” fomenting into full blown riots at Columbia, Wisconsin, and all points in between. The angst created by all of this eventually escalated into the fatal shootings of students at Ohio’s normally quiet Kent State University in 1970. When New York Yankees manager Ralph Houk observed police officers on the field to break up a typical baseball brawl at Yankee Stadium, his reaction was: “What the hell are the cops doing on the field? They should be at the university where they belong.”
In many ways the civil rights movement was swallowed up by the anti-war movement, which became the dominant theme of Time magazine beginning in 1966. American Communists had traditionally tried to co-opt the civil rights movement. Black leaders such as the staunch Republican Jackie Robinson put the kabosh on that, but even Dr. King’s organization was infiltrated to some extent. The Communists helped finance much of the anti-war movement. The anti-war protest was unquestionably genuine, and among average kids and citizens who participated, a Communist revolution was not their agenda. However, the FBI and the historical record proved that time after time the nuts and bolts of the movement - actual organization, leafleting, purchase of permits, legal shelters, and the like – came from de facto, front or actual Communist groups.
The Reverend Billy Graham said as much at the time, but the Left thought he was out of his mind. Jim Bouton called him “dangerous” in Ball Four, but de-classified documents over the years demonstrated that Graham was right as rain.
Even protests of the Iraq War have often been organized (not always) by offshoots of these Communist organizations. Since the end of the Cold War (and the exposure of Communist body counts over the years) it became unfashionable to use the word Communist, but a virulent sense of anti-Americanism, with many roots, motivations and guises, has risen up in its stead. The anti-war movement had an enormous effect on the conduct of the Vietnam War and American life, resulting in huge fissures in American society and politics, all profoundly felt to this day.
California always seemed to have been a place that “got it right,” a progressive state, a trendsetter. It certainly was when it came to societal progress on the fields of athletic competition. A decade before Jackie Robinson broke the “color barrier” in Brooklyn, he and his integrated UCLA teammates were freely, openly playing football games against the integrated University of Southern California in front of 75,000 integrated fans at the L.A. Coliseum. The Golden State liked to pat itself on the back because, when the rest of the country was backward, in their minds they were elites, superior. This concept came crashing down with a huge dose of reality during the long, hot summer of 1965. A white cop stopped a black motorist not far from the same Coliseum where Robinson thrilled football fans. A black crowd gathered. Enraged over long-simmering police brutality, they became violent, sparking riots in the Watts section of Los Angeles.
The Watts riots had a profound effect on the body politic. The conservative movement, defeated at the polls in 1964 and thought to be “too extreme,” found voice in California’s rookie Gubernatorial candidate for 1966, Ronald Reagan. Reagan and the Right separated from its moderate GOP counterparts, known as the “Rockefeller wing” of the Republican Party, centered in New York and Connecticut. This was the GOP that David Halberstam identified the losing 1964 Yankees with. Like the Yanks, the party re-grouped and found a new, winning formula. The political Republicans found it faster than the baseball Republicans did, though.
Reagan and the Right were reactionaries to all that happened in the 1960s. If the Left could ever admit to such a thing as their version of “blowback,” a CIA term they like to point to when finding all the world’s ills somehow flowing back to America, they would have to acknowledge that the Reagan Revolution which followed was in many ways caused by them. Reagan and the conservatives appealed to mostly white, middle class homeowners pursuing or trying to hold onto the American Dream. Many have found hate, division and racism in its message. In truth many with those predilections attached themselves to it, but the essential message of patriotism, Christianity, anti-Communism, low taxes, personal freedom, responsibility, entrepreneurial capitalism, a strong military, courageous valor, respect for life and family (therefore opposition to abortion) were planks of the movement.
Despite being attacked, reviled and spat upon for decades, these remain its rock positions. Its positive messages have enormous appeal, with visceral emotional attachment that tends to make people willing to die upholding them. This explains why the enormous majority of the military, both officers and enlisted personnel identify to one extent or another with these themes. Many argue they are the foundation of the country. It is the argument with those who disagree with this concept in a fundamental way where the greatest divide currently resides. In this respect the notion that conservatism is divisive (certainly as opposed to moderation) might not be as far off base as many wish to admit.
Reagan won in a landslide over Democrat Governor Edmund “Pat” Brown, who only four years earlier soundly defeated former Vice-President Richard Nixon and had some excellent accomplishments under his belt. Reagan’s popularity came from his opposition to anti-war protestors (therefore supporting Vietnam), the Black Panthers (who replaced Martin Luther King’s Christian non-violence in many quarters), the Watts rioters, the hippies, the Summer of Love, the campus marchers, the Berkeley agitators, all things Communist or close to Communist, atheism or religious weirdness, a Supreme Court more concerned with criminals than victims (Miranda), and socialists (high taxers “stealing” your hard-earned money), among other hot button issues (then and now).
After having the 1960 election stolen from him by Kennedy, Nixon chose not to contest it “for the good of the country.” Some historians say Nixon was involved in “dirty tricks” of his own (the later record makes this seem plausible), but the record is by no means as clear on the subject as the Chicago-Texas-Daley-LBJ-Joe Kennedy “tombstone vote” scandal the Washington Post chose to hide in plain sight from.
Nixon turned down the chance to become Commissioner of Baseball in 1961, entered private law practice in Los Angeles, and then made a failed run for Governor. Nixon was disgusted that his home state did not bow and scrape to him in the manner he felt a Vice-President under Dwight Eisenhower deserved. He moved to New York to pursue the “fast track” on Wall Street; probably his smartest political move. Between 1963 and 1967 Nixon was involved in several important Supreme Court decisions revolving around the issue of private rights vs. those of a public persona. He had general freedom to travel, make speeches, and be political. He was what major law firms call a “rainmaker” who brings in big bucks clientele by virtue of reputation and contacts.
Nixon chose not to run for President in 1964 for any number of reasons, mainly that he could not beat JFK or the man carrying on the martyred man’s legacy, Johnson. He supported LBJ in Vietnam (the GOP as a whole did; a decided reversal from the actions of Democrats when placed in a similar position in the 2000s) but virulently opposed the Great Society. He was the perfect voice to speak against the anti-war protestors and that ilk. In 1966 he traveled the nation, earning favors as he supported Republican candidates (including Reagan in their shared home state). The Republicans won a huge mid-term sweep.
Throughout 1966 and 1967, the general perception was that the United States was winning the Vietnam War. There were unnerving signs, however. American casualties were disturbingly high, troop escalations constant, and the enemy (a combination of Viet Cong “terrorists” and hit ‘n’ run elements of the North Vietnamese Army) could not be crushed. Some have argued that had Nixon been President during this crucial period, he would have struck with enough savage force to end the conflict. This may be true but is unlikely. The period in which the war might have been “won” in decisive military manner was probably early, during JFK’s term (1961-63) or 1964. By 1965-66 too many elements were working against the U.S. to achieve a complete victory using limited means, which was all LBJ was willing to do.
In the back of all American minds was the Korean War after the Inchon invasion. General Douglas MacArthur had brilliantly captured the Communist capital of Pyongyang. Victory belonged to America again; not just victory in the Korean War but the symbolic victory of freedom over Communism, still a relatively nascent political concept whose full truths were only being revealed in piecemeal fashion. Then 1 million Chinese regulars crossed the Yalu River to join the fray. MacArthur chose to take a stand, to defeat China and international Communism once and for all, in North Korea followed by hot pursuit into Mainland China. But Manhattan Project architect Robert Oppenheimer had leaked atomic secrets to Soviet scientists, apparently because he did not think it “fair” that America be able to wage such war without millions of our people suffering the consequence of our actions. It was as if Oppenheimer thought after the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we should have suffered similar fates in Wichita and San Diego just to “even things up,” not unlike the actual ending in Fail-Safe.
The Russians used Oppenheimer’s technology and that given them by American spies, including Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, exploding their weapon in 1949. Red China and the U.S.S.R. were tightly allied. President Harry Truman feared a nuclear World War III, and ordered MacArthur to retreat. The war ended in stalemate, but the essential goal of maintaining a free society in South Korea was achieved. The chance to achieve an undivided, free Vietnam was lost in the early stages when the U.S. did not invade the north and conquer Hanoi, although this certainly sounds easier said than done. The limited goal by 1967-68 was to establish a free South Vietnam with a Communist north, as in Korea.
Everything came to a boil in 1968. In January the Communists launched a military offensive on the eve of Tet, the Chinese New Year. It was an abject military failure but the American media, led by CBS’ Walter Cronkite, treated it as a success. Cronkite just plain told his audience he thought the war unwinnable and so we should quit. Most of the public (or at least the Left) bought it with a fork and spoon. Right or wrong - and mistakes have been made since then by not adhering to this premise - when the public lost support for the war (which occurred between January and March, 1968), achieving a difficult objective became, and continues to be, very, very hard to do. The conservatives and hawks clung, and still in many quarters still cling, to the notion that the Left is overcome with cowardice, and that they alone remain the last, best hope – the “thin red line” – between anarchy and order, between chaos and freedom.
In March, Johnson announced that “if nominated I will not run, if elected I will not serve” as President after the November elections. Senator Robert Kennedy immediately entered the Democrat Primaries, establishing himself as the favorite in the general election. Nixon, in the process of winning the Republican nomination, was apoplectic over the prospect of losing a bitter campaign to another Kennedy. He vowed to play “hardball” this time; to fight the Kennedy’s with everything he had no matter how bare knuckles it got.
In April, just as Major League teams were playing their openers, a white man in Memphis, Tennessee assassinated Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Race riots had gripped a number of American cities in 1967. After Dr. King’s murder, it escalated to virtually every metropolitan urban center in the nation. However, Senator Kennedy spoke soothingly to a black audience in Indianapolis. After informing the unsuspecting crowd, who reacted in horror, he gave a graceful speech, invoking the memory of his brother “who was also killed by a white man.” Kennedy quoted the Greek poet Aeschylus, and almost by miracle Indianapolis remained one of the few major cities that did not burn.
In the spring of 1968, RFK shot to the stratosphere of political popularity like few before or since. He organized a coalition of blacks (despite having wiretapped King), Mexican farm workers (despite coming from unimaginable wealth and privilege), and all-out opponents of the Vietnam War (despite literally being one of the architects of the war). Kennedy was able to walk all these tightropes, harnessing the full force of anti-war sentiment.
In June, Kennedy won the California Primary, establishing himself as the de facto nominee and favorite against Nixon. That day he and his family relaxed in the sun and surf at the Malibu home of John Frankenheimer, a friend and supporter. He was the same man who directed The Manchurian Candidate, the 1962 political thriller about the assassination of a Presidential candidate which had been shelved for a while after JFK’s actual killing the next year. RFK had no intention of attending a rally at the Ambassador Hotel near downtown L.A. Sometime around nine at night he received a call from aides who said the ballroom was abuzz with excitement over his victory, and that his appearance would be a tremendous help to the campaign. Kennedy made the 45-minute drive along the twisting, turning Pacific Coast Highway, then on up to the mid-Wilshire District where the Ambassador is. After telling the exuberant audience “it’s on to Chicago <sight of the Democrat National Convention> and let’s win there,” he brushed his moppish hair, smiled, waved and left. He would have exited through the front entrance but it was a madhouse of supporters so at the last second, so his handlers (including former football star Rosey Grier) took him through the kitchen. There he was shot and killed by Sirhan Sirhan, a Jordanian Arab-Palestinian apparently motivated by RFK’s support of Israel. It may have been the first shot in the War on Terror.
The murder of Robert F. Kennedy opened the door for Richard M. Nixon’s election to the Presidency that fall. Historians can argue that RFK’s victory over Nixon was not in the bag. Indeed, anything could have happened and it was not a fait accompli, but even the most ardent Nixon fans, if honest, must admit it would have been an uphill struggle.
Nixon found his voice and his constituency, who he brilliantly identified as the Silent Majority: Christians, patriots, honest citizens, taxpayers, families, supporters of the military who believed winning in Vietnam, defeating Communism, and achieving American interests was necessary. The unsaid flip side of the Silent Majority was that Democrats, liberals and anti-war protestors were not what the Silent Majority was; Christians, honest citizens, taxpayers, and the like. This divisive argument lasts to this day, and of course no conservative can successfully blanket the Left with accusations of treason, dishonesty, atheism, and the like. That said, Nixon identified his constituency, and they voted for him. In 1972 they returned him to office with the highest vote count in the history of America.
The “Kennedy would have won” crowd also fails to account for the effects of the 1968 Democrat National Convention in Chicago. Even Bobby Kennedy would have been hard pressed to salvage a successful convention out of the warring parties. The Left took the Democrats to task for not taking a hard-line stance on the Vietnam War (not unlike the Iraq scenario). There were still many hawks in the Democrat Party. The South was still Democrat.
Protestors threw bags of feces at the Chicago cops. Mayor Daley, ironically the man who may have been most responsible for giving his party the Presidency in 1960, may have been most responsible for denying it to them in 1968. His orders to the Chicago police were to treat the rioters like enemy combatants in a war, and that was what happened. The convention was a disaster for the party, giving an ugly face to the Left. The Silent Majority saw those mean faces, all captured in techni-color on every television set in every living room. They rejected it wholesale. The election went to Nixon by a thin margin over Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, who had broken from LBJ on the war.
Nixon also utilized what has come to be known as the “Southern strategy.” He siphoned off just enough of George Wallace’s supporters to cut into Dixie. It was still the Jim Crow South, with the Ku Klux Klan a major influence. These leftovers from the Confederacy were 100 percent Democrat. Over time, the South found Nixon and later Reagan to be palatable. Jim Crow and the KKK faded away. The Republican Party filled the vacuum, husbanding the South back into the mainstream of America, to the great benefit of its citizenry, especially its black citizenry. Some have tried to accuse the GOP of using “racist tactics” to divide the South after the “Southern strategy.” If indeed Republican motivations were to hurt black folks, the wholesale, indeed miraculous improvement in their lives in the following years indicate the Republicans were abysmal failures if this was their intent.
It was not.
As 1968 turned to 1969, the United States was at its most divided point since the Civil War. Nixon promised to “bring us together,” but at that time and place he was not likely the one to accomplish this. His role in bringing down Alger Hiss in the early 1950s still stuck in the craw of Democrats. They despised him. As a strident anti-Communist, literally a “Red baiter,” a term of the 1950s, Nixon was committed to his Right-wing constituency and to orchestrate what he called a “secret plan” to end the war. Most on the Right were hoping to bomb Hanoi back to the Stone Age, force Communism to its knees, and declare American hegemony in the manner of MacArthur accepting Japanese acquiescence on the deck of the U.S.S. Missouri in 1945. All of this, they believed, was the will of the true God, the Lord Jesus Christ. It was in many quarters a “go it alone” strategy in which the Republicans simply wrote the Democrats off as somewhere between cowards and traitors. The dirty work needed to be done by them and them alone. In the end, the liberals could thanklessly complain about the conservatives who saved them. The conservatives would just shrug it off, like a reluctant movie hero; Clint Eastwood, Gary Cooper, John Wayne.
This attitude played out again during the Iraq War. Neither Vietnam nor Iraq (at least so far) has had the results conservatives said it would. The lessons of both these wars are not yet determined and may not be for a long time. The Right holds dearly to the “no appeasement” strategy of Winston Churchill during World War II. This might be simplistic, since World War II was relatively “black and white,” dividing simple lines of demarcation between good (America, England) and evil (Nazi Germany, Japan). Our “allies,” the Soviets and China (at least part of China was our ally), almost immediately became evil while West Germany and Japan became post-war partners. Out of this confusion Korea and Vietnam emerged.
Wars in the Middle East are even more complicated. They involved “friends” like Saudi Arabia, who rooted for Hitler until they saw which way the wind was blowing and threw in with Roosevelt. Iran was a friend, now a foe. Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was a “friend” when he opposed the Iranians who kidnapped U.S. diplomats. We supported Afghanistan’s Islamic militants when they beat the Soviets before they turned on us.
From a strictly political point of view, which in Washington and many circles is the only one that counts, “blame” is assigned to the Democrats in Vietnam and is being conveniently lined up the same way in Iraq. The Republicans successfully painted Ted Kennedy and the Democrats as “selling out” the South Vietnamese after Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger orchestrated a brilliant tri-angulated peace plan favoring U.S. interests over those of both the competing Soviets and Chinese in 1972-73. After Watergate, Kennedy’s Democrats refused to uphold the accords in order to get back at Nixon. Millions died in Southeast Asia over the next years. Ronald Reagan blamed the Left, America agreed, and the GOP went on a winning streak beginning in 1980 that, depending on one’s standards or point of view, they still ride today.
These kinds of long-term global strategies were the specialty of both Nixon and Kissinger, both Machiavellians who saw everything as an endgame. Like a good baseball manager who sees the eighth inning in the second inning, in 1969 they were making decisions that they knew would affect events in the 1970s and beyond. Many of these resulted in short term criticism, long term success. In Latin America, they supported Right-wingers in a series of “dirty wars,” but our CIA killed Che Guevara and Communism never did take.
In Vietnam, they inherited a war that could no longer be won the way Nixon might have won it in 1962-64. Nixon has critics who say he should have understood the futility of fighting on when public support was gone, which it was by 1969. In looking at the big picture, however, the price Nixon made the Communists pay in Southeast Asia eventually played a role – maybe even a decisive one - in Reagan forcing the Communists to their knees two decades later, when Cold War victory was finally achieved. It could be further theorized that Vietnam today is peaceful and semi-capitalist; more or less the very result we were looking for between 1964 and 1973. The Left argues that they arrived at this state of affairs despite American involvement in the region. It is not an easy question to resolve. However, considering the ferociousness of the Communists - their torture chambers where our prisoners were held, the 100 million who died under this ideology - the concept that this peaceful condition was to be arrived at strictly by agrarian Communist means is nebulous at best, impossible to conceive when logic is applied.
This “war of attrition” theory, a large part of Kissinger’s stock in trade, very well may apply to the War on Terror, although those of us reading this now may be long in the tooth when this endgame plays itself out. The Pyrrhic victory of King Pyrrhus of Epirus may be used as an effective analogy for the Vietnam-Al Qaeda scenarios. MacArthur certainly understood this concept, declaring at one point during World War II that, “Disease is my strategy. Starvation is my friend. Attrition is my ally.”
But in 1969, the street protestors and students demonstrating on American campuses did not see that far ahead. They did not know, understand or chose not to believe the facts about the Communist Holocaust, which made the Nazi version pale in comparison, albeit over a longer term and in less spectacularly heinous manner (although a life is still a life). Nixon had no “honeymoon period.” “LBJ’s war” immediately was “Nixon’s war” in the minds of the Left. He vowed an “honorable end,” although his promise of a “secret plan,” scoffed at by the Left in the beginning, turned out to be less than what many believed it should have been (all-out bombing in some quarters; Kremlin intervention from others).
In the summer of 1969, three events occurred that diverted attention from the Vietnam War. In July, the U.S. successfully landed a man on the Moon. Whether this is the greatest accomplishment in the history of Mankind is hard to say. However, when one adds up a list of contenders, say 50 of the all-time greatest achievements – the Pyramids, roads, wheels, the printing press, the Trans-continental railroad, electricity, flight, the Hoover Dam, the World Wide Web – it becomes clear that at least half, and probably more like 80 percent of these things, occurred on American soil by Americans. There is a pervasive anti-American bias that will make note of this and still fail to recognize American Exceptionalism, regardless of the self-evident truths placed before thine eyes.
In August of 1969, the Manson family went on two brutal murder rampages in the Hollywood Hills. They appeared to be hippies gone bad. This event and the Altamonte fiasco a year later helped to officially close the chapter on the “Summer of Love.”
The third event was part of that cosmic Greek tragedy known simply as “Kennedy vs. Nixon.” Ted Kennedy picked up on a campaign worker named Mary Jo Kopechne. Driving drunk on Martha’s Vineyard, he veered the car into the waters under the Chappaquiddick Bridge. Kennedy escaped and chose not to make a rescue attempt of the girl. He waited nine hours until his intoxication could not be detected before contacting authorities. The girl died. Whether she could have been saved either by Kennedy or a quick call to the police is not known; most probably not. Nevertheless, Kennedy’s actions devastated his political career. It was all watched in mute silence by “old man Joe,” felled by a stroke years earlier. He was forced, as if by wrathful judgment, to watch all he had schemed for fall apart by the most unpredictable means.
After the death of Bobby, Ted was the heir apparent to the Kennedy political dynasty. He had been approached about running for President in 1968, but a November election was just too soon after RFK’s June killing. It was all systems go, however, for 1972. Nixon seemed vulnerable with Vietnam. After Chappaquiddick, he was done for 1972 and even 1976. He tried in 1980 but failed miserably.
The “what if?” game revolving around JFK and Nixon, both World War II veterans, freshman Congressmen in 1946, so close they were like “brothers,” with “old man Joe” helping to finance Nixon’s Congressional and Senate campaigns; the possibilities and scenarios are utterly mind-blowing.
JFK’s stealing the 1960 election. The Bay of Pigs, the Vienna summit with Kruschev, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the coup d’etat of Ngo Dinh Diem, the death of Marilyn Monroe, even the Vietnam War, may have gone very differently had Nixon been in the White House.
Events revolving around Bobby Kennedy are equally ironic. Wiretapping King, his fallout with Johnson, the escalation in Vietnam, Johnson’s election and subsequent decision not to run again, RFK’s murder, and Nixon’s election; all create a tangled web of possibilities with various starting and end points.
Then came Teddy’s disaster at Chappaquiddick with more convoluted results. It prevented him from running in 1972 (in truth nobody was going to beat Nixon that year based on any foreseeable circumstances, tenuous when these people are being discussed). However, the greatest motivation for bugging Democrat National Headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in 1972 was Nixon’s obsession with Ted Kennedy; a desire to play the same “hardball” the Kennedy’s played against him in 1960; to beat that family at all costs; and therefore to get “dirt” on Teddy Kennedy.
It was the resulting Watergate scandal that gave Kennedy the political upper hand. He and his party were determined to destroy Nixon and wipe out his Vietnam tri-angulation legacy, forged in the Paris peace talks. Kennedy succeeded. Millions died in Southeast Asia. It would be moral relativism to blame Kennedy. The blame is directed at Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge and Communism, but this disaster was not beyond the ability of a smart man like Ted Kennedy to foresee. He did what he did anyway, in order to disgrace Nixon and gain naked political power.
So, it would appear that the “great game” was over. The Kennedy’s (as usual) had won. Not so fast. Kennedy lost the 1980 Democrat nomination and never dared to run again. In 1991 his nephew was arrested for rape. In the investigation, it was discovered that instead of coming to the girl’s rescue, he appeared pantless in a nightshirt, hopin’ for “sloppy seconds.” Kennedy’s name and visage, at least in conservative circles, has been synonymous with drunkenness, sexual lasciviousness and cowardice. Like his father, he has had to helplessly watch the “Kennedy curse” affect others in the family, such as nephew John Kennedy Jr., who perished in a 1999 plane crash. Perhaps most galling of all, he has been a spectator at the “coronation” of the Bush family, replacing his own as the true “royal family” of American politics. Despite having far less appeal and elitist charisma, their success and influence has outweighed the Kennedy’s impact, despite every desperate effort to prevent it by Teddy!
****
In the years after the Dodgers and Giants left New York, the city found itself in a political and social upheaval.
“The country had been so dominant after World War II, but then in the ‘60s we slipped into a slew of problems starting with Vietnam,” recalled former New York Governor Mario Cuomo. “It was a very unsettling time with social and cultural changes. Under our feet the ground was giving way.”
“I think New York City always felt things more quickly,” recalled David Halberstam, a Pulitzer Prize-winning chronicler of Vietnam, as well as a book on the 1950s and others about sports. “There was a feeling by the administration in Washington that whatever happened in New York wasn’t happening in the rest of the country. But, in New York City in 1968 . . . there was an acute sense of anti-war and a country in conflict with itself.”
New York’s racial animus, always boiling right below the surface, began to come to a head. The dominant civil rights ethos of the late 1960s was not Dr. King’s Christian non-violence, especially after his assassination, but the “hate whitey” rhetoric of Sonny Caron, H. Rap Brown, Stokeley Carmichael and the Black Panthers. Malcolm X had been assassinated in New York in 1965. In the aftermath of this tragedy, the Black Muslims radicalized. Malcolm X himself had softened right before his death. Having journeyed to Mecca, he experienced a religious epiphany, returning with the resolve to work with King and view all men of any color as his brothers.
After three terms, Mayor Wagner was gone. The influence of kingpins such as Carmine De Sapio and Robert Moses was waning. John Lindsay, an upper class liberal-to-moderate rank-in-file member of the “Rockefeller wing” of the Republican Party was elected in 1965 over Conservative Party candidate William Buckley and Democrat Abe Beame. Lindsay oversaw a city in manufacturing decline, with Wall Street down in a struggling economy. Union militancy and strikes beset him. On his first day in office the Transportation Workers Union shut down subway and bus service. It was something like that seemingly every week. The citizens of the greatest city in the world were held virtually hostage to strikes by bus drivers, garbage workers, sanitation workers, and the like. The place literally stank.
In the wake of the Great Society, welfare costs were out of control. Ironically, Nixon, who mistakenly thought if he embraced some liberal ideas they would hate him less, enacted many of the Great Society’s proposals under LBJ.
“Things were difficult in the city for a long time during this period,” said David Garth, a political advisor to Lindsay. By 1969, much of the Berkeley-San Francisco counter-culture found its way to Greenwich Village. Lindsay put two of the most radical 1960s hippies, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, on the city payroll, hoping to mollify their criticism, with predictably bad results. Crime soared out of control. The Mob controlled more of the city than Lindsay or the Governor.
“You were really talking about two New Yorks,” said Garth. “To some, crime didn’t exist in our section (of town). But the black and Spanish communities were having real trouble. The confrontation between whites and blacks and Spanish grew tremendously in that period and that’s when you had riots.”
Hoffman stabbed Lindsay in the back by organizing one at Grand Central Terminal, with 3,000 protestors creating havoc. The police reacted predictably with dozens ending up in hospitals.
On the day of King’s assassination, Lindsay courageously went to Harlem and spoke with people, as Bobby Kennedy did that day in Indiana. The riots in Harlem and the Bronx were not as bad as in other places. Baltimore, in particular, was seemingly on fire. In an era of great suspicion between blacks and whites, Lindsay was viewed as one of the few white politicians who could effectively communicate with black audiences.
Columbia University was the scene of anti-war riots as bad as any at Cal-Berkeley, the University of Wisconsin, or other hot sports. The Students for a Democratic Society, organized by Left-wing radical Tom Hayden (one of the “Chicago seven,” so named when they stood trial for the riots at the Democrat National Convention in Chicago), organized sit-ins and occupation of Columbia. At one point Columbia was shut down for a week, ending only when the cops stormed the buildings. At one point, 200,000 people marched in New York City to protest Vietnam. The hippies morphed into something called the “yippies,” which may or may not have become the “YUPPIES” of the 1980s. They stormed the stock exchange where, ironically, many of them became millionaire “capitalist pigs” 17 years later.
The teachers went on strike, with predictable results: juvenile delinquency and crime. Many have said this event started the bad relations between blacks and Jews (traditional social allies) that came to a head during the Al Sharpton/Tawana Brawley incident of 1987. Blacks seemed to prolong the school closings. Jews, chomping at the bit to get back in, blamed the blacks for the strike.
“It was a time of tremendous social unrest and poverty in the city,” said Mario Cuomo. “We were in a corroding period, and the city bore the brunt of all the problems and the real use of major drugs started around this time.”
“I was definitely aware of things,” recalled black filmmaker Spike Lee, one of the great chroniclers of New York society over the years. “My parents made sure we all knew what was happening. The civil rights movement, the assassinations, everything. The whole country was in turmoil.”
“The country was not feeling very good about itself and the city was not feeling very good about itself,” said Rudolph Giuliani, later a prosecutor credited with “sending the Mob upriver” in the 1980s; cleaning up New York in that role and later as Mayor in the 1990s; leading them through 9/11; and embarking on a quest for the Republican Presidential nomination in 2008. “They both needed some things to feel good about.”
In 1969, novelist Norman Mailer made a quixotic run for Lindsay’s office. His original supporters and advisors included writer George Plimpton, gadfly Norman Podhoretz, New York magazine editor Clay Felker, and feminist Gloria Steinem. He hoped to gain traction from the Upper East Side crowd. He joined forces with the Irish columnist Jimmy Breslin. As a political combination others have been better, but as literary talents this was heavyweight material. Most of the campaign consisted of sitting around Mailer’s Columbia Heights abode drinking heavily. The idea was to split the vote and pick up the Democrat Party, in shambles at the time.
“New York City is today a legislative pail of dismembered organs strewn from Washington to Albany,” Mailer wrote in the New York Times Magazine. “We are without a comprehensive function or skin. It is simple: our city must become a state.” The city-state idea may have been a “modern Athens” in Mailer’s view perhaps, but to most it was a “crackpot idea.” Mailer also came up with the plan of banning automobiles in Manhattan, an elitist concept of imposing one’s will on others, since the man “slummed” in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights when not in Provincetown, a Martha’s Vineyard village that later became known for its gay community. This was an ironic twist since Mailer, married six times, fancied himself a man of Hemingwayesque machismo, an amateur boxer (and chronicler of the “sweet science”) whose greatest “fight” was the stabbing of his second wife during a passionate argument.
Breslin wanted to legalize gambling, which he was lucky did not result in his being offed by the Mafia. Mailer called himself a “left conservative,” a moniker he was still holding onto as late as the Iraq War debates, with little explanation as to what it meant other than he fathered a lot kids!
Mailer lost in the Primary. Lindsay had looked to be all but dead, but revived his candidacy when he switched to the Liberal Party. His association with the New York Jets, rabid cheerleading, appearances at Shea Stadium, and locker room celebrations with the Mets gave him face time, a veneer of popularity allowing him to squeak by in the fall elections.
“If I’m right about this city being on the edge of doom, then Heaven help this city, because there’s not much to look forward to with the men they elected today,” Mailer said after losing. His candidacy was blamed by some with splitting the vote not in his favor as planned, but for Lindsay and the Liberal Party ticket, which despite the name was more moderate than some of the other parties and candidates running. Mailer always maintained a strong identification with New York in succeeding years.
High hopes
“I have a dream.”
- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
“High hopes” was Frank Sinatra’s campaign song for John F. Kennedy in 1960. Indeed, JFK’s high hopes came true, but so much had occurred in the star-crossed decade that followed; no pundit, no prophet or political scientist could possibly have painted a picture describing the changed, topsy-turvy, tragically beautiful world that followed. The cataclysmic differences between 1960 and 1969 mark the great social upheaval in American, and possibly world history. Perhaps only wars have brought about such change, but even that is arguable.
1969 dawned, and with it high hopes that change was in the air. So much had gone wrong that it seemed there was no place to go but up. Richard Nixon was sworn in on January 20. He was a Californian but like so many of New York’s greatest sports stars over the years, was also a bona fide New Yorker. He had taken a job with a “silk stocking” Wall Street law firm in 1963 and lived in a fancy East Side building that also housed Nelson Rockefeller. His New York connections paid off when the Empire State gave him the electoral votes he needed to win the Presidency.
Now, America looked to him to extricate the country from Vietnam. The Right wanted him to turn up the heat militarily, forcing the Communists to capitulate. The Left knew that Nixon had established diplomatic ties with Soviet leaders like Nikita Kruschev. They hoped he could arrange a deal with the Russians that would benefit everybody, the result being American withdrawal with honor.
New York had particularly high sports hopes for 1969. Something was in the air. Aside from having a quasi-New Yorker in the White House, the city was enthralled with the Jets. On January 12 “Broadway Joe” Namath engineered the seminal event in NFL history, a 16-7 upset of Baltimore. Mayor Lindsay attached himself to the team, leading the over-the-top celebration when they returned from Miami. It had been such an upset, such a miracle, and was so full of magical serendipity, that all things seemed possible. Namath and the Jets embodied the very essence of change, in sports and in society. So influential were the key players in the Jets’ saga that there was a sense, unrealistic as it may have been, that they could do anything. In this regard, it went beyond the playing field. They could effect society. They could help end the war.
This blending of sports theatre with high hopes for peace originally started with the rock music of the era. Crowds would gather to hear the great bands of the 1960s, many of whom sang songs of peace, convincing themselves the energy would translate into action. At one legendary Doors concert, Jim Morrison sang a song called “The Unknown Soldier,” with lyrics that included:
“It’s all over,
For the Unknown Soldier.
It’s all over,
The war is over.”
In the euphoria of the moment, people were treating the words as real, as if it was a lyrical “press conference” announcing the end of hostilities, with concert-goers spreading quasi-hysterical messages that, “Jim’s ended the war, man; it’s over.”
If a guy like Joe Namath said we should get out of Vietnam, then people listened to him. Athletes were among the most conservative members of society. In 1968-69, many served in National Guard and Army Reserve units, usually arranged by the teams to satisfy military duty without actually being on active duty or, worse, seeing combat. Only one pro football player, Bob Kalsu of the Buffalo Bills, died in Vietnam. Tom Seaver, who was always seemingly smarter than everybody else, had done his Marine stint in 1962-63, before it got hot “in country,” as they called it. He was done with his service commitment. Many Mets and Jets had to give up a weekend a month and two weeks a year, sometimes missing games in the process, at Reserve depots like Camp Drum, New York.
“Seaver had done that bit,” said Ron Swoboda. It gave him just a little more credibility than others. The athletes were not longhaired “pinkos” fouling the nation’s campuses and streets. They were the new cause celebres, and nobody more so than Namath’s Jets. Athletes started to find themselves approached about lending their name to the cause of peace.
As Namath was shocking the world, Seaver was finishing up final exams at the University of Southern California. He told people later that the last thing on his mind was the Mets’ accomplishing a similar feat. However, as he lifted weights and worked out with Rod Dedeaux’s defending National Champion Trojans in the winter sunshine of Los Angeles, the ever-optimistic Seaver could not help but have . . . high hopes.
Despite Seaver’s Rookie of the Year performance in 1967, it had been a year of reversal; a 10th place finish after ending up ninth the previous season. Wes Westrum was fired. During the World Series between the Boston Red Sox and St. Louis Cardinals, a plan was hatched to attract Gil Hodges, then managing the Washington Senators, to the Mets. When approached, Hodges expressed an interest, and why not? He had done a good job in Washington, but the Senators were not threatening to become contenders any time soon. Hodges was of course a Brooklyn icon, and it was the Dodgers whose memories were most closely associated with the early Mets. He had married a Brooklyn girl, lived in the borough during his playing days; shopped in the stores, sent his children to the schools, worshipped in the local church. After accompanying the Dodgers to L.A., he had returned to New York with the Mets in 1962 and 1963. Despite having lost all his skills, he was a fan favorite. Gil was one of the game’s all-time gentlemen and good guys, but as a manager he was no pushover. He seemed to be just right for the times, the kind of man who could handle the modern player, the black player, the Latin American player. A deal was worked out with New York sending a prospect who never panned out and $100,000 to the cash-strapped Senators. Hodges was the Mets’ manager for 1968.
“The ownership, Donald Grant, Herbert Walker, and Luke Lockwood, quickly came to me and said, ‘We want you to do whatever you want to do, but we would like you to take a long look and think about Gil Hodges,’ ” recalled Bing Devine of his last move with the Mets before going back to St. Louis.
The deal was effectuated in large measure because Devine’s assistant, Johnny Murphy and Washington GM George Selkirk were old Yankees teammates. Murphy took over as the Mets’ GM. According to Whitey Herzog, a member of the Mets’ front office at the time, he was the man who got things done.
“When <Devine> left the Mets, they made John Murphy the general manager,” said Herzog. “John was a fine man, but his nickname was ‘Grandma’ – he just couldn’t make a decision. That was fine with me, since I moved in to make all the tough ones for him . . . He let me run the organization pretty much as I wanted.”
The outspoken Herzog told writer Peter Golenbock that M. Donald Grant “was a stockbroker who didn’t know beans about baseball but thought he did. I’ve run into guys like Donald Grant a lot in my career, and everywhere they show up, they’re trouble.”
A similar situation occurred at this time in Los Angeles, where industrialist and media magnate Jack Kent Cooke, owner of the Lakers, fancied himself a basketball expert.
“He thought he knew,” said Jerry West. “He didn’t know.”
“All of us knew Gil, knew who he was and what kind of ballplayer he had been,” said Bud Harrelson. “He brought credibility to the team as soon as he arrived. Because he had come from the American League, he kind of just let us play in 1968 and didn’t presume he knew everything about the league and the Mets. But you always knew he was in charge. Gil was a big, strong man, and I don’t think anyone wanted to find out how strong.”
Ken Harrelson, a star hitter with the Red Sox of that era, said Hodges was a “tyrant.” Jerry Koosman, a 1968 rookie, heard that and expected to see that side of him. Instead, “Gil was just the opposite. I found him to be a fun person, joking around a lot, a good guy all year.” However, once 1969 rolled around, “he got tougher.” Koosman surmised, correctly, that “Maybe it was because he felt he had a team that could win. He became stricter that year,” but he was “always fair.”
Ed Kranepool symbolized the “old Mets.” He had been there since the beginning. A high school wunderkind and local product, Kranepool had gone through the motions for six years before Hodges arrived. He had little incentive to do much more than that. The team was bad, if not outright comical. Little was expected of anybody. Hodges inspired him that maybe he could experience true excellence before hanging up his spikes. He also sensed that the fans were ready to close an old chapter and start a new one.
“I always felt that New York fans were and are the greatest in the world,” he said. “They were always knowledgeable, and by 1967 last place wasn’t fun anymore.” When Hodges came on the scene, “It wasn’t a matter of just showing up any more . . . so many guys were used to losing that they had negative habits. It’s contagious.”
Ed Charles was an American League veteran, where he had seen Hodges operate. He had just a few good years left and had never been with a winner.
“Hodges changed the losing mindset,” Charles said in Miracle Year: 1969 Amazing Mets and Super Jets by Bill Gutman. “He was an upfront type of manager, very knowledgeable about the game, very firm in what he expected from the players. He told us when we were out there he expected 100 percent effort. If we couldn’t give it because of a physical reason, he wanted us to tell him, because he wouldn’t put us on the field.”
This required a level of trust and team sacrifice that was unusual for ball players. Seaver, for instance, told his manager when he was tired instead of fibbing so he could stay in the game past the point of effectiveness. It was a fine line that some could perceive as a lack of guts, but Hodges knew Seaver left it all out on the mound. His drop-and-drive pitching style required a level of fitness, strength and endurance like few others. The two developed rapport that quickly became mutual respect.
The young 1968 Mets drew well but were totally overshadowed by the Jets. Young players Bud Harrelson, Jerry Grote, and Ron Swoboda improved. Young pitchers Nolan Ryan, Dick Selma, and Jim McAndrew showed promise. Veterans Phil Linz, Al Weis, Art Shamsky, Don Cardwell, Ron Taylor, and J.C. Martin gave the team stability. Cleon Jones looked to be on the verge of stardom. His childhood pal from Mobile, Alabama, Tommie Agee, came over from Chicago. Agee hit .273 with 22 home runs and 86 RBIs in 1967, swiping 44 bases for manager Eddie Stanky’s “Go Go White Sox” as they battled for the pennant until the last week. But in the “Year of the Pitcher” (1968) Agee was overwhelmed. His .217 batting average, five homers, 13 stolen bases and 17 runs batted in were pathetic.
Seaver and Koosman dominated on the mound, Koosman, a native of Minnesota, had signed in 1964. Without the college polish of Seaver, he took longer to develop, but had come up at the end of the 1967 campaign. Nobody could have predicted his 19-win, 2.08 ERA performance in 1968. Despite winning three more games, Koosman said, “I probably wasn’t on the same level as Seaver.” There was no sense of rivalry between the right-handed Seaver and the southpaw Koosman, other than healthy one-upmanship. Koosman was happy to let Seaver take the lead as the “face” of the team. Koosman was not the kind personality who needed extra attention.
Hodges had played for Casey Stengel with the Mets, and even though the Dodgers teams he starred on had a “set in stone” line-up, he became a disciple of Stengel’s platoon system. It was a matter of necessity, especially in the offensive doldrums of 1968. Swoboda clashed with the manager, but most saw its benefits.
“When Gil got there I was coming off my best year in 1967, thought I had arrived as a Major Leaguer, and probably thought I was a little more important than I should have,” Ron Swoboda recalled. The young outfielder was head strong, but introspective. He rubbed some people the wrong way and was irritated by others, but he had the ability of discernment; to study things, learn from his faults, and admit his mistakes. “I was never cool with” the platooning, “but in the end Gil proved that he knew what he was doing.”
The Mets finished in ninth place with a 73-89 mark, one game better than Houston in 1968. It was a tremendous improvement over all previous Mets teams, but the high hopes of individual players still looked unrealistic entering 1969. The lack of offense seemed to be impossible to overcome. After Seaver and Koosman, the only pitcher with a winning record was Cal Koonce. Tug McGraw had seemingly lost ground. Nolan Ryan was a project like the Pyramids or the Tennessee Valley Authority. However, on September 24, 1968, Hodges suffered a heart attack on a hot day in Atlanta. It was mild. The consensus was that he could return in 1969.
1969 offered an intriguing new twist on the pennant races. Expansion had come to baseball via the Los Angeles (by ‘69 California) Angels and Washington Senators in the American League (1961); the Mets and Houston Colt .45s (by ’69 Astros) in the National League (1962). Seven years later the Seattle Pilots (now Milwaukee Brewers in the National League) and Kansas City Royals (fulfilling a special interest promise in the wake of Charlie O. Finley moving the A’s to Oakland in ’68) were added to the American League. The National’s saw the addition of the San Diego Padres and the first Canadian team, the Montreal Expos (now the Washington Nationals).
With this second round of expansion came East and West Divisions. For the first time teams played a staggered schedule instead of facing every club in the league an equal number of times. Teams would play 18 games with divisional opponents, 12 against non-division foes. The National League West featured San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Houston, Cincinnati and, despite being just a relatively short drive from the Atlantic Ocean, Atlanta.
The planners wanted to maintain some of the traditional rivalries. The East included obvious members like the Mets, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Montreal. Chicago and St. Louis were deemed too inseparable a rivalry to split up so they were in the East instead of Atlanta and Cincinnati. For those Mets fans and players who were either crazy, dumb or overly optimistic, the East Division meant a “good news, bad news” scenario. The good news was they only needed to beat five teams to win the division. The bad news was the best team, St. Louis was in the East. Chicago promised a big year under Leo Durocher, too. A very scary play-off loomed for the winners; after battling for 162 games, a too-short best of five series would determine the World Series participants.
The divisional format had the effect of diluting the “rivalry” with the Giants and Dodgers, the two greatest draws at Shea Stadium. Some baseball experts predicted a possible .500 finish, but Las Vegas set the odds at winning the pennant, which meant first the division and then the play-off, at 100-to-one.
Ron Swoboda later said he thought the 1969 Mets “could go out and play with anybody,” but his limited expectations were the .500 mark. “I don’t think anyone came out of Spring Training aiming at the Moon.”
Bud Harrelson recalled Hodges holding Spring Training meetings in which he said New York had lost 36 one-run games the previous season, and that, “If you won half of them, you’d be in contention.” Hodges put it in logical, easy to understand terms; if each pitcher won just one more game than he lost, this goal could be achieved. Since it seemed obvious that Seaver and Koosman would do much better than that, optimism soared.
Kranepool admitted that in other years he and his teammates “just showed up,” but Gil “wanted us to learn how to win, to be able to find ways to win.” This was the key; finding new, inventive ways to win, since in the past they had specialized in new, inventive ways to lose.
Ed Charles said Hodges’s platoon system of 1968 took some getting used; by the players, fans, and press alike, but “By 1969, I think we had all adjusted to it.”
While expectations from the baseball punditry were mixed, there was legitimate historical comparison of the Seaver-Koosman tandem with the Koufax-Drysdale combination. The Dodgers of the mid-1960s had little more offense than this Mets team, and despite mythology were not great defensive clubs. They had pitched Los Angeles into three World Series, winning two. This was the power of great mound work, which famed Philadelphia A’s manager Cornelius “Connie Mack” McGillicuddy once said was, “90 percent of the game.”
A key newcomer was rookie right-hander Gary Gentry, a fireballer from Arizona State; the same program, coached by Bobby Winkles, that won the 1965 (and later the 1969) College World Series. They produced such stalwarts as Reggie Jackson, Sal Bando and Rick Monday of the Oakland A’s. Don Cardwell was a veteran expected to fill the fourth spot. He just needed to win a little more than he lost. Jim McAndrew and Nolan Ryan competed for the fifth place in the rotation. Ryan, like Harrelson, was slated to miss some games because of a military commitment; a few weekends and a two-week training hitch. Traditionally, baseball teams went with four starters. Seaver went every four days when he came up as a rookie in 1967, but he and Hodges were revolutionizing the way pitchers were used. Aside from the platoon system, originally put into full use by Stengel and now utilized by Hodges, the five-man rotation would prove to be the way of the future.
Seaver was a gamer, a bulldog who gave every ounce of what he had. He had over the years devised what many consider to be the most perfect pitching motion ever. Certainly, for pitchers below 6-2, with strong legs, buttocks and lower back muscles, his style was machine-effective. At the top of his leg lift there was a slight hesitation, a gathering of momentum, maybe even a slight mental preparation. This was followed by a release that resembled the uncoiling of a spring. Seaver dropped his right knee to the ground. He needed a pad to prevent bleeding. He went through pants like they were going out of style, but in so doing he made full use of the biggest muscles in his body. This took the essential pressure off his shoulder and elbow, which he used in an overhand release perhaps slightly three-quarter, but with the elbow parallel to the shoulder to avoid short-arming. His low-gravity mound-dragging style put a lot of stress on his feet, which required constant trainer’s attention. He also kept the shoe company in business and needed new pitcher’s toes all the time.
To the hitter, it was a flurry of legs and a blinding fastball that seemed to be on home plate before they could adjust. There was none of the saaame old wind-up, the double-pump, a big kick, a lazy arm action as in the old days. Instead, Seaver exploded. He had strength, he had ability, but most of all, Seaver was a scientist on the mound. His style (similar to Hall of Famer Robin Roberts), was perfect for his body type, which resembled a wrestler. Tall pitchers like Don Drysdale and Steve Carlton utilized their height. Jim Palmer’s motion was the polar-opposite. None made use of the “drop-and-drive” of Seaver, but among pitchers, mostly right-handers of Seaver’s general physical dimensions, he was a guru. Virtually all of his pitcher-teammates on the Mets, later Cincinnati and Chicago, patterned themselves after him.
But this pitching style took a great effort. Tom did not pace himself. By the eighth or ninth inning, he was often spent and honest about it with Hodges. Hodges had seen Don Newcombe work himself into exhaustion trying to go nine. Perhaps if he had not started the ninth inning of the 1951 play-off loss to the Giants, things would have been different.
One day Seaver approached Hodges, suggesting that he was fresher if given an extra days’ rest; from four to five. It made sense to Hodges. The Seaver-Koosman tandem was fabulous used in this manner. Many in baseball, including the irascible Leo Durocher, disdained the practice. They were old school guys who believed pitchers were coddled enough, not working three of every four games. It was less than “manly” for them if they failed to complete nine innings.
In the new scheme of things, with Hodges using starters every five days, removing them instead of letting them pitch into the ninth inning with tired arms, the Mets’ bullpen would be key. There was potential but it was largely untested. Cal Koonce and Ron Taylor were veterans. Tug McGraw was a question mark.
In 1965, the rookie southpaw beat Sandy Koufax. He had been seen as a starter, but his promise fizzled and he had been up-and-down. Military commitments set him back (he was a free spirit and certainly not well suited for it). McGraw spent 1968 at Jacksonville, but Hodges planned to make him a regular member of his staff. His exact role – starter, long relief, closer – was not yet defined. Pitching coach Rube Walker was tasked with the “project” Tug McGraw; when to use him, how to focus his off-the-wall personality.
Kranepool held the first base job, but he needed competition to push him. Second baseman Ken Boswell was so shaky defensively that people made a “clink” sound to resemble a ball bouncing off a metal glove when describing his “prowess.” Al Weis had come over from Chicago and was a journeyman at best. Harrelson had suffered a knee injury that needed to be taken into consideration. At third base, Hodges planned to alternate right-hand hitting Ed Charles with left-hand hitting Wayne “Red” Garrett, who reminded nobody of Brooks Robinson in the field or Eddie Mathews at the plate. Young prospect Amos Otis was given a shot at third base, but he was an outfielder and resisted. Eventually Otis was sent to Kansas City, where he enjoyed success.
Jones was set in left field. If the Mets were to support Seaver and Koosman, he would need to emerge into the star player he had the potential to be. Perhaps the biggest key was Agee in center. He had gotten it done in Chicago in 1967, not so in New York the next season. But the ability was there, offensively, defensively and on the base paths.
“I liked them,” Swoboda said of the two friends from Mobile. Mobile, Alabama, a small Gulf Coast town, may have produced more unbelievable baseball talent than anyplace of similar size. Aside from Jones and Agree, Hank Aaron and his brother Tommie came from there, as did Willie McCovey. Willie Mays hailed from Fairfield (closer to Birmingham). Billy Williams of the Cubs was from Alabama, too.
“I still like them,” said Swoboda. “Everybody wanted to make Cleon and Tommie Mobile boys. But Cleon came from a much rougher background. Tommy’s people were religious. There was a lot more structure in Tommy’s family. Cleon grew up a little rougher.
“There was a tendency back then for whites to grant black athletes their due as physical athletes, but reluctant to recognize them as intelligent athletes. And Cleon was a very studious hitter. He understood hitting. He would look at film. He would be in the back looking at the little loops of film we had of hitting. He studied that and understood. I didn’t. He would be a good hitting coach today. He could transmit what he knew about hitting to today’s young players, no doubt in my mind. I’ve seen him talk hitting. It’s illuminating.
“Tommy understood himself as a hitter very well, too.”
Swoboda fumed over his platoon status with Art Shamsky, one of the great rarities of sports: the Jewish athlete. While Jews were few and far between in athletics, some were genuine stars: Sandy Koufax, Hank Greenberg, Ken Holtzman, basketball hero Dolph Shayes, and Hall of Fame quarterback Sid Luckman. Rod Gaspar would be a utilityman. Behind the plate, Jerry Grote would handle the pitching staff with aplomb, albeit in gruff manner. He was not about to win any personality contests. When Grote got tired Duffy Dyer could step in. J.C. Martin could bunt and pinch-run. Bobby Pfeil could fill in if Harrelson’s knee hurt, or when Bud took off for Camp Drum.
The question was: do the Mets rely on pitching and defense, in the manner of the 1965 “Hitless Wonder” Dodgers, or do they make a move for some more offense? The organization decided to take on the rest of the National League using the pitching and defense option, for a few reasons. First, L.A. had shown it could be done. Second, the future, when honestly assessed, was 1970, maybe 1971; not 1969. Finally, after the offensive woes of 1968, expectations for offensive prowess anywhere in baseball were not high. But the league had shortened the height of the mound a few inches to make pitching less dominant. The expansion of the league promised a dilution in mound talent that should create more offense.
The National League of 1969 was at a crossroads. Since the signing of Jackie Robinson in 1947, it was the league that gave greater opportunities to black and Latino players. Consequently, it was a faster, more aggressive league. Their All-Star Game dominance demonstrated its superiority. With the Yankees in a tailspin since winning the 1964 pennant, the senior circuit was unquestionably better. But the league had been built by several great superstars, some of whom were fading by 1968-69.
Chief among them was San Francisco’s Willie Mays, one of if not the finest player of all time. After winning the 1965 MVP award and pushing his team in a tight, down-to-the-wire pennant run in 1966, Mays slipped considerably in 1967-68. Despite that, it had not prevented him from winning Most Valuable Player honors when he scored the only run in the National’s 1-0 1968 All-Star Game win at the Astrodome. Mays was still a fan favorite in New York. The Mets were not pleased that he would only play six games at Shea Stadium instead of nine under the old system. Then there was Drysdale, a star in Brooklyn at the end. Outside of manager Walt Alston, coach Junior Gilliam . . . and owner Walter O’Malley, plus a host of advisors kept on the payroll for PR purposes, he was the last link to Brooklyn. Big D had been spectacular in 1968, but he came down with the curiously named “tennis elbow” early in 1969, forcing an early retirement.
But a look back at 1969 indicates it to be a golden year in which many veterans were still at the top of their games. These stars were matched with a glittering array of young players who promised to be the baseball heroes of the 1970s. The Cubs featured third baseman Ron Santo, Hall of Fame first baseman Ernie Banks, All-Star center fielder Billy Williams, and two young mound aces, Ferguson Jenkins and Ken Holtzman.
The Cardinals had high-priced superstars: pitcher Bob Gibson, emerging star southpaw Steve Carlton, and speed demon Lou Brock in left. Catcher Tim McCarver was one of the best in the game. But unbeknownst to many, they were about to implode. Right fielder Roger Maris had retired, and would be missed. Star first baseman Orlando Cepeda, after wearing out his welcome, was packed off to Atlanta. Outfielder Curt Flood was a “clubhouse lawyer.” His attitude would eventually effectuate his trade to Philadelphia, opening a “Pandora’s Box” of legal problems.
Pittsburgh had veterans: the incredible Roberto Clemente, still slightly underrated in the pantheon; slugger Willie Stargell; a host of mashers (Al Oliver, Matty Alou), and not enough on the mound. Philadelphia featured the fearsome Dick “don’t call me Richie” Allen, who when not spraying frozen ropes off walls and over fences infuriated everybody with his carefree attitude and tendency to do a little bit o’ drinkin’. This was manifested by his playing in the right field shade on hot days, regardless of where the best place to defense hitters was. His manager, Gene Mauch, was infuriated by him, but had been fired and was now in Montreal. They were the East Division’s expansion team. Their one name player was Rusty Staub, a star in Houston.
The Giants were an early West Division favorite. Aside from Mays, Hall of Fame first baseman Willie McCovey was in his absolute prime on the verge of his best season ever. They had power, little speed, average defense, two Hall of Fame pitchers (Juan Marichal, Gaylord Perry) and not much else. Atlanta featured an offensive powerhouse, led by Henry Aaron (who had not slowed up a step and was just starting to get people to calculate his age, rate of homers, health, and longevity with an eye toward Babe Ruth’s 714 home runs). Mays was the man chasing Ruth, but he had slowed up and there was no chance. “Hammerin’ Hank,” to quote Mick Jagger, could say that “time is on my side.” Rico Carty was a monster at the plate, too. The Braves question mark was pitching, but knuckleball ace Phil Niekro would have his best year.
Cincinnati was all offense with little mound presence beyond their 1960s ace, Fresno’s own Jim Maloney. But they sure could hit. The future Big Red Machine included Johnny Bench, one of the greatest all-around catchers ever (Josh Gibson may have been the only one who was better); slugging first sacker Lee May, RBI-man extraordinaire Tony Perez, and fiery left fielder Pete Rose. They called L.A. The Mod Squad, after a popular TV show of the era. They were a gaggle of challenging names for announcer Vin Scully to pronounce: Grabarkewitz, Lefebvre and Sudakis, a few vets, and the next ace in the tradition of Koufax and Drysdale, Don Sutton. Houston still had the “expansion” tag. In those days, before free agency, an expansion team took years to develop. But the Astros had world class talent, namely in the form of heaterballers Larry Dierker and Don Wilson, second baseman Joe Morgan, and center fielder Jimmy “the Toy Cannon” Wynn. San Diego was the other new N.L. expansion club and offered little incentive to watch. Nate Colbert was their only good player. In looking back, and examining the statistics as well, it seemed incongruous that among all these good teams and good players, the Mets would emerge victorious.
****
Union problems for the first time hung over baseball, with a strike threatening Spring Training, but on February 16 it was resolved. Bowie Kuhn, a Wall Street lawyer, was the new Commissioner of Baseball. A classic confrontation loomed with Marvin Miller, the new head of the player’s union. Miller came from the rough ‘n’ tumble world of the Steel Workers’ Union. A lot of accusations about Socialism and Communism – prime rhetoric of the Vietnam era – were bandied about.
“Back in 1969 we were talking about nickels,” said Ron Swoboda. “There were nickels and dimes on the table, and we still had to hold out. It was finite sums of money, and we weren’t changing the system, just improving the dollars in the system that existed.”
Worry about picket lines never materialized, but at the beginning of camp there were no organized workouts. Players from the Pirates and Cardinals trained informally.
The “Tom and Jerry Show” reported to camp with raises; $10,000 (to $35,000) for Seaver and $15,000 (to$25,000) for Koosman.
“These are the two guys we call our untouchables, and they are worth the money,” announced general manager Johnny Murphy.
Nevertheless, there was a rumor that New York offered Koosman to Pittsburgh for Freddie Patek, a diminutive decent-field, no-hit shortstop who later was a key member of Kansas City’s clubs in the 1970s. According to Bruce Markusen’s Tales from the Mets Dugout, Pittsburgh rejected the one-to-one offer. The question: what is more unbelievable; the Pirates turning down a 19-game-winning southpaw rookie flame-thrower, or the Mets offering such a prize for a guy who looked more like a jockey than a baseball player?
When the Mets were reporting to Spring Training at Al Lang Field in St. Petersburg, Florida on February 9 and 10, 1969, 15 inches of snow fell on New York City. Manhattan was plowed and cleared. Queens remained blocked. Embattled Mayor John Lindsay was blamed.
Ron Swoboda held out but reported to St. Petersburg and signed by March 1. Swoboda had tried to entertain the writers at the New York Baseball Writers banquet by allowing a straitjacket to be placed on him, which he would then wiggle out of, Harry Houdini-style. Swoboda never got out of the straightjacket and had to be extricated backstage.
Swoboda, known as “Rocky,” was brash, outspoken, and articulate. His unusual facial composition came from some Chinese ancestry. His honesty got him in trouble on more than a few occasions. He and Seaver clashed.
“Seaver had Hall of Fame written on him when he walked into camp and pitched his first game in ’67,” Swoboda said. “He was a finished product when he came there. I don’t ever recall the sense of him being a rookie. He came out of the box a big league pitcher, and there was this golden glow about him. This was clearly big talent, intelligent, capable, controlled, and awesome stuff.”
But they were not “tight.” Swoboda admitted he said some things he should not, that he would have been “smart had I hung around Seaver.” Seaver and Harrelson were “California guys” and Seaver came from “a different socio-economic level,” which apparently rankled the blue collar Swoboda. Plus Seaver was “a younger, more aware person” than he was.
Swoboda debuted with the 1965 Mets, as did Tug McGraw and Bud Harrelson. He found himself on the roster after Paul Blair, a major prospect, was left unprotected, snatched up by Baltimore. Casey Stengel first saw Swoboda when he was at the University of Maryland in 1964. He hit a ball over the center field fence at Miller Huggins Field in St. Petersburg, a feat never previously accomplished by a Met.
Swoboda was blue collar as a player with a blue collar background. Perhaps he was not a Baby Boomer statistically (having been born in 1944 in Baltimore), but he was one in reality. In the past, a guy like Swoboda might have been a boxer, a heavy on the docks, but in the new post-war sensibilities he found himself in college. He was bright and observant, yet head strong.
His dad – “my hero” - was a World War II waist gunner on a B-29 at Tinnian, a hot spot in the South Pacific Theatre. After the war the elder Swoboda went into the automobile business. He had done some boxing and passed on the toughness to Ron, who admitted that there were times it was necessary to “go out there to bust somebody’s head.”
Swoboda’s story is emblematic of why so many players come from the West, where the weather is good and the programs were excellent. In Maryland, he played a total of eight games his senior year at Towson High School. When he floundered at some curve balls he figured that was it; he did not have the stuff.
He went to the University of Maryland and was given some baseball money but mainly he had to work his way through. He met his future wife Cecilia, and in the summers played for a legendary Baltimore semi-pro outfit called the Leone Boys Club, sponsored by an Italian restaurant called Mama Leone’s. Featured years later in Sports Illustrated, it was run by a local man named Walter Youse and offered the kind of organized baseball that Tom Seaver was playing with the Alaska Goldpanners. Reggie Jackson was another of the many top players who emerged from the program, which was so good college coaches sent prospects from all over.
It was with the Leone’s club that Swoboda improved and was scouted, becoming a bonus prospect. The Mets offered him $35,000. Swoboda was savvy enough to realize he could shop around and get more, but this was around the time that Casey Stengel was inviting the “youth of America” to come play for the Mets. It was well known that players could get to the Major Leagues faster with this organization than any other. It was the reason Swoboda signed with New York, and played no small role in the club’s eventual success.
While still a minor leaguer, Swoboda hit a home run in an exhibition game in which the catcher was Gus Triandos, a big name in his hometown of Baltimore. Triandos had worked at a car dealership in the off-season and gotten to know Swoboda’s father, who had invited him to be a dinner guest at the Swoboda home.
“This was pretty heady, pretty awesome,” Swoboda said of the experience.
Swoboda impressed people and quickly moved up to triple-A Buffalo, where they played at War Memorial Stadium. It was “the most depressing place I have ever walked into . . . It looked like a prison . . . The only thing missing from the clubhouse was bars.” This was two decades before it was chosen for its decrepit appearance in The Natural, starring Robert Redford. It also became the sight of some of O.J. Simpson’s greatest exploits with the Bills.
In Richmond, Virgina Swoboda observed “the black guys and the dark-skinned Latinos” – Pumpsie Green, Choo Choo Coleman, Elio Chacon and others – get off at another motel. It opened Swoboda’s eyes. He had grown up in Baltimore, a “border city” just a half-hour from Washington, D.C. Baltimore was notorious for its Confederate sympathies during the Civil War. The motel incident reminded him that Baltimore was de facto segregated, but he had “never thought to ask why.” Occasionally white teams played black teams. On the sandlots there was mixing, with no trouble; but there were schools for whites, schools for blacks. A white section, a black section. It was not like Alabama, with “white only” drinking fountains. It was subtle, almost subversive. Now Swoboda had minorities who were teammates, friends, and it hit him hard that “this was 1964,” the year President Johnson got the Civil Rights Act going, yet here this was happening.
As a kid Swoboda had been saved from a beating by three white kids when some blacks intervened, for reasons he never figured out. He was taught “you have no right to look down on anybody. You respect everybody.” Before becoming the big, tough “Rocky” of big league fame, he had been a sensitive kid, picked on at school, and felt a kinship with the downtrodden.
He did not make a big deal of the segregated motel incident, but filed it way in his memory. If he would ever have the chance, he wanted to effectuate change. The “youth of America” Casey Stengel called for would include a number of these kinds of fellows; young, race-neutral whites, enlightened beyond the previous generation. The Mets of the 1960s, run by blue bloods - Yalies like George Weiss running the front office and Herbert Walker a minority owner - saw the future.
The colleges were developing better and better programs, and therefore more prospects. It was not just Southern Cal; California, Minnesota, Texas, Oklahoma, Ohio State, Michigan, Santa Clara, Fresno State and Arizona State made their respective marks in these years. Years later, Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane favored college players for a number of reasons, with great success. This was a trait of the early Mets, and it would pay dividends on and off the field. These guys were not as rough-hewn, and in changing times they were the “new breed.” Swoboda was the “new breed,”
Swoboda was with the Mets during Spring Training of 1965, when they featured two of the all-time busts, Danny Napoleon and Duke Carmel. Carmel had once been a big Yankee prospect who could not hit the broad side of a barn. Whitey Ford, Mickey Mantle and Jim Bouton started joking, “It looks like you’re just not a south Florida hitter, Duke,” until he went hitless in the north part of the state.
“You’re just not a Florida hitter, Duke.”
Finally, when the team went north and Carmel was still oh-fer, it was determined he was not much good “north of the Mason-Dixon Line,” either.
Swoboda absorbed Stengels’s teachings and made the club in 1965. He became a favorite with the writers; intelligent, quotable, a little controversial. He had an inquisitive way about him. He found interests, like the New Orleans jazz scene, studying the history of jazz and developing rapport with Southern blacks like Jones and Agee, using Louis Armstrong as a focal point.
Swoboda demonstrated power with 19 home runs and, in the mid-1960s, was the closest thing the Mets had to a star. This may have effected his relations with Seaver and Hodges. When Seaver came along he stole Swoboda’s thunder. Swoboda was a solid player, but Seaver “had Hall of Fame written on him.” It was natural for Swoboda to be a little jealous, because Tom had it all; the looks, the USC pedigree, golden boy from California, everything. Then Swoboda clashed with Hodges over the issue of platooning, figuring he had established his bona fides.
“My problem with Hodges was that I had just hit .281, and I thought I was a big (expletive deleted) deal, and he came in with his authority, and I thought I approached the game pretty seriously myself,” Swoboda was quoted saying in Peter Golenbock’s Amazin’: The Miraculous History of New York’s Most Beloved Baseball Team.
Swoboda would “butt in” when Hodges was getting on another player, for no apparent reason other than to be a contrarian. He had a problem with authority, questioning everything. But Swoboda was sharp enough to appreciate Hodges’s baseball acumen, and in later years admitted his impetuosity got the better of him. He felt one of his biggest regrets was not establishing good relations with Hodges, which hit home especially hard when Hodges died after another heart attack in 1972.
During a 23-inning game with Houston in 1968, Hodges took a bunt away from the Astros when he had his first and third basemen come all the way to the dirt edge of the home plate circle. It forced the batter, a pitcher who could bunt but not hit, to try and swing away. He struck out.
“That’s pretty sharp,” observed Swoboda.
Swoboda resented “Tom Terrific” Seaver while the ace pitcher stayed above it, but the outfielder’s relationship with catcher Jerry Grote was just plain ornery.
“He was a red-ass Texan who loved to (expletive deleted) with people but who didn’t like anybody to (expletive deleted) with him,” said Swoboda. “It was a one-way street, it seemed like, but we’ve all grown up and gotten a little older. Grote is Grote, and we would not have been as good without him behind home plate.”
The pitchers swore by their young catcher, who had great duels with Cardinals speedster Lou Brock in an era in which the stolen base was much more prevalent than it is today.
Just as the Yankees and Brooklyn Dodgers featured star players from California who gave their teams a certain personality, so too did the Mets. Seaver was the star from USC, and his best friend was the skinny guy from Hayward, Buddy Harrelson. But neither of these guys had “California personalities,” at least not in the goofy, “hey, dude” beach boy stereotype; the Jeff Spicoli character from Fast Times at Ridgemont High played by Sean Penn.
Seaver was all business, like a Wall Street executive. He was as buttoned-down as Richard Nixon, another Californian who did not fit the profile. Harrelson was less corporate, but he was quiet and serious. But another stereotype had long existed: the flaky southpaw. The original was literally nicknamed “El Goofy.” Vernon “Lefty” Gomez was one of the all-time World Series greats during his Hall of Fame career with the Yankees, but he was always playing practical jokes, saying something off the wall, and making people laugh . . . at him or with him.
Another “Lefty,” O’Doul, was not a pitcher but a free spirit from San Francisco. Just breaking into the big leagues in 1969 was the ultimate flaky left-hander, Bill “Spaceman” Lee of the Boston Red Sox. At USC, Lee was a freshman when the junior Seaver was a star. He viewed himself as a proletariat of the Russian peasantry, Seaver as the Czar’s nephew or some such royalty (even though Lee’s dad was a middle class executive and his uncle the former dean of the USC business school).
Two other later USC left-handers were saddled with the flaky label, although neither lived it like Lee. Randy “the Big Unit” Johnson talked to himself and was a cheerleader for his infielders at USC, but by the end of his big league career all the color was drained from his personality by money. Barry Zito was half Zen master, half surfer dude, but by the time he was paid over $120 million as a free agent by San Francisco his talent and personality were both flat.
Then there was Frank “Tug” McGraw. He was beating Sandy Koufax when Seaver was fighting to make the starting rotation at Southern Cal; was the next big thing before Ryan or Koosman; but in the spring of 1969 he had fallen behind all those guys. Even rookie Gary Gentry was ahead of him. McGraw had been a starter but not gotten it done, so now he was in the bullpen. In 1969, the best pitchers were starters. The cast-offs were relievers. Oakland’s Rollie Fingers was a tremendous prospect as a starter. It was years before young stars were brought up as closers.
McGraw was from Vallejo, just across the Carquinez Straits from Rodeo, where Lefty Gomez had been born. Vallejo is 25 miles north of San Francisco and just a short drive east of Marin County, a place that in the swingin’ ‘60s was the swinginest. Marin was, at least according to mythology, the home of hot tubs, peacock feathers, key parties, swingers, cults, alternative sex styles, classic porn, drugs, infidelity and the nouveau riche. Both San Francisco and Marin, who looked across the northernmost part of the bay at Vallejo, were close geographically yet light years away psychologically, financially, socially and aesthetically.
It was as if the “planners” of the Bay Area, one of the most beautiful natural locations, as well as architecturally with its bridges, the skyline and unique, diverse communities, found the most desultory place and set “put Vallejo there.” The hills were bare, the few trees lacked the splendor of the rest of the area, the bay was marshy there, and the wind blew cold.
After World War II the blacks, who came to work at the nearby (and unglamorous) Mare Island Naval Shipyard, settled in along with the Filipinos. The whites were blue collar NASCAR types, Johnny Cash aficionados. It might have been a notch below blue collar, if that. It was a Jack London kind of waterfront town, something out of a Marlon Brando movie.
Not quite the East Bay (Oakland, Berkeley), not quite the wine country (Napa, Sonoma), definitely not Marin, and God forbid it be associated with San Francisco, Vallejo’s hardscrabble fields produced great athletes. Vic Bottari was an All-American on the University of California’s last National Championship team (1937). Dick Bass starred for the Los Angeles Rams. Ronald Reagan’s influential advisor, Lyn Nofziger, was an amateur pugilist from Vallejo before going into Sacramento and Washington politics.
The Buckner brothers came out of Vallejo. Bill was a star with the Dodgers, star-crossed in Boston. His sibling was a career minor leaguer. McGraw also had a brother, Hank, who was good but not as good as Tug. McGraw and Buckner were the odd mixture of laid-back West Coast types, yet kind of from the wrong side of the tracks. They both liked to party and loved the ladies, had the looks, but were just a little lawless. McGraw enjoyed a good bar fight. He was just crazy enough to get after guys bigger than he was.
Every guy who ever played minor league baseball played with Tug McGraw. Every guy who ever served in the Army served with Tug McGraw. He was a type. You remembered this type. He got the chicks, was usually adept at pool, drank a lotta beer and was crazy. He probably road a chopper. You did not mess with him but he was cool. Charlie Sheen played this character in Major League. He was not serious enough to succeed and you later found out he returned home and now tended bar, worked construction, or maybe even moved to Vegas to become male gigolo. Only this Tug McGraw, against all odds it sometimes seemed, was destined to make it.
“He was California all the way, man, full of these different expressions about things,” said Swoboda. “He had about four or five different words for t-----s, you know, very much a California personality.” Swoboda simply thought the guy had spent too much time in the sun, a typical put-down of the California player over the decades. McGraw simply had fun. Seaver loved baseball but it was a job, a career.
“I’m going to work now,” he would tell his wife Nancy as he left the Greenwich, Connecticut spread he eventually bought.
McGraw’s nickname came from his mother, who called him her “little Tugger” when she was breast-feeding him. His old man was a fireman, apropos in that the son sought adventure and excitement like a fireman, becoming the baseball version of one. After the dad hurt himself he took a nightshift job with the water department so he could watch his kids play ball.
McGraw went to St. Patrick’s High School, where he drove the Catholic nuns crazy. He was 4-11 as a freshman, weighing in at 98 pounds, but if somebody tried to take him on he was all fists. But he was mainly a showboat who sought attention, showing off for the girls, cracking wiseacre jokes and being a general brat. Because the pitcher’s mound was the center of attention, that was where Tug wanted to be. The coach, Father Freehan (no apparent relation to the Tigers’ catcher) put him in center field. It was not quite the same dynamic as the famed Brother Mathias-George Ruth relationship at St. Mary’s Industrial School, but it was what it was in Northern California of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Father Freehan was virtually blind and did not notice when Tug and teammate Bobby Hay, a pitcher who wanted to play the outfield, switched jerseys. Tug became a regular starter as a junior while the scouts turned their attention on his talented older brother Hank, a catcher.
In 1961, Hank signed with the expansion Mets for $15,000 and paid off the old man’s debts. Tug finished up at St. Pat’s and moved on to Vallejo Junior College. He had no business playing football at his size but this guy was Evel Knievel in cleats; until suffering a cracked vertebra and a concussion. He no doubt had never heard of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who famously said, “That with which does not kill me makes me stronger,” but the crazy Tug lived by that creed. Recovered from the football injury he tried to do a flip onto a hayloft, missed and was out the first five weeks of the baseball season. He was the anti-Seaver, the controlled guy who had a careful plan and stuck to it at another J.C. about 200 miles south of where McGraw was at that time.
Finally, McGraw returned to the mound, found his body had matured, and with it his fastball. The St. Louis Cardinals wanted to see him play against fast competition, so they asked him to go to a collegiate summer team in Canada, not unlike the one Seaver played on in Alaska. His coach was Ray Young, who ran Stanford’s program. McGraw received $300 for some non-existent job and was made fun of by sophisticated college teammates when he asked what “prime rib” was. Strong Canadian beer and Canuck farm girls occupied his attention more than pitching, which was not enough to impress St. Louis into signing him at the end of the summer.
As a sophomore at Vallejo J.C. he led the team to the state championships but was knocked around in the finals. St. Louis lost interest. Tug McGraw was not exactly four-year college material so it was time to “fish or cut smelt.” He called up Mets’ scout Roy Partee, who signed Hank, and told him he wanted to be part of the team’s “youth of America” movement. After a try-out he was given $7,000. Over the next year, something happened not unlike what was going in with young Seaver. Planning or even weight lifting cannot match God’s development program. No longer 4-11, 98 pounds, McGraw filled out, put some hop on his heat, and impressed the right people in the New York organization. With any other team he would have languished in the bushes for years, but under Casey Stengel’s plan opportunity came a-knockin’. By 1965 he was pitching at Shea Stadium. For Casey Stengel.
“He was talking and jabbering away, to nobody or anybody or everybody, and even to me, and it was a blast just meeting him,” McGraw said of his first impression of the “Ol’ Perfessor.”
The win over Koufax got him attention, but over three years he was spotty. It was obvious he was not ready for Major League competition and could easily have lost confidence in himself. In 1966 he pitched poorly at Jacksonville. Seaver, Koosman and Ryan were all in the organization, stealing his thunder. But in instructional league he developed the out pitch that saved his career. Ralph Terry, a one-time 20-game winner for the Yankees, taught him how to throw a screwball. Even though Carl Hubbell and Christy Mathewson had been Hall of Famers using the “fadeaway,” as it was called in Matty’s time, Mets coach Sheriff Robinson told him to concentrate on his curve and control.
In 1967 he had a poor spring. Desperate, like Gaylord Perry when he went to the “spitter” against the Mets in the famed 23-inning game of 1964, McGraw made a last-ditch effort to master the scroogie, resulting in a 10-9 record with a sterling 1.99 earned run average. In a call-up to New York, however, McGraw and Wes Westrum did not react well to each other and he did not get the chance to shine.
Westrum was an old school baseball man, cut out of the Leo Durocher cloth; a Giant on the 1951 team who could not relate to the young player, circa late 1960s. McGraw was a hayseed, a Hank Williams song, but nevertheless he was definitely of the “new breed.”
Thinking he could be released and out of baseball at any time, McGraw looked for other career opportunities. He apprenticed at a barber shop in the Bowery, cutting the hair of bums and homeless. Despite the smell, he got something out of it. He certainly was no aristocrat. Seaver, for all his hoary phraseology about not judging another man who seemed to be below him in societal rank, never would have cut dirty hair. Seaver’s friends were people he perceived as working hard to get where they were, like Mike Garrett at USC. But despite the obvious differences, Seaver found something to admire in McGraw; the little guy who learned an “out pitch,” a screwball, and used it to get back to the big leagues.
But in 1968 McGraw got into it with longtime Mets’ coach and organization man Sheriff Robinson. Older brother Hank did the same thing, ending his career. Entering 1969, Tug was an unknown quantity. The team was still not convinced his screwball was a big league out pitch. He had more arm problems, but would stick.
Some years ago, I was an assistant baseball coach at the University of California. We went to Wichita, Kansas for the NCAA Regionals and played Baylor in the first game. During batting practice, fellow assistant Bob Ralston and I approached Baylor coach Mickey Sullivan, an old-timer, and introduced ourselves. In the course of that conversation, Coach Sullivan said he had scouted Nolan Ryan as a Texas prep. We expressed that Nolan must have been a Lone Star state legend like Ken Hall, the famed “Sugarland Express” who garnered a huge retrospective in Sports Illustrated anointing him, for all practical purposes, the title of “greatest high school football player of all time.” Not so, said Coach Sullivan.
“He threw about 86 miles an hour,” he said to our surprise.
The Mets were a team of disparate characters and personalities: the “golden boy” (Seaver); the veritable “Rocky Balboa” (Swoboda); the hybrid surfer/gun rack personality of McGraw; the quiet gentleman (Nolan Ryan); among others.
Ryan hailed from a small town called Alvin, Texas. If he threw only 86 miles an hour there, after signing with the Mets, whatever magic God touched Tom Seaver with in Fresno, he had plenty of stardust for this kid in the minors. They called him “the phantom” because he hardly pitched due to military service or small injuries, but when he did take the hill he could throw a baseball threw a car wash without getting it wet.
“He just blew everybody away,” said Rich Wolfe, who roomed with Ryan’s minor league teammate Shaun Fitzmaurice at Notre Dame. Wolfe followed Ryan closely in September of 1966, when his friend Fitzmaurice and Ryan were called up to the big club together. They went to games at Shea Stadium. Ryan started against the Braves. Superstar third baseman Eddie Mathews stepped into the box and saw the first pitch whiz past him. He looked at catcher Jerry Grote, uttering a swear word in reaction to it.
Ryan had a big, high kick, long stride and straight-over-the-top delivery. Eventually, he modified it, apparently influenced by Seaver. He developed a hesitation/tuck of his knee to his chest, dropped to get full use of his legs, and went to more of a three-quarter-arm deliver. His control eventually improved. But with the Mets he was wiry and wild as a March hare.
Even though he had a good attitude, Ryan did not have great work habits. Apparently, nobody had really emphasized physical conditioning to him. He was lazy less out of a lack of desire and more because he did not seem to know better. Some thought he was “too nice.” It was a mean era. Books such as Ball Four, North Dallas Forty and Semi-Tough portrayed rough ‘n’ tumble athletes who liked to drink, swear, chase women and disdain authority. Christian athletes like Roger Staubach were often called names, their manhood questioned . . . until he engineered a succession of winning two-minute drives. But in 1966 Time magazine asked if God was “dead?” Movies replaced Him with Satan’s offspring, with all manner of implication. Ryan was quiet, reserved, religious, and on a team of young studs let loose amongst the fleshpots of Manhattan, happily married to his lovely childhood sweetheart with the Biblical name of Ruth. In this respect he had more in common with the family man Seaver than the wildman McGraw.
Swoboda first saw him pitch a bullpen session in an empty Astrodome. He said the sound of Ryan’s fastball smacking into the catcher’s glove sounded like “shooting skeet.” Apparently the Astrodome had pigeons and a maintenance man would clear them out with a shotgun. It said sounded like that.
Catcher John Stephenson once took a Ryan fastball directly on the chest protector, which was designed to withstand high velocity baseballs. He was out three weeks. Ryan was a highball pitcher, though, and the National League was still considered a low-ball strike zone.
Ruth Ryan could not handle New York. Nolan was equally intimidated. They never socialized, which for the most part meant drinking; not their gig. He had the respect of teammates because he was real. His ways were his, and Ruth’s. They did not look down on others who liked to get out and about. The Seavers, while not party animals, were more social; visiting museums, the opera, and other highlights of the Big Apple. The Ryan’s were not up to that.
As the Mets prepared for the 1969 season, many felt it was a “make or break” year for Ryan. His incredible fast ball was already being compared to the likes of Walter Johnson, Bob Feller and Sandy Koufax. Not even Seaver and Koosman, who threw heat, were in his league. If this guy could reach his potential . . .
Jerry Koosman was another country boy who had escaped the kind of attention that Dick Selma and Tom Seaver got in scout-heavy Fresno, or Nolan Ryan in talent-laden Texas. The weather was so cold in Minnesota that by the time kids really got out on the field, school was almost out. Koosman’s high school did not even have a baseball team. If a community did not have a big time American Legion program, local players could be overlooked. It was hockey country.
Koosman came out of Appleton, where he was born in 1942 to a farming family. When not tending to livestock, he played some semi-pro baseball before going to college to study engineering prior to getting drafted in 1962. Stationed in non-descript places that did not feature baseball teams, he came home on leave. What happened next was perfect timing for Koosman and eventually the Mets.
He went for his annual dental exam. Koosman’s dentist was Bob Miller, who just so happened to be the Commanding Major General of the Minnesota National Guard (he was neither of the Bob Miller’s who pitched for Casey Stengel, one of who whom answered to Nelson). Koosman asked him if he could help transfer him to a unit that had a baseball team. In order to effect the transfer, Koosman needed to test for Officer’s Candidate School because the base Miller had the power to transfer him to was part of the Fifth Army out of Texas. It was a helicopter unit with the best baseball team in the Southwest. Koosman would need to be a warrant officer in order to train to be a helicopter pilot. As an engineering student he had the aptitude.
At some point, Koosman’s pitching skills became apparent and he claims his orders were changed from helicopter training to “play baseball down there,” which he did for 17 months. He later told Peter Golenbock that Bob Miller saved him from flying choppers. Those guys all went to Vietnam with a poor rate of survival, since they had to hover in sight of the Viet Cong shooting at them while boarding wounded and evacuees.
The serendipity did not end there. His catcher on the Army team was the son of a Shea Stadium usher. Through that connection scout Red Murff was sent to see him pitch. With the draft and a war brewing, so many young men were in the Army that it was worthwhile to scout the military teams looking for nuggets . . . like Koosman
He signed on August 28, 1964 in anticipation of an October discharge. Koosman went to college that fall and reported to Homestead, Florida in 1965, but impressed nobody. Pitching in the Army was not the kind of pedigree that made a guy stand out. But Frank Lary, the famed “Yankee killer” of the Detroit Tigers who always seemed to have the Bronx Bombers’ number, was the Mets’ minor league pitching instructor. He taught Koosman a slider. Like McGraw’s screwball it would make him a Major Leaguer.
At Auburn of the New York-Penn League, he had a startling 1.38 ERA. Suddenly he was a prospect instead of a suspect. His teammate was Steve Chilcott, a catcher who was the number one pick in the entire 1966 draft. According to Reggie Jackson, a collegiate superstar at Arizona State, the Mets chose the white Chilcott because Reggie “dated a white girl,” which Reggie found amusing since she was actually Mexican, and he was half-Spanish himself. Chilcott threw his arm out at Auburn and never made it. Jackson as a lifelong Met conjures numerous enticing scenarios. Another hot prospect on that club who never panned out was 6-5 pitcher Les Rohr.
After a brief big league debut in 1967, Koosman was sent back to Jacksonville for more seasoning in 1967. He pitched well and earned a return to New York during the September roster expansion. Wes Westrum liked Koosman but was fired shortly after his arrival. Gil Hodges took over in 1968.
“Looking back, he was feeling the club out and learning the organization,” said Koosman. Koosman’s first start in 1968 at San Francisco was post-poned because of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Instead, he debuted with a sterling 4-0 shutout of Los Angeles at Dodger Stadium. The series in L.A. symbolized a subtle change; the Dodgers were no longer dominant, and in 1968 were little better than New York.
In Houston, Hodges used the entire staff in a 24-inning loss to the Astros, 1-0 when a ground ball to Al Weis took a bad hop. The next game at Shea Stadium, Koosman was for all practical purposes the only available pitcher. When he loaded the bases against San Francisco in the first inning it looked like a long afternoon. Koosman simply overpowered Willie Mays, Jim Ray Hart and Jack Hiatt, all dangerous hitters. Ron Swoboda’s mouth just dropped seeing it. A star was born.
Koosman ran his scoreless innings streak to 21 against Houston in a 3-1 win. Largely because of his tremendous mound work, the press started to think unthinkable things early in 1968, although the club’s offense was so dismal that it could not be overcome.
Koosman befriended Ryan, “a farm boy from Texas and I’m a farm boy from Minnesota, and neither one of us was comfortable in New York,” said Koosman. “It was way out of our realm of upbringing. Neither one of us was used to the lifestyle. Going from the farm to New York City, I don’t know of any other extreme a person could have as a young person. Look at the change in the pace of life. You go from the farm to the tension and the crowd, something neither one of us was used to.”
Seaver was “a friend.” Younger than Koosman, Seaver’s worldliness always made him seem older. “He was a college graduate <actually Seaver went to USC every off-season for years and did not get his degree until well into the 1970s>, well-spoken, well-read, a man who handled himself real well with the press.”
Koosman’s description of Jerry Grote was the same as Ron Swoboda’s: “red ass,” but “he’d fight tooth and nail ‘til death to win a ball game.” Grote controlled the pitching staff like a Marine drill instructor. The staff seemed more concerned with earning his respect than anything else. If Grote respected you, everything else was in order anyway.
The Mets played above their heads until the 1968 All-Star break. Seaver, Koosman and Grote were all selected for the game in Houston and they returned riding high. But the Mets slumped in the second half of the season.
Koosman pitched the day Hodges had his late-season heart attack, almost blaming himself for getting knocked out in the sixth inning, as if that caused the seizure. Koosman, who did not play in high school or college, had experienced real success for the first time under Hodges and was very concerned that “Number 14,” as they called him, would be back in 1969.
Koosman’s 19-12 record with a 2.08 earned run average was even more spectacular than Seaver’s support-deprived 16-12 with a 2.20 ERA. However, he did not repeat as a Rookie of the Year winner, as Seaver had been in 1967. Cincinnati’s Johnny Bench earned the award, apparently when a writer in Chicago named Enright split the decision, giving it to Bench by half a vote.
Gary Gentry brought a 150-pound St. Bernard with him to Spring Training.
“Mrs. Payson doesn’t have enough dough to feed that thing,” Johnny Murphy said in kidding.
Gentry was a rookie trying to make the staff. Spring camp was his chance to prove himself. When the players struck at the beginning, it was a real shock to the system, and to the fans, who had never fathomed such a crazy notion. Gentry needed the whole spring to make his impression. But while other young pitchers sweated out the strike, costing a couple weeks of preparation, he never seemed to worry.
Gentry was tall, thin and threw heat. He was a high school phenom but his father, a schoolteacher, wanted him to go to college before signing a professional contract. After turning down suitors from Baltimore, Houston and San Francisco, Gentry went to Phoenix Junior College, and from there a scholarship to baseball powerhouse Arizona State. He played for coach Bobby Winkles right after the Sun Devils won the 1965 College World Series behind Sal Bando and Rick Monday. Gentry was right behind Reggie Jackson, who was a year behind Bando and Monday. In 1969, ASU would win their second National Championship.
Gentry was 17-1 with two victories in the College World Series. His gaudy record, however, was an indication of something amiss in the Arizona State program. Over the years, a number of Sun Devil hurlers have compiled big records like Gentry’s: 17-0, 19-1 and the like. Winkles and later coach Jim Brock tended to overpitch their aces. Many promising Sun Devils experienced arm troubles and did not enjoy as much big league success as some of USC’s pitchers over the years; Seaver, Randy Johnson, Barry Zito, to name a few. Rod Dedeaux and later coach Mike Gillespie did not overpitch Trojan aces as much as Arizona State tended to. Gentry, who did not use his legs as Seaver and Koosman did, would experience arm problems later, but in 1969 he was young, strong, and seemingly carefree.
Gentry had been given a nice bonus by the Mets in 1967, progressed nicely through the minor leagues, and at 22 was seen as the 1969 version of Seaver and Koosman. The press took to calling him “the new Tom Seaver.” It was a big expectation, and he had competition, namely from Ryan, but Gentry was loosey-goosey about it.
Jim McAndrew was a bundle of nerves, but not Gentry. A code of machismo, established by Seaver, ruled the Mets’ pitching ethos. Seaver was no gentleman on the hill. In a league without designated hitters, he was willing to go after batters, incurring the wrath of such opposing “head hunters” as Don Drysdale and Bob Gibson. In one legendary encounter, Gibson and Seaver retaliated against each other with wicked fastballs that, if landed in the wrong place, could kill a man. Seaver threw a 99-mile per hour fast ball that seemingly split the difference between Gibson’s skull and his batting helmet.
“I know you got better control than that, Tommie,” Gibson said to the glaring, unsmiling Seaver. Respect had been earned.
McAndrew was called “Moms” because he lacked the fire of Seaver, Koosman and now Gentry. Ryan was still working on this part of his make-up. He would not achieve his potential until embracing it.
Being tough was “an important thing,” Swoboda said. Pitchers often are at either one end of the spectrum or the other. If they are good, they are the most respected players on the team. Good pitching stops good hitting, it is 90 percent of the game, and if a team has it they are given the opportunity to win. On the other hand, bad pitching can ruin the best efforts of an otherwise-good team. The blame game is an easy one to play in a clubhouse. A pitcher needs to display a “gunslinger” mentality, like a quarterback in the huddle during a two-minute drive. Gentry was a cowboy and it came naturally to him.
“His stuff was every bit as good as Seaver’s,” stated Swoboda. This was quite a statement. “He had just as live an arm.”
Swoboda, in order to keep his reflexes sharp, would go to the bullpen and spell the bullpen catcher. When he caught Gentry’s fastball, it simply exploded with a wide variance of movement. Plus, “Gary was this Western guy who just wasn’t afraid of anything,” said Swoboda. “He was a cowboy, a skinny kid with a tremendous arm. He was great.”
On the mound, Gentry challenged hitters inside, or up and out over the plate, daring them with his great movement and tremendous velocity. He came straight over-the-top, his ball exploding on home plate zone, resulting in broken bats, “blue hammers” (jarring pain to the hand and fingers when the ball makes contact with the low end of the stick) and checked-swing strikes.
Fans often do not understand the true nature of the big league hurler, the kind of stuff a talented young pitching ace possesses. Television does not accurately depict it. Most seats in the ballpark do not reveal it. Only those right behind home plate, or behind the dugout near home plate, see the real thing. It can be awe-inspiring, leaving the fan in admiration of anybody who has the courage to stand in against it without fear, much less hit it. Of all athletic endeavors – dunking forwards, majestic passing quarterbacks – the hard-throwing pitcher may be the most magnificent figure in sports.
The Mets had four of the best: Seaver, Koosman, Gentry and Ryan. Now, to harness all that talent.
While few things are given less notice than big league exhibition games, the Mets did beat the defending World Champion Detroit Tigers, 12-0 and the defending National League pennant winning-Cardinals, 16-6. The thing most people watched that spring, however, was Hodges. He appeared to have made a complete recovery from his September heart attack, writing an open letter to sportswriter Red Foley stating “I’ve never felt better.”
“Most of the guys had a philosophy similar to mine,” Tom Seaver wrote of the mindset going into 1969, in The Perfect Game. “Maybe they didn’t articulate it, but deep down they shared my attitude. I wanted to be the best ball player, the best pitcher Tom Seaver could possibly be. Jerry Grote wanted to be the best catcher Jerry Grote could be, and Cleon Jones wanted to be the best outfielder Cleon Jones could be, and Bud Harrelson wanted to be the best shortstop Bud Harrelson could be.
“If each of us achieved his goals – a reachable, realistic goal – individually, then we could all reach our team goal, no matter how unrealistic, no matter how impossible it seems to outsiders . . .”
That spring, Seaver, Grote, Harrelson and Ryan bonded on regular fishing trips under Bayway Bridge in St. Petersburg, a retirement community and longtime home of Spring Training teams, which is adjacent to Tampa Bay. Occasionally they were joined by Hodges, who had been advised by doctors to lose weight and get more exercise, which he endeavored to do by trying to stop smoking and making the trek down to Bayway Bridge with a pole and some shrimp bait.
Sipping coffee or beer, the young Mets philosophized and predicted. There was bravado, perhaps unrealistic expectations of their own chances and some put-downs of the competition. Pittsburgh, a perennial contender, had problems. Philadelphia was not strong. The Expos were the “old Mets,” as far as they were concerned. Durocher’s Cubs were seen as the main competition . . . for second place. St. Louis was the prohibitive favorite.
“You know, we could win our division if we play up to our potential,” Seaver dared to say.
It was the first time such a thought was uttered. That spring, Seaver continued to analyze the Cardinals, comparing players and pitchers; noting the Cardinals’ loss of Roger Maris to retirement and Orlando Cepeda to the Braves. He logically assumed that there was no way Bob Gibson could be as good as he had been in 1968. Gibby was the reason the mound had been lowered.
Agee had to avoid major batting slumps, such as the brutal 30 at-bats without a hit he endured early in 1968, sending him on a downward spiral. “This is a guy who .270 as a rookie,” Seaver assessed. “He showed he can hit 20 home runs and better.”
Jones was coming off a .297 campaign but Seaver noted that he batted .360 in the second half. Jones would need to be the anchor for Agee, his pal from Mobile. The other guys needed to be on; draw walks, bunt, get hit by pitches, steal bases, and generally make things happen.
Hodges began to talk about 85 wins. Seaver called himself “The Supreme Optimist with that touch of reality,” almost an Age of Aquarius kind of attitude. “ The Supreme Optimist thinks we’ll finish second in the Eastern Division of the league,” Seaver told Joe Durso of the New York Times, not wanting to overdo Hodges. “Maybe third, but more likely second. The only team we can’t catch is St. Louis. The only team we have to fight off is Chicago. But we can beat Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and Montreal.”
This no doubt resulted in a few guffaws in Pittsburgh and Philly. In the final game of Spring Training, the Mets drove Cardinal pitcher Ray Washburn – a longtime nemesis – off the mound early to win a game the Cardinals’ probably could care less about. It was treated enthusiastically by New York. Seaver gave up two hits in seven innings, looking like a world-beater.
Hodges had a coaching staff made up of veteran baseball men.
Rube Walker “was one of the best pitching coaches,” Art Shamsky wrote in The Magnificent Seasons. “He was a player’s friend, too.”
Walker had been Roy Campanella’s back-up in Brooklyn, unfortunately behind the plate when Bobby Thomson hit the “shot heard ‘round the world.”
Eddie Yost had been known for scratching out bases on balls with the Washington Senators. Yost was a collegian from New York University; a thinking man’s baseball player. Yogi Berra was “dumb like a fox,” according to Shamsky, who realized he had arrived because “Yogi now knew my name.”
The best news as Spring Training broke was Hodges’s health. He had rested four weeks after his heart attack before resuming his duties in the warmth of Florida, where the Mets had an Instructional League squad. He gave up smoking and dropped from 225 to 201 pounds.
Computers had been around at least since the 1930s, essentially still another American invention courtesy of IBM. By the 1960s, they were popularized in science fiction magazines, in movies like Dr. Strangelove, and by NASA. A computer was used to analyze data and predict the outcome of the 1969 baseball season. Among its findings was one surprise. The Mets were rated second best in the National League defensively; Seaver and Koosman virtually at the top on the mound; and according to the finding, if New York scored 100 additional runs they would win 100 games and the East Division. The “wild card” was their 36 one-run losses of 1968; a fact already analyzed by Gil Hodges.
As the 1969 season was about to get underway, two distressing reminders of the year that was 1968 reared their ugly heads. In a Los Angeles courtroom, Sirhan Sirhan admitted killing Robert Kennedy. James Earl Ray plead guilty to assassinating Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Then he retracted his plea, opening up myriad conspiracy theories.
But optimism and “high hopes” were the order of the day with the New York Mets.
“We knew that our best days were in front of us,” said Seaver.
In the “big inning”
In the big inning, Gil created the 1969 New York Mets, and it was not so good. At first.
- The Last Miracle, 7:1
Out of the darkness that was the New York Mets of 1962-68, the Spirit of Gil moved upon the face of Shea Stadium.
And Gil said, let there be Tom Seaver, and it came to pass that George Thomas Seaver of the Fresno Seavers, the University of Southern California, and Bayside, Queens stepped forth in the manner of a Knights Templar to do battle with the heathens from Quebec, Canada, the Montreal Expos, on the cold, blustery afternoon of April 8, 1969 at Shea Stadium.
In looking back from the perspective of history, the “big inning” of the 1969 season was like so much of the Holy Bible, a terrible blow to the “good guys,” in this case the Mets. Retribution, the Promised Land, would come later. It was the last possible result that, given how the season would play out, might have been expected. It was Goliath running roughshod over the Israelites; the Federals turning tail at Bull Run; the Americans taking a licking “their first time at bat against the Germans,” to quote General Omar Bradley after the debacle at Kasserine Pass.
The high hopes of Spring Training were in full peak when the Mets broke north. Hodges was recovered from his heart attack. New York played excellent ball in Florida, knocked off the Cardinals, and had Seaver primed. Even the most pessimistic Mets fan, convinced that they were the same old losers, only no longer lovable, felt that finally someone had been invented for them to beat. Despite optimistic fishing trips under the Bayshore Bridge in St. Pete, neither their 1968 record nor 1969 spring convinced everybody that New York could finish ahead of Chicago, Pittsburgh, or Philadelphia. St. Louis was an impossible goal. But Montreal (as well as West Division expansion club San Diego), represented something so mediocre even the Mets lorded over them.
Or so it seemed. At first.
The 1969 Expos were an oddity. Minor league baseball had been played in Canada for years. Jackie Robinson broke the “color barrier” with the Montreal Royals in 1946. The Expos would play at Jarry Park until an all-purpose facility for the 1976 Olympics could be erected. The strange ensemble of design Montreal wore started the trend of colorful uniforms in the 1970s. The Expos went for veterans over youth. Gene Mauch, fired in Philadelphia, put his stamp on them. They featured an over-the-hill Dodger, Ron Fairly, obtained for two over-the-hill Dodgers, Maury Wills and Manny Mota. Old-timer Mudcat Grant was an Expo, along with young pitchers Steve Renko, Larry Jaster, Bill Stoneman, Jerry Robertson and Mike Wegener.
A career minor league third baseman, Coco Laboy had the perfect name for Montreal. Then there was ex-Astro Rusty Staub. They called him Le Grand Orange because of his red hair. A gourmet chef, Rusty was immediately a hit with sophisticated French Canadians. John Boccabella was a veteran catcher. Gary Sutherland had, like Seaver, come out of USC.
It was an odd mix of old and young, perhaps enough name guys to give somebody a run for their money. Expansion had been a mixed bag in 1961-62. The Senators and Mets were awful. The Astros were not half-bad, the Angels surprisingly good. But Seaver was expected to mow this Montreal line-up down on Opening Day. 44,541 came out for the festive occasion. It was the first international game in Major League history. The Mets invited Montreal Mayor Jean Drapeau to throw out the first ball.
Around baseball, the openers were surprising. The expansion Kansas City Royals, Seattle Pilots (of Ball Four fame) and San Diego Padres all won. One team beating another in any given big league baseball game never posed true upset ramifications; certainly not like the Jets over the Colts, or USC over Notre Dame a few years earlier. Baseball has a fluid, day-by-day flow that does not manifest itself in a single game but over 162 of them. Even the Mets had been blind squirrels who occasionally found some acorns: a double-header sweep of Hank Aaron’s Braves in 1962; beating St. Louis twice in a row the last weekend of 1964; Tug McGraw besting Sandy Koufax in 1965.
So it was not a given that Seaver would defeat the Expos. Stranger things had happened. But the nature of that game was so out of character with everything that could have been expected – New York’s 1968 hitting woes, Seaver’s overpowering stuff, supposed Met defensive prowess – as to make people just scratch their heads over the nature of this crazy game.
The contrast from the Florida sun to wintery conditions had its effect on Seaver, whose high 90s heat, exploding and moving, came in flat at around 88 MPH, perfect batting practice fodder for Montreal. The Expos went after the two-time All-Star like they were the 1961 Yankees. Hodges stuck with his ace, thinking each inning that the guy would settle down.
It was not all Tom’s fault. When he needed a break to get out of a jam he did not get it. Liners were misjudged in the windy sky, grounders booted by clunky gloves. “I think I’ve seen all this before,” said veteran sportswriter Maury Allen. “Another bad ball club.”
Then there were the Mets’ bats, last in the league the previous year (.228), only today they made Shea look like a pinball arcade. It remains one of the ugliest games in New York Mets history, the antithesis of tight, taught baseball rhapsodized over by the likes of Roger Angell.
There is an expression: “all’s well that ends well.” Or “a win’s a win.” In baseball, in all sports, coaches and managers take it any way they can get it. Despite the ugliness, they could have been winners anyway. Seaver was ordinary, giving up two runs in the first inning. New York came back. Seaver struggled, throwing 105 pitches, told Hodges he was done (as if it was not obvious) and departed with a 6-4 lead. He still could have gotten credit for the lackluster victory.
Al Jackson and Ron Taylor were roughed up. Rusty Staub went deep and Montreal forged an 11-6 lead. The Mets still could have pulled it out, finally giving their fans an Opening Day win, and gotten 1969 off to a decent, even exciting start. Alas, they fell just short after Duffy Dyer’s three-run pinch-homer in the ninth, losing 11-10.
“My God, wasn’t that awful?” Seaver said to the writers afterward. They agreed and the next day’s columns were negative, expressing little confidence that the high hopes of St. Pete would translate into a winning spring start, not to mention summer or fall. The most frustrating thing was to finally get real run support and waste it.
“You know Seaver is a better pitcher than that,” Gil Hodges told the press. “The next time we get 10 runs when he’s pitching, I think we’ll win.”
The oddities of baseball are also its beauty parts. Despite the bad day, it was just one game. There were 161 to go, always tomorrow. Only 13,827 showed up the next night, and form again did not play out. New York scored nine runs. The 19 they scored in the first two games equaled two weeks’ worth of 1968 production. The pitchers gave up 16. Between expansion and the lowered mound, this did not shape up to be another “Year of the Pitcher.” Jim McAndrew was given the start but he was ineffective, blowing a 4-0 lead before getting yanked. New York had 12 hits, including a homer by Ken Boswell. Jones, Grote and Kranepool each drove in two runs. Tug McGraw pitched brilliantly in relief. Nolan Ryan closed out the 9-5 victory. They were at .500.
Young Gary Gentry overpowered Montreal, 4-2 behind Tommie Agee’s two home runs to give New York a 2-1 series win. To see the rookie pitch with such promise was a major lift, but nothing compared to Agee’s offensive production. In one game he showed almost as much pop as in the entire previous season.
St. Louis came to town. For the proud, defending champion Cardinals, it was just another early season series. Other than the two losses to New York before finally getting the last needed win, earning the 1964 pennant, there was no sense of rivalry with the Mets. That said, the Cardinals had a long history with the city of New York. They had battled for the pennant in many a year with the old Giants of Bill Terry and the Dodgers of Leo Durocher. They had beaten the fabled Yankees in three out of four World Series (1926, 1942,1964). St. Louis and Los Angeles were the National’s League’s dominant teams of the decade.
Sports Illustrated ran a feature on the Cardinals. Next to photos of each key player posed in a group photo was their salary, which by 1968-69 standards was extraordinary. Owner August Busch was not afraid to pay a player $25,000, $50,000, even $90,000. The leader of the pack was the great Bob Gibson, a seminal figure in baseball history. As a pitcher, he was in 1968-69 the best of the best: the previous year, a 1.12 ERA, 13 shutouts, 22 wins, a record 17 strikeouts vs. Detroit in the World Series, dominant. History records that others were better over time. Seaver would finish with more lifetime wins, strikeouts and a better ERA. Most give Koufax an edge, too. In the all-time pantheon, Gibson is there with Jim Palmer and Juan Marichal, but slightly below Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson, Roger Clemens, maybe even Greg Maddux. But all of that was immaterial, especially in 1969.
As a clutch performer, Gibby is without equal. The list of World Series pitchers mentioned in the same breath is a short one: Mathewson, Babe Ruth, Lefty Gomez, Whitey Ford, Koufax, perhaps Catfish Hunter and Curt Schilling. Johnson, Lefty Grove, Seaver, Palmer, Clemens, Maddux; in the Fall Classic, Gibson was better than any of them. But this still did not tell the whole story. Bob Gibson was a mythic hero. He was to black athletes what Nordic or Valkyrie legends were in the tales of old. The so-called “blacksploitation” movies of the 1970s featured modern African-American stars taking on corrupt white cops, gang menaces and drug lords. Gibson was the real thing, a diamond version of Black Gunn or Shaft.
It started in 1964. It was Gibson who manager Johnny Keane turned to when the Mets threatened to rock their world. In the World Series, he beat the vaunted Yankees twice. A former basketball player at Creighton who made a brief stint with the Harlem Globetrotters, “Bullet Bob” made one of the best defensive plays any pitcher ever has. Jumping to barehand a high chop along the third base line, he twisted in mid-air, firing a strike before his feet hit the ground, nabbing the batter at first base in a key moment. In game seven, he was exhausted in the ninth. Keane left him in to win the Series. Afterwards, the manager told the writers, “I had a commitment to his heart.”
If a pitcher was ever better in the World Series than Gibson in both 1967 and 1968 (even though a defensive lapse cost him game seven in ’68), I am not aware of it. This includes Mathewson’s three shutouts in 1905; Koufax against the Yankees in 1963 and the Twins in 1965; Catfish Hunter during Oakland’s heyday of the 1970s.
As the 1960s developed, and the civil rights movement turned up the heat, Gibson became an outspoken black man, to the consternation of some. Jackie Robinson had been told he needed to have “the guts not to fight back.” Over time he became forceful and verbal. But the “black athlete” was supposed to know his place. Elston Howard of the Yankees was an example of what was expected of him; Christian, family man, quiet and respectful. Gibson would say something like, “Not a day goes by I’m not reminded I’m black.” A man like that walked a fine line in sports, and still does. Controversial black boxer Jack Johnson was drummed out of boxing, with the full weight of the Federal legal system used against him, 60 years earlier.
But Gibson, like Robinson before him, was just too impressive to really find fault with. His pitching record was impeccable, but his athletic gifts, his sheer power, his presence, size and strength, were intimidating to say the least. He was a known “head hunter” who could back it up, but played by the accepted code of the day. He was college-educated, a family man whose tender love for his little girls made him human. He was highly articulate, intelligent, a team leader on the best club in the league. He was a competitor par excellence who never gave in, not even playing ping-pong or tiddly-winks with his daughters.
Gibson’s Cardinals were the “new breed.” St. Loo was an old-time baseball town, in a border state famed for the “Missouri Compromise,” which meant that although they did not take to slavery, they accepted it. No town gave Robinson a harder time. When the rest of the National League integrated wholesale in the 1950s, the Cardinals were slow about it and paid the price. Branch Rickey returned to St. Louis after the Continental League did not materialize, immediately making them the most diverse team in baseball. They had blacks like Gibson, left fielder Lou Brock, and center fielder Curt Flood. The Cards also featured Latino players, like second baseman Julian Javier, one of the many, many stars from the Dominican Republic. Role players included Dal Maxvill and Mike Shannon.
In 1964 Bill White had been their star first baseman. White was another stalwart black player and man whose impressive qualities played a great role in the advancement of his people. White had the intelligence and bearing of a college professor, and later became President of the National League. He was gone by 1969, though.
Pitcher Steve Carlton was about to have a breakout season. The 6-4 left-hander from Florida was the essence of what a big league pitcher looks like; his height, physical size, massive strength, perfect bow-and-quiver pitching motion delivering sizzling heat and impossible to hit sliders. He made it look easy (although his workouts were legendary) as opposed to Seaver, who always seemed to be expending his last gasp of energy as he dropped, and drove, and dropped, and drove . . .
Carlton seemed normal enough in the beginning. He had the looks of a movie star, but was quiet. He seemed to get along with teammates. Eventually he forged a career even better than Gibson’s, but developed a policy of not saying one single word to reporters. Upon retirement, he was sought out for an interview. He lived in some kind of geodesic dome on a remote hilltop in the middle of no where, a separatist from society who had odd conspiracy theories about Jewish bankers, the Rothschilds, the Tri-Lateral Commission, the Bohemian Grove . . .
Star catcher Tim McCarver symbolized the new sensibilities. McCarver hailed from Memphis, Tennessee, where his affluent family employed black servants. He grew up with segregation and did not question it. In a story detailed in David Halberstam’s October 1964, McCarver was on the team bus drinking a Coke when Gibby walked by. Like Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction, he asked McCarver if he could have a sip. He was not thirsty. It was a move. McCarver gave it up. Gibby took a big old honkin’ sip, half-belched, and gave the can back to McCarver.
“Thanks, bro.”
McCarver was a rookie, Gibby a star. The rules had changed and McCarver, a sharp rookie cookie, learned to live with it. They became partners, classic batterymates, and friends. It was the story of America.
But there were fissures in the St. Louis juggernaut in 1969. Roger Maris, the one-time Yankee home run king, had been a key player, a defensive star, on the 1967-68 champions. He retired after the 1968 campaign and his presence was missed. Then there was the Curt Flood case.
Flood was, like Gibson, the “new breed” of black athlete. In 1969-70, these guys included Bobby Bonds of San Francisco, Richie Allen of Philadelphia, and Reggie Jackson of Oakland. In basketball, Bill Russell of Boston, and in football, former Cleveland star Jim Brown of Cleveland, had symbolized this type. White fans were not sure what to make of them. They were smart, out-spoken, and truth be told they had legitimate grievances, but in 1969 the civil rights movement was moving from Dr. King’s Christian non-violence to Black Panther militancy. The Black Muslims and their separatism, the angry voices of H. Rap Brown and Stokeley Carmichael, were frightening to many, many white people.
Flood was not loud, just proud. He was an artiste at heart, a canvas painter of noted skill. Born and raised in Oakland, he was part of an extraordinary “flood” of black East Bay sports talent in the 1950s and 1960s: Bill Russell, Joe Morgan, Frank Robinson, Vada Pinson, and Willie Stargell. He was stunned to discover the racism of the American South as a minor leaguer. Then he and his wife bought a home in a fashionable neighborhood across the bay in the most liberal city in America, San Francisco. The Floods were aghast when petitions and legal action were brought about to try and keep them out of their lily-white midst. He became disillusioned by just about everything.
By 1969, Augie Busch was getting tired of his negativity. He traded him to Philadelphia after the season. Flood refused to report. When asked he said that, “I’m a slave; a $90,000 slave but still a slave.” Most people found little if any sympathy for him. Other players, even blacks, separated themselves from him. Later, he sued baseball. Ultimately, his case went to the Supreme Court and he lost, but in losing the court ruled the Reserve Clause invalid, opening the door for free agency and multi-millionaires. Flood made a brief comeback, his skills gone, and never saw any of the money he helped make possible for others. He became a recluse and died too young, a tragic figure.
When St. Louis entered Shea Stadium on April 11, 1969, the loss of Maris did not seem to deter their chances at a third straight pennant. Key stars Gibson, Carlton, McCarver, and Brock were all in their prime. Flood was still towing the company line. General manager Bing Devine, back with the Cardinals after a productive sojourn in New York, told the writers in Spring Training that the Cardinals were “so good it scares me.” As for the Mets, manager Red Schoendienst may as well have announced after the three-game sweep, “Veni, vidi, vici” ("I came, I saw, I conquered"). They beat both Koosman and Seaver. The third game was a classic Gibson-Seaver duel. Brock and Flood manufactured two runs off Seaver in the first. The two settled down after that, but Gibson was untouchable in the 3-1 complete game victory. It ran his lifetime record vs. New York to 22-3. The Mets were 2-4, with Pittsburgh leading the East at 5-1.
“Early in the season we realized we had to win low-scoring games,” Koosman said. If the Mets scored two runs, “then you had to win.” This would be the formula eventually, but in the beginning the Mets were inconsistent. There was improvement over the 1968 offensive numbers, but the rest of the league was better with the bat, as well.
Koosman certainly was not up to par in the early going. Pittsburgh’s “Lumber Company” batted around on him in the first inning. Nolan Ryan had no more luck in relief. The Pirates’ Bob Moose shut the door and won, 11-3. That was followed by a 4-0 shutout at the hands of the veteran former Tiger and Phillie Jim Bunning, now with Pittsburgh. The Mets had lost seven of their first 10. Then on April 19, Seaver went up against Gibson again in a key game at Busch Stadium.
Ron Swoboda would complain that over his career Seaver’s starts always fell on the fifth day regardless of rain-outs or double-headers; that other pitchers had to accommodate their schedules to his. There was a reason for this: the man was a superstar. Swoboda also would say that Seaver was withheld from opposing the other team’s ace because the Mets did not want to “burn” their best guy up. This was both “sour grapes” and illogical. Since he went every fifth day no matter what, Seaver dealt whatever hand he was given. Nobody could predict when ace pitchers went up against him; he just answered the bell every fifth day. He faced many, many aces, and over the years was given poor run support. He never complained.
Seaver was the ultimate “stopper,” and he was against St. Louis when he out-dueled Gibson in their re-match, 2-1. Ryan completed the sweep of the two-game series in St. Louis, which served notice. Koosman got on track with a 2-0 home win over Bunning on April 23.
On April 25 the Chicago Cubs entered Shea Stadium. For the first time in years, in decades, since 1908, the ’30, the Cubs had swagger. They had once been an elite team. In 1906, the Cubs set the all-time record with a 116-36 record (an incredible .763 percentage). They were led by the indomitable Los Angeleno, manager Frank “the Peerless Leader” Chance. Poems were written about their double-play infield of “Tinkers to Evers to Chance.” In both 1907 and 1908, Chicago knocked off the heralded Ty Cobb and Detroit in the World Series. In 1908, they benefited from the “Merkle Boner” to break the heart of Christy Mathewson, John McGraw and the New York Giants.
There were World Series appearances in 1910, 1935, 1938 and 1945, but they lost each time. Mobster Al Capone like to come out to Wrigley Field, where nervous players smiled and took pictures with him. According to lore, some fan’s billy goat was not allowed inside Wrigley Field and a “curse” was placed on the Cubs. They have never been to, least of all won a World Series since then. Of course, their previous World Championship prior to that event had been in 1908.
The times seemed to pass the Cubs by. They played at Wrigley Field, a beautiful-but-dilapidated park. It had no lights and would not until 1988. In the brutal Chicago summers Chicago players had to endure all day games. Many enjoyed the Rush Street bar scene, as did later broadcaster Harry Caray, a “hail fellow well met” who was friends to hookers, cab drivers and fans of all stripe. But Caray did not have to face 90-mile per hour fastballs or curves dropping off the table while nursing his hangovers, as the players did. Mediocrity marked the Cubs.
While the Dodgers, Giants, Braves, Pirates and later the Cardinals built champions through integrated rosters, the Cubs were more like an American League club. They did have a black shortstop, Ernie Banks. Banks was a Hall of Famer, two-time league MVP, 500-homer slugger, and an all-time great. His may be the sweetest disposition in all of baseball history. He was such a gentleman; so kind, so giving, so respectful, and so willing to turn the other cheek to racial prejudice; as to be considered a saint.
“Welcome to the bee-yoo-ti-full confines of Wrigley Field,” Ernie would say to anybody and everybody. “What a great day for baseball,” even it was 102 with 90 percent humidity. “Let’s play two.”
Strangers would introduce themselves to Ernie.
“How’s your wife, how’s your kids?” Ernie would ask.
Do I know him from some place? Does he know my wife? How does he know I have kids? It was just Ernie’s way. The most prejudiced white Southerner had to be disarmed by Ernie Banks. It was like Christ healing the sick. If you met Ernie and still hated blacks after that, you were legitimately evil, and God help you then!
In 1962 Banks was moved from shortstop to first base. Each year he produced fabulous numbers on teams that went no where. Chicago was a joke. Owner Philip K. Wrigley, the chewing gum magnate, first failed to capitalize on his territorial rights to Los Angeles, and later allowed a ridiculous system of revolving coaches to manage the team to a succession of second division finishes.
The Cubs, like Banks, were nice guys, nice managers, a nice owner, with nice fans in a nice stadium in a nice town. In 1966 they hired a guy who famously said, “Nice guys finish last.” That was where Leo Durocher’s team finished in his initial season. However, Durocher sparked a talented young team to an incredible improvement, from 59-103 to 87-74, good for third place behind St. Louis and San Francisco in 1967. That was followed by another solid third place showing in 1968.
They were confident. The Cubs knew they were good. Third baseman Ron Santo made no bones about his belief, in himself and his teammates. Banks had slipped somewhat by 1969, but was still a star player, a fine first baseman, and the team’s symbol. A string of celebrated players had finally been getting their shot at the World Series the last few seasons. After toiling in splendid obscurity for six seasons, Boston’s Carl Yastrzemski got his chance to shine on the October stage in 1967. The next year, veteran Detroit star Al Kaline played in his first World Series when the Tigers made line-up changes, giving him a chance to start. It paid off in Detroit’s seven-game win over St. Louis.
As the Cubs got off to a fast start in 1969, establishing themselves as a bona fide contender if not favorite for the East Division crown, they became the early “people’s choice.” Banks was a sympathetic, sentimental figure. The fans wanted to see him play in the World Series before his inevitable retirement.
One man who was not a sympathetic figure was Leo Durocher. This was a guy who said he would knock down his own mother to win a game. Babe Ruth beat him up when, as his roommate, Durocher stole his watch. He was a gambler, a hard drinker, a womanizer who cheated on his wives. He ordered his pitchers to throw at the opponents, often to outright hit them. He wanted spikes flying, did not mind if the other guy got hurt. He probably used a spy in the scoreboard to flash signals to the Giants, giving them an edge in 1951. He went for every advantage; legal, illegal or immoral.
He was a backstabber, a “table for one” guy who played politics, went after the other fellas’ job, position, wife, girlfriend, sister, friend. He spent years in L.A. lobbying for Walter Alston’s job, making fun of the hayseed from Ohio behind his back; to the writers, with players. Durocher had an exclusive Hollywood Hills tailor, a mansion in Trousdale Estates, drove a Caddy. Alston lived modestly, went back to Darrtown in the winter, and wore clothes off the rack. Leo had guys in the press do his dirty work. He made fun of people on a lower pay scale (“My dry cleaning bills are bigger than his salary”). His endorsements were for cigarettes and beer. He smoked, got in guys’ faces, reeked of tobacco. The umpires felt his spittle on their faces, his shoes “accidentally” kicking them during arguments. He had a deal with Schlitz beer, an appropriately ugly name for an ugly man. Durocher was no matinee idol, but he could “dirty talk” a woman into bed.
“Always try to get her in the sack the first five minutes of a date,” he advised. “That way if she says no you’ve got time to score another broad. You’d be surprised, there’s a helluva lot of famous broads who say yes quick.”
Durocher bragged of his sexual conquests, mostly lying, not carrying if he spread rumors or impugned the reputation of an actress in the tabloids. He was from Massachusetts, seemed like he was from the Bowery, but thought of himself as Beverly Hills or Park Avenue. He cultivated big shot friends like Frank Sinatra, the Rat Pack, George Raft, New York Mob boys, gang hitters. It was always “Frank called” and “Frank’s comin’ by,” and most everybody looked at each other, rolled their eyes. BS
He thought money was class, a fancy car defined you, a gold watch, a big ring. He was like the Alec Baldwin character in Glengarry Glen Ross who waves his expensive timepiece at poor Ed Harris and says, “My watch is worth more than your car. That’s who I am, pal.”
Branch Rickey fired him for immoralities, using the cover of his gambling suspension of 1947. What an odd couple those two made. Leo and Walter O’Malley got along. Not surprising. Strangely, the word that most appropriately suits Leo is not immoral, but amoral. He was not evil. If the right thing was convenient, that was okay by him. If anything good can be said of Leo, it was that he was not a racist. Maybe an anti-Semite, probably used the N-word, but for effect more than anything. He gave Willie Mays his chance, stuck with him when Willie needed a friend. It was a shining moment for “Mista Leo” and he deserves credit. Mel Durslag wrote there was a “good Leo” and a “bad Leo,” which was better than just a “bad Leo.” When he was dying he appealed to God during an interview, expressing hope that his sins would be forgiven and Heaven opened for a wretch. John Wayne did a similar thing. At least Leo acknowledged the existence of the deity, which is certainly better than nothing.
But beyond all other considerations, Leo Durocher was a winning baseball man. He was a Yankee in their heyday, a member of the St. Louis “Gashouse Gang” – winners – and resurrected losers into winning outfits in Brooklyn, New York, Chicago, later even in Houston, for a while at least. He was Billy Martin before Martin, cut out of the same cloth. He always wore out his welcome but left his mark wherever he went.
If Hodges was a new wave manager, platooning, using a five-man rotation, employing advance scouts, Durocher was old school, brother. His starters went every fourth day and they went nine innings. His regulars did not beg out, take days off, sit out the nightcap of a twin bill, a day game after a night game, or with hangovers, hangnails or hangdog attitudes. They played through injuries and pain. Durocher played to win. If the season was lost he would dog it, not care, let his work ethic slide, but he did not tolerate it in others. If the pennant was still on the line he was relentless. He did not care about second place money, which some players and coaches needed in those days. He had his, probably got dough from his actress ex-wife, keeping him in style. Maybe he did a little gigolo work on the side.
Durocher took over a yery young, very talented team in 1966. They played well below their potential. The Cubs probably took a year to get used to the tyrant. Second baseman Glenn Beckert, shortstop Don Kessinger, and catcher Randy Hundley were All-Star quality young players, now in their prime. Left fielder Billy Williams was, like Ernie Banks, headed for Cooperstown, but he was still at the top of his game. He played every day. He had a big consecutive game streak going, although he still had a ways to go to catch Lou Gehrig.
They had an outfielder named Jim Hickman, an ex-Met. Leo prodded Hickman, made fun of his old team, using that to motivate him. In the first half of 1969 it was working. The Cubs had let a promising center fielder named Adolfo Phillips go. He was a moody Latino and could not adjust to the “bad Leo,” who had no empathy for him. Whatever soft spot he had in 1951 for Willie Mays was lost. His young players did not get any leeway. Besides, Leo was smart enough to know he had Willie Mays, and Phillips was no “Say Hey Kid.” Phillips’s replacement was Don Young, a rookie who supposedly had defensive skills but was a jittery mess around “Leo the Lip.” Durocher openly criticized him in the press.
But what the Cubs had, and boy did they ever have it, was pitching. Gold star, gold plate pitching. The mother’s milk of winning baseball. 90 percent of the game. The right stuff that stopped good hitting. As the season shaped up, it was apparent that Cub pitching was at least as good as Cardinals pitching, Tigers pitching . . . and Mets pitching.
Their ace was a strapping black Canadian, literally a country hardballer named Ferguson Jenkins. If baseball had modernized since the days of Denton True “Cy” Young and “Iron Joe” McGinnity, this guy was a throwback. He pitched nine innings every time out, or so it seemed. Pitch counts? Fergie didn’t need no stinkin’ pitch counts. Hitters knew what was comin’. High heat, brush back, in, in, in; bust the hands, break the bat, numb the fingers, blue hammers all day . . . then a nasty slider for strike three! His pitching motion was utilitarian, he worked real fast, probably cheated a little, had a temper and nobody wanted to screw with him. He was Gibson’s equal as a competitor. In Chicago, they were just glad he was on their side. It was like being with Patton or MacArthur. You did not want to be against those guys!
Right-hander Billy Hands: up ‘n’ coming star, now experienced, he would pitch 300 innings, win 20. A day laborer in Chicago’s summer sun. Hands could win a Cy Young some day, maybe be more than that.
Then there was Ken Holtzman. He was tall, skinny and Jewish. Later in Oakland they called him “Jew.” It went over well there, a crazy club in crazy uniforms, everybody an oddball, and a winner. But in Chicago it was a mean environment. Lord of the Flies. Papillon. As long as Kenny won, he and Leo were all right, but if he did not then it got ugly. Whether Kenny was in Leo’s doghouse because he was Jewish was really just speculation, but it seemed that way. Perception is half the environment. Early in 1969 Holtzman was unhittable. He had been an All-American in college but his competitiveness was a question. Even Red Boucher sensed that in Alaska, when he picked Seaver over the more-heralded southpaw to pitch in the National Baseball Congress at Wichita. Now, he seemed to have found his place in this tough baseball world, like Koufax finally had. Holtzman threw gas and had pinpoint control. Like Jenkins he did not fool you. 80, 90 percent fast balls, up and in, down and away, a little change-up, a wrinkle curve, and talent from the left side. He was golden. But Kenny was a business major in school, read the Wall Street Journal in the clubhouse, put business plans together on the plane. No chew. Light drinker. Leo tolerated it as long as he won, but if that train stopped rolling there would be trouble down the line.
It did not end there. Leo had more arms. Rich Nye was a talented lefty out of the University of California. His potential was like that of Holtzman, but he was a college boy, from Berkeley, so that made him suspect in Leo’s eyes. Hey, Frank never went to college, dropped out of school in Hoboken . . .
Phil Regan was one of the toughest relief pitchers in baseball, kind of the last of the old school bullpen aces before the Rollie Fingers’s and Goose Gossage’s re-defined a closer’s role. Dick Selma, Seaver’s boyhood pal, was very effective in whatever way he was used. Ted Abernathy had a nasty submarine pitch delivered from below his knees.
So what was Ron Swoboda talking about? Seaver avoided the other team’s ace, huh? He got the best Montreal could muster on Opening Day, Gibson twice, and now Ferguson Jenkins when Fergie was probably at the absolute apex of his career. It was just a rumor that New York City paramedics were called to the clubhouse after the game for removal-of-bats-from-anal-cavities after Jenkins used nasty inside heat to shove them up there all day. Tom was effective but got touched, losing 3-1.
Cubs bats could not be stopped in 8-6 and 9-3 wins. Chicago was the hottest team in the National League. Leo talked it up with his boys in the New York press corps. The Mets? They was nothin’. No respect. Ron Santo was out-spoken. Nobody gave the Mets any respect except for Ernie Banks, who could find something nice to say about the Grand Wizard of the KKK. But before Chicago could depart, having raped and pillaged the Big Apple to their satisfaction, Tug McGraw stepped up big time with a 3-0 “stopper” win in the series finale. New York was 7-11.
New York made their first-ever trip to Canada. Jarry Park resembled a “handsome little field that much resembles a country fairground,” wrote Roger Angell. Their fans were “slightly bush,” but not disheartened. Montrealers seemed to take to big league ball, expecting little and appreciating what they had from their unroofed stands.
Major League ball clubs were quickly discovering that Montreal, while a little minor league from the baseball perspective, was big league in one area that counted in a big way with them: women. This was Paris/North America, maybe better. Girls were just beautiful, fashionably dressed, coifed and stylish. Montreal strip clubs were, to coin a later phrase, “off the hook.” Years later, when baseball died in Montreal and the Expos left, ball players expressed their greatest regret that the trip to this sex capital was no longer on the schedule.
At Jarry Park the fans cheered politely even at foul pop-ups and booed called third strikes against their boys. Baseball had been in Montreal for decades, but many fans at Jarry Park were apparently first-timers. Attendance went up during a long losing streak. It was a bilingual audience, a long parade of lanceurs trudged to le monticule. A double-header was le premier programme double dispute au crepuscule par les Expos. It sounded like an adult movie. One almost expected the announcer to inform the crowd that the menage a trois would begin precisely at one.
Each game was a partie, runs were points, scored via coups surs, the first out au premier but. Second baseman Bobby Wine occupied l’arret-court. Back-to-back home runs were dos-a-dos, each one a circuit clout, while the scoreboard fired up the fans with the words “VAS-Y” and “IL NOUS FAUT UNE VICTOIRE!” It felt like the resistance urging the overthrow of the Nazis from Paris.
When the Expos had a rally going, however, the French trait of pessimism cast a pall on the stadium. When the rubber hit the road, Napoleon lost at Waterloo, the Germans encircled the city, and in this case it meant failure at a crucial juncture was the next step. Gene Mauch was called “little Napoleon” when he was in Philadelphia, and Montreal fans called him le general or gerant. Pitchers removed from games were given the framboise from the stands. Ron Fairly was a voltigeur, pitcher Dan McGinn a gaucher, and wins were rare la victoires in the early years at Montreal.
The Mets arrived, wide-eyed, then got down to business. They won the opener 2-0, but it was not a good day. Jerry Koosman had a two-hit shutout going in the fifth but suddenly called Hodges to the hill. His arm had gone numb. He had knotted a small muscle just behind the armpit and the pain was acute. It would take a month to heal up. Nolan Ryan came in and finished off the Expos. Aside from Koosman, minor injuries later sidelined Ryan and McAndrew.
If Montreal thought they had Seaver’s number after batting him around in the Shea Stadium opener, they saw the real “Tom Terrific” at Jarry Park. Seaver overpowered them 2-1.
On May 2 and 3, Chicago defeated New York, 6-4 and 3-2 before wild cheering at Wrigley Field. The Cubbies were the toast of the Northside. The whole, early shaky Mets’ season was seemingly always on the line, and Seaver would be asked to respond each time. On May 4 he came through with a 3-2 win over Billy Hands. In the second game of the double-header, the Mets made a statement, winning 3-2 again to split the series.
Seaver’s game was key. It was a Sunday, the crowd loud and boisterous, drinking beer, the “bleacher bums” in full force, May weather starting to break the Chicago winter. Durocher was in the other dugout. The Mets were the baseball image of nice guys, and everybody knew what Leo predicted for that. Hodges was a churchgoing fellow; quiet, unassuming. Another Walter Alston guy, probably wore suits off the rack and was faithful to his wife.
Chump, thought Leo. Gil had a bunch of college guys, frat boys. Seaver, the preppie. Softies from California, surf dudes like McGraw; Harrelson, who was scrawny and could be taken out by a spikes-flying slide into second breaking up two. Koosman, an engineering student. So was Jay Hook. That’s impressive. Ryan, who threw hard but was scared of his own shadow. He did not have the guts to come inside. Kranepool playing out the string as usual. Agee in center, pretty good with the Southside White Sox, but a bust in the Big Apple.
Ron Santo faced Seaver. He was the face of the Cubs, the Italian guy, outspoken, a hard-ass. The time had come. No provocation really, other than Leo’s presence in the home dugout. Seaver let one fly right at Santo’s batting helmet. It flipped him. Santo stared out at Tommy Tom Tom.
So that’s how it’s gonna be, eh?
It was a baseball code, the way the game is played. The Cubs’ star brushed himself off, the crowd booing. Did Leo scream obscenities at Seaver, the home plate umpire, turn to Billy Hands and tell him to “Stick it in his ear”? No. He sat in stony silence. This situation required no words.
When Seaver stepped in against Hands, he got nicked on the arm. It was on. Hands got one in the leg. The benches looked to clear, players on the steps, ready to rumble. The umpire stepped halfway out to the mound. He warned Seaver, a $50 fine. Seaver knew he had reached the tolerance limit, and could not afford another one lest he be thrown out. He needed to stay in to win.
It was the baseball version of Tataglia trying to take down The Don; “business, not personal.” Both clubs were on edge, verbalizing, squaring off against each other. A rivalry was brewing. Seaver kept dropping, and driving, dropping, and driving . . .
Pitch after pitch. Cheese. Hard, hard sinkers, the kind that wore out Grote’s hand, left him black and blue, broke bats, made the ball hit wood like shot-puts, induced grounders struck by noodles. Good old country hard ball. Tom accepted the $50 fine as a small price to pay for victory and respect.
“That was my first really satisfying game,” he told the media afterwards. He could enjoy the second game, sit around half-clothed, taking his time, savoring the fact that he was a big leaguer. He was an All-Star, his potential and reputation sky high, and Tom Seaver knew how to play it. He was Central Casting’s typecast Star, but underneath all of it he was packing crates in 100-degree Fresno heat; rooting for “Dandy Sandy” at Dodger Stadium; using guile to get high school hitters out. He was a fan living a fantasy, not going mano-o-mano with Leo and Ron Santo at Wrigley Field. He drank some beer, iced, showered, rooted his team to victory in the nightcap. A great day in the Windy City.
“I tried to brush him back in New York but I didn’t do much of a job,” Tom told Larry Merchant of the New York Post when asked about the Santo brushback. “He was hitting me well. Possibly he’s taking the bread out of my mouth.”
This was Leo’s philosophy, one of the reasons he did not want college boys. Holtzman could take his Jewish intellectualism into the moneyed world of entrepreneurial business. He did not need baseball. Seaver’s old man was an executive. Where’s the hunger? He wanted gutter guys who felt that if they failed in baseball they were destined for the streets. Carl Furillo forced to work construction, bitter. But Seaver was the “new breed.” He had served in the Marines, he had a “war face.”
Santo had a habit after wins of jumping up in the air and clicking his heels. The “bleacher bums” loved it, opponents stewed. “I had to make sure he respects me,” Seaver continued. “You can’t let hitters dominate or intimidate you. The hitter shouldn’t intimidate the pitcher and the pitcher shouldn’t intimidate the hitter, but there has to be respect. I had to let Santo know I knew what he was doing to me. Then Leo had Hands hit me. What do I do, throw a bat at Leo? I had to do what I did. It’s a part of baseball. It’s a good hard game.”
Seaver fought like the CIA, not the infantry. There was a method to his madness. A time for an intellectual approach, mind games, deception, and time to demonstrate to the enemy that if they went too far they faced “mutual assured destruction.” Seaver had a reputation as a control pitcher, but his fastball in his prime years - and he was on the cusp of it now - were close to 100 miles per hour. He was dangerous.
“This is the code,” wrote Merchant. “But the thing is someone can get hurt or maimed with a baseball . . . The man who shoots back and kills may not know the first man was just issuing a warning. They are fooling with bullets.”
“You would have thought it foolish to throw at us when we had Tom and myself and the other guys, who could throw hard, but we weren’t that well known yet,” Koosman recalled. “But they helped get the fire going. They generated a lot of energy. That was one club you loved to beat.”
Seaver saw no ethical quandaries. “There’s a fine dividing line between throwing at someone or brushing him back. It’s the difference between good hard baseball and dirty baseball . . .”
But the Mets would face Chicago again down the road, and Leo Durocher played “dirty baseball.”
When the Mets reached the .500 mark at 18-18, it was celebrated as a major accomplishment in the New York press. Seaver had the perfect reaction to it.
“.500 is nothing to celebrate,” he said. The tone was set.
“We found ways to win games as opposed to finding ways to lose,” wrote outfielder Art Shamsky in The Magnificent Seasons. “Don’t get me wrong, at this point nobody thought about winning the Eastern Division title or even visualized hopes of a pennant. But we were a better ball club than the Mets had ever been in our history. More important, we were starting to have faith in our own abilities. Positive things started to happen.”
Shamsky had missed much of Spring Training with an injury. He spent the early part of the season at triple-A Tidewater before getting called up to the big leagues.
“We were learning how not to beat ourselves,” recalled second baseman Ken Boswell, who was trying to debunk his reputation as a defensive liability.
“I thought if we could just start winning some close games you never know what could happen,” said Grote. There was that computer analysis, and Gil’s admonition too: 36 one-run losses in 1968. Win half of those, that is 18 wins added to the 73 of the previous year . . .
“I’m tired of the jokes about the old Mets,” Seaver told Jack Lang and the assorted writers. “Let Rod Kanehl and Marvelous Marv laugh about the Mets.”
After the Wichita Dreamliners had beaten him in 1965, Rod told the young Goldpanner pitcher he was destined for the big leagues, and now here he was. When Seaver announced the “celebration” would come about only when a pennant was won, Maury Allen shrugged and said, “I’ll be too old to enjoy it.”
Meet the Mets
“The ‘new breed’ is here, baby.”
- Tommie Agee
As the 1969 season began to develop, the New York Mets began to demonstrate a distinct personality. They were part of the changing times, on and off the field. That spring, the great Mickey Mantle tearfully announced his retirement from baseball. The New York Yankees got off to a mediocre start. Their famed stadium was empty. Press attention was focused on the Mets. The Yankees were yesterday and had been for five years at least.
Shea was the place to be, just as it had been during the football season. Off the field, Mets players reflected the new sensibilities. They wore mod clothes, turtlenecks, a little jewelry maybe, sideburns, and flared bellbottoms. They spoke in the new dialect. It was a groovy time, man. They were with it. As for the war, there were divisions. They were mostly small town guys and the old values that especially make up the athlete’s creed led them to support their country, the President and the troops. Most voted Republican, but it was a far less conservative bunch than any average big league team of five years before. Truth be told, they probably were a little more to the Left than the average sports team, circa 1969-70.
Black players on the Mets were distinctly of the “new breed.” This was New York during a time of change. Their hairstyles, clothing, jewelry and attitudes were reflective of the times. They felt free to flirt with white girls, to meet them in the Manhattan hot spots or on the road without fear of the old-time recriminations about “their place” in the hierarchy.
The Mets were popular, young, attractive, and unlike the 1962 “all-time record for fatherhood” team, had their share of swingin’ bachelors. The sexual revolution was up and running and they were in the right time and place. Joe Namath had made it perfectly acceptable to kiss ‘n’ tell. After Namath, there was little debauchery the Mets’ could engage in that was going to shock anybody. Ball Four was still a year away from publication. Its revelations were shocking not so much because it told truths that people already suspected or knew about sex, pep pills and other aspects of the game, but rather because it tended to name some names; some pretty important names. But hey, after Namath said he went to bed the night before the Super Bowl with a “blonde and a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red,” the fantasy life of pro athletes was open for all to live vicariously by.
But an interesting dynamic was already in play by 1969. It really had started two years earlier and would continue to be a dominant, eventually divisive aspect of the Mets. Resentment would rear its ugly had, and not just from players but from writers, too.
Tom Seaver did not cheat on his wife.
This really does not sound like much, but left as an open statement the unsaid words, which every married Met and his wife thought of if not verbalized, was that it meant the other guys did. Now, nobody really, other than Tom Seaver, truly, actually knows that Tom Seaver did not cheat on his wife, Nancy. But to the extent that such a thing is known, that was, to quote Donald Rumsfeld, “a known known.” It was his reputation, then and now. Every team he played on, every teammate; the word was that Seaver did not cheat.
Did all his teammates cheat? Of course not. But the fact that pro athletes cheat on their wives is such a given and always has been that it is simply accepted common knowledge that those who do not are exceptions to the rule. It is the price paid by the wife of a pro athlete; in accepting the money, the fame, the travel and the excitement of the life, you accepted the fooling around. Most just held to the rule that it be confined to the road during the season. No girlfriends of wives. Not in their hometown. Keep it away from the kids. Boys will be boys.
The ballplayers often tended to marry high school sweethearts. The conservative, family-support nature of teenage sports meant that the guys more often came from a tight-knit background and married “a girl just like the one who married dear old dad.” But there were exceptions.
Namath did a motorcycle movie and a PR photo showed him playing “tonsil hockey” with sexpot Ann-Margret. Namath was shirtless, Ann in a bikini. The photo made it look like they were both naked as jaybirds, her ample breasts squeezed against Joe’s hairy chest, and God knows what was going on down below.
The single guys, some divorced men, plenty of married fellows, went after the “groupies,” the “Baseball Annies” who could be found in every nightclub and hotel bar, outside the stadium, down by the dugout. They “dressed for sexcess,” in tight mini-skirts, big hair, low cut tops, bare midriffs, high heels, “red lips and painted fingertips.” It was “Girls, Girls, Girls” world and these guys were welcome to it. That was the style. Sexy hippie chicks. Horny airline stews, whose attire in those days pretty much said “coffee, tea or me.”
But the sexy girls were no less likely to be faithful to some ball player they were having a fling with than vice versa. Some of these groupies became wives. Stories and rumors about how Jim met Jane were rampant. A girl would be passed around, sometimes by several guys in the same night in the same room. This was and always has been the scene. Two weeks later she is exclusive?
One of baseball’s all-time greatest superstars married a hot bartender at a Montreal strip club. He called up various superstars around the National League, telling them he was planning to marry this girl, and, uh, well, if you don’t mind, say as a favor to me, dude, please stop sleeping with her.
This was followed by a predictable flurry of cell phone calls from one National League city to another, with exclamations that sounded pretty much like, “He said what!?” Just as predictably, every fan in every park knew what was going on and razzed the player unmercifully until the marriage ended in a brutal, tabloid-headline divorce.
According to Maury Allen, one Yankee wife was a certified nymphomaniac who slept with Giants and Dodgers players when her husband was on the road. A trade to a one-team town did not solve the dilemma. Local guys, the postman, teammates; the girl had to have it and the marriage broke up.
There is no evidence that Tom Seaver was ever a monk. Dick Selma said he dated the best-looking girls at Fresno High. Use your imagination beyond that. After he met Nancy he dated beautiful sorority girls at USC. But Seaver knew this world, the world of infidelity. Not up close, but he was savvy enough to know the things that matter - family, children, trust, faith – get eaten alive by cheating hearts.
In 1969 they began to start calling him “perfect.”
“I’m not perfect, because I drink beer and I swear,” he said. “There’s only one perfect man and he lived 2,000 years ago.” He was not a guy who went around asking guys if he could talk to them about Jesus Christ, but he wore a St. Christopher’s medal and seemed to walk the walk.
While still in college, Seaver decided he wanted to marry Nancy. He was apparently able to discontinue whatever it was he might have done with those USC coeds, which as Matt Leinart demonstrated years later could be a free-for-all. As a minor leaguer at Jacksonville, a town with Southern belles, honky tonks and strip clubs, he sat in his hotel room, lonely. Nancy came out and they were married in a small ceremony. He could not wait out the season.
So by 1969 the word was out. Seaver did not cheat. There was never any indication that Seaver called guys out who did. Years later in Cincinnati he was good friends with Johnny Bench, a notorious chick hound. One of Bench’s favorite ways to relax his ace pitcher with the bases loaded would be to saunter out to the mound and asked Tom to “check out the blonde behind home plate.”
“How do you think I got into this trouble in the first place?” Seaver laughingly replied before invariably striking out the batter to end the threat.
Seaver, whose politics were probably moderately Republican, maybe libertarian, was a “live and let live” type. He enjoyed a good joke, laughed like a hyena, and probably enjoyed hearing ribald stories of teammate escapades.
But there was still a tension. A look, a remark, shared knowledge. He knows what I did. He can hold that over me now.
When a man sins and another man knows of it, this creates an interesting dynamic. The sinner can be shamed; “go forth and sin no more.” But that is not human nature. When New York City policeman Frank Serpico refused payoffs, he did not judge his fellow cops or rat them out. They stabbed him in the back anyway. They wanted him to be as corrupt as they were.
Over the years, Seaver had a reputation that was truly unusual. There were others who were faithful, some were gung-ho Christians, but Seaver was said to be so admired, so influential, such a leader by example on and off the field, that other guys would not cheat! A goody-goody might be made fun of. Seaver was no goody-goody. He was a leader, a Marine. He threw heat, made Ron Santo eat dirt and traded aspirin tablets at the noggin with Gibby.
So there were divisions forming. There were those who admired the Seaver credo, following it even when it was hard. Then there were those who wanted the man to cheat on Nancy! Go ahead, everyone does it, man. She’ll never know. Seaver never said stuff like this, but he knew God would know.
The Mets had attractive wives and girlfriends. Just being in New York, this upped the “attractiveness factor” a few notches, like a team in L.A. or Texas. Gary Gentry’s wife was similar to Nancy Seaver; pretty, blonde and poised. Her husband was said to be “the next” Seaver. Nancy Seaver was a doll. A classic California blonde, she dressed like a fashion model; tam ‘o’ shanters, shawls, pretty dresses. An Irish lass.
Seaver and Nancy were “Ken and Barbie dolls.” They loved Seaver, they admired him, and man, he was “our savior,” but there were a few mutterings here and there.
Jesus, are you kidding me?
Who do they think they are?
Cleon Jones was the anti-Seaver. The fact that Cleon Jones and Tom Seaver could be teammates, colleagues . . . friends? . . . well, that was the story of America, too. A few years later, Jones was arrested in a van parked outside Shea Stadium for possession of drugs. The newspaper reported, “Jones was found nude, in the company of a young lady; not his wife.” He and Seaver eventually had a falling out, on account of Jonesie’s indiscretions. Seaver only cared when he thought it started to hurt the ballclub . . . and his win-loss record!
Jones needed to be motivated. Hodges knew that. Cleon came from Mobile, and everybody moves at a different pace down yonder. He was six feet tall, a muscular 195 pounds, and as black as they come. He grew up in a racially hostile environment. The year he made his big league debut, during that long hot summer Birmingham police chief Bull Connor sicced dogs and ordered rubber truncheons on blacks marching for their rights. He tried college at one of the traditional black universities but never made it through. Had he not been a baseball player he would have been subject to the vagaries of black life in the “Redneck Riviera,” which was what Alabama quarterback Ken Stabler called the Gulf Coast of Alabama. Jones was a rarity who threw left but batted right-handed. As a youth in Mobile, he played sandlot ball with a right field fence so close that balls over it counted as outs, so he switched from left- to right-handed. Cleon grew up “hard” according to Ron Swoboda. He and Tommie Agee played baseball and football on the same high school team.
He led the International League in errors in 1965, and on this Mets’ team defense was imperative. But he could wake up at midnight on Christmas eve swatting a line drive. He had almost hit .300 in 1968, a year in which almost nobody sniffed that magic number. He got hot in 1969 and was embarking on stardom.
His teammate, Tommie Agee, was a more sensitive soul. The American League Rookie of the Year in 1966, he was a grizzled veteran by 1969 because he had experienced so many ups-and-downs. The Mets got him for Brooklyn-born Tommie Davis, thought to be over the hill with injuries (he still had a few hits left in him with Baltimore down the road).
Agee was very athletic. He and Jones were subject to the age old stereotype, which Swoboda freely admitted, that as black athletes they possessed natural skills and, by implication, did not need to put in the hours, the sweat and the effort of a Seaver, a Buddy Harrelson.
“Our coach’s name was Curtis Horton,” Agee recalled. “I was a year ahead of Cleon in school.”
Told that Cleon was five days older, Agee responded, “He’s older, but I’m smarter”
Lou Brock said Jerry Grote was the toughest catcher he ever ran up against. Brock squared off for years against Johnny Bench. ‘Nuf sed. He was a Texas boy. In another time and place Grote; Jones and Agee; Ed Charles; they would not have been able to play together. He blamed others for his poor performances in the beginning, especially an anemic bat, but learned to protect the plate. He called a great game and the pitchers swore by him, even if they did not really dig the guy.
Bench would embarrass Jack Billingham by catching one of his “fast” balls barehanded. Grote would fire the ball back to Jim McAndrew harder than McAndrew pitched it; right at the belt buckle, literally “buckling” him. He tried it with Koosman, who told him if he ever did it again he would “kill” him. He never did it to Seaver. Ex-catcher Wes Westrum tried to take Jerry under his wing.
“If Grote ever learns to control himself, he might become the best catcher in the game,” he said.
Like Randy Hundley of the Cubs, Grote was something of an ironman.
Buddy Harrelson had speed and agility. He was not as great in the field as Luis Aparicio or Davey Concepcion. The Cal Ripken’s, Nomar Garciaparra’s, Derek Jeter’s and Alex Rodriguezes’s were not on the scene yet. He was what a shortstop looks like. After hitting .108 in a 19-game 1965 call-up, Buddy became a creditable switch-hitter. He stole home twice in 1966 and became a Gold Glove winner. He was consistent and a fan favorite.
Born in Niles, California on June 6, 1944, a day in which America was pre-occupied with events on the French coastline, he grew up in Hayward. Today, Hayward is part of the urban sprawl of Oakland and the gritty East Bay, but back then it was the country. There were no A’s games to go to when he was growing up. He was 5-10 1/2, maybe, and weighed all of 155 pounds soaking wet. He and Seaver became pals. They liked to drink beer and golf.
Whether Harrelson and Seaver were close because Buddy did not cheat either is just speculation. Who really knows such things? But he was quiet, studious and dedicated. Seaver loved those qualities in a teammate. This was just a white Mike Garrett absent the Heisman Trophy. Unlike Seaver, Harrelson slogged through the minors. He may have been part of the “Youth of America,” called to opportunity with the Metsies, but his road was a two-year slog at Salinas, just down the road from his Hayward roots, then Buffalo and Jacksonville. His build and appearance were made for jokes and put-downs from grizzled vets, but he just played through it. He hit .219 in 1968 but was learning how to swing from the left side.
Seaver met Harrelson at Jacksonville in 1966, and thought he was “a skinny runt of a kid who never said a word.” They broke into the big leagues with lasting results in 1967. In Seaver’s third career start, he led 1-0 in the seventh inning at Chicago. Harrelson’s error allowed the tying run to score, but Seaver won 2-1 in 10 innings to improve his record to 2-0.
“I felt just great,” Seaver recalled. But Buddy was sitting in front of his locker holding his head in his hands, miserable because he cost Seaver a shutout. “Forget it, Buddy. We won. There’ll be lots of shutouts.”
Harrelson was adept going after pop flies, an art in and of itself.
Harrelson tried college at San Francisco State but unlike Seaver did not finish up. He missed two weeks doing his Army duty in 1968 and was slated to miss parts of June and July in 1969 doing the same thing.
Johnny Murphy was a Yankee pitcher, a durable right-hander saddled with the enigmatic nickname “Grandma Murphy” when he toiled for Joe McCarthy’s champions of the 1930s. He played a dozen years at Yankee Stadium and was one of the first “relief specialists” as bullpen roles evolved.
Murphy posted 12 wins out of the bullpen in 1937 and 1943; had 107 career saves and 73 lifetime victories. He was very effective in World Series play, compiling a 1.10 ERA in six separate Series. He finished with Boston in 1947 and went into player development with the Red Sox.
While George Weiss, Bing Devine and others helped develop the Mets - their “college philosophy” after going with veterans early – Murphy is the man who ultimately built the 1969 Mets (with great help from assistant Whitey Herzog, who never missed the chance to tell anybody who wants to listen how great that help was).
The ownership wanted Gil Hodges, but he was under contract with Washington and it was easier said than done. It was Murphy, friends with Washington GM George Selkirk from their Yankees days, who made it happen. Officially, Devine was still the general manager when it occurred, but it was Murphy (who replaced him shortly thereafter when Devine when to St., Louis) who arranged a “trade” for Hodges, a rare but not unheard-of event for managers. Hodges came back to New York for $100,000 and pitcher Bill Denehy. The Mets had been rumored to be after Hodges since Casey Stengel’s 1965 retirement.
Murphy also made one of the biggest trades in all of Mets history, the acquisition of Tommie Agee and utilityman Al Weis from the Chicago White Sox after the 1967 campaign.
Some of the most famous baseball announcers over the years have included Vin Scully and Red Barber of the Dodgers; Mel Allen of the Yankees; Lon Simmons, Russ Hodges and Jon Miller of the Giants; Harry Caray of the Cubs; Harry Callas of the Phillies; Bob Prince of the Pirates; Bob Elson of the White Sox; Bill King of the A’s; Dick Enberg of the Angels; and Ernie Harwell of the Tigers. Add to that list the name of Lindsey Nelson, who eventually won the Ford C. Frick award and a place in the Hall of Fame.
Nelson is one of the “giants of baseball broadcasting,” wrote Peter Bjarkman in The New York Mets Encyclopedia. He saw it all, beginning with the 1962 campaign. Just being able to keep an audience through so many long, losing games was an art.
Nelson started after World War II in his native Tennessee. He re-created baseball for the Liberty Broadcasting System and became popular when night games came into being on a regular basis, which had a big effect on the listening audience size. He honed his skills with NBC and became adept at all sports.
Nationally, Nelson was well known as a college football announcer, especially as Notre Dame’s game announcer and for many years their Saturday (and Sunday) man, when Irish games were truncated across the country.
“Purdue failed to sustain a drive, so after punting we pick up action with the Irish taking over at their own 45,” Nelson always seemed to be intoning in a staccato-yet-smooth, very distinctive yet not-quite-Southern accent. For years, Nelson’s voice was synonymous with the Cotton Bowl.
Nelson came on board with the expansion Mets in 1962 and gave them imprimatur. The hiring of Southern broadcasters was a long tradition in New York that included the likes of Allen and Barber. Nelson’s voice could not be pinpointed. To many he even sounded like a native New Yorker. It was a somewhat nasal accent, but lively and knowledgeable. His colorful, checkered sportjackets were his trademark.
Nelson’s partner from the beginning was Bob Murphy, another Hall of Famer. He became Boston’s play-by-play man in 1954, covering the great Ted Williams in his twi-light years along with Curt Gowdy. Like Nelson he was adept at college football. His older brother, Jack Murphy was a renowned San Diego sports columnist whose efforts brought big league ball to that city. The stadium was named after him.
The third Mets’ broadcaster in 1969 was also a Hall of Famer, which had to be a record (“You could look it up,” Casey would advise). Like Nelson, Ralph Kiner wore snazzy sportcoats. In 1951, Kiner hit 51 home runs for Pittsburgh. He led the National League in homers for five straight seasons. Only Babe Ruth and Mark McGwire surpass his lifetime ratio of one home run per every 14.1 trips to the plate.
Kiner was a minor league general manager in the Pacific Coast League before entering the broadcast booth with the Chicago White Sox. He, Nelson and Murphy had been intact since the 1962 inception. He was by 1969 a mainstay on Mets TV and radio broadcasts, hosting the well-known “Kiner’s Corner.” His “Kinerisms” and malapropos, sometimes unfit for print, included, “We’ll be right back after this word from Manufacturer’s Hangover.”
The leaping corpse
“Pastime, National, 99; after a lingering illness. Remains on display at Cooperstown, N.Y.”
- Roger Angell, The Summer Game
May is a special month in New York. The seasons change on the East Coast. After a long, hard winter, the sun shines through, the girls start breaking out the mini-dresses, and in the spring, a young man’s fancy turns to baseball. Also a middle-aged man named Roger Angell.
Angell took “baseball road trips” every year, then wrote marvelous articles about his experiences in The New Yorker. The Summer Game (1972) chronicles this odyssey from 1962 to 1971. He went to SpringTraining in Florida, watched the 1963 World Series in various Manhattan taverns, and checked out Dodger Stadium the year it opened. Angell’s essays included the ’62 pennant chase and rain-delayed Fall Classic; Gibson’s epic 1964 “coming out party”; the Dodgers of Koufax and Drysdale; an absolutely eloquent, poetic paean to New England during the “Impossible Dream” 1967 campaign, and a brilliant depiction of the tense, unpredictable 1968 Tigers-Cardinals battle.
Angell has a following, but it should be a bigger following. He was to the written word what Vin Scully was to the spoken one, which is the ultimate compliment. I write about sports in large part because of Angell, Jim Murray, and Pat Jordan. If my efforts are pale imitations call it homage. Angell put himself in the story, like a clean Hunter S. Thompson. He sat in the stands with his daughter, quoted her, described the people he talked ball with, and gave a perspective the “knights of the keyboard,” as Ted Williams derisively called the beat writers, never did. Angell spurned controversy. He was in love with baseball, with its purity, and he captured it.
Angell was a New Yorker, of course. He grew up with all of it, but fell for the National League. He favored the little guy, and saw the Yankees as a corporate entity. His baseball sensibilities allowed him to admire their greatness, but it was more like the Dutch or the Belgians watching the Americans stomp on the Wehrmacht in their back yards. It was great and all, but it was not their team. His team was Brooklyn. When they left, he was heartbroken and went to Yankee Stadium to get his baseball jones, but that was all it was. He showed up at the Polo Grounds in 1962, sat through a double-header bludgeoning by the mighty Dodgers over the lowly Mets, and loved every minute of it. So did his fellow fans in the sold-out stadium, which stayed full and boisterous to the end. Angell was hooked on the Mets.
In 1968, Angell heard all about the “death of baseball.” “Broadway Joe” was all the rage. “Hey, have you seen the crowds at the Jets’ games lately?” a syndicated columnist friend of his said over the phone that December. “Unbelievable! It’s exactly like the old days at Ebbets Field. Pro football is the thing, from now on. Baseball is finished in this country. Dead.”
Angell said baseball’s death knell almost led him to the New York Times obituaries to find something that read like this: “Pastime, National, 99; after a lingering illness. Remains on display at Cooperstown, N.Y.”
The combination of Broadway Joe and His Super Jets, as compared to the distressing “Year of the Pitcher,” a seemingly endless string of 1-0 and 3-0 baseball games played in empty old stadiums, all seemingly in dangerous neighborhoods on dead nights, led The New Republic, the Wall Street Journal; even some foreign publications to declare that “Our National Pastime” was now football.
1969 was the 100th anniversary of professional ball, going back to the Cincinnati Red Stockings of 1869. An “all-time all-star team” was announced, and looking back it said a lot about the state of the game that year. For one thing, the center fielder and “Greatest Living Ball Player” was not Willie Mays, it was Joe DiMaggio. DiMag held to that like a survivor to his life raft, for years never accepting any invite anywhere unless it was preceded by the introduction of “The Greatest Living Ball Player.”
Now, Di Maggio was great, no doubt. A winner, yes, but Mays was better. The statistics and the eyes tell us that. The team was mostly comprised of very old old-timers; mostly guys from the 1900s to the 1920s and ‘30s: Ty Cobb, Pie Traynor, Bill Dickey, Honus Wagner, Walter Johnson, Lefty Grove, Rogers Hornsby. No Ted Williams, Hank Aaron, Mickey Mantle or Roberto Clemente. No Sandy Koufax, not to mention Bob Feller, Warren Spahn or Bob Gibson. Conspicuously absent were any Negro League stars. The research tells us that Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige probably should have been on that team.
Was Gibson better than Babe Ruth? Many say yes. He probably was not, but the fact that such an argument is valid says all that needs be said of Gibson. Paige was probably a notch better than Johnson, Christy Mathewson and Grover Alexander. Some argue that “Cool Papa” Bell should have been in there, but he was probably just below that level.
The selectors placed all their credence on the statistics of a very by-gone era, as if Cobb could possibly have hit .420 in the 1960s, or Ruth would have put up those numbers facing Gibby’s heat, Jim Bunning’s slider, and Warren Spahn’s curve. As if Cy Young’s 511 wins were possible in this new era. There was a lot of old man bluster. Lefty O’Doul once said Cobb would hit “about .320” in the modern era. Asked, “Why only .320?” he replied, “Well, the man is 70 years old now.”
The people who selected this “all-time all-star team” were effected in large measure by the desultory offensive statistics of 1968. It was if nobody could hit anymore. The Glory of Their Times by Lawrence Ritter was a very popular book of the era. Most of the old-timers clung to the archaic idea that their game was better than what the modern boys were doing in the 1960s, not seeming to realize that in 1910 nobody brought it like Koufax or Seaver.
But because the team was so old-timer heavy, the impression was that the game’s best days were long gone. These kids in this new-fangled era? Forget them. Looking back, the 1960s and 1970s are seen by many to be the golden era. The 1971 All-Star Game in Detroit is hailed as a confluence of Cooperstown talent like none other. Time has provided new perspectives, but it is important to understand that baseball was not popular at the beginning of the 1969 baseball season.
In 1968, the Mets were second in National League attendance with 1,781,657. This would be considered a very poor year by today’s standards. Population is greater, but not by the degree of attendance increase the game has seen, really beginning in 1969. St. Louis broke 2 million with a pennant winner. L.A., a team that draws well over 3 million most years now, drew 1,581,093. The famed Wrigley Field faithful, with a young, exciting club, barely cracked a million. Philly and Pittsburgh, playing in ancient edifices, drew pitifully. A team attracting less than 700,000 today would have to file for bankruptcy. San Francisco semi-contended before finishing second, but Candlestick Park was a wasteland with only 837,220 showing up.
The Tigers thrilled Detroit and broke 2 million in 1968. Boston had it goin’ on, but it was nothing compared to the 2000s: 1.9 million. The Angels had been a near-failure in Los Angeles and Orange County despite a huge population and every natural advantage, but they barely cracked a million. Washington, playing in a very bad criminal environment in tense, racially charged times, drew flies: 546,661. Oakland (837,466) split the Bay Area market in half, peeving a lot of people in San Francisco and the Commissioner’s office.
The Yankees were happy to break a million with a pretty good team, but what had happened to the pinstripers was a shock to the system. Chicago and Cleveland were baseball wastelands in falling-apart parks.
New Commissioner Bowie Kuhn came from Wall Street and was strictly the owner’s man. The divisional set-up gave he people hope that it would generate more excitement. For some reason, the idea that New York needed a champion did not really register with people yet.
It certainly should have. Baseball was monumental in 1962 and 1963, when the Yankees squared off first against San Francisco, then against Los Angeles. After the demise of the Yankees a series of champions emerged in the American League: Minnesota, Baltimore, Boston and Detroit. Baltimore had never really caught on and their attendance was poor. Despite a solid club in 1968 they drew less than 1 million to Memorial Stadium. The Twins and Tigers were strictly regional. 1967 had been a big year, with four, even five contenders late in the season; the Bosox, Tigers and Twins all in it until the last weekend, so baseball fever took hold. But there were problems. Riots in Detroit spoiled the fun for a lot of people. Tiger Stadium was in the heart of a decaying city. The perception in 1968 was that the old man was ready for pasture. Overall, baseball declined from 25,132,209 in1966 attendance to 23,105,345 in 1968.
The murder of King, race riots, anti-war demonstrations; cities did not seem like safe places with a future. The suburbs were the future, but the stadiums were all downtown. The streets were dirty, the cops were violent, and the criminals ran the place like some futuristic nightmare. Movies predicted disaster: Planet of the Apes, Omega Man, Soylent Green. Christianity was a “white man’s religion,” a “cracker’s fable.” Richard Nixon went to a sold-out revival with the legendary Billy Graham, but the press made fun of it. They said it was either irrelevant or that Nixon should have not have tried to connect church and state. The ACLU went after long-held traditions, calling everything racist and bigoted.
A “generation gap” divided America. “Don’t trust anyone over 30,” they said. “I hope I die before I get old,” sang Roger Daltrey of The Who. The FBI put surveillance on John Lennon, rock stars, subversive Hollywood types; all deemed to be corrupters of the youth. Baseball was an old man’s game, slow and witless. The young and the restless, the students, the protest generation, had no time for baseball. Boring. Like watching grass grow, people said of it. Long games, long shadows. Double-headers.
If you wanted excitement, you went for the NFL and the even more-exciting AFL. Pro basketball was fast and athletic, with wonderful black superstars like Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell, Oscar Robertson, and Elgin Baylor. UCLA was like rolling thunder under John Wooden, people moving Heaven and Earth to get tickets at Pauley Pavilion. College football had everybody excited. Southern Cal had O.J. Simpson. Texas would win the 1969 National title. A great rivalry, traditions, fans going crazy at Notre Dame, Ohio State, Michigan, Nebraska.
All of this had the Roger Angell’s stressed out. They liked baseball’s pace; its cerebral intellectuality, its building tensions. They liked the “Year of the Pitcher”; fast pitcher’s duels, two gunslingers in the sun using horsehide instead of bullets to mow down dangerous enemies. Denny McLain was a master; big kick, high heat, a workhorse. Marichal, same thing, just an extraordinary craftsman. They were artists.
But pro football played to 87 percent of its stadium capacity in 1968, and in those days some of those yards were huge (L.A. Coliseum, Cleveland Municipal Stadium). A Harris poll confirmed baseball’s unpopularity with Angell’s succinct, Politically Incorrect assessment that it was popular only with the poor, the old, “and Negroes. Bad, bad image.” Rich folks, women and the jet set preferred football.
But Angell’s keen eye was picking up on something, and by May of 1969 he was ready to put his finger on it. The divisional alignments were popular. The lowering of the mound had not created an offensive extravaganza, but rather very exciting, highly compelling statistics, teams and stories in the early going. A plethora of excellent young players at every position were making their mark in 1969. Men who would go on to greatness.
Angell invited some of his friends out to the park but was declined. Still, he had a good feeling. Attendance in May was up 32 percent from 1968. Kuhn and the owners were breathing a collective sigh of relief. Talk of the Jets was subsiding, as was that of baseball’s demise. The old fella’s greatest ally, the good ol’ summer time, was just around the corner.
Angell rationalized the discrepancies between baseball and football. Played on 14 Sundays, each pro or college game had intense meaning. The collegians could nary afford a loss and still hope for the National title. Baseball was languid. Win two of three. Lose four, pick it up with a 5-1 home stand.
“Being forced to pick between them seems exactly like being forced into a choice between a martini and a steak dinner,” wrote Angell. He liked baseball’s “clarity, variety, slowly tightening tension, and acute pressure on the individual athlete,” observed from a seat behind first base, while giving credence to football’s “violence and marvelously convoluted machinery,” preferably on the tube.
The spring strike, a shock to the system in those days, was old news by May. Out in Cleveland, a controversial player named Ken “Hawk” Harrelson was trying to be baseball’s Namath: beads, bell-bottoms and broads. Jim Maloney of Cincinnati and Don Wilson of Houston repeated the Gaylord Perry-Ray Washburn feat of back-to-back no-hitters at Crosley Field, but it had not foreshadowed comatose offensive numbers in 1969. Minnesota’s Rod Carew served notice that he would someday be knocking on Cooperstown’s door. Oakland’ Reggie Jackson got off to an astonishing start and seemed to be locked in on Roger Maris’s record of 61 homers.
Boston’s Carl Yastrzemski was putting up big power numbers. Hank Aaron, Denny McLain, Ernie Banks, Frank Robinson, Richie Allen, Harmon Killebrew, Frank Howard; these marquee names were all off to great starts.
Angell then turned his attention to New York baseball, his true forte. First he made a visit to Yankee Stadium, watching the pinstripers in a dispiriting series with California. He wanted to know for sure that the Mets were now the thing, that the Yanks were “New York’s other baseball team.” He was not disabused of that notion.
Then it was on to Shea. There were early reports of over-the-top fan excitement. The Mets were a happening. Something was in the air. In mid-May Angell saw New York play a squeaker with Cincinnati, but it was the “same old Mets” when two hits, an error, and a wild pitch gave the Reds a 3-0 win. Then Atlanta came to town. The Braves were a wildly entertaining group of talents. Gary Gentry tried to challenge them like they were the Southern Illinois Salukis in the College World Series. “Hammerin’ Hank” Aaron (Seaver could have told Gentry about him), newly acquired winner-everywhere-he-went Orlando Cepeda, and Bob Tillman sent baseballs into the friendly skies without stewardesses in a 4-3 Braves’ victory.
The next night, the magician Phil Niekro handcuffed Mets bats through six innings. Then, just as suddenly and as much by magic, New York scored eight runs, with Jones hitting a gland slam in a 9-3 New York triumph behind Seaver. On Thursday afternoon, May 15, Angell grabbed a seat at Shea on a glorious spring day. School was still in and it was Senior Citizens’ Day but jammed with noisy children, the most delightful of all sounds. Aaron wristed two launch rockets and Atlanta led 6-2 in the seventh. Four Mets singles and a wild pitch made the score 6-5. Angell described wild screeching, every bit as imploring as a Jets’ game; simply outrageous excitement.
In the ninth Harrelson singled, Grote was hit by a pitch and Agree dutifully moved them along with the kind of bunt the fundamentalist Gil Hodges demanded. .390-hitting Cleon Jones hit a “frozen rope” to right field, driving in the tying and winning runs . . . except that second baseman Felix Millan “climbs invisible ladder, turns midair, & gloves pill backhand,” Angell wrote on a notepad. The thrills and chills were replaced by utter silence, but the season was young and the games were insane.
After Seaver beat Niekro, 5-0 at Atlanta on May 21, New York dropped five straight, falling to 18-23. It threatened to cast a pall on the procedings. After one “sloppy” game with Atlanta, Hodges held a closed-door meeting.
“He quietly reminded us that were a better ball club than this, and we needed to make sure we were doing all the things we needed to do to be a better club,” Swoboda recalled.
“He was heatedly exasperated,” was the way one player put it at the time.
“We needed it,” said Seaver. “I expect it to help us. We’re mature. We are supposed to be able to take it. The man is on our side. He’s a perfectionist. That’s fabulous. I strive for that myself.”
On May 28 Koosman struck out 15 in 10 innings of a 0-0 game with San Diego. McGraw came on in relief, held the line, and Harrelson hit a homer to win it, 1-0. Over Memorial Day weekend, New York swept San Francisco four straight at home. Then they beat Los Angeles three in a row at Shea, followed by a three-game sweep at San Diego. After beating the Giants, 9-4 at Candlestick Park on June 10, they completed an 11-game winning streak. Gaylord Perry beat Gary Gentry, 7-2 the next day to end it.
The 11-game winning streak was the first defining moment for the 1969 New York Mets. First, crowds at Shea were out of control for the Giants and Dodgers. There was no vestige of old Brooklyn and Polo Grounds rooters there for the Californians. It was all Mets; foot-stomping, chanting, placard-waving, noise making. It was kids and grandparents, stockbrokers and schoolteachers. All sense of old Yankee Stadium decorum, like bored operagoers, was out the window. It was a rock concert, Hendrix going electric, “Day on the Green.” It was “Seav-uh, Seav-uh,” and “Lets go, Mets; let’s go, Mets!” With a lead late in the game they let loose with the old football plea for “DE-fense, DE-fense.”Girls danced, some even threatened to do a little more than that. Male fans did not object. Couples kissed, parents approved. It was a carnival, Mardi Gras.
But it was the Giants and the Dodgers. It was the old ghosts being exorcised after pasting some 170 defeats on the Mets over the previous seven seasons. For the very first time, the two great National League traditions had come to New York only to play a decided second fiddle to the Mets. It was not like these were bad clubs, either. Both would battle for the West Division crown until the end. Los Angeles had been down in 1967 and 1968, re-built, and featured a young, talented club which would form the great champions of the next decade. They made New York look like the veterans.
On May 30 Seaver won his seventh game, 4-3 over San Francisco, the second win of the 11-game streak. Gentry won the next day, 4-2. The sweep was completed in the next game, 5-4. Koosman stopped L.A. cold, 2-1. On June 3, Seaver fired a three-hitter to beat the team he rooted for as a kid, 5-2. Ed Kranepool hit a home run in the fifth, then another in the sixth. It was the first time the Mets had ever been above .500 in June.
On June 4, all bets were off. Los Angeles and New York went at it for 15 innings. As in the long, losing double-headers against the Mets’ and Dodgers’ of the Polo Grounds era, Mets fans stayed put; loud and exuberant. Only this time it was not just joy over “lovable losers.” In 15 innings New York held the line in an incredible 1-0 win to complete the sweep. Los Angeles had men on base all game but could not score them.
In what may have been the best play of the regular season, at least, Al Weis reversed gears to grab a ball deflected off the pitcher’s glove, then threw the Dodgers’ runner out at home plate on a bang-bang tag play. All the luck seemed to have swung towards the Mets. For the first time, people started thinking about contention. St. Louis was struggling so far, and what was going on at Shea Stadium appeared to many to have a divine touch to it! Flying to the West Coast afterwards, Seaver realized that the talk in St. Petersburg was for real.
In San Diego, Gentry stopped the Padres, 5-3. Koosman struck out 11 in a victory. Seaver won his 10th game of the season at Candlestick Park , 3-2 in 10 innings over the dangerous Giants. Ron Taylor picked up the save. Tommie Agee was hot. It was New York’s 11th straight win. After San Francisco finally ended the streak, the Mets (29-23) were solidly in second behind Chicago, and six ahead of the Cardinals.
The Cubs got off to a 35-16 (.868) start and were all getting endorsement deals. Leo Durocher had his own radio show, leading him to say little to the writers he considered beneath him. Sports Illustrated did a feature on their helmet-wearing “bleacher bums.”
“Pitching is still the name of the game, and the Mets have it,” said Montreal’s Rusty Staub, not quite ready to hand the division to Chicago. “In the old days of the Mets it wouldn’t have happened. They weren’t blood and guts, like these guys. Now I think they can win.”
“The Mets are always in the game with Seaver and Koosman,” said Ron Taylor.
Others still needed to be convinced. Seaver knew Pete Rose from All-Star Games, and casually mentioned that they might see each other in the play-offs. Rose looked at him like he was nuts, but Seaver told him, “Pete, we’ve got some guys who can get the ball over the plate.”
On Sunday, June 22, 55,862 came out for a double-header with St. Louis. Baseball was on fire, in no small part because of the Mets. That day, the 394,008 fans who attended games broke the all-time single-day record. The Mets looked “cool, loose, rich – like the old Yanks,” according to Angell, who may have been overdoing it a bit by this point, so enthused was he. With Koosman mowing ‘em down in the second game, Rod Gaspar threw Lou Brock out at home plate to save a 1-0 win.
“Brilliant baseball,” wrote Angell. “Day to remember.”
“The Mets have grown up,” said Los Angeles manager Walter Alston. “They no longer beat themselves. They hold onto one-run leads and they make the big plays.”
Sportswriter Joe Trimble called them the “best expansion team in Major League history, beyond a doubt.” It had taken “eight years and much patience,” but the whole roster aside from Agee and Grote was produced by their farm system.
Harrelson recalled that the West Coast series “was the biggest turnaround. Up to then, we had never played well against West Coast teams, especially the Dodgers and Giants. They always kicked our butts. This time they came in and we beat them in New York, then went out to the coast and beat them again. And that’s when we began to say, ‘hey, we’re competitive. Things are different.’ ”
In San Francisco, the Mets held a team meeting to address the issue of brushback pitches. Seaver and Koosman stepped up and responded when the other team tried to pitch New York tight, and “that sent a message that the Mets wouldn’t be intimidated . . .” recalled Ed Charles.
“Koosman would throw a baseball right through you,” recalled Swoboda. “Seaver would hit you, and Gentry was fearless.”
As the season played out, Ron Swoboda dealt with the frustration of platooning with Art Shamsky, while Rod Gaspar would come in as a defensive replacement. He felt the best way to deal with the situation was through action, not words. Rather than complain to Hodges, he asked Eddie Yost to hit him countless balls in the outfield in an effort to improve defensively. Yost would tire of hitting liners, sinkers, wall-bangers, stinging grounders and high pops to Swoboda, who worked on positioning, dealing with sunglasses, and setting up for throws.
It was an example of true professionalism on Swoboda’s part. He was willing to work hard in order to improve. Yet somehow in the strange, cliquish world of big league baseball, Hodges and his coaching staff did not see it that way. They thought Swoboda was trying to show them up, that his willingness to pay the price was like telling them what to do, to force their hand. It was a “Joe college” move. “High school Harry.” Attaboy, attaboy. The code of conduct on big league teams has seen some changes over the years, mainly because so many players are now collegians, but in 1969 there was still some of the same rough “tobacco juice” world John McGraw once defined.
On the other hand, Hodges went against the grain when he found out Don Cardwell threw a spitball, ordering the veteran to cease and desist. Most managers awarded cheating, in all its varied forms; the spitter, the “phantom swipe” of second on a double-play, stealing signs, picking up on what pitch was coming. Leo Durocher treated cheating like a religion.
Amos Otis, a hotshot prospect who had been forced out of position – to third base – was sent back to Tidewater in June. According to Ron Swoboda, Otis “never got a chance.” Also in June, the Mets pulled off a very important trade, acquiring power-hitting first baseman Donn Clendenon, 33. Clendenon had been a staple in Pittsburgh but recently dealt to Montreal as part of the expansion shake-up, then to Houston. It was the culmination of a long process that originally ticketed Atlanta third baseman Joe Torre for New York. Murphy went after Richie Allen of the Phillies but Philly wanted too much in return. Montreal then offered Clendenon for Gentry and McAndrew, but Murphy declined. Atlanta offered Torre, a native New Yorker who would have been a natural Met. Braves’ GM Paul Richards wanted Kranepool and Grote, but New York refused to let them go.
Torre would have solved the “third base problem” of 39 players at the “hot corner” since 1962. Many youngsters had been tried at third base without success, including a prospect named Danny Napoleon.
“Danny was no better at third than the real Napoleon was at Waterloo,” wrote Jack Lang of the Long Island Press (also The Sporting News’ Mets beat writer).
Clendenon was considered a malcontent in Houston, where as a black man he did not feel comfortable. On the June 15 trading deadline Houston all but dumped him to New York for Kevin Collins and three minor leaguers (one of whom, Steve Renko, had a creditable career).
“With one swing of the bat he could put us in the game or put us ahead,” said Koosman.
He was “loud and boisterous,” and it “didn’t take long for him to be a team leader,” acknowledged the man who now had to platoon with him, Kranepool.
“He became the first legitimate guy who could turn the game around for us with one swing,” said Bud Harrelson.
Clendenon knew Hodges. Prior to an exhibition game a few years earlier between his Pirates and Hodges’s Washington Senators, Clendenon sought out Hodges for advice because “he’s the best guy for any right-handed first baseman to copy . . . he will give you all the help he can. I had ‘stiff hands’ and was always told to use both hands when taking throws. Gil said it wasn’t necessary and showed me how to relax my hand and catch the ball with the glove.”
“Donn was not only a clubhouse lawyer, he was a <real> lawyer,” said Swoboda. “He was a member of the bar, an off-season lawyer for Scripto. Donn was a very educated guy. And he had a big mouth, he was always talking, always giving you (expletive deleted) about something, but it was wonderful, all good (expletive deleted).”
With Clendenon hitting from the right side, it allowed Hodges to platoon Kranepool against right-handed pitching. Clendenon was a clutch RBI man, and seemed to be the missing piece on a club already coming together. His addition to the team also seemed to provide social cohesion. Agee and Jones felt slightly isolated as black players. Clendenon was the kind of black athlete who seamlessly straddled the white and black worlds, and through him players mixed. Swoboda started to invite the three of them to his home. His wife would cook and they would “drink beer, eat crabs, and tell stories.” Seaver and his wife welcomed Donn to the Mets’ family.
Relief pitcher Ron Taylor was an electrical engineer who went on to become a doctor. Koosman had studied engineering. It was an educated group and they found kinship with Clendenon. The more educated Mets had the ability to communicate without flaunting their book smarts at those with less schooling.
Seaver, like many Mets, went to an all-white high school, but met blacks in Alaska and at USC. “On the Mets, I saw no racial friction at all, never a slur, never an insult,” Seaver recalled. “During the 1969 season, Cleon Jones, Tommie Agee, Ed Charles and Donn Clendenon each made significant contributions to our pennant drive. I didn’t think of them as black Mets. Just plain Mets.”
Clendenon took to Seaver immediately. When he saw him arrive in the clubhouse on game days he called him “the chubby right-hander.” Seaver would laugh and reply that he was still “growing” and the veteran Clendenon was just “jealous.”
Nancy Seaver reached out to the 6-4 first baseman, too. “I know who you are,” she told him when she first saw him at Shea Stadium. Clendenon was wearing a Jamaican shirt and vest. Clendenon pretended to put the moves on her. On another team, in another year, not long before that, it could have been big trouble; but Tom and Nancy thought he was the coolest dude they had ever seen.
Life was good, and it was great to be a Met.
This was a group of guys who symbolized the new era, what with a war going on and people thinking in different ways. “God, it was exciting, stimulating,” recalled Swoboda.
****
On June 27, the cops raided gay bars in Greenwich Village. Seven plainclothes and one uniformed police officer entered the Stonewall Inn near Sheridan Square. The bar was cleared out amid much anti-gay slurring. The atmosphere became tense, and in the street a confrontation ensued. Cops took to their nightsticks and started beating on the gays. A chant of “Gay Power” began. The protests went on for five days.
****
With Clendenon making an immediate offensive impact and, perhaps just as important solidifying the team socially, New York continued to play good ball throughout June. He drove in the leading or winning run in his first 16 games. New York took three of four from Philadelphia, three of four from St. Louis, then lost four of seven to the Phillies and Pittsburgh. They split a four-game set with St. Louis and finished the month with a 19-9 mark. Pittsburgh trailed them by three, the Cardinals by six.
The Pirates certainly posed a threat. They were led by the great Puerto Rican Hall of Fame right fielder Robert Clemente. When Walter O’Malley forced Rickey out of Brooklyn, he took over in Pittsburgh. One of the first things he did was bring in Clemente, one of the very first Latino players. It started a flood of great players from south of the border; Puerto Rico, Venezuela, the Dominican Republican and Mexico, among other countries.
Clemente was proud and sensitive. In 1960 he led Pittsburgh to the pennant and a thrilling World Series victory over the New York Yankees. When teammate Dick Groat won the Most Valuable Player award, Clemente ruffled feathers by accusing writers of not voting for him, presumably the more deserving choice, because of his race. In 1966 Clemente did win the MVP award. He was good for 200 hits a year despite being a hypochondriac, a source of amusement really since he always had a physical ailment of some kind, then delivered four sizzling line drive base hits.
As a right fielder, Clemente is probably without equal in baseball history. His throws from the right field corner to nail runners at third base, often on a direct line, are the stuff of legend. He could play the vines at Wrigley Field like nobody else. Because he toiled in out-of-the-way Pittsburgh before ESPN and cable sports, Clemente was not as ballyhooed as sluggers who hit more home runs: Mantle, Mays, Aaron, and Frank Robinson, to name a few. Carl Yastrzemski was never really at Clemente’s level, but being a white superstar in Boston during this time, he enjoyed fame that eluded Clemente.
First baseman/outfielder Willie “Pops” Stargell hailed from Encinal High School in Alameda, California. He was younger than Stargell, but a fan favorite who hit monster home runs, including one all-time tape measure job at Dodger Stadium. Stargell alternated between first and the outfield with Al Oliver, another major power hitter.
Outfielder Matty Alou was, like Clemente, always good for 200 hits, contending for the batting championship. He was a singles hitter from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, where he grew up with two other big league ballplayer-brothers, Jesus and Felipe; as well as pitching great Juan Marichal.
On the mound, Steve Blass had a below-average fast ball but above-average control and guile. Bob Veale was a big, overpowering left-hander. The Pirates had the tools to enter the race at any time.
On June 29, Seaver held all their big bats in check to run his record to12-3. He had not lost a game in over a month and was the best pitcher in either league so far. At career victory number 44, he now was the winningest pitcher in the club’s history.
Pittsburgh’s hopes took a big dive when New York swept them, 11-6 and 9-2, in a double-header to improve the Mets’ record to 45-34, 11 games over the .500 mark. New York City was swept up in Mets fever. A new report had recently indicated that the city was the center for severe inflation in America. Mayor Lindsay was in trouble, his city teetering towards economic freefall. But so much attention was diverted by the Mets that he was able to maintain optimism that, against all odds, he could win re-election in the fall.
“At the beginning of the season I thought it might be the same old stuff again,” recalled Kranepool. “But, when we won 11 in a row against some good teams I knew things were changing.”
The Jones-Agee show was paying off big time, as well. “We put in a lot of work over the winter working on our hitting,” said Jones. “I started watching Tommie. There were no films then, but I watched him and figured out what he needed to do. All I had to do was holler at him when he was hitting and tell him to kick his foot toward the plate so he could stay back. That was the only time he ever listened to me.”
The platooning was working out. “A baseball player wants to play – all the time,” was Art Shamsky’s feeling on the matter. “While you might have some personal feeling about the situation, most of us back then never complained. I didn’t, although I was frustrated at times.”
A Spring Training injury had set Shamsky back, but by June he was just happy to be part of something that looked to be very special. Clendenon “didn’t like” platooning. “Once you platoon you get labeled. It’s a difficult way to play. Hodges knew how I felt, and I respected his honesty when he and I talked about it. But no player I knew liked it.”
Hodges did not want or need them to. He had not platooned with the Dodgers. He knew his guys wanted to play the game and would have been disappointed if they enjoyed sitting on the bench. He also knew they were maximizing efforts in righty-lefty and situational match-ups. He had key pinch-hitters, pinch-runners and defensive replacements at the ready. Over the course of the long, hot summer they would be refreshed.
Meanwhile, as the delightful Chicago spring was turning into the broiling hot, humid Midwestern summer, the Chicago Cubs were playing the same nine guys nine innings day after day; pitching the same four guys as many innings as they could go, nine if possible. Leo the taskmaster was prodding them like a slave overseer.
The first crucial day
On July 8, 1962, the New York Mets made three throwing errors in one inning, allowed five unearned runs in an inning, lost to St. Louis by 14 runs, and in the process allowed 41-year old Stan Musial to hit no less than three home runs against them. They were 25-59 (.280).
Precisely seven years later, on July 8, 1969 the Mets woke up with a 54-34 record, five games back of the Chicago Cubs. The rest of the National League East was effectively out of it, in small measure because in head-to-head games with New York, they had fared poorly. St. Louis, the pre-season favorite, suddenly looked old at 40-44, seven and a half back of the Mets. The Mets had knocked Pittsburgh off. The Pirates were floundering at 38-43. The Phillies and Expos were playing out the string.
They were calling the other division the “wild, wild West,” as Atlanta, San Francisco, Cincinnati, Los Angeles and even Houston were all in the hunt. In the American League, the Baltimore Orioles were absolutely dominating everybody they played. The Yankees in their greatest year were never better than Earl Waver’s juggernaut. It looked like all the excitement over a possible Mets-Cubs showdown; a duel between the Braves, Giants and Reds; or the Kabuki dance in the A.L. West (where Oakland would throughout the season creep within three or so of Minnesota, get swept by the Twins, drop eight back, only to try again); none of it would matter in the wake of Baltimore dominance.
The most optimistic of Mets fans began to formulate the idea of a Mets-Orioles World Series, only because the January Super Bowl had featured a New York team against a highly-favored Baltimore powerhouse, but this still looked mighty far-fetched . . .
At 9:30 in the morning on July 8, 25-year old Jerry Koosman awoke after a restless night. On that afternoon he was scheduled to face the Cubs in the first of a three-game series. It was the first truly crucial series in club history. A Chicago sweep would give them an eight-game lead, not insurmountable, but the psychological damage to New York would be a major blow. A three-game Mets sweep meant they would be just two out, with the wind at their sails. A 2-1 series would not make for a huge differential either way, although if the Cubs got the two they would call it a big win. The problem for Chicago, however, was that they studiously avoided any acknowledgement that this meant more than all the other games they played. To do so would elevate the Mets into their stratosphere. Leo Durocher had no intention of paying the Mets any of his hard-earned respect.
The Mets needed to avoid what was happening that year in Oakland. Like New York, the A’s had been doormats for years in Kansas City before the move to California. In 1969 they featured a talented young squad. Minnesota was, like Chicago, a strong, veteran club. The Athletics would creep close, but Minnesota would sweep them in several crucial series. Their 13-5 mark against Oakland marked eight of the nine games they beat the A’s by at season’s end.
Koosman, leading the National League with a 1.67 earned run average, would be opposing Ferguson Jenkins in one of the best pitching match-ups of the year. Don Kessinger, Glenn Beckert and Billy Williams of Chicago were all hitting over .300. Ron Santo was among the league’s RBI leaders, and Ernie Banks was on pace to drive in 100 runs. Randy Hundley was a star catcher and capable with the bat. Even Jenkins had homered off Seaver early in the season. Koosman had his work cut out for him.
Chicago’s only weaknesses: ex-Met Jim Hickman in right field, and the unknown rookie Don Young in center. Young was walking on eggshells. Leo Durocher gave him no leeway, no rookie comforts as he had for Willie May 18 years earlier. He had impressed nobody so far and needed to prove himself, especially since he had replaced the talented, temperamental Adolfo Phillips in center field.
New York had two .300 hitters: Cleon Jones and part-timer Art Shamsky, but they featured the hardest throwing pitching staff in baseball: Seaver, Koosman, Gentry and Ryan all throwing gas, plus some of the second line guys were no slouches either. By 12:30, Mets coach Joe Pignatano, a one-time Dodger and member of the original 1962 losers, hit practice grounders. Shea was almost full to capacity along with a World Series-level contingent of press gathered around the batting cage.
“There are more writers here than at Cape Kennedy,” one of them remarked. 900 miles to the south, the Apollo 11 astronauts were in Florida, about a week away from a full-scale landing on the Moon.
“It looks like the World Series,” another writer said. “Everybody’s here.”
One prominent member of the press in attendance was the bombastic Howard Cosell. Cosell was a Brooklyn attorney who decided he wanted to become a sports broadcaster. ABC carried the Baseball Game of the Week on Saturday afternoons. The man in charge was a blustery New Yorker with a heart of gold named Edgar Scherick. Scherick gave Cosell his shot, thus launching his career. Cosell’s star was made in a series of hilarious, half-put-on interviews with the equally bombastic heavyweight boxing champion Cassius Clay. When Clay became not only a Muslim but also a member of the controversial black Nation of Islam sect, Cosell respected his religious views and was one of the first to call him Muhammad Ali. When Ali evaded the draft, refusing to serve in Vietnam Cosell – a major liberal – called him courageous. Later, Cosell would be in Munich when Yasser Arafat’s murderers blew up the Israeli Olympic wrestling team. Cosell begged to do the reports so he could describe “those Muslim faces,” and for that reason was denied.
In 1968-69, with “Broadway Joe” Namath popularizing pro football above all previous experience, Scherick saw the future and tried to grab it. He started Monday Night Football. Cosell became the face of MNF. Scherick ultimately lost a network power struggle with Roone Arledge, the man history says was behind the concept. Scherick went to Hollywood, producing The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three with Walter Matthau, among numerous other hits.
Cosell claimed baseball was boring, but he obviously knew a good story when it stared him in the face. The Mets were the story in the here and now. He conducted a national interview with Gil Hodges for ABC, then falsely announced to a crowd of kids begging for autographs that after the game Hodges would be “outside with a ball for each of you.”
One of the only members of the press Casey Stengel ever despised, Cosell was the “man you loved to hate.” Despite attracting boos and catcalls wherever he went, Cosell was convinced that he was loved.
Ron Santo, the Chicago third baseman, stared at the Mets’ line-up card posted on the dugout wall. He shook his head.
“I know Los Angeles won with pitching,” he said. “But this is ridiculous.”
But Ernie Banks did not disrespect the Mets. “People used to laugh at the Mets,” Bank said. “But not any more. Now they have a good team. They have good pitching and they play together. People laughed a few years ago, but the Mets play together now.”
Banks heard the Mets’ theme song, “Meet the Mets,” and hummed along to it with his own riff on the lyrics: “Beat the Mets, beat the Mets. Come on out and beat the Mets.”
He paused to observe his surrounding. “What a beautiful day for baseball,” he said. “New York. The melting pot. The Great White Way. Let’s go. What’s going on?”
On Broadway during this era it was Oh, Calcutta, Hair, and Jesus Christ Superstar. The times were changing. Just a few years earlier Sir Laurence Olivier had delivered a performance in the traditional Othello described by those in the audience as the finest acting of all time.
When Banks expressed an interest in such racy fare, one of the writers asked if he was a “dirty old man” underneath his Mr. Sunshine exterior.
“No, no,” answered Banks, smiling. “You can’t say that. What will all these kids think?”
He was asked what kept him so exuberant. “You have to be happy, and sports does it,” said Banks. “What kind of world would this be without sports, without baseball? Why, you’d have people at each other all the time.”
Mrs. Joan Payson paid for the Mets’ game to be transmitted by a special radio broadcast to her temporary vacation home in Maine, where she was staying. What she heard was a pitcher’s duel, with Jenkins and Koosman working fast and furious; a flurry of strikeouts in a 0-0 game until Ed Kranepool, booed each time his name was announced, lofted one over the right field fence to give New York a 1-0 lead.
Ernie Banks answered with a solo shot of his own and it was 1-1. In the seventh, Koosman walked Jenkins, of all people. Durocher manufactured a run via a sacrifice bunt and Glenn Beckert’s single to make it 2-1.
In the stands, a fan named Joe Delberti displayed a sign reading “UNBELIEVABLE.” Two attractive brunettes paraded a placard asking, “WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO MARV THRONEBERRY?”
In the eighth, Jim Hickman took Koosman deep, something he sure did not do much of in his New York days. With the score 3-1 and Jenkins still firing seeds, Mets fans began to resign themselves to the fact that they were going to be six back.
When the Cubs took the field holding a two-run lead in the ninth, Mets third base coach Yogi Berra passed Banks and said, “We’re gonna get three in the ninth and beat you.” This time Ernie remained silent.
As this was happening, a man in the Ridgewood section of Queens named Frank Graddock, who had been drinking and watching the game all afternoon, observed his wife, Margaret, casually flip the station to her favorite daytime serial, Dark Shadows. On that day viewers would learn whether Quentin, who carried the curse of the werewolf, would be able to keep the mummy’s hand he had been pursuing through the last few episodes. Frank was uninterested in Quentin, the curse, or the mummy’s hand.
In the ninth inning, Hodges pinch-hit .245-hitting Ken Boswell for Jerry Koosman. Boswell was a pull-hitter with some power. Cubs center fielder Don Young played him in right-center, a little too deep. Boswell had a bad hand. After working Jenkins to two-and-two, he hit a fly ball to straightaway center. If his hand did not hurt, he may have hit it right to Young. If the Cubs’ advance scouts had known, Young would have been stationed right where the ball was hit. Instead, Young froze like a deer caught in the headlights. Supposedly a defensive specialist – Young’s bat was certainly not exceptional – he lost the baseball for a crucial split-second in the mid-summer haze and background of white shirts in the crowd.
Kessinger and Beckert saw Young’s fatal hesitation and tried to make up for it, but Boswell’s lazy pop was, as they say, a line drive double in the scorebook. Suddenly, more than 50,000 Mets fans made mental note that Chicago had committed the kind of faux pas previously reserved for their guys. Reservedly watching the fast-paced pitcher’s battle, their guys striking out, popping up and weakly grounding out against a future Hall of Famer in his prime, now they came to their feet; imploring, hoping, desperately shouting.
In Queens, Frank Graddock was watching Quentin try to decide whether to keep the mummy’s paw or return it in exchange for advice from the witch Angelique, since she was an expert on how to shake the werewolf’s curse. Before this information could be made known to Margaret, Graddock switched the station back to Shea Stadium. The tying run was coming to the plate.
Nobody got up in the Cubs’ bullpen. Durocher’s creed was finish what you start. Out in the mid-summer sun Jenkins, perspiring and toiling, missed with two balls. Hundley went out to chat with him. Durocher watched stoically. Agee then popped up to Banks for the first out.
Clendenon came in to pinch-hit for light-swinging Bobby Pfeil, who was playing in Bud Harrelson’ place while he did his two-week military training stint. Clendenon tended to strike out a lot and at the time actually held the National League record for a season, a mark Bobby Bonds would break. Even though a home run would have tied the game, Clendenon did not feel he could handle Jenkins’s still-formidable stuff, so he choked up on the bat, hitting a liner to the warning track. Maybe, had he not choked up he would have cleared the wall but then again, maybe he would have swung and missed.
Young raced after it, this time without hesitancy. Ball, glove and fence met at the same time. The ball landed in Young’s glove for a tantalizing millisecond, but immediately popped out. The crowd held its breath, the “snow coned” white baseball held precariously in the webbing of Young’s mitt, then let out a roar that could be heard in West Islip, Long Island when it plopped to the ground.
Or was that gentle Leo cursing out Young?
Boswell had to hold at second and only made it to third, but his run was not the material thing. Clendenon reached second with one out and Shea was a madhouse. So was the Graddock household. Frank hit Margaret when, just as the Mets threatened with two on and one out, she tried to switch back to Dark Shadows, hoping to observe Angelique explaining how she, too, had once been bitten by a vampire.
Cleon Jones came to the plate, hitless all day, but Jenkins was withering. He smoked a line drive double over Ron Santo’s head, scoring Boswell and Clendenon to tie it. The Cubs bullpen was up by now as Durocher went out to talk it over with Jenkins. He kept him in the game. Shea throbbed with emotion. The noise, the fevered passions, were unlike anything ever felt at Yankee Stadium. It was Ebbets with Duke at the plate, Jackie dancing off third; “Broadway Joe” eyeing the Raiders’ secondary with a minute or so left, the goal post within his sights; it was all of it all rolled into one.
The Jets, in fact, were gathering for the 1969 training camp at Hofstra University on Long Island. According to sportswriter Dick Schaap, they were watching, cheering for the Mets on a television set in assistant coach Walt Michaels’s room.
Durocher ordered Art Shamsky to be walked. Wayne Garrett grounded to Beckert as hoped for, but it was not hard enough to turn two. Beckert threw Garrett out at first while Jones went to third, Shamsky to second.
Ed Kranepool, the symbol of all those bad Mets teams - of Casey Stengel asking, “Can’t anybody here play this game?” – the bonus baby from James Monroe High who never became the hometown hero; the man who just played out the string; stepped to the plate. No time for the usual boos. Cheers resounded as his name was called.
With J.C. Martin on deck, the percentage play would have been to walk him, but Durocher was not playing percentages. He stuck with the laboring Jenkins and showed disdain for Kranepool by ordering his man to pitch to him.
In Queens, Frank Graddock punched his wife so hard she had to crawl into her room. He switched from Dark Shadows back to the game. Margaret’s injuries were fatal. The next day Graddock would be charged with first-degree murder.
Jenkins missed high on the first pitch. Then he came back low and outside. Kranepool normally would have taken it, but he was guessing that way and wanted to punch an opposite-field hit between Kessinger, playing towards the middle, and Santo. But the pitch was farther out of his hitting zone than he thought, and his efforts were weak. The bat almost left his hand, but contact was made, resulting in a lazy pop that eluded Kessinger, landing in the outfield grass. Jones romped home.
The Mets raced out of their dugout. Koosman was the unlikely winning pitcher. The celebration had all the earmarks of a World Series victory, and the roar of the crowd was mind-boggling.
It was 4:14 P.M. on the afternoon of Tuesday, July 8, and at that precise instant, the Mets became the official passion of New York City; the team relegating the mediocre Yankees to backpage status; and the miraculous nature of the 1969 baseball season manifested itself as self-evident truth!
The 11-game winning streak of May and June; beating the Dodgers and Giants; all of that had been important, but now the ghosts of “Willie, Mickey and the Duke,” as the song goes, were replaced by a new generation, a “new breed.” It was like John Kennedy’s “new frontier” come to life. It was the “great beginnings” from the opening of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, embodied by Richard Strauss’s “Sprach Zarathustra.”
No metaphor, no description is too hyperbolic to describe what was happening. It was that huge. In a city that had seen everything, it was, if not new, so different, so refreshing and wonderful as to be a . . . miracle!
Clendenon, Jones and Kranepool went on “Kiner’s Corner,” but nobody, not even Ralph Kiner, seemed able to put into words what was going on. Jerry Koosman was equally flabbergasted in the winning clubhouse, muttering with a wide-eyed smile, “Unbelievable, unbelievable.”
After sipping some beer, he tried to do better than that. “They were marvelous,” he said of his teammates. “I was wild all day. I felt sure of myself, but I didn’t have good control. I was battling myself.”
Then, for the very first time, the question was dared ask: “Do you think the club’s going all the way now?”
Koosman looked stunned, as if the idea had not occurred to him, but instead of giving a cliché like, “We’re just playing one day at a time,” he told the reporter what was in his heart: “I don’t see why we just can’t keep winning and winning.”
“The Cubs went out there patting their pockets when they took the field in the ninth,” Cleon Jones said. “They were already starting to count that 25 grand.” The potential share for each player in the upcoming league Championship Series and World Series was estimated at $25,000.
“Nobody gave up,” he continued, talking about his teammates. “This is a young club and it believes it can win. We’ve got the momentum now. We beat their big man. Now we’ve got our big man. We’re in command now. We can relax.”
“Hey, don’t save the fireworks until the ninth inning for me,” said the Mets’ “big man,” Tom Seaver, dressing a few stalls away. “I’ll take a 9-0 lead in the first inning any time. I’ll finesse it the rest of the way.”
At Camp Drum in Watertown, New York, Seaver’s “Buddy,” now known as Sergeant Derrel McKinley Harrelson, heard that the Mets pulled their game out. He thought he was being kidded, since the last he heard they trailed 3-1.
****
In 1962, the Los Angeles Dodgers held what looked to be a safe lead with a week to go, but the San Francisco Giants came back and caught them, forcing a play-off. After blowing a 4-2 lead in the ninth inning at Dodger Stadium to lose the National League pennant in the third game of the play-off, the Dodgers trudged into their clubhouse and engaged in what has been described as the all-time “meltdown” in baseball history.
Walt Alston locked himself in his office like one of the survivors in Night of the Living Dead while Don Drysdale pounded on the door, trying to get at him with his fists. Booze flowed and with it all the frustrations, mostly aimed at poor Walter, who despite having won the 1955 and 1959 World Series had as much respect in Hollywood as the original screenwriter of a movie on its eighth re-write.
Leading the chorus against him was the Dodgers’ “celebrity coach,” Leo Durocher. The whole sordid affair was detailed the following year by famed L.A. sportswriter Melvin Durslag in an article penned for Look magazine called “Manager with a hair shirt.” Alston fended off the encroachments of ex-manager Charlie Dressen, brought in as a coach, when he won the 1959 World Series, but that was followed by two disappointing seasons as the club transitioned from the Brooklyn veterans to the Los Angeles youth movement.
Durocher, fired a few years earlier by the New York Giants, looked like a baseball exile in Elba, er, Beverly Hills. He did some broadcasting, but nobody hired him to manage. The word was out, that he was being “blackballed.” Durocher got Durslag, who had a reputation for writing nasty articles advocating the positions of various people – Durocher, Lakers owner Jack Kent Cooke – to write an article called “An Explanation to My Friends.” In it, Durocher explained that he was available, not being hired was not his idea, and that since he lived in Beverly Hills, why, the job of the expansion Angels or the Dodgers would suit him just fine, thank you.
Angels owner Gene Autry, a decent man, wanted nothing to do with Durocher and hired Bill Rigney. Walter O’Malley, who was not a particularly decent man, wanted to steal some thunder from the Angels when the team moved into Dodger Stadium. He hired Durocher as a “celebrity coach.”
“Though Alston had nothing to do with Leo’s appointment, he was solicited to make the announcement,” wrote Durslag. “After a flight from Darrtown to California, he had the privilege of revealing to the world the newest candidate for his job.”
Whenever the club performed below expectations, Alston was allowed to twist in the wind amid rumors of Durocher’s impending hiring. “The Dodgers never plan to fire Alston,” said one observer. “They prefer to torment him.”
Durocher got tired of Durslag’s constant lobbying for Leo and rebuked him, saying, “You’re pretty sensitive about Durocher’s feelings. What about mine?” But that was rare. Alston was as stoic as they come.
When the 1962 pennant was blown, the Dodgers’ players were furious over the loss of the $12,000 World Series share, real money back then. Durocher stoked their insecurities like Huey Long at a Bayou political rally, portraying Alston as the man taking food out of their families’ mouths. He was like Javert in Les Miserables, playing the baseball version of j’accuse, his goal being Alston’s head under a symbolic guillotine.
The Dodgers retained Alston, probably because they had just set the all-time Major League attendance record. The strange Kabuki theatre between Alston and Durocher existed until 1964, when after winning a third World Series Alston finally had control of the Dodgers. Durocher, like Napoleon, just went off to plot his comeback until Chicago came calling in 1966.
Now, on July 8, 1969 he presided over a clubhouse that had repercussions of that classic Dodger Stadium meltdown seven years earlier. This time, he was on the hot spot. Unlike Alston, who took it like a man and accepted blame whether he deserved it or not, Durocher always looked for somebody to blame, to project his own sins upon. His target: Don Young.
Several of his teammates came by to offer some condolence to Young, but not Durocher. The atmosphere was toxic. Young endeavored to dress and leave as soon as possible. One teammate suggested drinking as the best option. When reporters confronted Durocher, he exploded.
“That kid in center field,” he told the Chicago writers. “Two little fly balls. He just stands there watching one, and he gives up on the other.” A string of obscenities followed; foul words from a foul man.
“If a man can’t catch a fly ball, you don’t deserve to win he,” continued Leo, motioning to the dejected Fergie Jenkins. “Look at him. He threw his heart out. You won’t see a better-pitched game. And that kid in center field gives it away on him. It’s a disgrace.”
Ron Santo picked up on his manager’s theme and threw his teammate “under the bus.” “He was just thinking about himself, not the team,” he said of Young. “He had a bad day at the bat, so he’s got his head down. He’s worrying about his batting average and not the team. All right, he can keep his head down, and he can keep right on going, out of sight for all I care. We don’t need that kind of thing.”
Santo fired his spikes against the floor. “I don’t know who Leo has in mind to play center field, but I hope I can sell him on Jim Hickman,” he continued, “Any ball Jim reaches, you can bet your money he’ll hold onto.”
Santo was on a roll. “It’s ridiculous,” he stated. “There’s no way the Mets can beat us. Just no way. It’s a shame losing to an infield like that. Why, I wouldn’t let that infield play in Tacoma.”
Jenkins showed class, unlike Durocher or Santo. “With all those people on a bright day, the center fielder is in a constant battle with the sun,” he said. “I thought Young recovered quickly. After all, he had to find it before he could chase it.”
That night, Young returned to his hotel room at the Waldorf-Astoria and, as advised, did a “little bit o’ drinkin’ ” with teammate Rich Nye. Aside from his fielding blunders, Young’s batting average at this point in the 1969 season was a measly .228. Chicago sportswriter Rich Talley called him on the phone to ask whether he lost the ball in the sun? Did his two strikeouts and two pop outs affect him on defense, as Santo alleged?
“No,” said Young. “I just lost the game for us. That’s all.”
Talley’s column of July 9 read: “Young has a history of ‘getting down’ on himself. He is not a confident ballplayer. He has been happy with the Cubs, but never quite believed it and always seemed to be wondering when it was going to end. It may have ended yesterday.”
****
That night, the Yankees lost the second game of a twi-night doubleheader to fall 19 back of Baltimore. As the Yankees were trudging back into their desultory clubhouse, the first edition of the New York Times was about to go on sale. The Mets were the front page story in the “paper of record,” the paper that publishes, “All the news that’s fit to print.” The Times had not even deemed the Mets to be a sports story in their early years, preferring to make the comical Casey and his quotations a series of features on the art of losing.
Three years earlier, respected Times sportswriter Leonard Koppett wrote a lengthy essay titled, “A Yankee Dynasty Can Never Come Back” when the Bronx Bombers finished dead last, 28 1/2 games behind the Orioles. In 1968 the Yankees appeared to have made a comeback of sorts, but by mid-1969 they folded their tents. Koppett’s premise, at least for now and for a number of years to come, was as right as rain.
The previous front page treatment given the Mets by the New York Times had been in 1962, when they lost their first nine games. This was their first winning front page. It was a glorious day for the Mets and their fans. They were filled with optimism, having won the first crucial baseball game in their history, pulling within four games of the Chicago Cubs, a team just beginning to come apart at the seams.
Scheduled to start the next night: Tom Seaver.
The birth of a true New York Sports Icon
On July 9, 1965, the Houston Astros defeated the New York Mets for the seventh straight time that season, 6-2, behind a sensational teenager named Larry Dierker. Houston scored five runs in the second inning when Mets second baseman Chuck Hiller and shortstop Roy McMillan made errors.
29 hours and 45 minutes after Lindsey Nelson announced, “It’s absolute bedlam. You could not believe it. It’s absolute bedlam,” when Ed Kranepool drove in Cleon Jones to beat Chicago 4-3, another event occurred which utterly eclipsed that one. It was at 9:55 P.M. on Wednesday, July 9, the Year of Our Lord 1969. In the pantheon of greatness reserved only for that most heroic of all heroes, the New York sports superstar; “in the arena” as Theodore Roosevelt liked to call it, the bright lights of Broadway, the Great White Way . . . and Shea Stadium illuminating him in all his splendor; well, he is rare indeed and rarer still is his debut.
Olivier as Othello, the audience gasping in astonishment at his range.
MacArthur returned from the wars, our freedoms his gift, our thanks washing over him.
Gehrig telling a full house of sobbing mothers, kids and grown men that he was the “luckiest man on the face of the Earth.”
. . .
It started, maybe not as a normal day for George Thomas Seaver, previously a resident of Fresno, California; a Marine recruit and student at the University of Southern California; happily married husband of the former Nancy Lynn McIntyre; and now popular resident of a pleasant apartment complex in Bayside, Queens. He knew when he woke up on this morning that his task would be to stop the angry, talented offensive powerhouse that was the 1969 Chicago Cubs. He knew he and his team had some momentum. At 46-34, they trailed Chicago (52-32) by four games. A win meant three out, a loss five. Simple math.
Seaver was a New York Times guy, so he saw the front page headline declaring the 4-3 victory the previous day. Some guys were Post readers, or the Daily News, or any number of other papers in and around the tri-state, Metropolitan New York area. Some players – most probably most - were not newspaper guys at all.
Seaver was a man who read the front page first, whether his team was the lead story or not. He needed his fix of politics, world events, and human interest. In the summer of 1969, the Moon launch was big news, just 11 days away as it would turn out. There were the “body count” stories from Vietnam; President Nixon trying to turn up the pressure on the North Vietnamese; behind-the-scenes machinations of the National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, who seemed to have a bigger role than Secretary of State William Rogers.
This guy Kissinger, he was an odd one. He seemed capable of playing either side of the fence. He had come down from Harvard to work for Nelson Rockefeller (a moderate Republican), then offered his services to the Kennedys (liberal Democrats), apparently been spurned by the Johnson Administration (hawkish Democrats), and now had fallen in with Nixon (conservative Republicans). He was Jewish. Nixon was not known to be all that fond of Jews. Then again, Kissinger was not religious. His German accent never diluted despite having come to New York City as a refugee from Hitler at age nine. It was disquietly reminiscent of the Peter Sellers character in Dr. Strangelove. Or was that based on Wernher von Braun? It got confusing.
Seaver liked to read the editorials, too. The Times was solidly Left-wing, anti-war, against Nixon, and made no bones about it. Seaver, the Marine and son of a business executive, was a patriot who supported his country, but the casualty rates from Vietnam were very hard to live with, and had been for a few years now. Seaver was just not sure anymore.
But the sports section gave him reason to smile; something to be carefree about. He was living a dream, he and his teammates. He sometimes had to pinch himself. Seaver embodied the confident athlete with the press, a leader among teammates, but deep down he was still a fan watching Sandy Koufax from the Dodger Stadium fans, or struggling even to get high school hitters out on the dusty fields of Fresno.
The previous day Seaver came home and watched the Yankees lose to Baltimore on television with his father Charles, the one-time champion of a golf tournament named after one of the Mets’ minority owners, Herbert Walker. Tom and his dad stayed up until after midnight catching up.
“Seaver is educated, amiable, articulate, which separates him from the majority,” wrote Dick Schaap and Paul Zimmerman in the entertaining book The Year the Mets Lost Last Place, which detailed the nine crucial days in mid-July of 1969 when the club materialized into a contender.
“Two or three times a year,” Seaver was quoted in the book, “I can throw the ball just where I want, as hard as I want, with just the right motion. Two or three times a year, you put it all together.”
In the early afternoon of July 9, two events occurred. Schaap and Zimmerman noted that they would not have happened in previous years. A New York Daily News photographer arrived at Ed Kranepool’s home to take pictures of his family. In Central Park, Tommie Agee (batting .279 on July 9) and several teammates conducted a baseball clinic before rows and rows of teenaged boys. A year before, nobody wanted to take Kranepool’s photo, and the kids “would have been trying not to laugh” at Agee telling them to hit while he himself batted .217 with only 17 runs batted in. At one point, Agee went 34 at-bats without a hit.
“I wanted to explode when the season ended,” said Agee.
Agee, who played football at Grambling, spent the winter of 1968-69 in a batting cage in Mobile, Alabama with Cleon Jones and Hank Aaron’s brother, Tommy.
“The old Mets are dead,” he said as the season began to play out. “The ‘new breed’ is here, baby. I brought it here with me. It took me a year to get it going, but it’s here.”
Agee fancied himself, the “new breed,” part of something that Joe Namath had started.
“I met him at Bachelors III one day last winter,” Agee told Dick Schaap and Paul Zimmerman. “I go up to him and introduce myself. He’s sitting at the bar with a beautiful girl on his right. She’s dressed in chinchilla. Joe leans over after a while and, you know, he’s talking to me like a hippie or something.”
“You know, Tommie,” Namath told Agee. “I’ve got a problem, I’m in a fix. You see this girl on my right. Well, she’s waiting for me to take her home. You see that girl at the end of the bar. Well, she’s waiting for me to take her home. But that’s not all. I just got a phone call from my girlfriend and she says she’s on the way down here.”
“Joe says he’s got a problem,” the bachelor Agee said, shaking his head. “I mean, I’d like to have a problem like that.”
If anybody was jealous, it must have been Mickey Mantle. Married to his high school sweetheart, he wanted to live like the swinger Namath, but every time he went out on the town with a girl other than his wife the tabloid columnists wrote about it.
At the Waldorf-Astoria that afternoon, a press conference was held in Ron Santo’s room. The subject: cutting remarks he made of his teammate, Don Young. Dressed in a black knit sports shirt and checkered-and-black slacks, Santo expressed remorse.
“Don Young and I talked for an hour today,” said Santo. “I apologized to him then and I want to make a public apology now for what I said yesterday. I was upset. There had been a lot of pressure before the game from newsmen, radio and television. Then we lost the game the way we did and when I saw Donnie walking out of the clubhouse five minutes after the game was over, I just lost my head. I said he’d put his head down between his legs because of his hitting. I was wrong. I said it because it had happened to me when I was on a losing ballclub. I fought myself so hard at the plate that when I went to the field I forgot about fielding and I caused the team to lose ball games. I thought the same thing had happened to Donnie, but it really didn’t.
“Donnie has done too much for us. He’s too good a kid and too good a competitor. You’ve got to be a competitor to get as mad as he got at himself yesterday. He walked out of the clubhouse because he couldn’t bear to face his teammates.
“We had a long talk. Very emotional. I knew I was wrong. I couldn’t sleep last night thinking about it. I tried to convince myself that I was right but I knew I wasn’t.”
When Ken Boswell arrived at Shea Stadium that day, he relaxed with a newspaper before preparing for the pre-game rituals. When he read the story about Frank Graddock killing his wife so he could watch the ninth inning the day before, it began to seep into him that the Mets were bigger than they realized they were.
With Seaver on the hill, he was naturally the subject of many of the pre-game queries. His ex-high school and Mets teammate, Dick Selma, now with Chicago, was approached for some obligatory comments.
“I was the guy who told the Mets about Tom,” Selma told Dick Schaap at Shea Stadium. “I told Al Lyons <a Met scout> that this kid could pitch in the biggies when Tom was at USC. I knew he was ready ‘cause I knew what he had inside. He’s a good pitcher now, but he’s really no better than when he came up. That’s how good he was to start with.”
Seaver’s opponent on that day was Ken Holtzman, the man he beat out for the last roster spot on the Alaska Goldpanners. That meant Ron Swoboda would get the start in right field. Rod Gaspar knew that this meant he might get some playing time. Up until July 9, he had thrown out seven runners with his strong throwing arm, including the Cardinals’ Lou Brock in a 1-0 New York win.
By 5:45 P.M., Shea Stadium’s parking lot was full and the stands were mostly full. The excitement and air of anticipation was at a fever pitch. It was a World Series atmosphere. Leo Durocher, who saw it all long before this night, was non-plussed, playing gin rummy in his office with old friend Barney Kremenko of the New York Journal-American. With a mass of writers and TV people on hand, Joe Reichler, an assistant to new Commissioner of Baseball Bowie Kuhn, entered to ask if, maybe, possibly, could he, uh, come out and say a few words? Durocher gave Reichler the “bum’s rush” in favor of his gun rummy match. Reichler asked if Durocher would sign on to a post-season tour of Vietnam. Durocher ignored him.
Since Durocher’s firing in New York after the 1955 season, his great protégé Willie Mays had played for five successors, and not without problems. Alvin Dark, who skippered San Francisco’s 1962 pennant winners, was a Southerner who apparently had problems with black and Latino ballplayers.
“They just a different kine,” he drawled.
Durocher was asked about a recent run-in between Mays and his new manager, Clyde King, succeeding Herman Franks after four years.
“Anybody who tries to manage Willie is crazy,” said Durocher. “You don’t manage Mays. You just put him in the line-up every day and let him play. When I wanted to say something to him about something he’d done wrong in the field, I never took a smile off my face while I was talking.”
Once Durocher and Mays attended a father-and-son dinner in Hackensack, New Jersey. Durocher drove to Mays’s apartment up on Coogan’s Bluff, where he was playing stickball with about 150 kids. Mays jumped into Durocher’s back seat and said, “Drive on.”
At the dinner a small boy asked Mays who the greatest center fielder was. Like Dennis Quaid playing Gordo Cooper in The Right Stuff, Mays just dead-panned, “You’re looking at him.”
Durocher was reminded of pitcher Sal Maglie. Durocher abused Maglie’s Italian heritage. “When I went to the mound,” he recalled, “I used to call Maglie everything I could think of and get him so mad the veins on his neck would bulge.”
Maglie would be so peeved at Durocher he would pitch out of jams just to spite him, then offer to fight Leo in the dugout. Leo would just smile to himself. Durocher was a 1940s and ‘50s guy, managing in the 1960s. The profound difference in these eras was far more than just the passage of 10 or 20 years. His players were now the “new breed.” If he thought his old school ways, his psychology with Durocher or handling of Mays, would work with this bunch, he would discover it did not. It certainly had not worked with Don Young.
After batting practice, the Cubs held a player’s only meeting in which Santo apologized to Young in front of his teammates. Many managers would have put Young back in the line-up to boost his confidence. Not so Leo. A little-known nobody named Jimmy Qualls was penciled in to start in center field. Durocher was Durocher, and he was back in New York, his old stomping grounds. Finally, he relented and gave some time to the reporters.
“I didn’t ask Young what happened on those fly balls. I never criticize a kid for making a bad play in the field,” he said 24 hours after having done precisely that. “Don’s still my center fielder against left-handed pitchers.”
Qualls was a 22-year old rookie who had just been called up from Tacoma of the Pacific Coast League. He was only now starting to get his swing down, having missed two weeks to serve with his Reserve unit in Stockton, California. In the Mets’ clubhouse, Qualls’s surprise start left Seaver, Grote and pitching coach Rube Walker looking for a scouting report. Without any computer databases or Internet searches available, they had to rely on Bobby Pfeil, the only one to have seen him hit. Pfeil recommended “hard stuff” – fast balls and sliders – as opposed to curves and change-ups.
“He can get his bat on the ball,” he told Seaver.
Seaver, preparing to go out for his warm-ups, passed coach Eddie Yost, catching up on his reading; the Daily News and Sports Illustrated. SI featured a spread on Oakland’s Reggie Jackson, in his second full year and enjoying a breakout season. At the time, he was well ahead of Roger Maris’s pace for 61 home runs. The magazine depicted a shirtless, highly-buffed Jackson - a former Arizona State football player – who possessed the kind of muscles players in the later “steroid era” would have. Seaver saw the photo and instinctively “defended” his teammates.
“Not built as well as Jones and Agee,” he said, even though Reggie’s body was superior.
As Seaver prepared for the game, one of “Leo’s friends” arrived at Shea Stadium. Burt Lancaster, wearing a dark sports jacket and slacks, had prime seats behind the Cubs’ dugout, where everybody could see him hob-nob with Leo. Still a presence in 1969 – his signature film, Seven Days in May by John Frankenheimer, was now six years old – Lancaster told Schaap and Zimmerman, “I’m an old Met fan. After all, I’m a native New Yorker. But tonight I’m here as a guest of Leo Durocher so I’ll be cheering for the Cubs – and pulling for the Mets. I have to cheer for the Cubs. Otherwise my life would be in danger.”
Said in jest. It was a veiled reference to Leo’s Mob ties, which were as shadowy as his pal Frank Sinatra’s were. The Cubs were used to Mafiosi coming out to cheer them on. One famed photograph showed a nervously smiling Cubs’ catcher, the great Gabby Hartnett, shaking Al Capone’s hands in the 1930s. Ernie Banks emerged from the dugout and shook Lancaster’s hand.
“Beautiful,” said Mr. Cub. “Beautiful.”
At 7:48, Seaver began to get loose, but he was experiencing trouble. There was a twitch in his shoulder. He went through 103 pitches, trying to get the kinks out. “It still feels a little stiff,” he told Rube Walker as he made his way to the dugout.
“Do the best you can,” Walker replied.
Outside the stadium, a group of about 50 kids, described by a policeman as a “raving mob,” managed to sneak into the park when Jerry Koosman’s wife, Lavonne arrived and the gate was opened for her. It was a portent of future events. The game was a sell-out – 59,083 - with standing room only packed shoulder to shoulder, some fans having waited since 7:30 in the morning. Outside the stadium, hundreds of fans stood in fruitless lines, hope against hope that they would catch a break; an extra ticket, scalpers, some just soaking up the atmosphere, listening to transistor radios. The excitement was as high as for any conceivable sporting event: a USC-Notre Dame game at South Bend with the National Championship on the line; a Final Four in basketball; or a pro football contest at Shea Stadium. The tension was as so thick it could be cut with a knife.
Baseball was back!
Finally Tom Seaver, now stiffness-free and throwing easily, took the mound. His fast ball simply exploded. The Cubs’ hitters stared at it, or at what they heard of it, since they could not actually see the thing. They went down like the French Army circa 1940, one-to-two three in the first inning.
New York then faced Ken Holtzman. Holtzman had gone 9-0 in 1967 but was 11-14 in 1968. With Chicago sprinting out to an early lead in 1969, Holtzman was their best pitcher, at least as effective as the redoubtable Jenkins. He won nine straight again, but entering the game he had lost three straight.
Holtzman was a streaky pitcher. There was no mystery to him. He threw real hard with little else in his repertoire. He relied on location, in many ways the baseball version of USC’s famed “student body right,” or Vince Lombardi’s adage that trick plays do not win football games, “blocking and tackling does.”
When Holtzman won nine straight, all was right. If his velocity was off, his fast ball straighter than usual, his pitches out over the plate, trouble found him, and it did this night. Tommie Agee lined the first pitch like he knew what was coming, down the right field line for a triple. Shea was awash in sound, and out of that a thunderous chant, “Let’s go, Mets!”
Bobby Pfeil, who Ron Santo did not think could hit his way out of paper bag, did his best imitation of Rogers Hornsby: first pitch, double in the left field corner, 1-0. Seaver’s admonition for a 9-0 first inning lead so he could “finesse” the rest of the way looked possible at this point. They were teeing off on the Cubs’ southpaw.
Durocher, who sat cross-legged while Jenkins battled nine complete innings the previous day, immediately called for submariner Ted Abernathy to get loose quickly down in the bullpen. With Cleon Jones coming to the plate, fans began to climb over the fence. Park police cleared some away from the “batter’s eye,” the black background behind center field so hitters did not have fans blurring the pitch.
“I have been to every ball game here, and I have never seen anything like this,” broadcaster Lindsey Nelson told the hundreds of thousands tuned into the television broadcast. “People are everywhere.”
Then, just like that, Holtzman settled down, striking out Jones and Donn Clendenon in the process of pitching out of the jam. But he had no time to gather himself on the bench. Seaver retired Chicago one-two-three in the second inning, causing Rube Walker to tell Gil Hodges that he had “no-hit” stuff. Indeed, Mets fans were seeing something very, very rare.
Many a well-pitched game marks an average baseball season, but Seaver was out of his shoes, above and beyond even his best games over the course of his first two-and-a-half years. He was bringing it in the high 90s, maybe breaking 100 miles per hour, with perfect control and rhythm. What these fans were seeing was Koufax on his best night; Gibson in full domination mode; or any of the all-time legends, whether it be Walter Johnson, Lefty Grove or Bob Feller. They say “good pitching beats good hitting.” It does, but it has to be exceptional. Seaver was beyond exceptional. He was simply unhittable. His stuff could not be touched, merely waved at, gawked at, stunned by.
Poor Kenny Holtzman, a mere mortal in fruitless opposition to a god, took the mound in the second. With one out, he induced Grote to hit a sharp bounder to Santo, who chested it to the ground with his customary grit, but for some reason could not pick it up. Grote reached. Then Al Weis’s perfect double-play ground ball skimmed through Kessinger’s glove. The “god” Seaver now stepped in against his one-time Alaska Goldpanners teammate. As if to demonstrate it was no fluke that Seaver had gotten the final roster spot in 1964, he tomahawked a line drive between first and second base, scoring Grote. Then Agee doubled off the right field fence, scoring Weis and moving Seaver to third. Chicago’s Rube Walker (the brother of Mets pitching coach Rube Walker; some things had not changed since the days of Rube Waddell, Rube Marquard and Rube Bressler) went to the mound to remove Holtzman, who was not a rube. Durocher sat in the dugout, disgusted.
Shea was frantic. With Seaver knocking the eyelashes off flies from 60 feet, six inches, plus swinging the bat like he was Bobby Clemente, the outcome of the game was utterly without doubt. It was full throttle momentum and Chicago was as done as an overcooked Thanksgiving turkey.
“Break up the Mets!” began to be heard. It was a strange plea that fans occasionally chanted in Seaver’s rookie year, when he for the first time demonstrated such unaccustomed excellence that the people conceived in jest that he had made them too good for the rest of the league. In past years, fans and writers had legitimately asked for the Yankees’ dynasty, or Connie Mack’s greatest A’s teams, to be “broken up.” In Mack’s case they were, mainly when the Great Depression made it impossible for him to keep paying his high-salaried stars. But no such luck with the Bronx Bombers, at least until now. What was going on up at Yankee Stadium was attrition, a decaying empire.
Abernathy was effective and held New York without further scoring, but that was immaterial, especially when Seaver mowed through Chicago in the third, one-two-three. In the stands, Dick Schaap and Paul Zimmerman were roaming about, looking for fan reaction, trying to figure out what made these special, lively baseball fans tick. They approached George Hubela, in his early 20s from Brooklyn, sitting in the loge section back of home plate with his brothers, Louis (14), John (13) and friend Ralph Vilardi (14). Hubela displayed a Mets banner.
“The Mets are the greatest,” said Hubela. “They’re the team that’s happening, baby. This is it – the ‘new breed.’ Jets and Mets, Mets and Jets. That’s it. No other teams. The Mets have already gone all the way. They’re here. They’re going to the Moon, the next flight to the Moon.” He managed to sound like a famous TV Brooklynite, Jackie Gleason’s Honeymooners character, Ralph Cramden.
Hubela had already mailed in for World Series tickets. “Just wait,” he said. “I’ll be here.” Hubela was typical of the Mets’ fans. Indeed, the team itself was not the only thing that was “new breed.” Hubela and the other fans, none of whom sat on their hands like Yankees fans always had, were decidedly different.
In the fourth inning, Seaver faced the top of the Cubs’ order - Kessinger, Beckert and Williams – for the second time. A strikeout and two easy grounders to Ed Charles made quick work of them. In the fifth, Santo, Banks and Al Spangler went down – a fly ball, a grounder to shortstop and Seaver’s eighth strikeout. In the sixth, as he went through the Cubs’ order for the second time, Ed Kranepool said it: “He’s got a perfect game.” The tradition in the dugout of a pitcher with a no-hitter, much less a perfect game, is to say nothing, but it was obvious to every player and fan in Shea Stadium that evening.
At the offices of the Associated Press in mid-town Manhattan, baseball writer Ed Schuyler was dispatched to Shea Stadium in case Seaver pitched a perfect game. Schuyler had done the same thing in 1968, arriving just as Orlando Cepeda of St. Louis broke it up.
On Long Island, Nelson Burbrink, the scout who signed Tom Seaver off of the USC campus a mere three years earlier, got in his car after scouting a prospect. As the car eased onto the Long Island Expressway, he heard Lindsey Nelson on WJRZ say, “Tom Seaver will get quite a hand when he comes up to bat here. He’s faced 18 Cubs and retired them all.”
Sitting in a box seat near first base, Nancy Seaver began to cry. Seaver glanced at her and saw the emotions start to spill out. The atmosphere was utterly electric, almost indescribable, a buzz of sound and anticipation bubbling to the surface, threatening to swallow up a stadium, a whole city.
Kessinger led off the seventh; the top of the order for the third time. Seaver had been pounding fastballs on Chicago all night, but thinking that he should give them a little wrinkle he curved the Cubs’ shortstop, who sliced a liner to left field. At first Seaver thought it was their first hit, but the ball hung and Jones grabbed it easily. Beckert popped to Swoboda, sweating bullets of nerves in right. Williams bounced to Charles. Shea exploded.
With one out on the top of the seventh, Jones lined a homer, an “insurance” run on a night Tom Seaver did not need it. The score was 4-0. In the bottom half of the inning Hodges send Rod Gaspar to right field in place of Swoboda; Wayne Garrett to second; and Bobby Pfeil moved to third, replacing Charles.
“You go into a game like this, cold and everything, and you’re just hoping you can do the job if the ball is hit to you,” Gaspar was quoted saying in The Year the Mets Lost Last Place. “It’s a perfect game. We’re going for first place. All the people in the park. It’s frightening.”
In the eighth, Seaver induced Santo to fly to Agee. Then, facing Banks and Spangler, he seemed to jet it up a half a notch. The middle innings were over, his pitch count low, the game in hand. There was no holding anything back. Incredibly, he started throwing harder. The Mets’ fans watched; loud, crazy, boisterous, yes, but by now in awe. They were observing a baseball Michelango, a sculptor of the mound. Seaver, who admired his brother the sculptor, and wanted to somehow duplicate in baseball what he could do with clay, was now accomplishing this task.
Old-timers, who had seen it all over the past 50 years of baseball in the golden age of New York, knew instinctively that the 24-year old Californian was a new Koufax, a Ford, a Newcombe; maybe better than any of those guys! A “new breed.” After Seaver rocketed a heater past Spangler to end the eighth, he walked off the mound to insane cheering. Announcer Bob Murphy then stated, “LADIES AND GENTLEMAN, AFTER EIGHT INNINGS, TOM SEAVER IS WALKING INTO THE DUGOUT WITH A PERFECT BALL GAME.”
Grote grounded out but Weis singled. Seaver donned a batting helmet, undid the donut from his bat, and gave his warm-up jacket to the batboy. It was 9:55 P.M., Wednesday, July 9, the Year of our Lord 1969. The seminal moment in which George Thomas Seaver entered the pantheon.
Th crowd rose; they had been continuously cheering all through Seaver’s dominant eighth inning, building to a crescendo that rocked the five-year old stadium to its very core. It was the sound Marilyn Monroe wished she heard when she gyrated before the boys in Korea. The sound Joe DiMaggio had heard when he was at his heroic best at Yankee Stadium, the knowledge of which he so contemptuously informed the breathless Marilyn when she tried to tell him, “Joe, Joe, you never heard such cheering.”
It was the rafter of the old Stadium when Gehrig told them how lucky he felt, or Ruth circled the bases having hit a towering shot in the Series. It was what Namath heard less than a year earlier, but according to all the pundits, all the experts and futurists during this age in which Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock was being taught in schools, it would never be heard again at a baseball game! That was yesterday, passe, old school. But here it was. Tom’s official entrance and acceptance into the pantheon of that with which was and remains the rarest of rare air: the true New York Sports Icon.
The Packers’ fans treated Bart Starr and Vince Lombardi like pagan idols. In Los Angeles, Sandy Koufax and Magic Johnson have been given the star treatment. Many cities have their heroes, and of course they cheer wildly, they are loud, and it gets electric.
But this was New York.
“If I can make there, I can make it anywhere. . .”
This was the biggest of the big time, the ultimate stage, the winning over with the most impressive of all bravura performances the most cynical, loud-mouthed, hardcore, hard-to-please sports aficionados on the face of the Earth. In this we get to the heart of what made this different, what made this a miracle. The winning over of the crowd, the total, childlike exuberance of the hard-bitten seen-it-alls, had a Pentecostal touch to it. They were children, all of them. The middle-aged men, who toiled for big bucks on Wall Street or union wages in a delivery truck; the grandmothers wondering what was happening to kids these days – all the drugs and sex and lack of respect – yet it all came together here, with Seaver a Pied Piper who did not quite know what was happening himself, so magical and mystical was it. The young man who old folks related to, the sex symbol who was faithful to his wife, the sports hero who seven years earlier was 6-5 pitching for the Fresno High varsity.
So the sound washed over Tom Seaver. 9:55 passed into 9:56, and it kept coming like baptismal firewaters, like a revival, like the Holy Spirit. Above the stadium, Christy Mathewson, John McGraw, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Branch Rickey, and Mel Ott formed a ghostly Hall of Fame, granting approval, imprimatur to the newest member. Ruth called Seaver “Keed.” Matty told McGraw, “He reminds me of me.” Rickey saw the perfect harmony of black and white teammates, the stands a diverse mix of New Yorkers, and nodded approval over that which he had wrought. In the Mets’ dugout, Yogi Berra understood that a new guy was joining that exclusive fraternity of guys he belonged to, the one that included Joe D. and Mick and Whitey and Casey. In the Cubs’ dugout, Durocher looked enviously at the 24-year old from USC, knowing this mere child was ascending, before thine eyes, to a place he could only dream of being; a place where Bill Terry, Carl Hubbell, Mel Ott and the “Say Hey Kid” were; a place where names like Jackie and Duke and Roy resided in regal splendor; a club he was barred from entering into no matter how expensive his silk suit, or how stylish the dame on his arms. It was like Frank and Dean entering the room, turning and saying, “Sorry, Leo, not tonight” just as a giant bouncer stood between him and the entrance to the hallowed palace they were in and he was not.
Somewhere in America, Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano knew that Tom Seaver felt that special sense of recognition they had worked so hard to attain during all those nights at the Garden. Somewhere in Manhattan, probably at the center of a social whirl that had stopped itself in its tracks to watch the Mets’ game on television, Frank Gifford was smiling at the TV image of another Trojan entering the pantheon he had forged in the previous decade. Out in California, a Glendale banker named Casey Stengel was most likely asleep when it happened, but upon his awakening and perusal of the Los Angeles Times the next morning, the “Ol’ Perfessor” surely knew that a Met was in his cherished, exclusive club. Somewhere else, in temporary retirement after Pete Rozelle told him it was Bachelors III or football - not both – was Joe Willie Namath. He had a blonde on one arm, a brunette on another and a bottle Johnnie Walker Red in the middle. His sense of inclusion, his egalitarianism forged in a tough Pennsylvania upbringing, honed in segregated Birmingham where he walked the streets of the “colored section” like Huey Long, made Joe Willie smiled.
Sure, New York’s big enough for the two of us. Welcome to the club, Tom.
So be it. So it was. The latest true New York Sports Icon, the savior then laid down a perfect sacrifice bunt. The runner moved to second as he jogged off the field, cheered as if he had just moved a mountain.
An estimated two-and-a-half million New Yorkers were now watching Seaver trot off the field. Over the past innings, phones rang, doors were knocked on, people left all forms of human endeavor to rush home; to a bar, to a car radio, anywhere to hear or see this happening. It was like Orson Welles’s re-creation of The War of the Worlds.
“Housewives not the least interested in baseball have been dragged to the set by their husbands to watch history,” wrote Dick Schaap and Paul Zimmerman. Little kids, boys and girls, foreigners, people of all stripe who call themselves “New Yorkers,” found a common bond in Seaver and the Mets at this instant. Schaap and Zimmerman informed readers that a Chrysler commercial played in between the bottom of the eighth and the top of the ninth, urging carbuyers to “dream the impossible dream.” The song “The Impossible Dream” from Don Quixote’s Man From La Mancha was popularized at that time in part because it was associated with Boston’s “Impossible Dream” pennant chase of 1967. Now it applied to the Mets.
Nancy Seaver wept as she watched her husband take the mound for the ninth. Next to her was Tom’s father, Charles. Tom’s body was floating with pure adrenaline. He had thrown a perfect game as a little leaguer, then had all his hopes and dreams for a baseball future seemingly dashed when he made the move to the “big diamond.”; then high school, where the likes of Dick Selma – now a spectator sitting in the opposing team’s dugout – had surpassed him by leaps and bounds.
59,000 fans chanted “Seav-uh, Seav-uh.” It was beyond incredible, beyond heady. He later said his arm was light, as if detached from his body. He was in touch with his feelings. His heart pounded furiously, but the crowd noise was somehow so great as to be silent. He was in a zone. Few ever reach such a zenith. It is the zone that Barry Bonds was in when he hit 73 home runs in 2001, or Joe Montana was in as he drove the San Francisco 49ers down the field in the closing minute of the 1989 Super Bowl vs. Cincinnati. It is the rarest of air, the highest peak in the mountain range.
But with all of this going on, Seaver still had a job to do, and it required concentration. Amid all the furor, he dropped, drove and delivered furious heat to Randy Hundley. Hundley, as if acknowledging that to actually swing and hit Seaver was by now beyond conception, tried to bunt his way on. The ball came right back to Seaver, the easiest play in the world, except that under such intense pressure some people stiffen right up. Grote told him he had plenty of time, and Seaver threw out Hundley as if he did not have a care in the world.
Bud Harrelson, his best friend on the ball club, was watching the game at a restaurant called Giovanni’s in Watertown, New York, where he was stationed for two weeks of summer training. Nobody knew who he was. Now, he was a fan like everybody else.
At seven minutes after 10 Jimmy Qualls strode to the plate. Qualls was the only Cub to get decent wood on a Seaver pitch all night, hitting a sharp line drive caught at the warning track, then a liner to first base. A left-handed batter, he had 47 Major League at-bats prior to his stepping in against Tom Seaver. Tommie Agee in center fielder was not sure where to play him. Seaver was throwing so hard that it seemed implausible that Qualls would pull him, but he seemed to be on Tom’s pitches in a way no other Cub was on that night.
Bobby Pfeil’s “scouting report” – hard stuff - was all Grote and Seaver had to go by. Seaver had dominated with the best fastball in the game, and that was what he and Grote agreed on. As he nodded yes to the sign, Ed Schuyler of the Associated Press arrived in the Shea Stadium press box.
Tom Seaver went into his wind-up, dropped, and delivered. Instead of sinking action, down and away, the pitch came in waist high. All night, Seaver was perfect with his location, but his heat was so great that he could get away with a mistake. The Cubs simply could not hit what they could not see. Major League hitters feast on fast balls, much prefer it over curves and off-speed stuff. Their reflexes are the best in the world. They are the most skilled of athletes, those who engage in what Ted Williams called the “single most difficult act in sports,” the hitting of a “round ball against a round bat at 95 miles per hour,” as Pete Rose described it.
In little league, high school and college, the overwhelming fastball artist dominates with speed alone. His competition cannot touch it. At some point, usually in the minor leagues and especially when he reaches The Show, he discovers, sometimes alarmingly, that he is now dealing with the only 400 or 500 men on the face of the planet who are capable of dealing with his heat. An adjustment, an accommodation must be made. This decides whether he will continue with a successful big league career, or become a coach, a scout, a salesman . . . a writer?
Seaver was throwing so hard that the best-hitting team in baseball during the first half of the 1969 season was stopped cold, unable to get around on it. That rarest of feats, the fast ball they knew was coming, could not be hit. It was like an overwhelming army that blasts past all defensive positions, but cannot be stopped by tricks, decoy or espionage.
But Seaver; dropping, and driving, dropping, and driving . . . all night, over and over, expending all that energy . . . now, in the ninth, he was just a quarter-inch off with his fast ball. Qualls was the one Cub who seemingly felt no pressure. Little was expected of him. He had not been around all season, subject to Leo Durocher’s demands and psychological games. Suddenly, he was Ted Williams or Duke Snider, seeing the ball, and reacting to it.
Bat connected, solidly, and the ball carried on a fly to deep left-center field. New York Mets center fielder Tommie Agee broke after the ball, but quickly snuck a look at his boyhood pal from Mobile, Alabama, Cleon Jones, as if to say, “Hey man, you better get to it ‘cause I ain’t got it.”
Jones just shook his head.
More than 59,000 people groaned as the ball dropped in for a single. Nelson Burbrink and Bud Harrelson swore. A few boos for Jimmy Qualls were replaced by a cheer, louder than ever, for Seaver, now a solitary figure on a mound of dirt surrounded by green grass. Another prolonged standing ovation. Seaver later called it the biggest disappointment of his life, “within my grasp,” knowing he might not, probably would not, ever get another chance at something this close to perfection.
With a 4-0 lead, Seaver straightened up, took the mound and worked to the next two Cubs hitters, retiring them easily. The celebration on the field was muted, but the crowd let forth still more outpourings of adulation. A star was born, that was for sure, manifested more like it; a self-evident truth right before thine eyes. Seaver disappeared into the clubhouse. Later the crowd, not wanting to leave, chanted, “We want Seaver,” but he was gone. The 59,000 made their way into the parking lot, the subways, the bars of Queens and Manhattan, to celebrate and talk it over. What a night!
Seaver was immediately met by Nancy, still battling tears. “I guess a one-hit shutout is better than nothing,” she told him. Tom Seaver’s greatest triumph was a melancholy moment. Despite the incredible flow of electrical energy, despite now being a mere three games out of first place, the New York clubhouse had a subdued quality to it, but it was nothing compared to Chicago’s.
“Nobody was going to beat Seaver tonight,” Durocher told the writers. “I never saw him throw so hard. If he keeps throwing that hard, nobody’s going to beat him. But I don’t think he will.
“We’re still three games ahead. And from now on the Mets are going to find the going rougher. They’re going to see the best pitchers in the league.”
Gentle Leo refrained from predicting “100,000 suicides” if the Mets let their fans down after such a big build-up. He had made his suicide remark in 1952 when the Giants threatened a repeat of their 1951 “shot heard ‘round the world” comeback. Then he smiled. “That Qualls ruined you guys,” he said. “He made you re-write your stories.”
“There was no pressure on me at all,” Qualls told reporters. “All I wanted to do was get a base hit and get something started.”
On “Kiner’s Corner,” Seaver, Nancy and Cleon Jones were Ralph’s guests. “He’s a sticky little hitter,” Seaver said of Qualls. Later in his career, Seaver would say that the sluggers – Mays, Aaron, Clemente, Stargell, Mike Schmidt, Johnny Bench – were obviously challenging but somehow “pesky” hitters like Ralph Garr of Atlanta, Matty Alou of Pittsburgh and St. Louis, those kinds of singles specialists, gave him the most trouble. With a home run threat he always felt he could go mano o mano with his best fast ball, and even though he occasionally got taken deep, he always liked his chances.
When Tom returned to the clubhouse, Dick Selma met him.
“Who were you pulling for?” Seaver asked him jokingly,
“I was pulling for us,” Selma replied.
“Dear Diary, last night I sat in, with 60,000 other rabid believers, on the birth of a folk hero,” wrote sportswriter Ray Robinson “The folk hero . . . was Tom Seaver, a right-hander, possessing the virtues of Prince Valiant.”
The historical memory often plays tricks. Many New Yorkers who recall the 1969 season would say that Seaver’s great performance spurred them on while setting the Cubs back irreparably. They would say it was the beginning of the hottest winning streak imaginable, all leading to ultimate glory.
In 1986, California Angels relief pitcher Donnie Moore gave up a home run to Boston’s Dave Henderson in the ninth inning. Fans might think it ended the game, or was the game winning hit. California tied it in the bottom half of the inning, only to lose in extra frames.
Less than a year after the Mets’ great season, Lakers guard Jerry West made an impossible 62-foot desperation shot at the buzzer against the New York Knickerbockers at Madison Square Garden in the 1970 NBA Finals. It was the signature moment of West’s career, and many assume it won the game. It would have if the three-point shot had been instituted at the time, but instead it just tied the score. New York won in overtime.
When the weary City of New York went to sleep on July 9, 1969, or more like the wee morning hours of July 10, visions of an East Division championship danced in their heads. Momentum was theirs. Caesar had just defeated the Gauls. “The Surge” was working. But the season was only halfway played out, and oh what more ups and downs were to come!
After the Pentecost: July 10 – July 16, 1969
On July 10, 1966, the New York Mets lost to Pittsburgh, 9-4, to become the first team in Major League history to lose 500 games in their first five seasons.
The New Testament tells us that after Christ’s death and Resurrection, there was a period of time in which The Word was slowly spread in Jerusalem, the Jewish countryside, then throughout the Roman Empire. At some point, a gathering took place, among believers and the curious. At that gathering, the Holy Spirit made His presence known. People of different tribes and language suddenly spoke in understanding of each other, all proclaiming the Truth. It was a moment of ecstasy.
After that, the people went about spreading The Gospel; to Egypt, Syria, Ethiopia, then Europe; Greece, Italy, and beyond. The aftermath of the Pentecost proved the mettle of the believers, the disciples, and the apostles. It was not easy. The Holy Spirit was not made as plainly known as at the Pentecost. It was, simply, hard work.
Tom Seaver’s “birth” as a true New York Sports Icon on July 9, 1969 should not be placed on an equal footing with the Pentecost. It was only a baseball game, Seaver only a man. But many truly felt that the 1969 “Amazin’ Mets” were an honest to God miracle. Who can say? But those who were at Shea Stadium that night – there were over 59,000, a million who say they were – experienced something magical, moving, even spiritual. This feeling was repeated in 1969, but in truth has never really returned to the environs of Shea Stadium in all the years since.
But just as the early Christians faced an uphill battle after the initial glory of ascension followed by the Holy Spirit, so to did the Mets. In both cases, the “high” of the first event was followed by a naturally anti-climactic letdown. It was in how both groups dealt with the harsher realities of everyday life that they made their respective marks on the world.
****
It was close to one in the morning before all the fans, the kids, the hangers-on and the writers finally cleared out of Shea Stadium after Seaver’s near-perfect game.
Cubs manager Leo Durocher, 62, was not one of them. He showered and spiffed up for an appointment at the Waldorf Towers for a party thrown by Frank Sinatra. It was his second night with Ol’ Blue Eyes this week. Earlier, the two tore it up hot and heavy at a “Rat Pack” hangout called Jilly’s.
The third and final game of the series between Chicago and New York was played on July 10, a Thursday afternoon; getaway day. Gary Gentry, the Mets’ rookie right-hander from Arizona State, was awakened at quarter after six in the morning by his son, Chris, who was running a fever. He tried to get some more shut-eye, but without success. Tom Seaver, not to mention Jerry Koosman on Tuesday, had made it quite an act to follow. He was excited but anxious. Gentry was 8-6 entering the day.
At 10:15 in the morning, embattled Mayor John V. Lindsay stood in front of city hall inspecting a new piece of equipment to be installed in the subway trains. Trailing in the polls, he shifted the subject.
“I don’t know what could be more exciting than the victory of the Mets,” he announced. “Perhaps that’s what we should be talking about.”
Lindsay then walked to his office, and with newsmen taking photos, made a big flourish of his phone call to manager Gil Hodges. “Hello,” he said. “Gil Hodges? This is John Lindsay. Tell Leo that Chicago is still the second city. We’re bursting with pride over the Mets. I know it’s an uphill fight and I think I know something about uphill fights. Let’s go, Mets.”
Lindsay’s next call was to Tom Seaver. “Your fantastic pitching is giving you an unbelievable year,” he told him. “I’m just sorry you lost the perfecto last night. But it was a great job. Let’s go all the way, the pennant and then the Series.”
Conventional wisdom did not favor either. Lindsay’s comments to Hodges and Seaver were corny politico-speak, but believe it or not it gave him momentum, just like the Mets.
At Shea, Gentry refused to show nerves, insisting that he had pitched against the “best competition” at Arizona State (crowned National Champions about a month earlier), had “a good year at Jacksonville,” and at 22 he knew all that needed to be known about the art of pitching. He was only two years younger than Seaver. In the Cubs’ clubhouse, Durocher – looking none the worse for wear despite another evening with Frank - refused all interview requests, saving his pearls of wisdom for his own pre-game radio show carried in Chicago.
“There’s no way the Mets can go on this way,” he said, eschewing any semblance of the age old “respect your opponents” theme. “We won a few games and were eight games ahead of everybody. Then we came back down, and they will, too. Just wait and see.”
Then Durocher regaled his audience with a story about Don Mueller, one of his key players on the New York Giants: “Mueller had a funny way of moving about. It was the way he ran. There was one club – I can’t remember which one – that always got on Mueller and called him half-man, half-woman. This used to bother the hell out of me. I told Don that I’d give him $500 if he’d go back at those guys and challenge them to come out of the dugout and repeat it. But he never did.
“I told him all the time about $500 in my locker just waiting for him, but what they said never seemed to bother Mueller. Why, if they’d said that to me, I’d have gone out there, I wouldn’t have cared how big the guys were. I might’ve ended up with them jumping on my head, but I just wouldn’t have taken it.”
Leo was not bluffing. He had been beaten up by “big guys,” namely Babe Ruth. The Babe reportedly knocked him within an inch of his life after Leo stole his watch. When Durocher and legendary St. Louis player-manager Frankie Frisch were a double-play combination on the famed Gas House Gang Cardinals, Frisch and Durocher would “stomp all over” the runners.
Just prior to the game, Phil Pepe of the New York Daily News put in a person-to-person call to Casey Stengel, at the time holding a cushy job as the vice-president of the Valley National Bank in Glendale, California, the home of his protégé, Rod Dedeaux. Stengel still “kept his hand in,” cheering the Trojans on in the spring, attending Dodgers game with Rod in the summer time.
“85 people have called me up,” Stengel told Pepe. “They’re doin’ wonderful, beatin’ the big fellers. I’ll be staying back here pullin’ for that team to win and win and win.
“They’re beatin’ Chicago and everybody thought that was a strong club and the only time that club is weakenin’ is now. When you commence to beat the big fellers, you’re gettin’ good and that really shocked the people because they can’t believe it. But when you beat them it means two games and I know because I was in a number of pennant races and I win it.
“Like I said, they are the Amazin’ Mets. They’re really hotshots now, hot potatoes. I ain’t made plans as far ahead as October yet, but that’s only ‘cause Mrs. Payson has so many friends that I don’t like to call her and ask for 100 tickets.”
Ernie Banks just stared at the Mets’ dugout.
“Look at those Mets,” he said. “They’re calm for such a young team. That’s pretty strange.”
Bob Murphy gave the starting line-ups, describing Gentry as “the tall, slender rookie right-hander from Phoenix, Arizona.” Tommie Agee possessed “awesome power.” Wayne Garrett was “the Huckleberry Finn” of the team. Long fouls had the “legs” for homers, the eldest umpire was the “senior arbiter of the umpiring crew.” Hitters “reach on a walk” or “reach on an error,” and when the first Cub stepped in against Seaver in the ninth inning Murphy advised the audience to “listen to the hush falling over this big crowd.”
Gentry then went out and did his best imitation of Seaver, setting Chicago down in the first inning with ease. When Tommie Agee reached Bill Hands for a leadoff home run, the crowd of 49,753 (36,012 paid) went – slightly subdued in the afternoon hangover – ballistic again. The three-game attendance was 163,931 (123,752 paid).
Gentry carried a no-hitter into the fourth (retiring Qualls, who heard many a boo). Then Ernie Banks drove in a run to tie it, 1-1. Kranepool drove in a run and New York regained the lead in the bottom half. In the fifth Qualls doubled and pitcher Bill Hands bunted. Qualls got caught in a rundown but Al Weis dropped the throw, so it was runners on first and second. Kessinger’s base hit tied it. Then Billy Williams’s sacrifice fly sent the go-ahead run home. Grote tried to catch Glenn Beckert tagging on the play and stretching for second, but second baseman Ken “tuning-fork hand” Boswell missed it and another run scored, making it 4-2. Then Ron Santo took Gentry deep for a two-run homer. Just like that Chicago had a 6-2 victory and a four-game lead.
On “Kiner’s Corner,” Santo and Beckert were wary of downplaying New York as Leo was blithely doing. “The Mets are no flukes,” Santo said of the Mets. Two days earlier he said they had an infield that could not play for Chicago’s triple-A club in Tacoma. “I’m not joshing. They’re here. They’ve got a fine pitching staff.”
“I’m glad to see the Mets winning,” said Beckert. “Of course, I’ll be glad if they finish second.”
When Dick Selma saw the New York press crowd into the Cubs’ clubhouse, he crowed, “Here come the front-runners.”
Speaking of front-runners, Commissioner of Baseball Bowie Kuhn chose the winning clubhouse to bring his sons into. Durocher immediately took up an argument with Kuhn about “umpire’s judgment,” complaining about a play in Montreal filled with the word “lovable” in place of words that start with “f” and end with “k,” presumably to avoid stinging Kuhn’s son’s ears. The Wall Street attorney listened bemusedly, then concluded, “Well, Leo, as I said before, it must have been the umpire’s judgment.”
“Leo sure does have a nice way with words,” stated George Kuhn, 17.
When Leo was asked if the “real Cubs” showed up on that day, he said, “No. These were the real Mets.”
Jack Lang of the Long Island Press asked Hodges if the team “let down today.”
“It’s not possible to be on Cloud Nine that long without letdowns,” replied Hodges. “The players are human, you know.”
Gary Gentry, the losing pitcher, announced that he planned to get “bombed” drinking beer that night.
Las Vegas oddsmaker “Jimmy the Greek” Snyder’s mid-season odds: Cubs, 1-3; Mets, 3-1 (up from 75-1 in the pre-season), and the Cardinals, the pre-season favorites, now at 75-1.
On July 11, 1964 the Mets committed six errors in an 11-4 loss to the St. Louis Cardinals. Prior to 1969, they had won only once on July 11, in the first game of a double-header in 1968.
The July 11 edition of the New York Post revealed that for the third time, a New York Met would start in the upcoming All-Star Game, at Robert F. Kennedy Stadium in Washington, D.C. Cleon Jones made the outfield with Atlanta’s Hank Aaron and Pittsburgh’s Matty Alou. He beat out the likes of Pittsburgh’s Roberto Clemente, Cincinnati’s Pete Rose, St. Louis’s Curt Flood, and San Francisco’s Willie Mays, most of whom had good seasons in 1969. Jones was hitting .347. Previous Mets All-Star starters were Ron Hunt (1964) and Jerry Grote (1968).
The Mets played the Montreal Expos on July 11, a Friday night at Shea Stadium. After overcoming Tom Seaver to win the opener, 11-10, Montreal settled into predictable mediocrity, at one point losing 20 straight games.
That day, Seaver, Koosman, Gentry, Nolan Ryan and Don Cardwell filmed a Vitalis commercial with Gil Hodges. The Mets were getting endorsement deals. Gentry and Seaver were also tapped to sing in a Royal Crown Cola ad.
The Mets went with Jim McAndrew, a 25-year old husband and father from Lost Nation, Iowa. He had a psychology degree – some said he thought too much – from the University of Iowa.
The news in baseball that day centered on excerpts from Ken “Hawk” Harrelson’s autobiography, running in Sports Illustrated. Harrelson played for Hodges at Washington in 1967. He wrote that the current Mets’ manager was “unfair, unreasonable, unfeeling, incapable of handling men, stubborn, holier-than-thou, and ice cold.”
“It’s all just a publicity stunt to promote the book,” was Koosman’s reaction.
“Maybe Mr. Harrelson in his immaturity couldn’t tell the difference between professional treatment and somebody picking on him,” said Seaver.
“Gil handles player like men, not babies,” said Ed Charles.
“I’ve heard that holier-than-thou description of a dozen managers,” said Swoboda.
“I’ve got no comment,” said Hodges.
With the Cubs losing to Philadelphia that day, the Mets had a chance to regain a game in the standings. At the batting cage, Tom Seaver walked past a writer and said “hi” to him, calling him by his name.
“You’re the first ballplayer who ever remembered my name,” the writer told Seaver, who had recently transferred his major at USC from pre-dentistry to public relations.
“ ‘New breed,’ ” Seaver said.
That night, the expansion Expos looked like the 1929 Philadelphia A’s, slugging Jim McAndrew out of the box en route to an 11-4 win that had restless Mets fans getting drunk and arrested in the stands on a Friday night. It was a relapse.
Danny Frisella, a California kid who like Tom Seaver had pitched for the Alaska Goldpanners, was unable to hold Montreal, allowing four earned runs in two innings after replacing McAndrew.
Heading home to his Manhattan apartment, Frisella told Dick Schaap, “My fast ball was as straight as an arrow. . .”
He was on borrowed time anyway. Frisella knew that as soon as Tug McGraw returned, he would be headed back to triple-A Tidewater. McGraw joked that he was stuck in the swamps on his military stint “with Captain Cook.”
“This game’s the greatest game in the world,” said Frisella. “I’m young and I’m single and I’m doing something every kid’s dreamed about since he was six years old.”
After the game, Bud Harrelson returned from his Army training.
On July 12, 1962 Sandy Koufax of Los Angeles shut out the Mets, 3-0. On July 13, 1963 Koufax struck out 13 Mets, again shutting them out, 6-0. Between 1962 and 1966, Koufax was 17-2 vs. New York. The Mets never scored on July 12 until 1964.
On Saturday, July 12, the Mets were rained out on a day that Nolan Ryan was scheduled to start. They were scheduled for NBC’s national Game of the Week, with Sandy Koufax and Jim Simpson behind the microphone. The Cubs beat Philadelphia 7-4, so New York lost half a game.
On July 13, 1963, Bob L. Miller, an original Met who won no games as a Met, beat the Mets as a member of the Dodgers, 11-2, stretching New York’s losing streak to 14 games.
The make-up game was played the next day, now a double-header on Sunday the 13th. Jerry Koosman started the first game. With New York leading 4-3, the Chicago score was posted as a final, to the groans of the big Sunday crowd: 6-0, Cubs over Philadelphia. Koosman did not have his sharpest stuff, but it was enough in a complete game win.
6-2, 195-pound right-hander Nolan Ryan, 22, pitched the nightcap. As he began heating up in the bullpen, a small crowd of fans and even Expos players formed to watch him. His legend as a fastball ace was well on its way. As hard as Seaver threw, Ryan threw at least as hard. So far in his career, his incredible potential had not been reached, but Seaver’s influence on his mechanics was beginning to take.
As Ryan warmed up, a Rheingold beer commercial resounded throughout Shea Stadium, regaling fans with tales of young pitchers from “Van Meter, Iowa and Alvin, Texas, with arms that fire bullets.” The reference was unmistakable. Van Meter was the hometown of Bob Feller; Alvin that of Nolan Ryan. Ryan was already being mentioned in the same breath as the immortal Feller, a one-time Cleveland Indian and easily one of the greatest pitchers in history.
“The town’s so small,” joked Koosman of his Alvin roots, “it doesn’t even have a last name.”
In 202 minor league innings, Ryan had averaged one and a half strikeouts an inning in 1966. When he pitched at Jacksonville in 1967, a crowd three times its normal size came out, but he hurt himself and, mainly due to injuries and a lot of Army service, was an enigma. They started calling him “The Myth.” He was spectacular, but always had blisters.
Entering the Expos game of July 13, Ryan’s 1969 statistics read 3-1 with 42 strikeouts in 41 innings and a 2.85 ERA. Bob Murphy had already named his legendary fastball the “Ryan Express,” in reference to a Frank Sinatra film called Von Ryan’s Express.
In the first inning with Montreal, Ryan struggled with control. Then, just trying to locate home plate, he grooved one to Rusty Staub, who deposited it over the auxiliary scoreboard in left field to give the Expos a 2-0 lead. Ryan lasted only 3 1/3 innings, leaving after having given up five earned runs. But in the fourth inning of a sloppy game, Gene Mauch replaced journeyman pitcher Howie Reed with 6-6, 265-pound relief pitcher Dick Radatz. Radatz had been the best reliever in the American League with Boston in the mid-1960s, nicknamed “The Monster.” In Montreal that was changed slightly to Le Monstre. By 1969, Le Monstre was a shell of his old self. Agee powered a home run over the right-center field fence to put New York ahead, 7-6.
Midway through the second game, the scoreboard revealed that “the other New York baseball team,” as Dick Schaap and Paul Zimmerman referred to them, had lost the second game of their double-header to fall 21 games back of Baltimore. Also on the scoreboard was the Cubs’ victory in the second game of their double-header with the Phillies, by a 6-4 score.
In the seventh Ron Swoboda, whose nicknames included “Clark Kent” and “Li’l Abner,” but whose batting average was .222, knocked in the go-ahead, and ultimately winning run in the 9-7 victory. After the game, Hodges was asked if the Mets were “a team of destiny.” Hodges said no.
“The Mets have the pitching that should keep them up there,” Gene Mauch said after the game. “But the Cubs are too solid to catch. The big problem with the Mets is their bullpen.”
Montreal’s Mack Jones was asked if the Mets were “for real?”
“Nope,” replied Jones.
Jones was Kiner’s guest. “Sometimes it was so bad, I felt numb,” he said of his brutal offensive performance in 1968.
“He got the most vicious abuse from the ‘bleacher bums’ in Chicago,” Swoboda said of the famed Wrigley Field faithful, next on the Mets’ schedule. “They just might be the worst people in the world. ‘Bleacher pigs’ is more like it. They yell foul stuff. They throw foul stuff. My wife and mother are pretty sacred to me, but those people get some kind of perverted kick out of calling them names. Last year during the whole game, they kept calling Tommie’s wife a streetwalker. They’re so damn ignorant. Tommie isn’t even married.”
After the long double-header with Montreal, concluding a successful and, to say the least, consequential homestand, there was no rest for the weary. It was mid-summer; hot and humid. The New York Mets had no time to read their press clippings. They boarded a bus that took them to nearby La Guardia Airport for a Chartered United Air Lines flight to Chicago, losing an hour due to the time change, where they would have to get up early in order to play a day game. Hundreds of fans crowded the terminal to wish them well. The channel nine news crew was on hand, as well.
While making their way through the airport, the Mets passed “the other New York baseball team,” returning from a long, dreary series in Washington. “You guys are doing just great,” said former Met Billy Cowan, now with the Yankees.
“Go get ‘em,” shouted Yankees manager Ralph Houk, an ex-Marine. “Give ‘em hell.”
“We won a double-header today, and it’s weird, but it doesn’t feel like anything special,” Ron Swoboda told Schaap and Zimmerman on the plane. “. . .We were just the better ball club, that’s all, and so we won . . . We have pride now . . . On this club I feel like a winner.”
To paraphrase the late Robert F. Kennedy’s last recorded words, “Now it’s on to Chicago and let’s win there.”
The New York Mets never won a baseball game on July 14 (Bastille Day in France); not in 1962, ’63, ’64, ’65, ’66, ’67 or ’68.
As the Mets’ plane descended into Chicago’s O’Hare Airport around 11:30 P.M. on Sunday evening, the pilot jokingly announced that the control tower, when informed the team had swept a double-header, requested that their landing be put on hold for 24 hours.
Chicago was swept up in “pennant fever.” The Cubs had won the 1945 National League championship in the last year of World War II. In all the years since, they rarely had a decent club and never had a contender. Durocher’s teams in 1967 and ’68 were promising and talented but did not seriously challenge St. Louis.
Activity around Wrigley Field began early, at Ray’s Bleachers, a popular tavern outside the famed park. The drinking was already beginning, along with chants and songs reminiscent of a college football weekend, even though it was a Monday; theoretically a work day in the Windy City. I.C. Haig of Northbrook, Illinois (his initials, he said, stood for “Incredibly Creative”), penned lyrics to a drinking tune:
“Hey, hey!
Holy Mackerel!!
No doubt about it!!!
The Cubs are on their way – Hey! Hey!
“The Cubs are gonna HIT today,
They’re gonna PITCH today,
They’re gonna FIELD today
Come what may – the Cubs are gonna WIN today!”
It was not exactly “Chicago, my kind of town,” but to the denizens of Ray’s Bleachers it was Grammy material. The “bleacher bums” were the invention of Ma Barker and her husband. They created a sign that requested Cubs hitters to slam a homer and “Hit a Bleacher Bum.”
The 1969 bums had their own uniforms; a yellow construction hat, designed to keep out the sun, garbage, flying beer cans and bottles. A man named Don handled their “public relations,” which needed some work since Ron Swoboda’s assessment of them was a universal theme around the senior circuit. They were being blamed with spitting on opponents, among other indecencies. Their “president” was a fellow named Ron Grousl.
The bums represented a city in need of a winner. They were called the “Second City,” but even that appellation, based on their having the second-largest population of any American town, was in the process of being surpassed during this time by Los Angeles, which as overall Greater L.A. would even overtake the Metropolitan New York tri-state area.
New York had everything. Chicago always was . . . second. The aforementioned Los Angeles had all the glamour they did not. They were known, aside from being the Windy City (because of fierce gusts off of Lake Michigan) as the “city with husky shoulders,” a reference to its reputation for meatpacking plants, construction workers, and other blue-collar types, often of Polish, Slavic or Irish Catholic ancestry.
A fire had once burned down half the city. It was blamed on “Mrs. O’Leary’s cow,” which supposedly knocked down a lantern or something causing the blaze to spread. By 1969, the “Cubs’ curse” was not a fully formulated theory, but subsequent bizarre, losing efforts would focus this premise on a billy goat denied entrance to Wrigley Field in the 1940s. No more World Series appearances would follow after the team appeared (and lost) four times (1932, 1935, 1937, 1945).
New York produced Presidents. Its electorate was catered to, its media and opinion-makers shaping the nation. Illinois produced Democrat Governor Adlai Stevenson, twice trounced by Republican war hero Dwight D. Eisenhower (1952, 1956). If that was not bad enough, Ike’s running mate was former Senator Richard Nixon of California. The young Westerner’s selection was indicative of the growing shift in population and influence away from the factories of the Midwest to the Sunbelt.
If Chicago could not “produce” Presidents, then they could . . . well, get John Kennedy elected in 1960 through nefarious means, namely the votes and re-votes of thousands of Cook County Democrats, dead or alive. It was just enough to give Illinois to JFK over Nixon in the tightest election up until that time.
In 1968, Chicago got the ultimate Karmic black eye when Mayor Richard Daley, who orchestrated the stolen 1960 vote, presided over a riot in the streets, complete with full force “police brutality” during the Democrat National Convention. Ironically, Daley’s actions probably did more to elect Nixon (that man again) than any single event after Kennedy’s assassination.
It was a “shot ‘n’ a beer” town. The Rush Street bar scene was much more Studs Terkel in 1969 than the current “Viagra triangle” that the post-AIDS sex frenzy of the 2000s has become. Athletically, the Cubs were a joke. The Bulls were a joke. The Bears were not a joke, but they had never achieved dynasty status, like that of Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers or Paul Brown’s Cleveland Browns. Under coach-owner George Halas, the Bears had competed evenly over the years with the Washington Redskins, New York Giants and Los Angeles Rams. Just when a bona fide superstar, Gale Sayers out of Kansas, came along, he injured himself. Then running back Brian Piccolo died tragically of cancer (Brian’s Song). The Black Hawks (Stan Mikita) were popular but hockey was like a well-kept secret to most of America. Depaul was a nice little Catholic school with a decent basketball legacy (George Mikan, Ray Meyer). The University of Chicago, once a Big 10 powerhouse (Jay Berwanger), no longer played football.
Chicago’s greatest sports pride was reserved for a college team that was neither in Chicago or even in the state of Illinois. Notre Dame owned the town, and had ever since Soldier Field crowds of more than 120,000 (1927) and 112,000 (1929) saw the Irish beat Southern California by a single point each time. Chicago was the base of operations for its fans, it “subway alumni,” and opponents’ supporters, all of whom stayed in the city’s hotels, patronized its restaurants, and got drunk in its bars the night before and after Irish football games played in South Bend, Indiana; a town so small it had virtually no accommodations, not to mention nightlife.
But by the time the New York Mets arrived in town on July 14, 1969 Chicago was a Cubs town. The upcoming football season was a question mark. The Bears looked ordinary and Sayers’s health was an issue. Notre Dame (and hotshot quarterback Joe Theismann), a football team that always seemed to feature guys with names like Kuechenberg and Patulski - big white boys, often of Polish extraction who Chicagoans took to with great fervor - were no longer the only thing on their minds, or on the sportstalk radio shows.
At Wrigley Field, 200 ushers and a large police contingent were on hand to handle the raucous, drunken, baseball-crazed fans. For sure, the 1968-69 off-season premise that Our National Pastime was “dead” now was a non-existent synapse in the air. Throughout both leagues, where either great races or great teams dominated, attendance and excitement were way up. But no where was it more fevered than in the National League East: the ancient towns and rivalries of New York and Chicago; the “Merkle Boner,” Babe Ruth’s “called shot” off Charlie Root; Gabby Hartnett’s “homer in the gloaming” and the wars between Bill Terry’s Giants and Charlie Grimm’s Cubbies.
In Henry’s Hamburgers before the game, a man wearing a Mets cap walked in, met by a group of “bleacher bums.” “Two bits, four bits, six bits, a comet, all for the Mets stand up and vomit,” a helmeted Shakespeare belched as he removed the cap from the man’s head, threatening to use lighter fluid on it if he saw it again.
Tom Seaver was scheduled to pitch; a return appearance against the team he so thoroughly dominated five days earlier. “With his blond hair and boyish good looks, he might have stepped out of an Esquire shirt ad or off a Peace Corps poster,” wrote Schaap. It was around this time that the national media began to recognize that Seaver was the next great superstar in sports; a man who, with Joe Namath, was emerging to replace the icons of the past decade-plus: Willie Mays, Johnny Unitas, Bart Starr, Bill Russell. The descriptions of Seaver resembled Schaap’s: fictionally perfect sports heroes like Frank Merriweather, Hobey Baker and Jack Armstrong, or real-life heroes whose images glowed in Halo-like memory, such as Christy Mathewson or Lou Gehrig.
Looking back at Seaver’s life and career through the prism of all he was and all he became, it appears slightly ridiculous. His image would be tarnished here and there, although never seriously. But he would become human. The Tom Seaver of 1969 was not a real-life figure; he was a comic book superhero, perhaps an anti-dote for the times with his clean-cut appearance during this age of hippies, drugs and protest. The media was building him up like nobody else was ever built up.
Unitas and Starr were certainly heroic, albeit in an “aw, shucks” kind of way. Mays was the greatest player of his generation, but seemed to stick his foot in his mouth, saying something stupid or self-serving, always coming out wrong somehow. Russell was a militant, never popular in semi-racist Boston. Even Namath was an anti-hero, something out of a Robert Altman movie. But Seaver was this extraordinary figure. He and his wife were like “Ken and Barbie” models. Seaver was considered intelligent well beyond the ordinary, accorded the respect of a college professor or a rising young politician. Then there was his pitching. After the “imperfect game,” Seaver was bidding to go beyond comparisons with other greats, like Bob Gibson and Juan Marichal. Rather, he was now seen as a “sure” Hall of Famer already, his fastball and all-around ability comparable to Sandy Koufax, Bob Feller, Lefty Grove, and a list so short it boggled the mind. His was a golden image that comes along once every century or so.
But as Seaver warmed up at Wrigley Field, he felt a bothersome twinge in his shoulder. While he prepared in the bullpen, Pat Pieper read the starting line-ups over the public address system. Pieper had been the Cubs’ voice since 1906, having read off the names of “Tinkers to Evers to Chance.” He saw his team play in the World Series, winning it twice in his first three years on the job. In 1969, it had been 61 years since their last World Championship, won after the “Merkle Boner” of 1908 (over Christy Mathewson and the New York Giants). Pieper was a man who had “seen too many surprises in this game,” recounting how in the 1918 World Series, “I saw Babe Ruth lifted for a pinch-hitter.”
Wrigley Field was filled with placards and banners, fans singing and chanting. It had all the earmarks and regional pride of a World Cup soccer match. This being the summertime, a large contingent of New Yorkers was on hand, challenging the locals with signs of their own. The ushers and cops were all on edge.
After Bill Hands set New York down in the first, the great Tom Seaver took the hill. Cubs fans booed, of course, but his appearance was a curious phenomenon. You could not help admiring this guy, his superlative ability. He was becoming a myth, a sighting. In the first, he was untouchable, appearing to be as unhittable as he had been at Shea Stadium.
The game settled into a pitcher’s duel; Hands, effective but pedestrian in comparison with the superhuman heat of Seaver. In his first shot at Jimmy Qualls, Tom got his nemesis to ground out. The first nine Cubs went down like doomed, blindfolded prisoners before a firing squad.
In the fourth, Chicago mounted a rally, mainly on the strength of New York second baseman Ken Boswell’s error. Boswell’s defensive liabilities were many. Seaver simply responded by throwing what could be described as baseballs traveling “through a car wash without getting wet,” in so doing blowing away Santo and Banks as if they were 11-year old scrubs in the Fresno Little League.
In the sixth, a chink in the armor. Kessinger bunted for a hit. Seaver made a pitch to Beckert that he said was virtually impossible to hit – high cheese – but the Cubs’ second baseman managed a slow grounder to Boswell, advancing Kessinger into scoring position. Then Billy Williams, the iron man and future Cooperstown inductee, proved that even Tom Seaver could allow a measly single, which in this case resulted in Kessinger scoring to make it 1-0. The capacity crowd at Wrigley, over 40,000 after the standing room only were counted, cheered like it was 1945 and they had just been informed of Nazi Germany’s surrender to Ike at a French school house.
The utilitarian Hands matched Seaver zero-for-zero after that. In the eighth, Durocher took the field to argue a play. “How about a Schlitz, Leo?” Seaver joked to the manager, who had recently completed a series of beer ads. Seaver mowed Chicago down, but an imperceptible problem, unseen by average fans, began to make its presence known. His fastball slowed down imperceptibly, his curve hung just that much; and worse, his shoulder was stiff.
With a 1-0 lead and two outs in the ninth, Hands allowed a base hit to J.C. Martin. Durocher, who sat on his hands while Fergie Jenkins blew a two-run lead in the ninth inning a week before, seemed at this point to have recognized the error of his ways, perhaps taking a lesson from the Hodges playbook. When Hands told him at the mound, “I’ve run out of gas,” Leo did not berate his man, telling him that real men complete what they started, and go into some diatribe about Sal Maglie or Kirby Higbe. Instead, he patted Hands on the butt and waved in ex-Dodger Phil Regan, one of the better firemen of the 1960s. Regan was particularly tough on the Mets over the years. He got Donn Clendenon on a soft liner, and Tom Seaver had been beaten! This concept seemed impossible, but here it was, right there at Wrigley Field in Chicago.
Santo ran to the mound, leaped high, and clicked his heels together. The “bleacher bums” loved it, grunting and plagiarizing the Black Panthers: “AEEBEE! UNGOWA! CUB POWUH!”
“I love them,” Durocher told the writers. “I love the ‘bleacher bums.’ ” Recently he had bought a group of them $29.70 worth of drinks when 10 male bums and two female ones “cornered” him at the Chase Park Plaza Hotel in St. Louis.
“Who’s the pressure on now?” Chicago’s next day starter, Dick Selma asked the writers. He and Seaver were friends, but Selma could not help but feel just a twinge of something . . . maybe not jealousy, but rather a desire to demonstrate that “Tom Terrific” was not the only guy from the 1956 Fresno Little League who was worth his salt.
“Yes, sir, yes, sir, that was a World Series game,” Durocher remarked of beating Seaver. It was telling, in that he now tacitly admitted beating the Mets was more important than Chicago’s other opponents.
Tom Seaver, seemingly pitching on a plaque at Cooperstown, or from a granite perch at Mt. Rushmore, suddenly was all too human, sitting in the dank Wrigley clubhouse; his head down, his arm aching. The Mets then boarded a bus back to the Executive House Hotel, surrounded by taunting Cub fans.
On July 15, 1963 Roger Craig of the New York Mets lost his 13th of 18 consecutive decisions; the team their 17th of 18 games, against the Houston Colt .45s. Between 1963 and 1968, the Mets never won on July 15.
On the morning of Tuesday, July 15, the Mets were 49-37, five and a half back of Chicago (57-34). Writer Dick Young had recently predicted that defending league title-holder St. Louis (46-46) would rebound from their 11 1/2-game deficit to beat both teams.
Gary Gentry, the rookie who never let anything bother him, was scheduled to start at Wrigley Field. Their ace having been beaten the previous day, a loss would drop New York six and-a-half-back. Aside from the first game of the Cubs series the previous week, this above all the games played during this home-and-home stretch in the middle of the long, hot summer was crucial.
Gentry had said of his previous start against Chicago that it was “just another game,” but this time he sensed the gravity of it and decided to allow himself a sense of excitement. “He had good schooling at that baseball college,” Hodges said, referring to Arizona State (as if classes on political science, geometry and economics had been replaced by full course specials on the bunt, the hit ‘n’ run, and the art of short relief pitching). But Hodges realized, also, that both Gentry and Nolan Ryan were still “babies” who had yet to respond to coaching as the “veterans” Seaver (24) and Koosman (26) did. Whether they would remained to be seen.
Bud Harrelson, still regaining his form after his Army service, was not in the starting line-up. Al Weis, the former Chicago White Sox infielder and normally a second baseman, was penciled in at shortstop against the Cubs. In Webster’s dictionary, the word “skinny” was accompanied by Weis’s photo: all 170 pounds of him, and that was after an off-season training regiment of “pasta and beer.” The Chicago heat probably sweated 10 pounds out of him, beer or no beer.
“I haven’t been hitting the long ball yet this year,” said Weis, as if there was a bonus in his contract if he should match Hank Aaron’s home run total. Prior to the game, Weis had a total of four home runs in seven Major League seasons.
Before the game, the “bleacher bums,” emboldened by yesterday’s win, were out in force, obnoxious as ever. When Mets hitters homered into the bleachers during pre-game batting practice, they tossed the balls back, but on Waveland Avenue kids retrieved those balls hit all the way out of the stadium, keeping or selling them.
The day of the July 15 game at Wrigley, both Koosman and Seaver were named to the National League All-Star roster in Washington. When Santo came on the field for batting practice, Mets coach Joe Pignatano caught his attention and did a clumsy imitation of the Cub infielder’s heel-clicking dance. “Bush, that’s real bush,” Pignatano yelled at Santo, a fellow Italian-American who responded with the traditional Italian finger sign for “back at ya.”
During the pre-game line-up card exchange at home plate, Hodges addressed Cubs captain Santo, telling him he reminded him of Tug McGraw. McGraw, he said, would
“jump and down” when he was “young and immature.” Poker-faced, Hodges then said, “He doesn’t do it anymore,” and left Santo to ponder non-sequiters.
This was Dick Selma’s chance. The talkative Californian was 9-3 with 104 strikeouts in 103 innings coming in. Aside from winning on the same mound where Tom Seaver lost the previous day, he wanted to show the Mets he belonged. A one-time hot prospect, New York considered him expendable. He was lost in the expansion draft to San Diego, who traded him to Chicago.
The “bleacher bums’ ” so-called “commando squad” charged a Mets fans with a cardboard “LET’S GO, METS” sign, ripping it to shreds. When a “replacement” appeared, its holders were showered by garbage.
In the fourth inning of a 1-1 game, with two men on and two outs, Selma got two quick strikes on Weis with breaking pitches, long considered his “Achilles heel.” Selma went for the outside corner but did not get the call. Weis choked up on his 35-ounce bat. Randy Hundley wanted another breaker, but Selma, no doubt figuring Weis could not go yard in batting practice, challenged him.
“Get that fast ball in there,” yelled Ernie Banks, trying to cross up the hitter. Weis connected and the ball landed not amongst the “bleacher bums,” but on Waveland Avenue for a three-run clout. Later, when Banks singled, Ed Kranepool razzed him about his “call.” Banks remained silent. It turned out Mr. Cub usually rattled away only when his club was winning.
Gentry pitched one of the best games of his life. Leading 5-1 in the eighth, however, he hung an 0-and-2 curve ball to Santo, who powered it over the fence for a three-run homer to make the score 5-4.
“That was a dumb, dumb pitch,” he told the reporters, then explained that it was based on Seaver’s “advice.” It turned out Seaver told him “a real good pitcher” such as Bob Gibson or Juan Marichal tries to close the door on 0-and-2 counts instead of wasting an “out” pitch. Apparently, the likes of Gibson, Marichal . . . and Seaver could do it, but Gentry was not there yet.
Hodges went to Ron Taylor, who finished the eighth and then set Chicago down in the last frame, retiring Qualls on the game’s last play, a grounder to first. Weis was two-for-four, scored two, and drove in three runs in the 5-4 victory. After the game, Weis was the toast of the clubhouse, rattling off the names of all the pitchers he had homered off of in his career: Tommy John, Dick Stigman, Dave McNally, Cecil Upshaw, and now Dick Selma.
“Once when I hit a homer for the White Sox I came into the dugout and all the guys were lying on the floor like they were dead or passed out from shock,” he told the reporters.
“Weis, Weis, Weis,” sputtered a towel-covering-his-head Durocher, the villain of this story. “Don’t mention that name. Selma had to furnish the power. There had to be a tail wind. And he had to swing as hard as he could.”
As for Selma, Leo said he “just wasn’t thinking very well, I guess. It was a lack of concentration. You got to think a little with a one-and-two pitch – throw a curve or a bad ball.”
Durocher did not toss Selma “under the bus” as badly as he had Don Young, who despite Leo’s public admonition on his behalf after his July 8 outburst against the rookie in New York, had lost his job to Qualls (who earned it by swinging the bat well).
Durocher was asked about the razzing he got from Joe Pignatano on the Mets’ bench. Leo said Piggy had never been a decent player so, “Why should he worry me now?” He was piling up the bulletin board material for later in the season.
“He hit my best pitch,” Selma said, giving Weis the credit Leo refused.
At Mr. Laff’s, a Manhattan sports bar, saloonkeeper Phil Linz just smiled at the television set. Linz, a former Yankee and Met, tended the bar and played his harmonica for patrons. He had once been fined for playing his harmonica on the team bus. Linz was a teammate with and played for Berra, now a Mets coach, while later playing for Hodges. When Linz hit a home run in 1968, it was considered so rare that Gil ordered champagne. Once, when a patrolman stopped Linz for speeding, he was told he was supposed to wear his glasses while driving.
“I got contacts,” he told the officer.
“I don’t care who you know, you still gotta wear your glasses,” was the reply.
On July 16, 1968 the New York Mets were beaten by Pittsburgh, 3-2.
Trailing by only four and a half games on Wednesday, July 16, the Mets faced a game that may or may not have been as crucial as the previous day’s encounter. A loss would not be as hard to swallow as it would have been had Gary Gentry lost his game, but a win would be cause for great joy in the world of baseball momentum. More important, it was the “rubber match” of a three-game set on the road against their rivals. It would give them two straight series victories over the Cubs and a 4-2 record with Chicago during the crucial overall stretch between July 8-16.
On a team featuring young, hard-throwing studs, victory would have to be attained on this day with a veteran who no longer had a great fastball, and was decidedly not a stud, at least not in the baseball sense of the word. With temperatures in the 90s, the humidity as sticky as Mississippi mud, Don Cardwell’s task was a difficult one. Once upon a time, he did throw hard, when as member of the Cubs he tossed a no-hit game in 1960. At 33 the Mets now called him “Big Daddy.” His record: 3-8. His opponent: Ferguson Jenkins, 25, seemingly impervious to the conditions. Jenkins was one of the first pitchers to run to and from the pitcher’s mound, which for years was viewed as a “high school” example of false hustle. The odds of Cardwell beating Jenkins: not good.
“I want to see if Fergie runs out to the mound today,” surmised Agee.
“That Jenkins doesn’t even sweat,” said Art Shamsky. “He wears long sleeves on days like this.”
Ken Boswell liked to joke about how much he drank, although whether it was an “act” or not was often an open question. He told the writers he did not think he could make it through infield drills on a day like this; that his uniform was soaked with “all that Bourbon coming out.”
Francis X. Smith, a member of the New York City Council in Chicago on business, attended the game. Bidding for the “ball park vote,” Smith said he lived 10 minutes from Shea Stadium, never missed a home game, and chided John Lindsay – his opponent in the fall Mayoral election - as a football fan, a front-runner who “didn’t even make Opening Day at Shea Stadium.”
Jenkins did sprint out to the hill. The “bleacher bums” held signs extolling their support for him in light of the fact that St. Louis manager Red Schoendienst inexplicably left him – or any other Cubs pitchers – off the All-Star Game pitching staff. The opinionated Santo, writing a daily column for the Chicago Daily News, made no bones about his feelings. In Jenkins’s case he was justified. The pitcher was 12-6 and leading the league in strikeouts on July 16. Over the course of their respective careers, Jenkins’s statistics would hold up to those of Schoendienst’s ace, Bob Gibson.
But Jenkins did not have it that day. When Tommie Agee homered, the ball was thrown back on the field by the “bleacher bums.” Removed from the game, trailing 5-0 with no outs in the second by the other Rube Walker, Jenkins did not sprint off the mound. With nothing going for them the “bleacher bums” took to saying vile things about Agee. They were not above racial insults and references to homosexuality, then eventually started fighting among themselves.
In a sloppy game played in the intense heat, the Mets held a slim 6-5 lead when reliever Rich Nye hung a curve ball and Weis hit another home run. “Oh, no!” was all Cubs announcer Jack Brickhouse could muster. “Not again!”
Art Shamsky’s home run added some more insurance, and Cal Koonce pitched well in relief to wrap up the 9-5 victory. The third straight sell-out crowd made for 112,000 fans over the three-game series. That equaled attendance at the 1929 Notre Dame-USC football game at Soldier Field, and was the largest baseball crowd for a Chicago series since the 1959 White Sox-Dodgers World Series (in which Los Angeles set all-time records of more than 90,000 at each of the games played in the L.A. Coliseum).
When the game ended, Seaver ran out to congratulate Taylor, who closed it out. He jumped in the air, clicking his heels to spite Santo and the Chicago fans. In the clubhouse, the PR major stood up and stated, “I have a press release. Al Weis is only 483 years behind Babe Ruth.” Of the heel-clicking, Seaver said, “It was just a little kick, a small dig.”
“Weis has lost a little power,” a smiling Hodges said of the fact that his second-day home run did not make it to Waveland Avenue as his Tuesday shot had.
As if to counter City Councilman Francis Smith, Mayor Lindsay sent a telegram to Hodges: “ALL NEW YORK WISHES YOU AND THE METS BEST OF LUCK IN THE SECOND CITY. LET’S GO, METS. MAYOR JOHN V. LINDSAY.”
Ron Taylor asked a reporter, “Are the nine crucial days over yet?” It was in reference to the media’s interpretation of the period between July 8 and July 16 and “nine crucial days,” in which two series with Chicago sandwiching the Montreal set would prove whether the Mets were “for real” when the “rubber hit the road.” The cliches were flying.
“Hey, wait’ll we get ‘em in Wrigley Field next week,” one Met yelled. It was a further dig at Santo, who had said that after losing two of three in New York.
In the Cubs’ clubhouse, Santo sat dazed from the heat, the long day, and especially the loss. “I still don’t believe it,” he said.
Durocher, who called the 1-0 victory over Tom Seaver tantamount to a World Series game, shrugged off this one as “just another ball game. Don’t forget who’s in first place.” When the reporters began to ask actual questions, he cut them off in his inimitable style.
That night, as the Mets gleefully made their way to O’Hare, escaping the brutal Chicago heat for the cooler climes of Canada and another series with the Expos, Ed Charles comprised a poem:
“East Side, West Side,
The fans are feeling gay.
After seven long, long years,
The Mets are on their way
“South side, north side,
The word is going ‘round,
When October rolls around,
The Mets will win the crown,
“East Side, West Side,
The fans are feeling gay.
After seven long, long years,
The Mets are on their way.”
Whether a player today, post-Stonewall, would refer to Mets fans as “feeling gay” is doubtful, but the point of Charles’s poem was heartfelt. They were 51-37, three-and-a-half games back with the All-Star break coming up. The “other New York baseball team” lost to fall 22 games out of first place.
“After seven long, long years, the Mets were, indeed, on their way,” wrote Schaap and Zimmerman in The Year the Mets Lost Last Place.
“What ever happened to ‘Marvelous Marv?’ ”
****
Truly, after the Pentecostal spiritual that was Tom Seaver’s “birth of a true New York Sports Icon,” the Mets - like the early Christian martyrs - had faced great adversity in the immediate aftermath of the event. They had not suffered at the hands of Roman persecutors, but like the apostles did triumph over evil, or at least the dark forces of Leo Durocher and the vile “bleacher bums.”
The momentum they had at mid-season, the confidence they felt, the optimism of their manager and star pitcher, and of course the high hopes of a whole city – indeed an entire country – were overflowing. The historical memory informs us that they rode their victory train like destiny’s child. But history is filled with bumps and bruises.
School texts often gloss over the details of the American Revolution, as if we declared our independence, George Washington won a few battles, and the Constitution wrote itself. Americans are often unable to concede the possibility that victory in World War II was not inevitable, preferring to pay little heed to the closeness of losing at Midway, or early losses to the “Desert Fox.”
Indeed, experience informs us that greatness is forged through great trials and tribulations. The New York Mets still faced their greatest challenges down the road to . . . destiny.
The wrath of Gil
Because all those men which have seen my glory, and my miracles, which I did in Egypt and in the wilderness, and have tempted me now these 10 times, and have not hearkened to my voice;
Surely they shall not see the land which I sware unto their fathers, neither shall any of them that provoked me see it:
- Numbers: 22-23
God spoke to Moses, and told him to lead his Chosen People, the Jews, out of Egyptian bondage to the Promised Land of Israel. Moses did so, with the help of miracles performed by God, most notably the parting of the Red Sea.
God gave Moses the Ten Commandments by which His people were to live by, but the Jews did not obey. After a golden calf was made and worshipped by the population, God poured His wrath upon His people, threatening that the Promised Land they sought would not be forthcoming.
Moses prayed that the Lord be forgiving, and eventually, after 40 years wandering in the wilderness, the Promised Land was found and occupied, but not until the Canaanites were defeated in battle.
The Jews had to earn the Promised Land.
So it came to pass that after the “birth” of the “savior” Tom Seaver on July 9, 1969, the New York Mets could see the Promised Land. It was so close they could touch it, almost tasting the “land of milk and honey.” But like the Biblical Chosen People, they would not simply enter it. They would have to fight for it. And they would face his wrath first; the wrath of Gil Hodges.
****
After the series at Wrigley Field, the Mets traveled to Montreal where they took on the first-year expansion Expos. Montreal under manager Gene Mauch was not as bad as the 1962 Mets, but they were close: 52-110. Yet somehow, they played the Mets fairly even in 1969, at least in the first half of the season. They had knocked the superstar Tom Seaver around on Opening Day, before he was a superstar. They took a game at Shea Stadium sandwiched in between the crucial Cubs series, but neither of those two wins came easily for New York.
Then the Mets rode into Montreal so high they did not need an airplane. Choose your historical metaphor: they were the rebs after Manassas I, the Japanese after Pearl, Nixon after beating McGovern. Each would learn it was not so easy after all. At first it seemed to be more of the same, with Koosman gliding to a 5-2 win.
But the next day the great Tom Seaver, the unhittable master, the superstar, the savior; was terribly distressed by severe stiffness, which became actual pain in his throwing shoulder. He lost a pedestrian 5-4 game to Bill Stoneman, a pretty good pitcher who threw a no-hitter in 1969. The next day Gary Gentry pitched well, but not well enough in a 3-2 loss. They lost a series to the Expos.
After that came the All-Star break, a needed and necessary three days off for most ball clubs, but curiously not of value to the Mets. Regardless of the Montreal series, the Mets were the hot team in the National League and were better off playing other not-so-hot teams.
Nevertheless, the break came. Some of the Mets coaches went up to the Catskills. They were notorious cheapskates, complaining about the cost of everything; gotta tip this guy, gotta tip that guy. Then again, this was an era in which the minimum big league salary was around $7,000 a year. These guys were working men, not retired millionaires from their playing days who coached out of a sense of noblesse oblige.
A crowd of 42,259 showed up at Washington’s recently re-named Robert F. Kennedy Stadium (originally Griffith Stadium, named after Calvin Griffith, but no longer popular after taking the original Senators to Minnesota, turning them into the Twins). A black-tie dinner honoring the Greatest Team Ever in honor of professional baseball’s 100th anniversary, and a White House reception, highlighted the social calendar. President Richard Nixon was an enormous baseball fan who was reading the Washington Post Sunday statistics of all big league players when he was informed that President Eisenhower had suffered a heart attack in 1955, thus making him acting President. Seaver met the fellow Californian, whose wife was, like he, a USC alum (Nixon often courted her, sometimes even driving her when she dated other guys, at SC football games in the 1930s).
“Oh, you’re the young man who won for the Mets when they were losing,” President Nixon said to him.
Seaver told him it was great to finally be a winner.
Nixon smiled. He had lost the 1960 Presidential election, the 1962 California Gubernatorial race, and was counted out by many before attaining the Presidency the previous November.
“I know what you mean,” he said to Seaver.
Mother Nature did not oblige, raining out the last daytime All-Star Game. Pushed back to Wednesday, Detroit’s Denny McLain eschewed the honor of starting for American League manager Mayo Smith because he had to make a dental appointment.
McLain was one of the true characters in the game’s history, which is saying something. As a young pitcher, he was Seaver’s equal, no questions asked. An absolute future Hall of Famer, McLain was baseball’s last 30-game winner in 1968, when he pitched Detroit to the World Championship over Bob Gibson’s Cardinals. In 1969 he was almost as good, on his way to 24 wins and a repeat Cy Young award.
McLain liked to play the piano in hotel bars and hang out with gamblers. In 1970 he was suspended by Bowie Kuhn for nefarious gambling activities. When he returned, all the greatness was sapped out of him. It was as if God came down from Heaven and removed his ability as penance for wasting His gifts. After retirement, which was essentially the point where nobody wanted any part of him, his name stayed in the news. Every few years, it seemed, McLain got arrested or indicted on extortion or racketeering charges of one kind or another, eventually doing some serious prison time. His wife was perhaps the most remarkable woman in history. She stuck with him throughout all of it.
Nixon had to miss the game to attend the splashdown of the astronauts in the Pacific. Vice-President Spiro Agnew, the former Governor of next-door Maryland, threw out the first ball. In those by gone days Republicans were cheered by D.C. crowds, kind of.
In the 1960s and ‘70s, the National League was vastly superior to the American League in All-Star Games. The original reason – the N.L. integrated better, faster and by bigger numbers, thus playing aggressive “National League baseball” – was no longer a prevalent factor by 1969. American League teams had, for the most part, caught up socially with rosters filled by talented black, Latino, and as a vestige from pre-Castro days, a fair number of Cuban stars.
But the National League had gained the edge with Jackie Robinson’s signing. The American League played the losing game of trying to inadequately match the Yankees. Now, even the Yankees were mediocre. The American’s had not won since 1962 at Wrigley Field. The 1969 classic featured a galaxy of all-time greats and near greats. Mel Stottlemyre of New York started for the Americans, but he and successor John “Blue Moon” Odom of the A’s got knocked all around the park, ending any pretense of competitiveness in the first couple of innings. McLain arrived from the dentist in time to toss an inning.
The American League roster demonstrated that by 1969 at least, the junior circuit was just as good, just not in All-Star Games. Featuring such stalwarts as Minnesota’s Rod Carew and Harmon Killebrew, Oakland’s Reggie Jackson and Sal Bando, Baltimore’s Frank Robinson, Brooks Robinson and Boog Powell, Boston’s Carl Yastrzemski, Washington’s Frank Howard, and California’s Jim Fregosi; their failure in this and so many other years before and after that, is unexplainable.
Steve Carlton of St. Louis, enjoying his breakout year, was manager Red Schoendienst’s choice to start, followed by teammate Bob Gibson. The fact that the Cardinals had two pitchers as superb as Carlton and Gibson had fans gasping at their around-.500 record, thanks mainly to anemic offense (as if the Cards forgot the “Year of the Pitcher” was over). After Gibby, Bill Singer of the Dodgers, Koosman (one and two-thirds innings, no runs), Houston’s hard-throwing Larry Dierker and Atlanta knuckleballer Phil Niekro closed out a 9-2 N.L. win. Seaver, named to the squad and in attendance, did not pitch because of shoulder stiffness.
Cleon Jones was two-for-four and scored twice. Chicago’s Don Kessinger, Glenn Beckert, Randy Hundley, Ron Santo and Ernie Banks all played. Cincinnati’s Tony Perez and Pete Rose, San Francisco’s Willie Mays, and Atlanta’s Hank Aaron, were among the great stars for the Nationals, but the day belonged to Johnny Bench of the Reds and Willie McCovey of the Giants.
When Ted Williams first saw Bench play, he signed a baseball to him, “A Hall of Famer for sure.” The 40th All-Star Game was his debutante ball: two-for-three, a home run, two runs scored, two RBIs. But a second homer was denied Bench when Yastrzemski stretched over the left field fence to make one of the most spectacular fielding plays in All-Star Game – or any game, for that matter – history.
But the Most Valuable Player was McCovey. This was the day, and this was the season, in which Big Mac finally extended himself out from beyond the shadow of the now-declining Mays. He was two-for-four with two spectacular home runs.
****
The summer of 1969 was a momentous period in this nation’s great history, for good and most definitely also for bad. On the good side was America’s landing on the Moon on July 20. It was a spectacular achievement, the embodiment of John F. Kennedy’s “new frontier.” In 1961, JFK outlined a “stated purpose” that America “land a man on Moon,” and then “return him safely to Earth.” It was an outlandish proposal, yet both the Soviets and the United States entered into a fierce “space race,” with the Moon being the ultimate prize of the victor.
The U.S.S.R. put a man in space first, but the U.S. won each round of the race after that. Throughout the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs, we continually – with some mishaps and tragedies – enjoyed success. One of the most successful was a “failure,” that being John Glenn’s return through the Earth’s atmosphere in 1962 with a damaged heat shield after his continual orbiting of the Earth had to be shortened. It was all depicted in spectacular manner first by Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, and later in a film version starring Ed Harris as Glenn.
By 1969, the Soviets were, to para-phrase the late astronaut the Gus Grissom, “in our shadow.” After having to abort a 1968 trip to the Moon within sight of the planet’s rocky terrain, Apollo 11 took off in July of 1969. On July 20 they landed. Neil Armstrong, like Tom Seaver a graduate of USC, was the first man to set foot on the surface, announcing, “One small step for man, one giant leap for Mankind.”
(Walter Schirra and several other astronauts had advanced degrees from the University of Southern California, because NASA contracted to have a simulator, known as “the bubble,” located on the campus for space candidates to work in.)
Ironically, the Mets observed the Moon landing from an airport in Montreal, where they were stuck because their plane did not work! The 1960s striving for the Moon landing was Biblical in its epic qualities, inspiring a number of films and movies with space themes during this period. One of the most spectacular was Stanley Kubrick’s eerie 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was not the story of Barry Bonds’s 73-home run campaign of that year.
On a decidedly bad note on August 12, 1969 the Manson killings rocked Los Angeles. Manson, a career criminal who had spent the majority of his life behind bars, was a would-be songwriter who befriended The Beach Boys’ Mike Love. Love let him hang around because he always had a bevy of sexually active young girls made available. Manson was even credited as the writer of one of the group’s songs, “Learn Not to Love.” But Love got scared of Manson and distanced himself. While with Love in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles, Manson noticed a nearby home and endeavored to some day kill its occupants, who were unknown to him.
The “Manson family” lived on the secluded, semi-abandoned Spawn Ranch in the mountains northwest of Los Angeles. In the hot, smoggy summer of 1969, Manson sent his “family” first to the home of a Beverly Hills hair stylist, Voytek Frykowski, who was hosting a party that evening. Actor Steve McQueen was invited, but on his way to the soiree stopped at a Beverly Boulevard eatery, El Coyotes. There, the handsome actor picked up a chick and left with her for some recreational sex instead of going to the party. It saved his life.
Upon orders from the absent Manson, his “family” killed all the people at the party, using their blood to spell words like “PIG” and “WAR” all over the walls. Among the dead: lovely young actress Sharon Tate, star of the film version of Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls. She was carrying the unborn, now-murdered baby of her husband, famed director Roman Polanski (Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown). At first, Polanski was a suspect. Rosemary’s Baby was a Satanic cult hit, thought somehow to have inspired the killings.
Neighbors heard screams, but this being Hollywood they figured it to be an orgy, a cult meeting, a witch’s coven, or any number of “ordinary” happenings of this time and place. “It seemed like the world was going insane,” Art Shamsky recalled.
A few nights later, the “Manson family” returned (sans Charlie) to the city, this time to the Los Feliz home that caught Manson’s eye a few years earlier when he was hanging out with Love. It belonged to a businessman and his wife, Antonio and Barbara Locci Lo Bianco. They were murdered as heinously as the Tate-Frykowski party had been.
Eventually, Los Angeles prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi was able to convict Manson and his “family,” although a 1972 Supreme Court ruling that the death penalty was un-Constitutional spared them their lives.
The other seminal non-sports event of 1969 was Woodstock. Whether this was good or bad is dependent upon the interpretation. On the one hand, it was a free demonstration of peace, love, joy and harmony. On the other, it was a dirty, filthy event that spawned a culture of drug addiction, plus a sexual revolution resulting in transmitted diseases, including AIDS.
History views Woodstock as the last gap of the 1960s, mainly because a year later The Rolling Stones tried to re-create it at a motor speedway outside of San Francisco, only to result in mayhem. In 1971, Peter Townshend and The Who, who headlined Woodstock, wrote a classic rock anthem called “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” Its premise was that the young people of the 1960s were duped into believing all the malarkey about peace and love that supposedly came from rejecting such traditions as Christianity, family and patriotism. Townshend said he “hated” the Woodstock experience, which included his almost clubbing a man to his death when he tried to take the stage and fiddle with his beloved guitar.
Held in the Biblically named town of Bethel, New York, it drew kids from all over the country, but naturally most came from the Metropolitan New York area. The conservative residents in the surrounding farming community saw it as a religious disaster, akin to the plague of locusts that descended upon Egypt. Poorly planned, its fences taken down every night by those simply wanting it to be an open, free event – attempts to sell and enforce ticket purchases were futile – Woodstock averted disaster seemingly through the hand of . . . God. It rained. It was muddy. There was not enough food, not enough water, not enough medical care, no place to sleep, little shelter. After the rains it was sticky, putrid with humid heat and the inevitable bugs and pestilence that comes with it.
But the music was world class. It included Jimi Hendrix at his best, including a crazy, electric, drugged-out rendition of “Our National Anthem” from the former “screaming eagle” of the 101st Airborne Division. The Who did not want to be there, but being pros they delivered with their usual intensity. “Country Joe” McDonald regaled the crowd, estimated at a million people, with anti-war folk songs. Carlos Santana may well have made his name at Woodstock. The promoters were not professionals and they lost their shirts, but over several decades record sales and merchandising brought a profit.
On August 17, Hurricane Camille, a category five storm, hit the Gulf Coast. Huge hurricanes had pounded Florida in the 1930s, but subsided somewhat over the decades. The lessons from the earlier storms were lost. In the 1930s, there was a small population in the area, so the weather mainly just hit beaches with little damage to property. There was no cable TV warning or 24-hour news cycle sensationalizing them. When word of Camille came about, people in Miami and other locations in its path held “hurricane parties,” in some cases with tragic results when the storm came through and killed people. All in all, 248 died and billions were lost in damages. Nobody considered the possibility of “global warming” in 1969.
John Wayne’s The Green Berets was an enormous box office hit. Its theme song, “The Ballad of the Green Berets,” was a popular tune; all belying the idea that everybody in America opposed the war or supported the hippie protesters.
“We were all aware of what was going on in the country,” Jerry Koosman recalled. “I remember watching the Moon landing on television in a Montreal airport. So much was happening then, with Vietnam and all the demonstrations and protests at home. Yet as a team, I don’t recall us talking much about politics.”
“Baseball has always been an escape,” said Ed Charles. “We were quite conscious of what was happening in the country with the war and the demonstrations. But baseball has never been a political thing.”
While Charles may be right, Jim Bouton painted a different portrait in Ball Four, which was a snapshot of not just the 1969 season, but the country. Bouton was a self-described liberal, a hippie living inside a crew-cut family man who sympathized with the protesters, even driving over to San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park to express solidarity with them when the Seattle Pilots played at Oakland. Bouton described certain Right-wing teammates who accused him, only half-joking, of being a Communist. Bouton identified a small group of teammates who looked at the world as he did. In 1969 they kept their views mostly to themselves.
“I had gone to Vietnam in 1968 as part of a USO tour, and places I had been were always popping up on the news,” said Ron Swoboda. When the Tet Offensive began in 1969 <it actually began in 1968>, I knew just where that was and I knew what Saigon looked like, so it was hard to ignore what was going on . . .
“I remember Tom Seaver once quoted as saying if the Mets can win the World Series, America could get out of Vietnam.”
Late that summer, Lieutenant William Calley was charged with six counts of murder in the deaths of 109 Vietnamese civilians in My Lai.
“As a young professional athlete you are so engrossed in what you are doing that it is difficult to be totally emotionally involved in what is going on around you,” Tom Seaver told Art Shamsky years later. “The city was in a dire financial mess. The country was dealing with Vietnam and demonstrations . . . Every night on television you were seeing people being shot up and it was surreal. I was in the Marine Reserves, and I knew I could have been there. I thought about that a lot.”
1968-69 saw major events in other countries, and not just Vietnam. The North Koreans kidnapped American sailors on the U.S.S. Pueblo, holding them a year before releasing them after drawn-out political negotiations. Czechoslovakia, attempting to distance themselves from the Soviet Holocaust, declared “Socialism with a human face” under reformist leader Alexander Dubcek. The Soviets responded as they had in East Berlin in 1953 and Hungary in 1956, with tanks rolling into their streets during the so-called “Prague spring” of 1968.
In Belfast, Northern Ireland, a Catholic street protest was met by shots from British soldiers on the infamous “bloody Sunday.” It began a 30-year period of occupation and “war” between the British and a terrorist organization, the Irish Republican Army, known as “The Troubles.”
****
After the All-Star break, the Mets experienced the kind of metaphorical baseball lows that the ancient Jews experienced after being freed from Egyptian bondage. Thinking perhaps they would simply walk to the Promised Land of Israel, settle down, grow crops, and live in bliss forever, they instead wandered aimlessly in the desert. They incurred God’s wrath. They faced enemies with strong armies blocking them from their destiny.
The Mets, after Seaver’s bravura imperfecto of July 9, and in beating Chicago in both home-and-away series, were too young, inexperienced and naïve to realize just how difficult the road ahead was. Serious baseball would have to be played in the remainder of July, August and September if their Promised Land would be found. Many diamond Canaanites, Hittites, and Philistines would have to be fought and defeated. Then, on top of that that, they faced the wrath of Gil.
Tom Seaver may very well have felt like one of those ancient Roman generals who found it necessary to have a slave whisper in his ear, “All glory is fleeting.” No sooner had he been become a true New York Sports Icon than he saw that all of it could be taken away in a flash.
Herb Score had once been a pitcher of such promise as to warrant comparison with Lefty Grove and Hal Newhouser, but a Gil McDougald line drive to his face ended that dream. Wayne Simpson came “straight out of Compton” to dominate National League hitters in the first half of 1970, but a mid-season injury did him in.
Seaver felt pain and stiffness in his first start after the imperfecto, when the Wrigley Field mound apparently knocked him off stride. He did not pitch in the All-Star Game because of it, and the Mets reverted to their pre-1969 ways in late July and early August.
Doctors examined Seaver’s shoulder. It was theorized that with all the adrenaline of the imperfecto against Chicago, he had simply thrown too hard for the human shoulder to endure. “It’s only a muscle strain, maybe from throwing so hard in that one-hit game against Chicago,” one doctor told him. “It’s not a muscle tear and there’s nothing wrong with the joint. With proper treatment, it will be okay again.”
He was given Butazolidin pills and bathed the shoulder under heat lamps, but the pain would not go away. The unhittable master suddenly was very human, his record falling from 14-3 to 15-7. He lay awake at night, trying to convince himself it would be alright, but the harder he tried the more he worried. He used logic, refused to panic, thought it through, but came back to the basic question all athletes ask: What do I do if I can’t play anymore?
One of his heroes growing up, Don Drysdale of Los Angeles, had been as healthy as an ox for years, never missing a start, even pitching victory after victory down the stretch in 1965 with broken ribs. Just last year, Big D had been as dominant as ever, throwing 58 straight shutout innings, but in 1969, without warning, a persistent pain in his arm forced him to retire years too soon.
After the Reds clobbered him, Seaver almost convinced himself he was done. He walked the streets of Cincinnati, reasoning that he would go back to college, that he had the intelligence to have success outside of baseball. Maybe he had earned enough notoriety in three years in New York to parlay that into broadcasting. But to have gone from the mountaintop of July 9, to be an icon only to fall so perilously fast was mind-boggling. Seaver’s religious beliefs have always been privately held. His intelligence and capacity for reason led him to seek logical answers, not to surrender all to a deity who seemed, according to The Who’s rock opera “Tommy” at least, like a game of pinball; one’s life and destiny subject to the whims of a bouncing ball.
But God’s plan does not always – usually does not – rarely does, in fact, lead a man to great heights of fame, riches, and pagan idolatry. To be truly famous, especially in the fishbowl existence of the Big Apple, can be a perilous journey in which a man is tempted by things that try his soul, literally. Seaver had resisted the kinds of temptations that destroy most men. In later years, Mets stars Darryl Strawberry and Dwight Gooden, when placed in a similar position, allowed it to destroy them. Seaver was faithful to Nancy, held to his values, but was God saving him from something? From himself?
Tom Seaver was on a path towards that rarest form of fame and hero worship. There are people who look at the famous – actors, Hollywood celebrities, models, best-selling writers, political leaders – and seriously question whether some of these people, many of whom are utterly sleazy and immoral, have done a secret pact with the devil in order to get what the person who possesses the same ability but not the willingness to sell his soul, does not get; at least in this lifetime.
But Tom Seaver would let God sort it out. In the mean time, he knew that God helps those who help themselves, so he was going to work as hard as he could to stay in baseball, and let the chips fall where they may. There were tests ahead, for Seaver and his teammates. In the middle of August, New York traveled to the Astrodome, curiously one of their worst stops even in the years when the Astros were barely better than New York. They dropped all three. St. Louis passed them. Dick Young, the old sage that he was, might have been right after all. The cream was rising to the top, as it does in a 162-game season. It was hot. They call August the “dog days.” Momentum and spring enthusiasm was long gone. Pick the cliché: separate the men from the boys; the rubber hits the road . . .
Seaver contacted USC and told them to expect him to start classes in early October, as the Mets would not be in the post-season after all. Down by nine-and-a-half games, however, Gil Hodges still demanded professionalism.
On July 30 the Mets faced old nemesis Houston. Like the Mets, for the very first time the Astros were in contention, in the “wild, wild West” Division with Atlanta, San Francisco, Cincinnati and Los Angeles, all neck-and-neck. Houston featured Larry Dierker and Don Wilson, two of the hardest-throwing pitchers in baseball. They set records for strikeouts of opposing hitters. Wilson managed a no-hitter in 1969. Their plush in-door facility, the Astrodome (known as the “eighth wonder of the world”) was built for pitching and defense, their specialties. The Astros were a loose group.
Joe Morgan was still with Houston that season. Center fielder Jim “the Toy Cannon” Wynn was a power threat. The 1969 Astros, like that season’s expansion Seattle Pilots, were immortalized by Jim Bouton’s Ball Four. Bouton was traded to Houston in the second half of the year, and revealed a bawdy drinking song the team recited after wins. Catcher Johhny Edwards would “drink too much and call some long home runs.” The team’s ability to exasperate old school manager Harry Walker with their penchant to “drink and fight and (expletive deleted) ‘til curfew comes around” was glorified.
In the ninth inning of the first game of a doubleheader at Shea Stadium, Houston scored 11 runs – including two grand slams - to win, 16-3. “Using the word ‘played’ is somewhat of misnomer – we were massacred in both contests,” was the way Art Shamsky described it. The second game was “even uglier.”
In the third inning of game two, Houston scored 10 runs after two men were out to complete the sweep, 11-5. “This was the worst day I’ve seen as a Met,” said Seaver. “It was like it must have been seven years ago.”
An incident in this game has long been called the “turning point” of the season, although that is debatable on several levels. Johnny Edwards hit a slicing ball down into the left field corner. Cleon Jones barely jogged after it, picked it up and lobbed it back into the infield. The home fans booed his obvious lack of hustle.
Hodges headed out to the mound. He was superstitious about not stepping on the first base line, but this time paid no attention. He was furious. Instead of stopping at the mound to remove a hapless pitcher, he continued on. Bud Harrelson saw him coming and thought maybe he had done something wrong, but the seething Hodges continued into the outfield grass. Hodges confronted Jones. After a few words, Hodges headed back to the dugout, a contrite left fielder a few steps behind him.
“Nobody knows what really happened except Gil and myself,” Jones told Shamsky years later. “All anybody knows is that he came out on the field and pulled me out of the ball game. But, this is what happened. The ball was hit down the left field line and there was no way you were going to stop him from getting a double. So I ran after the ball the best way I could. It was soaking wet in the outfield that day and I had a bad ankle. When Gil walked out to me I was surprised as everyone else. First, I thought he was going to take out the pitcher. Then, I thought he was going to say something to Harrelson. But, then, when he walked past Buddy I looked back. I thought something had happened behind me. When I turned around he was right toward me. He got to me and said, ‘What’s wrong?’ I said, ‘What do you mean what’s wrong?’ He replied, ‘I don’t like the way you went after that last ball.’ I said, ‘Gil, we talked about this in Montreal. You know I have a bad ankle and as long as I wasn’t going to hurt the team I would continue to play.’ And then I said, ‘Look down.’ And he did. His feet were in water. He said, ‘It is bad out here. I didn’t know it was that bad. You probably need to come out of the game.’ So I said, ‘Fine’ and we walked in together. A few days later we had a conversation and he said, ‘You know I wouldn’t embarrass you like that, but I look at you as a leader on this club. Everybody seemed like they were comfortable getting their tails kicked, and I didn’t like that . . .’
“Everybody misinterpreted what happened. But in a way it proved a point and woke us up. That was his way of trying to shape up the ball club.”
When Hodges came home that evening, his wife Joan told him that he should not have embarrassed Jones the way he did. “You want to know something?” Hodges told Joan. “I didn’t even realize I was doing it until I was past the pitcher.”
“. . .Hodges and Jonesy had a rocky relationship,” Swoboda recalled, because “Cleon wouldn’t go out there for outfield practice or sometimes Cleon wouldn’t take batting practice.”
Swoboda’s assertion that Hodges and Jones had a “rocky relationship,” in part because of Jones’s failure to practice his defensive skills, brings up a conundrum of sorts, since Swoboda also claimed that he and the manager were on uneven terms because Swoboda practiced defense too much.
“Houston was the toughest club we faced,” said Koosman. “They had a great pitching staff with Larry Dierker and Don Wilson. We had a heck of a time beating them.
“But, I didn’t see what Gil saw. I didn’t see that Cleon didn’t hustle after the ball.” Still, Koosman added, “You don’t slough off when you play for Gil Hodges. You give him 100 percent all the time. It sends a message to the rest of the ball club.”
Whether the “wrath of Gil” was planned or not, the event is viewed through the prism of history as a catalyst, but in reality the team sank further into the abyss after that.
One of the Mets’ advantages was a loose clubhouse and a tightnit squad. Practical jokes were a regular event, as opposed to the Chicago atmosphere. Leo Durocher apparently was better at managing a team coming from behind than staying ahead. Joe Pignatano told a typical story. It seems that one day he came out to the bullpen, only to find a chef with three buffet dishes out there, with sternos underneath them.
“Who might you be?” Pignatano asked the chef.
“I’m waiting for Coach Pignatano,” he replied.
“You found him.”
The chef handed the coach a bill for $300.
“McGraw said not to worry, that you’d pick up the tab,” the chef told him.
“I told the guy the game is about to start and you can take the bill and all the food and you know what you can do with it,” Pignatano recalled. “I caught McGraw lying on the floor in the tunnel laughing. We ate the stuff in the clubhouse that night. By the way, Tug paid the bill.”
Pignatano also maintained a little garden out in the Shea Stadium bullpen. It produced tomatoes, radishes, pumpkins, zucchini, peppers and other vegetables. The groundskeepers looked after it when the Mets were on the road.
Gil’s removal of Jones and the Houston series in New York was not the low point of the year. Seaver tried to stem the tide, but his stiffness got worse. Using guile, he held Houston, but Astros fireballer Larry Dierker dominated New York with a 2-0 shutout to complete the sweep and put a fourth straight loss on the Mets. Houston won 10 of 12 from New York on the season.
The Mets managed to beat the Hank Aaron and Atlanta three in a row, but the Cubs were hot again so they treaded water. They traveled to brutally hot Cincinnati. The Reds were and always have been traditionally tough on the Mets. They were one team that always gave Tom Seaver trouble, even in some of his best seasons over the years. In 1969, Cincinnati still played at old Crosley Field under manager Dave Bristol. They were not yet the famed Big Red Machine. That occurred the next year when Sparky Anderson took over, the team moved to Riverfront Stadium, and won over 100 games en route to the World Series. However, the Reds were as potent an offensive force as there was in the game.
In 1968’s “Year of the Pitcher,” every team seemingly was effected except Cincinnati. The Reds’ trouble was pitching, although they had the hard-throwing Jim Maloney. Johnny Bench was in his second year, a brilliant superstar whose defensive abilities were absolutely second to any catcher in all of history.
Pete Rose roamed left field. He was the kind of hitter who gave Seaver trouble, getting his bat on the ball and spraying line drives all over the field. Bench could be challenged. Either he got Tom or vice versa, but Rose was a different story. New York came into the Queen City and dropped three of four.
After losing three straight games on August 11, 12 and 13 at the Astrodome, New York was nine-and-a-half games behind Chicago, with St. Louis moving ahead of them into second. By August 16, New York’s slump dropped them from 47-34 on July 9 to 64-51. The Cubs were 74-44 (.627), a full 30 games over the .500 mark, eight-and-a-half games ahead of the Mets. Resurgent St. Louis (66-53) was virtually tied with them.
Resurrection
“But Jesus beheld them, and said unto them, ‘With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible.’ ”
- Matthew 19:26
“Journalistically, it’s conventional to want to look for turning points,” said Ron Swoboda. “In a 162-game season there’s no single turning point. There are a collection of things that turn you in another direction, and for us the collection was Cardwell, Koosman, Gentry, and even McAndrew getting physically well . . . They all had little things bothering them, and they didn’t pitch very well in the first half of the year. Everyone but Seaver. Seaver was the same; dead steady.”
On August 16, Seaver started against San Diego, the worst team in the league. He told Grote if the Mets could not get happy against the Padres they did not deserve a pennant. Warming up Seaver was overjoyed to discover the stiffness had disappeared as mysteriously as it came. The San Diego series was a real ordeal: back-to-back double-headers. With Seaver’s arm, seemingly touched by an unseen hand and suddenly as strong as it had been on July 9, the first-year expansion club was helpless in a 2-0 Mets win. In the second game, and in both of the next day’s twin-bill, New York pitching held up in tense one-run victories: 2-1, 3-2 and 3-2.
Hodges benched Jones. Swoboda took his place and had a chance to face right-handers over the next few games, collecting a substantial portion of runs batted in.
“As late as August 19, we were still nine-and-a-half games back, but then we started to make our move,” Koosman said. “Seaver and I won our last 15 starts.”
Over the course of mid-August to the last game of the regular season on October 2, Seaver and Koosman were as “lights out” a pitching combination as has ever been known over a similar stretch. This is not an exaggeration, as it takes into account such stalwart duos as Christy Mathewson and Joe McGinnity (New York Giants, 1900s), Christy Mathewson and Rube Marquard (Giants, 1910s), Chief Bender and Ed Plank (Philadelphia A’s, 1910s), Waite Hoyt and Herb Pennock (New York Yankees, 1920s), Lefty Gomez and Red Ruffing (Yankees, 1930s), Bob Feller and Bob Lemon (Cleveland Indians, 1940s), Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale (Los Angeles Dodgers, 1960s), Juan Marichal and Gaylord Perry (San Francisco Giants, 1960s), Bob Gibson and Steve Carlton (St. Louis Cardinals, 1960s-70s), Catfish Hunter and Ken Holtzman (Oakland A’s, 1970s), and the staffs at Atlanta (Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, John Smoltz) and Oakland (Barry Zito, Mark Mulder, Tim Hudson) in the past two decades.
As for “hot” pitchers over a single year or partial season, Seaver in 1969 – and in particular after August 5 (his last defeat, 8-5 at Cincinnati) – is matched only by a handful if any. Old-timers such as Mathewson, Cy Young, Grover Alexander, Walter Johnson; “one-year wonders” like Jack Chesbro (1904), “Big Ed” Walsh (1906), and “Smoky Joe” Wood (1912) must have their statistics viewed in the context of the “dead ball era.” More recent hot-shots such as Dean Chance (1964), Denny McLain (1968), even Gibson (1968) and Drysdale (during his 58 straight scoreless innings in 1968), plus Ron Guidry (1978), Steve Stone (1980), and Orel Hershiser (1988) are among the few who might possibly match up with “Tom Terrific’s” dominance. So, with that in mind, it must also be stated that as good as Seaver was, Koosman was just as good!
The “Tom and Jerry Show” was off the charts. Their confidence was at such a high level that they simply determined to do things, then willed it true as if pitching baseballs to big league hitters was the easiest act in the world. In many ways, both pitchers ruined it for the rest of their careers. Seaver’s record of course speaks for itself; a first-ballot Hall of Famer with the highest percentage of votes in Cooperstown history. Yet, even in his best subsequent years, it was always hard work for him. Koosman was an effective big leaguer who never really repeated his 1968-69 dominance. Certainly he did not sniff what he did in late August, September and October of that year.
Both were hard workers, and their careers reflected success based on that ethic, their talent and competitiveness, but the pure ease with which they mowed down all comers in the aforementioned period was so spectacular, and so rare really, that it gives off the unique, unseen, unexplainable whiff of miracle. Was it just good pitching and some luck? Maybe.
Koosman and Seaver challenged each other, acknowledging their one-upsmanship with gestures from mound to dugout: 10 strikeouts would have to be matched with 11; a hitter sawed off after predicting the count in which it would happen; “making little bets as to who could get the side out with three pitches,” said Koosman.
“The difference between the physical abilities of the players in the Major Leagues is not that great and, something going hand in hand with that, the difference between the teams is not that great,” Tom Seaver surmised. “So what it comes down to is that the dividing factor between the one that wins and the one that loses is the mental attitude, the effort they give, the mental alertness that keeps them from making mental mistakes. The concentration and the dedication – the intangibles – are the deciding factors, I think, between who won and who lost. I firmly believe that. I really do.”
This was Seaver’s logical, reasoning mind at work, and of course each word of it is true. He once explained his motivation, his desire for perfection, the driving force separating him from so many others.
“It’s why you run wind sprints in 104-degree heat in the middle of the afternoon in St. Louis in the summer,” he said. “In the ninth inning with the game on the line, you draw strength from that.”
Fair enough, but it does not explain everything, especially not in 1969. Seaver’s own personal history was seemingly touched by Providence; from the JV’s to superstar by way of steady ascent matched by height, weight and strength that cannot be explained by summer wind sprints in St. Louis!
Many athletes are mediocre in high school, mature late, and become solid professionals in various sports. It is unusual, but not once-in-a-lifetime. There are even some valid theories – Sports Illustrated once examined this – that says a high school pitching star likely has peaked, matured too soon, probably burned out by zealous glory-hound coaches. By age 21 the wunderkinds are surpassed by those they once towered over. A fair number of baseball’s best pitchers in recent decades were not prep superstars. This includes Tom Glavine, Barry Zito, and Tim Hudson, all of whom did peak or started to peak at just the right time, which can be either the third year in the minors or the draft-eligible junior year in college (generally at age 21).
Many of the better pitchers – Greg Maddux and Glavine, certainly – were never overpowering, winning instead with control, movement, and guile. Dwight Gooden of the Mets might be the opposite of this coin. A high school phenom in Florida, he came roaring into the league and was, for a couple seasons, effective at the level of Seaver at his best. He dropped precipitously during and after the 1985-86 seasons, although off-field demons played a role.
Even Texas fireballers like Nolan Ryan and Roger Clemens, plus California fastball ace Randy Johnson, peaked anywhere from just in time to a little late. Ryan was said to throw 86 miles an hour by Baylor coach Mickey Sullivan, who scouted him in Alvin. Clemens had a big record at Spring Woods High School in Houston, but not so big that he was a first round draft pick or even the recipient of a full ride scholarship. He went to San Jacinto Junior College before starring at the University of Texas, then ascended to greatness at Boston in a manner similar to Seaver’s rise in New York. Johnson was fast and wild at Livermore High School. He was mediocre at USC, and took years to get anywhere in the minor leagues.
Mark Langston threw hard as a college junior, but too straight: his ERA was over 6.00 at San Jose State, but he found wood bats less daunting than collegiate aluminum, becoming an Angels All-Star. Mark Prior was a “can’t miss” high schooler who wanted the collegiate experience, was among the greatest pitchers in history at USC, and after setting the league afire saw his career burned out by injuries. Kerry Woods seemingly threw too hard for his own good. Numerous Arizona State pitchers had super collegiate records but short pro careers, probably because of burnout from their Tempe years (Gary Gentry?).
Bob Gibson was not signed right out of high school. He played basketball at Creighton University first. Steve Carlton’s promise took years to flower. Gaylord Perry was almost released by the Giants. Sandy Koufax was a big league bench rider for five years before his greatness began to be reached, but he was a myth; a basketball player whose arm was accidentally discovered in college. He probably threw too hard for his joints and sinews to take it beyond 1966.
Wayne Simpson was a plaque-in-waiting-at-Cooperstown . . . for half the 1970 season. Had he pitched too much at Compton, California’s Centennial High, in American Legion ball, and for every scout with a radar gun? Herb Score’s case was different: a straight baseball injury meant he would be better known as a broadcaster. Speaking of broadcasters, Joe Nuxhall was good enough to make his big league debut prior to the age of 16, but never materialized beyond journeyman status.
There are just not all that many Bob Fellers out there; high school pheenom, quick rise to The Show, followed by enduring career-long success. The baseball pitcher is particularly susceptible to the quirks of injury, development, maturity, luck and all other manner of strange circumstance, but cases of basketball and football players exist in large measure, as well. Bill Russell was an awkward junior varsity player at McClymond’s High in Oakland. Nobody, at least not the ones who counted, really saw it coming with Bart Starr, Johnny Unitas or even Joe Montana.
Tom Seaver’s work ethic cannot explain his performance down the stretch in 1969. This was “lightning in a bottle . . . quicksilver.” Many would say it is sacrilegious to suggest that somehow the deity guided the destinies of Tom and his teammates. After all, does not the Lord have better things to do? When George Burns, as God, said the Mets were his Last Miracle, it was played for laughs in Oh, God! What is a baseball season compared to wars, famine, and pestilence? Well, it sure brought a lot of happiness to a lot of people, and there is something to be said for that!
As Seaver – and for that matter Koosman as well – stood on the mound, throwing baseballs that darted to home plate, evading bats as if they were Moses’s staff turned into slithering serpents in the Pharaoh’s presence; determining the location of pitches and hitting Grote’s glove, their catcher not moving a twitch, batters swinging through them as if with holes in bats; watching grounders always hit right at Harrelson, fly balls always within Agee’s reach; each break going there way without fail . . . well, something beyond a reward for effort had to be going through their young minds.
Physically, Seaver was a prodigy. His pure stuff was the best in baseball. It was unadulterated athleticism, not guile or trickery as in a Whitey Ford or a Tom Glavine. Seaver had a weight training-induced-yet-God-given fastball comparable to Bob Gibson or Roger Clemens. There are a handful whose pure physical pitching gifts may have been better. Ryan threw harder, but was never better. Koufax was a little more dominant (but not by much). Myths and legends like Rube Waddell, Walter Johnson, Bob Feller, Steve Dalkowski and Randy Johnson are thought to throw maybe a mile or two per hour harder. Seaver did not always have his best stuff. In fact, it was always said what separated him from the rest was the ability to find the winning edge on his off-days, a trait of true greats in all sports.
Many run wind sprints, lift weights, and dedicate themselves completely, then fail miserably. For the most part, pro athletes all work at their craft. It is usually what separates them from the other high school and college heroes, who by this time watch from the stands or on TV, beer in hand. Seaver’s dedication accurately accounts for his great overall career, just as the willingness to go the extra mile describes why Tony Gwynn, for instance, is a Hall of Famer. But Gwynn was, like Seaver mostly, a guy who put in the time, saw results pay off, had a little luck (no injuries), and plodded through until the numbers said Cooperstown. He never had that single season like Seaver, Koosman or the Mets in 1969.
Amazin’!
As August droned toward September, the Mets got hot and the Chicago lead began to slip. Seaver started to think about 20 wins. It was not a selfish goal. If he could get there, it would help his team catch the Cubs. Chicago’s cockiness, their bulletin board bravado, the impatience of Leo Durocher, all combined with the Midwestern heat and the all-day-game Wrigley Field schedule to drain them just when they needed resources.
Hodges’s platoon schedule, judicious use of the bullpen, and five-man starting rotation, had the opposite effect on behalf of New York. In late August, the Mets won six straight. In early September, Chicago lost seven straight.
“We went into a composite slump,” Leo the Lion was quoted by Edgar Munzel in The Sporting News. “It wasn’t just one or two guys. It was everybody and every department. Hitting, pitching and fielding all went bad.”
“Leo Durocher was doing well with his veteran ball players,” said Rod Gaspar. “According to stories, Leo was enjoying himself at that time, but the Cubs pitching fell apart, and a young upstart team, the Mets, took their place. The majority of Durocher’s starting line-up was All-Stars. Leo wore ‘em out.”
On August 30 at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park, the score was tied in the bottom of the ninth. With a man on, New York went into the famed “McCovey shift,” ceding all of the left side to the pull-hitting left-handed slugger.
McCovey “hit a nine-iron down the left field line, and it lands fair,” recalled Gaspar. Gaspar, playing left field but shifted almost to center, took chase and discovered the baseball was stuck to the ground because the field was wet. He picked it up and fired a strike to the relay man, who in turn nailed runner Bob Burda, trying to score from first. Catcher Jerry Grote thought it was the third out and rolled the ball out to the mound. McCovey saw that and, having made it to third on the relay, tried to score. Clendenon alertly picked up the ball. Grote then stayed at home when he saw he had made a mistake. McCovey, realizing he could not make it home, tried to get back to third, but Clendenon nailed him there for an inning-ending 7-3-2-3-5 double-play. New York won, 3-2 in extra innings.
On August 31, Chicago (81-52) led New York (75-53) by three-and-a-half games. St. Louis slumped and was now out of it, nine games back. In a matter of a couple weeks, New York had gone from nine-and-a-half back to three-and-a-half, and while those games obviously represented a mathematical advantage for the Cubs, the psychology of momentum worked in New York’s favor.
With friends and family from Fresno in attendance (as a kid, Seaver and his kin made roughly an equal number of trips to Los Angeles to see the Dodgers, and to San Francisco to see the Giants) Tom tossed an 8-0 shutout at the powerful Giants, who were battling hard for the West Division crown.
The Giants had sluggers, namely Willie McCovey enjoying his best year; Willie Mays and Jim Ray Hart. They had two excellent starters, Juan Marichal (21-11) and Gaylord Perry (19-14). One-year manager Clyde King had a personality problem with Mays, which spelled his doom.
Despite a contender, baseball had fallen by the wayside in the City by the Bay. One reason was the arrival of the A’s in cross-bay Oakland, taking a large portion of their market share. A more accurate explanation, however, was the times. San Francisco was a baseball bastion, for decades the home of the wildly successful Seals of the Pacific Coast League. The City (they use caps there) had produced an endless number of baseball heroes, either homegrown or courtesy of the Seals (plus the Mission Reds and Oakland Oaks); Joe DiMaggio, Lefty Gomez, Joe Cronin, Paul and Lloyd Waner.
When Horace Stoneham brought the Giants west, they were welcomed with open arms. Local heroes Orlando Cepeda, Juan Marichal and Willie McCovey brought together a diverse cross-section of fans. The great Willie Mays, viewed warily at first, was accepted and joined Joe D. as a Bay Area icon, just as he had done in the Apple. In 1962, San Francisco thrilled to one of the great pennant races in history, with the Giants narrowly beating out Los Angeles before a seven-game World Series loss to the powerhouse Yankees. San Francisco loved the Giants. People talked baseball, listening with transistor radios to popular announcers Russ “the Giants win the pennant” Hodges, Lon Simmons and Bill Thompson on KSFO. San Francisco supported the team with great attendance. The rivalry with the Dodgers was better than it had been in New York. For close to a decade, the pennant race more often than not came down to an ancient Dodgers-Giants match-up. L.A. gained revenge for 1962, winning the 1963, 1965 and 1966 pennants.
But San Francisco was “always the bridesmaid, never the bride,” finishing second every year from 1965 to 1969 while the Dodgers and Cardinals took turns attaining ultimate glory. When the A’s arrived in 1968 and attendance went down, the baseball establishment was mad at Oakland owner Charlie O. Finley, because they had invested great hopes in San Francisco. It was needed as a counterweight financially and competitively with Los Angeles. Finley upset the apple cart.
By the late 1960s, Candlestick Park – Richard Nixon called it (and this is not a mis-quote), “The finest stadium in baseball” when he dedicated its 1960 opening – was an albatross, old before its time; dirty, windy, foggy, in a crime-infested neighborhood with bad car access. An embarrassment. Worse, it stood in silent, unmistakable comparison with gleaming Dodger Stadium down south. Candlestick’s fate was not unlike that of the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena. Nixon dedicated that place, as well, also calling it the “best basketball arena” in the country in 1959. It actually probably was for a few years, but when Jack Kent Cooke built the “Fabulous Forum,” the comparison rendered a simple manifest truth: there was no comparison.
But despite second place finishes, the rival A’s, and a bad stadium, the 1969 Giants were an excellent ball club; albeit a little boring, playing long ball and eschewing aggressive base running now that Mays had lost his quicksilver. But the chance to see superstars like Marichal, Perry and McCovey in their respective primes should have packed ‘em in. Mainly, San Francisco and the entire Bay Area suffered from a social malaise emanating from cross-bay Berkeley.
At the University of California, sports were viewed as bourgeoisie capitalism. Football players for the Golden Bears were given little more respect than soldiers enduring anti-war filth in the form of spitting and “baby killer” epithets. After a recruiting scandal and a lost lawsuit against USC in 1959, sports was de-emphasized at Cal. A program that had won four National Championships in football, two in baseball, the 1959 NCAA basketball title, while producing numerous Olympic track stars, became a joke. America’s Communist enemies found “aid and comfort” on its campus in the 1960s.
This general attitude made its over to San Francisco, where the “Summer of Love” epicentered the decade at Golden Gate Park in 1967, ironically in the shadow of Kezar Stadium, where those rough, tough football players performed for the 49ers. Overall, sports fell by the wayside at all levels in San Francisco. Its high schools stopped producing prospects. Cal was a punching bag for USC and UCLA. The Dodgers developed a dynasty of sorts with the Giants mere fodder for their big guns. Dodger Stadium symbolized all that was glamorous, Candlestick all that was low rent.
At least as far as the Giants were concerned, they were in the early process of becoming a second rate National League team. The once-lowly Mets, on the other hand, were ascending to the heights of glory; not just on the field but at the gate, via TV ratings, and in all ways that imprimatur is given to professional franchises.
In August of 1969, New York beat the Giants in home-and-home series, winning four of six and symbolically accepting the passed torch. Those four losses would prove to be the deciding factor in San Francisco eventually losing the “wild, wild West.” When the Giants series concluded, the Mets finished 21-10 in August, but as President Ronald Reagan so famously advised, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
Back in New York, Seaver won his 20th, 5-1 in the first game of a double-header with Philadelphia. New York took the last two games of the Philadelphia series, 3-0 behind Don Cardwell and 9-3 behind Nolan Ryan. The Cubs came to town, now leading by a mere two-and-a-half games on September 8. Chicago had a four-game losing streak and was ripe for the picking. Koosman and Seaver were perfectly aligned to oppose them in the two-game set.
It rained the first night, but the enthusiasm level of the 49,000 people at Shea Stadium was off the charts. The New York Jets had nothing on the Mets. Pro football, despite the build-up of a single game played each Sunday, was no more electric than each, individual Mets game. The Mets had saved baseball, possibly the city, and maybe even Mayor Lindsay’s bid for re-election. By this point, he was sticking to the Mets like glue, football fan or no football fan.
Leo Durocher had broken into organized baseball in the early 1920s. He had been part of great clubs; the Murderer’s Row Yanks and the Gashouse Gang Cards. He had managed Brooklyn’s Bums and Willie Mays’s Giants to pennants, tasting ultimate victory in 1954. He had coached on winners in L.A., now taken Chicago from last to first. He was the epitome of the crusty “baseball man.” Leo had seen it all, done it all, and bragged to anybody who would listen about it. According to him, Frank called him and he scored “every broad who counts.”
So it was that in a situation like this, it seemed logical that a man of Durocher’s experience knew what buttons to push. He had been on the other side of the coin, leading the Giants’ “creeping terror” comeback run in 1951. It was the other guy who flinched, like the Soviets when they turned back in the face of the U.S. Navy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Leo’s style was aggression. The war metaphors are valid: Grant because “he fights,” Patton never paying “for the same real estate twice.”
In game one at Shea Stadium, Leo looked at his starter, 20-game winner Billy Hands, only he did not see Hands. He saw Sal Maglie. He sent Hands to the Shea Stadium mound with marching orders: a “contract” was out on the Mets. Maglie had been the perfect guy to do it. They called him “the Barber” because of all the “close shaves” administered using horsehide instead of a razor (which he apparently did not own, considering his perpetual “five o’clock shadow” and Luca Brazzi appearance). But Billy was what was expected of a guy named Billy Hands. A job like this required somebody named “Iron Joe,” “Big D,” Gibby . . . or Sal.
But Billy Hands went out to the lion’s den, the middle of the Roman Colosseum, armed with a whip and chair against lions and gladiators, surrounded by a frenzied crowd out for blood. He gulped, took a deep breath, and threw his best fast ball right at Tommie Agee’s head.
“Stick it in his ear,” Leo yelled.
Who knows why a strategy that works in one time and place does not work in another time and place? In this time and place it did not work. If Durocher thought it would intimidate the Mets and . . . who knows how he thought the crowd would react? They were only the loudest, most boisterous crowd in the entire history of sports up until that time at least, but apparently he had not thought that far ahead.
Koosman got the ball and immediately retaliated. He did not low-bridge Ron Santo, he plunked him hard just above the wrist. “Koosman could throw the ball right through you,” Santo said.
“They threw at Tommie, and I had to do it to end it right there,” said Koosman. “. . . If Tommie doesn’t think I’m working for him, he won’t work for me – and I want Tommie Agee working for me. He and Cleon, they’re the two best hitters I have out there. I want both of them working for me.”
“Our pitchers can’t let us get run off the field,” said Agee,
The next time Agee faced Hands, with Harrelson on base, he took him deep. The crowd was ecstatic and New York led, 2-0. In the sixth, Chicago scored twice to tie it, 2-2. The bean ball war was over, replaced by tense, pennant-fever baseball. In the bottom of the inning, Agee doubled. Wayne Garrett singled to right field. Star outfielder Billy Williams charged the ball, hop-stepped, and fired home. Agee, the former football player, barreled past Randy Hundley, stepping on home just before the tag. It was a bang-bang play. Umpire Dave Davidson called Agee safe.
Hundley argued the call and Durocher came out, which was too perfect. The crowd went utterly ballistic, cat-calling him every step of the way after he inevitably lost the appeal. From that point, Koosman dominated, finishing with 13 strikeouts backed by solid defense, winning 3-2.
“The Mets are on their way,” the fans chanted and sang, like Brazilian soccer fans after Pele led them to their first World Cup in 1957. Placards were produced: “WE’RE NUMBER ONE.” Trailing by a game and-a-half still was immaterial, especially with Tom Seaver on the mound the next evening.
58,436 came out to see Seaver vs. Jenkins in a game that defined why baseball still was and remains to this day Our National Pastime. The day-to-day tension, the spectacular hopes and expectations, the ebb and flow of a pennant chase cannot be duplicated; not by basketball with its 50 teams making the play-offs, not by soccer and its endless 0-0 scores, and obviously not by football and its need for a weekend climax followed by six days of wound licking/war preparation.
In baseball they play for real every day; not a press conference, not an injury report, not practice in full pads. They strap it on, the fans pay real money to see ‘em play real ball, and on September 9 they got it in spades.
Now, the score tells us New York won, 7-1 behind Seaver’s dominant pitching. The standings tell us the Mets trailed by a half-game afterwards, with Montreal coming to town and Chicago headed for the “City of Brotherly Love” - Philly - where foul fans in a foul, stinking, about-to-be-demolished ball park had about as much “love” in them as the Germans in the closing days of World War II.
But the fact is that, despite the standings, the division was won on September 9. Furthermore, with Seaver at the full height of his powers, mowing Chicago down with the sheer velocity of a cannon mixed with the accuracy of a Special Forces sharpshooter; the crowd, the atmosphere at Shea Stadium surpassed even the imperfecto of exactly two months earlier. Lastly, if on July 9 the crowd witnessed the birth of George Thomas Seaver as a true New York Sports icon, then on September 9 he had his confirmation.
Poor Ferguson Jenkins, one of the greatest pitchers of all time, was reduced to playing the Washington Generals to New York’s Harlem Globetrotters. It was not a baseball game, it was a coronation, a celebration, and in all the years that the New York Yankees built their reputation as the most dominant of all sports franchises, never had they played in an atmosphere like this.
In the middle of the game, the crowd was hooting and hollering. Little kids told their dads they loved them, thanking them for buying tickets for this game. Young men proposed to young women, who said yes. Maybe a few other young women were saying yes, but not to marriage. People who had not been to church in years found their faith again. It was a Billy Graham revival, a Rollings Stones concert, Victory over Japan Day. Then, out of no where, a black cat, hearing all the noise, the foot-stomping, the thunderous ovations, darted out onto the field, right in front of the Cubs’ dugout. Durocher just stared at the thing, as if to say, “What next?”
Not a white cat, or a beige cat, or a striped cat. A black cat, and not in front of the Mets’ dugout, or out in the bullpen; no, in front of the Cubs. Mocking them, a scaredy-cat; the crowd, the buzz, the lights freaking it out. Apparently, feral cats lived in the catacombs of Shea Stadium. The insane pounding had forced it out of its hole, and here it was. After that, the East Division was clinched. All that was left was to play out the calendar.
“It’s almost a legend now,” Swoboda said, laughing. “But then it was the most incredible thing you ever saw. It was like we hired the cat and trained him to run back and forth right in front of their dugout . . . This cat . . . looked like he was right off a Halloween poster, had the hair up on his back . . . it’s like the Cubs can’t buy a break . . . This was like Hollywood. This happens in movies about baseball. You know what I mean?”
Santo, who was “very superstitious,” said the cat “just stared at Leo. It freaked me out a little.”
“The look on the Cubs’ faces was priceless,” recalled Grote.
“I thought that was a little eerie,” recalled Ferguson Jenkins.
Some people accused the Mets of setting it up, but Pete Flynn, a member of the groundskeeping crew, said nobody had “anything to do with that cat coming onto the field. As a matter of fact, I never saw that cat before that game or anytime after.”
“Mr. Leo Durocher, a baseball manager who on this night is reduced to being a wax house prisoner; a dugout denizen of ghostly superstitions; the leader of a doomed crew playing not at Shea Stadium, but on a different kind of diamond in a ball park known only as . . . The Twi-Light Zone.”
Do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do do-do do do doooooo . . . do-do-do dooo.
The crowd sang “Good night, Leo . . .” while waving handkerchiefs. It was surreal. The swing in momentum was so total that Chicago, while mathematically up by half a game, was theoretically at least eliminated. This is a premise that is easy to make in hindsight, but teams have withstood similar onslaughts. 17 years later, the St. Louis Cardinals led the defending World Series champion Mets. New York rallied in September of 1987, but the Cardinals regained their footing to win the East. But the 1969 Mets were a team of destiny. Nobody, in New York at least, and probably around the country (including much of Chicago, truth be told) doubted them at this point.
The Mets felt the Cubs were tired from all those days games in the Chicago summer, but more to the point, Durocher had ridden this horse until it was dead; emotionally, physically, and despite “Mr. Sunshine,” poor old Ernie Banks, spiritually.
On September 10, Montreal came to Shea Stadium. Yes, the 110-loss Expos, yet right to the end, those guys played the “team of destiny” for all they were worth. While Ken Holtzman and the Cubs were losing their sixth straight game, 6-2 at decrepit Connie Mack Stadium in Philadelphia, New York and Montreal battled to a 2-2 tie in the 12th inning. The crowd was scoreboard watching as Ken Boswell drove Gaspar home with the winning run, 3-2.
At the precise moment New York won, their record stood at 83-57. The Cubs, still toiling away in Philadelphia, were now officially 84-58. The Mets were in first place by .001 percentage points.
“Look Who’s No. 1” read the scoreboard. The metaphors continue to be apropos: Mardi Gras, Octoberfest, you name it. When Philadelphia held the lead, New York went to bed and woke up in first place for the first time. They would not relinquish it by a long shot. The weather began to cool in September. After battling through the summer heat, it was very refreshing.
The New York Times: “METS IN FIRST PLACE” in letters about the same size as “FIDEL DEAD” or “JFK MURDER SOLVED.” A telegram was received at the Mets’ offices: “Congratulations being number one. Am rooting for you to take all the marbles. As a New Yorker I am ecstatic, as a baseball person I am extremely pleased, and as a Yankee I consider suicide the easy option.” It was sent by Michael Burke, the chairman of CBS and, at the time (pre-George Steinbrenner), owner of the Yankees.
“By September 10, we began to feel that nobody could beat us. Period,” said Ed Charles. “We were sky high.”
There was no let up. Gentry shut out Montreal. At Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field (another relic in its last season), the Mets won both ends of double-header, 1-0. In each game, the pitcher (Koosman in the first, Cardwell in the second) knocked in the winning run in addition to holding the powerful Bucs of Clemente, Alou, Stargell and Oliver scoreless for 18 innings. When it was over, the two pitchers had a playful argument over whose knock was harder hit, both seeming to care more about swinging the bat than throwing shutouts.
Art Shamsky took the day off to honor the Jewish High Holiday. When he entered the clubhouse the next day, somebody posted a sign, in jest: “Why don’t you take off every day?” It was similar to something Don Drysdale said to Walter Alston. Sandy Koufax did not pitch the first game of the 1965 World Series because of Yom Kippur. Drysdale started but was batted around. Afterward he said to the manager, “I bet you wish I was Jewish, too.”
Later in the Pittsburgh series, Swoboda’s grand slam knocked the Pirates back in the 10th inning. Then the Mets traveled to St. Louis and faced Steve Carlton, who like Tom Seaver was coming into his own and would define pitching greatness in the next decade and beyond. He was an unhittable force of nature, striking out an all-time record 19 Mets (breaking the previous mark held by Sandy Koufax). The Mets made four errors. With the Cubs losing their third straight and 11th of 12, it was a good “off day” for the Mets to accept a rare defeat at the hands of a future Hall of Famer . . . except that Swoboda, who “never hit Carlton well” (who did?) powered two two-run homers and New York knocked him off, 4-3.
“How do you figure something like that?” Swoboda said of the game, but he may as well have been asking about the whole magical year. Al Weis throwing out a Dodger runner on a bang-bang play in a 15-inning 1-0 Mets win; the July 8 comeback vs. Fergie Jenkins; Seaver’s imperfecto, arm ailments and strange healing; the black cat; two 1-0 wins with pitcher’s RBIs winning ‘em; now beating one of the greatest ever on one of his best nights . . . ever. Chance? Luck? Or destiny?
After the game, Swoboda was on Harry Caray’s post-game show. Caray “looked like something just ran over his dog.” As talkative a man as has ever been associated with baseball, Caray was almost speechless, at least by his standards, by this point. After beating Carlton, New York led Chicago by four-and-a-half games. They had won 10 of 11 and were at .605.
“My God, the Mets have a ‘magic number,’ ” said Tom Seaver.
John Lindsay, who had lost the Republican Primary but was running behind as the Liberal Party candidate, was slowly moving back into the race, on the strength of you-know-what.
On September 19, Pittsburgh swept New York in a double-header. The next day, Bob Moose of the Pirates threw a no-hitter against them. The Cubs made no advancement despite the slight setback, losing two straight to St. Louis. On the first day of the fall, September 21, Koosman and Cardwell repeated their double-header act (minus the game-winning hits), beating Pittsburgh 5-3 and 6-1.
St. Louis came to Shea, enormous crowds simply exuding electrical, religious energy. Seaver dominated the Cardinals for his 24th victory. The next game, Tug McGraw picked up the 3-2 win over Bob Gibson, with Buddy Harrelson driving in the winning run in the 11th.
“Before 1969 I never saw any improvement in the team,” said Ed Kranepool. “You knew you were going to be eliminated from a pennant race by the All-Star Game.”
On September 24, 1969, before a packed Shea Stadium throng in the last home game of the year, Donn Clendenon and Ed Charles homered. Gary Gentry pitched his best game of the season, a powerhouse four-hit shutout that just amped the crowd up even more as he went along, mowing down Cardinal after Cardinal. Steve Carlton, the Hall of Famer in his prime, fresh off a 19-game strikeout performance against this same club, was bombed out early.
The stands were filled with signs: “QUEENS LITHO LOVES THE METS,” “YOU GUYS ARE TOO MUCH,” along with fly airplanes, people grinning idiotically at each other, and programs torn into confetti. The crowd continued to sing, “Good bye, Leo,” wrote Roger Angell, “rendered capella, with the right field tenors in especially good voice.”
A little after 9:00 P.M., Joe Torre grounded into an inning-ending double play. Pandemonium ensued, with ecstatic fans taking to the field, stealing bases, tearing up the pitcher’s mound and home plate (no mean feat, as these are drilled deep into the ground and they lacked pickaxes; they had to dig with their hands). The turf was torn up. It was a scene never seen before.
When the Jets beat Oakland to clinch the AFL title at Shea Stadium in December, 1968, there was nothing like this. In the old days at the Polo Grounds, fans would use the stadium to leave through the center field gate, but it was just a short cut to the subway.
The closest anybody had ever seen to this was when Boston won an exciting, last-minute game to clinch the NBA title a few years before, but the basketball crowd was already almost on top of the floor as it was. No baseball crowd had ever done this; certainly not at Yankee Stadium. Ebbets Field never let loose like this. When Bobby Thomson hit the “shot heard ‘round the world,” the crowd stayed in the stands.
Fans at Dodger Stadium were too laid-back for this kind of thing. Cardinals supporters were too polite. When Detroit won it all in 1968, they did it in St. Louis. They had crazy fans who may have tried something, but nothing like this, and it was only for the division.
“When the crew saw what was happening to the field when the people all ran out, we didn’t know what to think,” groundskeeper Pete Flynn told Art Shamsky in The Magnificent Seasons. “When we saw all the torn up turf afterward, we knew we had our work cut out for us.”
The clubhouse was sheer bedlam, of course. The Mets had broken out champagne when they went into first place for the first time. Now, simply winning the division, they celebrated as if they had captured the World Series. Angell wrote that it was “clubhouse water sports (Great Western, Yoo-Hoo, Rise lather, beer, cameras, interviews, music, platitudes, disbelief).”
“Beautiful, baby,” said Ed Charles. “Nine years in the minors for me, then nine more with the Athletics and Mets. Never, never thought I’d make it. These kids will be back next, but I’m 36 and time is running out. It’s better for me than for them.”
Rod Kanehl and Craig Anderson, two original Mets, met in the clubhouse and shared in the glory.
“It was wonderful,” recalled Shamsky. “There was dousing of champagne everywhere. Everyone entering the locker room got it.”
“I’ve gone full circle,” declared Kranepool.
Toasts were offered “to Leo” and “to Casey.”
George Weis hugged Gil Hodges. “1962,” he said to the manager.
“1962,” Hodges replied to the front office man.
“Our team finally caught up to our fans,” said M. Donald Grant. “Our fans were winners long ago.”
The papers treated it like a . . . miracle: “How could this team have done it?” At the heart of it all was Seaver, who now wore a new nickname over and above his “Tom Terrific” moniker: “The Franchise.”
There was no let-up after the clinching, as often occurs. In Philadelphia, Koosman, Seaver and Gentry dominated the Phillies in a sweep. Koosman and Seaver tossed back-to-back shutouts. They were both unhittable, in absolute pitching grooves of the finest kind. The Mets won the annual Mayor’s Trophy game with the Yankees, a charity event. Then it was on to Chicago. The topsy-turvy nature of the season, with the triumphant Mets now playing meaningless tune-ups against the beaten Cubs of Leo Durocher, had a surreal quality to it.
It was like “sticking a dagger into their wounds,” was the way Shamsky described it. The “bleacher bums” had nothing to say. The Mets did not gloat. Ernie Banks said little. “He deserved that chance,” was Shamsky’s attitude towards Banks. “Always friendly and outgoing, he was what baseball was all about. When playing first base he would always sing a little and make people laugh.”
“Earlier in the season when we realized we were gaining on these guys, we talked about the possibility: ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if we could come into Wrigley Field with a four-game lead and three to play?’ ”said Swoboda.
“. . .Wrigley Field was one of those places where cute little young girls would yell awful stuff at you, where they would say vile words, and you’d think, ‘Jesus God,’ and they threw pennies and hit you out in the outfield, and yet I still loved playing there. I loved Wrigley Field. Wrigley Field is a shrine of baseball. It should always be. You felt the history when you went in there, and the fans were so close and biased. Chicago is a wonderful town anyway, a big-hearted town. A great town worth going to.”
As Frank Sinatra sang, Chicago is “my kind of town,” and when the Mets came in there with the division wrapped up, it was was for all practical purposes their colony, having been won in battle. The Cubs fans pulled a purple funeral crepe and dropped it over the Mets dugout, to which Swoboda told them, “You’re pissing in the wind, and the wind is blowing in your face.”
The Mets won the first of the two-game season-ending set at Wrigley Field, running their winning streak to nine games and reaching the pivotal 100-victory mark. Finally, on the last day, the Cubs beat the Mets; almost a cruel joke at that point.
“Who were the Mets of 1969?” wrote Jack Lang for The Sporting News. “A bunch of nobodies. A bunch of kids. Outside of maybe Tom Seaver and Jerry Koosman and perhaps Cleon Jones, there wasn’t a regular on the club that anybody coveted.” Lang stated that it was “a miracle.”
“For me, personally, I thought it might be my last chance to get into the play-offs or World Series,” Banks recalled. “It was really disappointing for me, and as far as the city was concerned everyone was looking forward to a World Series in Chicago. It was pretty sad three or four months after the season ended.”
“Looking back, 1969 was wonderful,” Ron Santo recalled. “We were in first place from the get-go. I’ve always said the Mets won it, we didn’t lose it.”
“The Mets made a great move in August and September,” said Ferguson Jenkins. “That’s when they got strong, and the Cubs couldn’t win consistently. It turned out the Mets were a much better ball club.”
“For 155 days consecutive days, the Cubs were in first place, but it proved to be just a big buildup for a horrible letdown,” Edgar Munzel wrote in The Sporting News Official Baseball Guide - 1970. A three-game sweep by Pittsburgh at Wrigley Field (September 5-7) was viewed as their “turning point” for the worse.
In losing 11 of 12 games, Chicago scored just 31 while allowing 69 and making 13 errors. They were 9-17 in September, hitting .219 on the month. In that month, Selma was 0-4, Holtzman 1-5, and Jenkins 2-4. During one nine-game span, one of baseball’s most rock-solid defensive units committed 17 errors. Billy Williams played in every game to increase his record to 982 straight.
“Maybe we did run out of gas,” growled Leo. “But if the Mets had played only .500 ball, we still could have hung on. But they just kept winning, winning, winning.”
At 100-62, the Mets finished eight games ahead of the 92-70 Cubs. They won an astounding 38 of their final 49 games (29-7 when it counted), a record matched by few teams in history. Periods of relative success include the 1946 Red Sox, who captured 41 of their first 50 games. The 1984 Tigers opened 35-5.
In coming back from nine and a half games out on August 14, the Mets did something that is worth mentioning with the 1951 Giants (13 1/2 out on August 13) and the 1978 Yankees (14 1/2 behind on July 17). Similar comebacks include the 1914 Boston Braves, who were in last place on Independence Day but won the pennant. In 2004, Houston came out of no where to win 36 of their last 46, getting into the wild-card berth. Teams that were simply great, dominating the schedule from start to finish, include the 1906 Cubs, 1909 Pirates, 1927-28 Yankees, 1929-31 A’s, 1954 Indians, 1961 Yankees, 1969-70 Orioles, 1986 Mets, 1998 Yankees and 2001 Mariners.
The Cubs have been painted as “choke artists,” and they certainly did their share of clutch losing, but the picture is not cut ‘n’ dried. With the Mets making a major run in late August, Chicago won four straight games. This included one over the contending Reds, three over the powerhouse Braves in Atlanta, and another at Cincinnati.
A similar taint has been attached to the 1978 Red Sox, viewed as having “blown” the division to the Yankees. Down the stretch in 1978, however, Boston won eight of their last nine to force the play-off they lost on a Bucky Dent homer at the Fens.
What was really remarkable was not simply that New York came from almost 10 out with a month-and-a-half to play, but that they rallied, tied, and sped past their rivals to win by eight; a 17 1/2 game swing between mid-August and October 2. The season can be compared to both the 1951 and 1962 seasons. In 1951, the Dodgers really did not blow the pennant. The Giants won 37 of their last 45 games to tie, but Brooklyn fairly played well, even winning a clutch regular season finale at Philadelphia on a crucial Jackie Robinson grab to stay alive.
In 1962, Los Angeles stayed strong but ahead of a great Giants squad, only to blow it in the last week after having led by four with a week play. The Cubs’ loss was not as big a collapse as Gene Mauch’s 1964 Phillies, who led by four before lost 10 straight down the stretch.
“I think Tom and I won something like 18 of our last 19 starts that year,” recalled Koosman. Seaver was 25-7 with a 2.21 earned run average, having won his last 10 decisions. He struck out 208 hitters in 273 1/3 innings. Considering all the factors, it goes down as one of the finest pitching performances in history. Others have had more dominant statistics. Sandy Koufax (1963, 1965, 1966) won more games, struck out more batters, and posted a lower ERA (he also did it pitching from a higher mound). Seaver won more than Gibson did in 1968 (22 victories). Denny McLain’s 1968 record looks better, on paper at least (31-6, 1.96 ERA). Dean Chance won 20 games with 11 shutouts and a 1.65 ERA in 1964. Luis Tiant’s earned run average was 1.68 in 1968. All of these pitchers benefited from the aforementioned higher mound.
In subsequent years, Seaver posted lower earned run averages in 1971 and 1973. He struck out more hitters in numerous seasons. Mainly due to a lack of run support, he never won 25 games again. If later Mets clubs scored for him the way the Tigers scored for McLain in 1968, to use one example, Seaver may have been a 30-game winner.
Steve Carlton (1972, when the last place Phillies inextricably scored tons of run when he pitched), Steve Stone (1980), Roger Clemens (1986), Orel Hershiser (1988), Greg Maddux (1995), Pedro Martinez (1999) and Randy Johnson (2001) enjoyed seasons comparable to what Seaver did in 1969. Jim Bagby won 31 for Cleveland in 1920. Philadelphia’s Lefty Grove (31-4, 2.06 ERA) was spectacular in 1931 during an era of heavy offense. Detroit’s Hal Newhouser won 29 games in 1944. Whitey Ford (25-4) dominated for the 1961 Yankees. The old-timers of the “dead ball era” of course must be viewed in light of statistical relevance. There were other pitchers who enjoyed individual seasons comparable on paper to Seaver in 1969, but perhaps did not mean as much to their respective teams.
Seaver carried New York like the mythological figure on the cover of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, seemingly moving the world on his broad shoulders, honed under the hot Camp Pendleton sun doing “up-and-on shoulders.” Few if any pitchers were so important, stood out so spectacularly as the single true star of a team, as did Seaver. Koufax and Gibson; a few others. The list is short. But not even these mound heroes were so singularly identified with their club’s success, played such an overall role of leader and inspiration. Perhaps no baseball player, maybe no athlete in any team sport has ever had the image Seaver had in 1969. He was seen as a pure hero, on and off the field, a near-perfect human being as well as athlete. This was false, of course, since as Seaver pointed out “I drink beer and I swear,” and “there’s only been one perfect man and he lived 2,000 years ago.” No human can maintain the kind of saintly stature of his hallowed, magical 1969 season. Others, like UCLA basketball coach John Wooden have lived lives of such decency and respect that the glow of near-perfection still resides with them, but Seaver never pretended to or sought such unattainable status.
Tom Seaver was seen as a modern Lancelot, riding a white steed to the rescue of a team, a city, and indeed a whole country. Subsequent reports of his ego, his human flaws, while few and far between, were magnified because in that one year he was seemingly flawless. There were some indications that his image was not quite what people perceived.
“Such a combination of Galahad-like virtues has caused some baseball old-timers to compare him to Christy Mathewson,” wrote Roger Angell in The New Yorker. “Others, a minority, see an unpleasantly planned aspect to this golden image – planned, that is, by Tom Seaver, who is a student of public relations. However, his impact on his teammates can be suggested by something that happened to Bud Harrelson back in July. Harrelson was away on Army Reserve duty during that big home series with the Cubs, and he watched Seaver’s near-no-hitter (which Seaver calls ‘my imperfect game’) on a television set in a restaurant in Watertown, New York.”
“I was there with a couple of Army buddies who also play in the Majors, and we got all steamed up watching Tom work,” Harrelson said. “Then – it was the strangest thing – I began feeling more and more like a little kid watching that game and that great performance, and I wanted to turn to the others and say, ‘I know Tom Seaver. Tom Seaver is a friend of mine.”
“Most of the Mets, it seems, are equally susceptible to enthusiasm,” wrote Angell. “Young and alert and open, they are above all suggestible. And this quality – the lead-off hit just after a brilliant inning-ending catch; the valiant but exhausted starting pitcher taken off the hook by a sudden cluster of singles – is what made the Mets’ late innings worth waiting for this year. It is also possible that these intuitive, self-aware athletes sensed, however vaguely, that they might be among the few to achieve splendor in a profession that is so often disappointing, tedious, and degrading. Their immense good fortune was to find themselves together at the same moment of sudden maturity, combined skills, and high spirits. Perhaps they won because they were un-bored.”
Angell had a “sense of unreality” when visiting the Mets’ clubhouse, writing that the team less resembled a true big league ball club, and more the cast of a Hollywood set about a big league club. They were “younger and more theatrical,” the drama “hopelessly overwritten,” with players right out of Central Casting: “Bud and Ken”; the “freckle-faced” Garrett with a “sweet smile”; the “broken-nosed scrappy catcher” (Grote); Agee and Jones (“silent, brooding big busters”); the “cheerful hayseed” (Koosman); the “philosophical black elder” (Charles); at least one “Jewish character,” indispensable in New York (Shamsky); “seamy-faced, famous old-timers” (Hodges and Berra); “and Tom Seaver, of course, the hero. And who can say that the Mets didn’t sense this, too – that they didn’t know all along that this year at Shea life was imitating not just art but a United Artists production?”
Koosman was lucky in that he was simply viewed as a fine pitcher. The weight of all the expectations Seaver carried never fell on him. He just went out and pitched. His first half was a mixture of spectacular success, a few nagging injuries, and some mediocrity mixed with a lack of support. In the second half, down the stretch, he was almost as good as Seaver, and this statement must be understood in its full meaning. Almost as good as Seaver was like an actor who was almost as good as Olivier, a writer who was almost as good as Hemingway, a political figure who was almost as good as Churchill.
Koosman finished 17-9 with a 2.28 earned run average, with 180 strikeouts in 241 innings pitched. Gary Gentry was 13-12 and everybody expected him to someday be a 20-game winner. Don Cardwell was 8-10 and Jim McAndrew finished 6-7. Somehow, the starting staff does not add up to the concept of a 100-win team. One conjures the image of Baltimore’s four 20-game winners in 1971, or Oakland’s three 20-game winners of 1973. Where did those 100 wins come from?
Certainly Gil Hodges’s use of the bullpen explains much of it. Tug McGraw, used in various capacities, was 9-3 with 12 saves. Nolan Ryan was 6-3. Cal Koonce (6-3) and Ron Taylor (13 saves, 2.73 ERA) were effective late in games. In later years, McGraw and Ryan were stars, but they were not at that level yet. The 1969 Mets’ bullpen was not as spectacular as Oakland in the early 1970s, when a host of “stopper” pitchers held opponents until Rollie Fingers closed the door; or the Yankees of the late 1990s, when Mariano Rivera would do the same thing for Joe Torre.
New York’s 2.99 earned run average was quite insane, especially when compared to modern records in the age of designated hitters, “juiced” balls, small parks and steroids. However, St. Louis was better (.2.94.). They threw 28 shutouts on the year with 35 saves. In the American League, Baltimore’s ERA was 2.83. The American League as a whole: 3.63. The N.L.: .3.60. With expansion teams, there was a dilution of talent. Better N.L. teams tended to get better against Expo and Padre pitching; put up numbers against Expo and Padre hitters.
Offensively, the Mets’ numbers do not logically figure to a 100-win season, especially in a pretty good year for hitters. It was a vast improvement for baseball over 1968; a year of solid, even, competitive achievement, individually and for teams – pitching and hitting – in both leagues. Cleon Jones had a breakout year, hitting .340 to finish third in the league with a modest 12 home runs and 75 runs batted in. Jones’s run production is worth noting. Today, .340 hitters are generally expected to be power guys with 90-100 RBIs.
Agee hit a respectable .271, supplying more clout than his Mobile friend with 26 long balls and 76 runs scored from the leadoff spot. Clendenon was one of the strongest .252 hitters in memory, or so it seemed. He hit 12 home runs with 37 RBIs after coming over in the June trade. Shamsky was quite solid: .300, 14 home runs. Swoboda was nobody’s idea of Harry Heilman or any all-time greats, with a poor .235 average, nine homers and 52 RBIs. Kranepool’s .238 with 11 homers made nobody forget or remember Lou Gehrig. Ed Charles was anemic (.207). Bud Harrelson (.248), Al Weis (with the exception of two games at Wrigley Field in July), Wayne Garrett, Bobby Pfeil; all field, no hit. Ken Boswell? He could not even field. Jerry Grote went from .282 in 1968 to a .252 in 1969. J.C. Martin was mainly a pinch-hitter, Rod Gaspar a defensive replacement, and Duffy Dyer caught in the second games of twin bills.
The Mets hit 109 home runs. Eight of the 12 National League teams hit more. They batted .242, behind six other clubs (10 points below the league average). Some people have tried to compare the Mets to the Dodgers teams of Maury Wills and Lou Johnson, who stole bases at a great clip, manufacturing runs that way. Not so. They bunted and played a lot of “little ball,” but only stole 66 bases. The Mets scored 632 runs, compared to 720 for Chicago. Eight teams scored more, including every team in the West Division except San Diego. Their .980 fielding percentage (a nebulous statistic) led the division.
How did they do it? Again, if one looks at it in a logical, secular way, it was the pitching of Seaver and Koosman, with some luck. But considering it all, the hand of destiny played its role, too. It was like evolution; too perfect to be coincidence, like a windstorm blowing parts all over the place until it settles into a perfectly constructed F-16 fighter jet.
New York’s 100-62 mark was the second best regular season record in baseball (.617). Chicago (92-70) finished second in the East, eight games back, followed by Pittsburgh (88-74), St. Louis (87-75), then the Phillies and Expos. In the West, Atlanta won with a 93-69 mark over San Francisco (90-72), Cincinnati (89-73), Los Angeles (85-77), Houston (81-81) and San Diego (110 losses). It was competitive year with lot of teams playing winning ball. It was not a season of great mediocrity with the Mets emerging as survivors more than winners, as could be said of the 1973 Mets and many other “champions” throughout history. Undoubtedly, the 220 combined losses of Montreal and San Diego contributed to the winning records of their opponents, but in any given year there are losing teams, bad teams.
In the American League East, Baltimore dominated with 109 victories over Detroit (90-72), Boston (87-75), Washington (86-76), New York (not quite as bad as the memory would have one believe, at 80-81), and Cleveland (99 losses). It was a disappointing year for Mayo Smith and the defending champion Tigers, as well as Dick Williams and his 1967 pennant winning Red Sox (leading to the volatile Williams’s firing by owner Tom Yawkey after squabbling with Carl Yastrzemski). Washington had the best season in the Bob Short years (1961-71) before becoming the Texas Rangers of 1972. Manager Ted Williams talked them into believing they could hit.
The Yankees were so overshadowed by the Mets that they were overlooked. After falling all the way to the cellar in 1966, the pinstripers had made the kind of progress that other clubs would consider worthy, but their standards were so astronomical that nobody cared. Still, Ralph Houk’s team, in their first year after Mickey Mantle’s retirement, featured a top outfielder (Bobby Murcer), a defensive whiz at first base (Joe Pepitone), and a righty-lefty pitching combo not that far removed from the Seaver-Koosman duo. Mel Stottlemyre, the All-Star Game starter, was 20-14 with a 2.92 earned run average. Fritz Peterson won 17 games (just like Jerry) with a solid 2.55 ERA.
In the West, Minnesota’s dominance over Oakland in head-to-head play gave Billy Martin’s Twins (97-65) a nine-game edge over the A’s (88-74). Martin was fired after the season for getting in a bar fight with 20-game winner Dave Boswell. Jim Perry was 20-6. The 1969 A’s were none of the things the Mets were. They lacked the luck, the charisma or the electricity, playing in a half-empty stadium, losing key games, and finishing out of the running. But they were headed in an ultimately different direction than the Mets. They featured the cogs of a 1970s dynasty (the first in baseball since the Yankees): Reggie Jackson, Sal Bando, Catfish Hunter and Rollie Fingers, all young and superb. They would beat New York in the1973 World Series.
The rest of the West was desultory, featuring losing California, Chicago and two expansion franchises (Royals, Pilots). The two first-year teams certainly contributed to the statistical feast of the Orioles and a few excellent individual records in the junior circuit, but at 69-93 (Royals) and 64-98 (Pilots), they were vastly better than the two N.L. debuts.
Baseball was star-studded in 1969. Pete Rose led the National League with a .348 batting average, followed by Roberto Clemente (.345), Cleon Jones (.340), Matty Alou (.321) and Willie McCovey (.320). McCovey slugged .656, with Atlanta’s Henry Aaron second at .607. McCovey’s 45 home runs led the circuit, followed by Aaron (44), Cincinnati’s Lee May (38) and Tony Perez (37), followed by Jimmy Wynn of the Astros with 33. McCovey capped his monster year with 126 runs batted in. Ron Santo had 123, followed by Perez (122), May (110) and Ernie Banks (106). Lou Brock stole 53 bases for St. Louis, followed by Houston’s Joe Morgan with 49, San Francisco’s Bobby Bonds (45), Maury Wills of Montreal-L.A. (40) and the Reds’ Bobby Tolan at 26. Matty Alou had 231 hits, while Pete Rose collected his customary 200-plus (218).
Seaver’s .781 winning percentage was the best in the National League, followed by San Francisco’s Juan Marichal (.656). Marichal led the senior circuit with a sparkling 2.10 earned run average, with Steve Carlton at 2.17, Bob Gibson at 2.18, Seaver at 2.21, and Koosman at 2.28. Seaver’s 25 wins were the best in baseball. Phil Niekro of the Braves won 23. Marichal and Fergie Jenkins won 21 each. No Met was among the save leaders. Jenkins’s 273 strikeouts set the pace, followed by Gibson (269), Bill Singer of Los Angeles (247), Don Wilson of Houston (235), and Gaylord Perry of San Francisco (233). It was a different era, one in which Gibson’s 28 complete games almost matched Fred Gladding’s league leading 29 saves for Houston. No Met was among the complete game leaders, an example of Hodges’s judicious use of his staff and a portent of the future. Marichal spun eight shutouts, Koosman six. Gaylord Perry, Claude Osteen of Los Angeles, Singer and Gibson all pitched more than 300 innings.
In the American League, Minnesota’s Rod Carew had his breakout year, leading the circuit with a .332 average. His teammate, Harmon Killebrew, slammed 49 homers. Frank Howard of Washington was second with 48. Reggie Jackson, who had 37 at the All-Star break, slumped and finished with 47. Rico Petrocelli and Carl Yastrzemski of Boston both hit 40 home runs. Killebrew’s 140 RBIs set the pace, followed by Baltimore’s Boog Powell at 121, Jackson (118), his teammate Sal Bando (113), Howard (111) and Yaz (111).
Dick Bosman of Washington led the league with a 2.19 earned run average, followed by Baltimore’s stellar Jim Palmer (2.34) and Mike Cuellar (2.38), then California ace Andy Messersmith (2.52) and Fritz Peterson (2.55). Denny McLain won 24 games, Cuellar 23, with Boswell, Jim Perry and Mel Stottlemyre getting 20 apiece. “Sudden Sam” McDowell, Cleveland’s flame-throwing southpaw, struck out 279 hitters. Mickey Lolich of Detroit and Messersmith both finished with more than 200 Ks. McLain tossed nine shutouts and 325 innings, which probably explains his sudden fall more than association with unsavory characters.
The Sporting News National League All-Star team included McCovey (first base), Glenn Beckert (second), Ron Santo (third) Don Kessinger (shortstop), Cleon Jones, Matty Alou and Henry Aaron in the outfield, Johnny Bench behind the plate, with Tom Seaver the right-hand pitcher and Steve Carlton beating out Koosman as the lefty.
In the A.L., it was Boog Powell at first, Carew at second, Killebrew at third, Petrocelli at shortstop, with Frank Howard, Jackson and Baltimore’s Paul Blair in the outfield. The catcher was Bill Freehan of Detroit. On the mound was McLain from the right side, Cuellar from the left.
Killebrew was the American League’s Most Valuable Player. Cuellar and McLain shared (for the only time in history) the A.L. Cy Young award. Lou Piniella, traded by Seattle to Kansas City early in 1969, won the A.L. Rookie of the Year award. Ted Sizemore of the Dodgers took N.L. honors. No Met won a Gold Glove. John Murphy of the Mets was named The Sporting News Executive of the Year, and Gil Hodges was the National League Manager of the Year. Tommie Agee won the N.L. Comeback Player of the Year award. McCovey was The Sporting News Major League Player of the Year as well as the N.L.’s Player of the Year, with Tom Seaver selected as the Pitcher of the Year.
Seaver was easily voted the Cy Young award, but a major controversy came in the awarding of the National League MVP, which went to McCovey. Tom Seaver was unquestionably the deserving winner of the 1969 MVP. Pitchers had won MVP awards on numerous occasions in the past. This included Hal Newhouser of Detroit in both 1944 and 1945, and Brooklyn’s Don Newcombe in 1956.
In the 1960s, pitcher Sandy Koufax of Los Angeles was the National League’s Most Valuable Player in 1963. In 1968, pitchers represented both leagues: McLain and Gibson. This probably was too much for some members of the media, who began to clambor that, especially since the Cy Young award now was awarded in both leagues (instead of to just one pitcher in both Major Leagues, as it had been between 1956 and 1966), they had their own trophy.
Two writers on the selection committee simply ignored Seaver on their ballots altogether. The vote consisted of 10 places, with 10 points awarded for first place, nine for second, two for ninth, one for 10th . . . McCovey finished with 265 points, Seaver with 243. They both had 11 first place votes. Had both of the writers voted Seaver second, or if other writers who penalized him for being a pitcher, had voted him higher, he would have beaten McCovey.
It caused a howl in the New York press, and caused The Sporting News to editorialize that pitchers were the “step-children in the MVP poll,” reminding the Baseball Writers Association of America members that indeed hurlers are eligible. It caused the rules to be changed so that the vote would no longer be kept secret; writers would face accountability.
Seaver never complained, expressing only class and admiration for “Stretch.” McCovey has held popular elder statesman status in San Francisco, but he and Willie Mays, in truth, became (if they were not all along) egotistical blowhards. In 2001, Mays was asked a question about Joe DiMaggio. He bluntly stated that, “You can’t compare Joe to me.” Mays may be the greater all-round player, but DiMaggio is certainly worthy of being “compared” to Mays, and in 1969 was voted the Greatest Living Ball Player.
At the same time, McCovey was asked about the 1969 MVP vote. “Seaver had no bidness winnin’ that award,” said Big Mac. “I was far superior.”
Horse feathers. Seaver blew the Giants away in key games, willing to his team to ultimate victory in a manner so heroic as to be compared only to a very, very few athletic feats: Carl Yastrzemski of Boston in 1967 perhaps. Maybe Joe Namath and the Jets in 1968. DiMaggio in 1949 comes to mind. Bill Walton of the NBA’s Portland Trailblazers cast a similar, singularly large shadow in 1977. Joe Montana’s first Super Bowl title with the 1981 49ers is worthy of mention.
Neither McCovey nor Mays ever had that kind of take-the-team-on-my-shoulders season. Mays had a reputation for popping up in the clutch. McCovey was a great RBI man, but nobody mentions his name with Reggie Jackson when it comes to clutch hitting. Sometimes inches separate a man from this kind of glory; in McCovey’s case, the inches differentiating the last play of the 1962 World Series from a victorious two-run single and an F-4 to Bobby Richardson.
Seaver was the MVP in 1969, just as Ron Guidry should have won the 1978 A.L. award or Orel Hershiser the 1978 N.L. trophy. Roger Clemens did win the 1986 American League Most Valuable Player award. Even relief pitchers have been MVPs: Rollie Fingers of Milwaukee (1981), the incongruous Tiger Willie Hernandez, of all people (1984) and Oakland’s Dennis Eckersley (1992).
Seaver and the Mets revitalized the sport of baseball. They drew 2,175,373 fans to Shea Stadium, and 1,197,206 on the road (3,372,579 total). At the time, the 2 million mark in home attendance was what the 3 million mark became (inching towards 4 million as the new modern standard). Cleveland drew over 2 million under owner Bill Veeck in 1948. The Milwaukee Braves became the first National League club to crack the mark in the 1950s. Los Angeles set what the existing attendance record was in 1969, having drawn 2,755,184 in 1962. The Dodgers’ record would stand until they broke their own mark in 1977. Eventually 3 million would be passed, and attendance figures in Toronto, Colorado, Baltimore, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Anaheim, New York (Mets and Yankees), as well as other cities, would eclipse the size of crowds in the 1960s and ‘70s.
But considering the dire predictions for baseball in 1968, the Mets had truly done a major service for baseball, and for New York City. New stadiums were in the works for Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and later other cities. Each of those traditional baseball towns would experience a Renaissance. Expansion succeeded and continued (1977, 1993, 1998). In 1969, baseball fever gripped Chicago as well as New York. After a moribund period, Los Angeles began to pick up the pace attendance-wise.
Kansas City, a city that had failed with the A’s, was off to a good start and would succeed. Oakland and San Francisco were down in popularity, but both would survive, then thrive. So would the California Angels. Minnesota was on the rebound with a bright future. Boston helped carry the game in the late 1960s, too, and would develop into nothing less than a phenomenon. Part of their appeal came in their rivalry with the Yankees. A big part of the Yankees’ rebound as a franchise, on the field and at the gate, can be attributed to their reaction to the 1969 Mets.
The Yankees were the greatest dynasty in the game when the Mets came along. Even with the Giants and Dodgers competing for the New York fan base, the Yankees still made the most money, and were complacent about it. The combination of down Yankee teams between 1965 and the early 1970s, the Mets’ phenomenon, and changing times, forced them to re-evaluate their approach. In 1969, the Yankees drew 1,067,996 fans to Yankee Stadium. Like him or not, George Steinbrenner left no stone unturned. He saw the Mets as competitors and endeavored to make the Yankees the best team in New York. The Mets outdrew the Yankees for the most part between 1964 and 1975. In 1974 and ’75, the Yankees even played at Shea while Yankee Stadium was being renovated. The new Yankee Stadium played a huge role in the advancement of baseball popularity. The two-team town is a concept that had for the most part failed in Philadelphia and St. Louis. The White Sox were second in Chicago. Ultimately, three teams in New York did not work itself out. In 1969, two teams looked to be a losing proposition in the San Francisco Bay Area, and in the Los Angeles Basin (from Orange Counties’ perspective, at least). But the Mets’ spurred a successful two-team existence in the Big Apple. Eventually, the Bay Area, L.A., Chicago, and even the Washington-Baltimore corridor all thrived.
In winning the East Division title, the Mets had stunned the world, no question about it. That feat, in and of itself, was miraculous, amazin’, but to re-visit the Ronald Reagan quote, nobody had “seen nothin’ yet.”
Not by a long shot.
The march to the sea
“I’ll make Georgia howl!”
- General William T. Sherman
National League baseball existed in Boston since the league’s founding in 1876, but almost as soon as the upstart American League franchise started play in 1901, they were royalty. The Braves were Boston’s other team. In 1903, the first World Series was played, and won, by the Boston Pilgrims, whose ace pitcher was Denton True “Cy” Young. They defeated Honus Wagner and the Pittsburgh Pirates while their fans sang an incessant, constant, annoying song called “Tessie.” It apparently had the same effect on Pittsburgh as USC’s “Tribute to Troy” and “Conquest” has on their oft-beaten football opponents.
By 1912 the Pilgrims were called the Red Sox. They played in a new baseball palace called Fenway Park. The city’s mayor, John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald (JFK’s grandfather) attached himself to them in the same manner John Lindsay did to the Mets 87 years later. The Red Sox won four World Championships in the 1910s.
In 1914, the Boston Braves under manager George Stallings were in last place on the Fourth of July, but the “Miracle Braves” got hot, captured the flag from John McGraw’s stunned Giants, then beat one of Connie Mack’s greatest Philadelphia A’s teams in the World Series. However, Braves Field became a wasteland, the team a comedy act, even managed by the self-styled “clown prince” himself, Casey Stengel (1938-43).
In 1948, the Braves came seemingly out of nowhere to win the World Series behind the dynamo pitching combination of Warren Spahn and Johnny Sain (“Spahn and Sain and pray for rain”). Over time, the Red Sox had their ups and downs, but they dominated Boston baseball, filling Fenway with fans who rooted for Jimmie Foxx, Lefty Grove, and Ted Williams.
Also in 1948, Chuck Yeager broke the “sound barrier” in the skies over the California desert. With jet travel now made convenient, baseball looked to the West, like George Washington seeing the future past the Alleghenies after dispatching the British back to England in 1883. The Braves moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1953. They were followed by the Philadelphia A’s to Kansas City (1955), the Dodgers and Giants to California (1958), expansion and franchise shifts to Los Angeles, Minnesota and Houston (1961-62), followed by franchise shifts and expansion (Oakland, 1968; San Diego, Montreal, Seattle, Kansas City again, 1969).
Immediately, the Milwaukee Braves were successful, on the field and off. Suburban fans filled County Stadium. Having the benefit of a rising Hank Aaron, superstar Eddie Mathews, catcher Del Crandall, slugger Joe Adcock, defensive wizard Red Schoendienst, speedster Billy Bruton, ace pitchers Spahn, Lew Burdette, Bob Buhl and Johnny Antonelli; all led by one of the best minds in baseball (Fred Haney), turned them into the “Braves who made Milwaukee famous,” a paraphrase of the beer ads of the day. They won the 1957 World Series and came this close in 1958.
What happened in succeeding years is hard to explain. Some people say it is a four-word answer: the Green Bay Packers. More precisely, the Green Bay Packers under Vince Lombardi in the 1960s; Starr, Hornung, Kramer, Wood, Taylor. Legends. The Braves were talented and competitive, but the novelty wore off and attendance dropped. The club looked to greener pastures.
1966 was a fateful year in the franchise’s history. In January, they drafted G. Thomas Seaver off the University of Southern California campus. They also jumped the gun in signing him, therefore losing his services ultimately to the Mets. In April, they played their first game at brand new Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium. Baseball people did not like what happened to Milwaukee, just as they did not like the way Kansas City lost their team after a similar short-lived run. K.C. got an expansion team in 1969 and Milwaukee got the second-year Seattle Pilots, calling them the Brewers beginning in 1970. The whole musical chairs of baseball continued: Seattle re-loaded with the Mariners (1977); Washington lost the Senators, gained the Senators, who became the Texas Rangers; and Montreal became the Washington Nationals (2005).
It was difficult for many years to judge the merits of baseball’s move to Atlanta in 1966. A Southerner, Lyndon Johnson was elected to the Vice-Presidency (1961-63) and occupied the White House (1963-69). His signature social initiative was the Great Society. Like its predecessor, the New Deal, its intended beneficiaries were, first and foremost (at least in theory), black Americans. This dynamic has been the bone of historical contention between liberals and conservatives for decades.
LBJ represented the so-called “New South.” With the invention of air conditioning; major works projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority; Harry Truman’s integration of the Army; the Brown vs. Board of Education decision outlawing segregation (1954); followed by enforcement of Brown at Little Rock (1957), the University of Mississippi (1962) and the University of Alabama (1963); by gum, “modernization” was gonna come to Dixie – kicking and screaming – whether they liked it or not.
The aforementioned advancements in civil discourse, if you can call it that, were met by equally jarring acts of civil disobedience. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was jailed in 1960 and wrote “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.” Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett defied President John F. Kennedy when JFK wanted the African-American student James Meredith to enter Ol’ Miss in 1962. That same year, Alabama Governor George Wallace stated that his policy was, “Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” The next year, with ‘Bama football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant looking on from his corner office, Wallace “blocked” the entrance to the school before Federal troops intervened, letting two black students enroll in the school.
White America half pretended, at least until the 1960s, that the South was really no different than the rest of the country. There was oil in Texas, big money in the booming 1950s, and by golly they got a big league ball club. The 1962 Houston Colt .45s were the direct result of an “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” deal between George W. Bush’s grandfather, U.S. Senator Prescott Bush (R.-Connecticut), U.S. House Speaker Sam Rayburn (D.-Texas) and Senate Majority Leader-turned-President Johnson. Direct beneficiaries included Senator Bush’s nephew, Herbert Walker, with the result being an expansion team in New York partially owned by him, and his son, George, elected to Congress in the Houston suburbs.
Whether it was a problem for black pro athletes in the South was immaterial to the fact that the region wanted, and had enough political clout to get, baseball and football franchises. In Atlanta, that meant the Braves (baseball), the Falcons (NFL) and the Hawks (NBA). In Dallas, the Cowboys. The American Football League was formed, and with it teams in Dallas, Houston and Miami. Following that: the Johnson Space Center, NASA’s headquarters in Houston.
While all of these entities went about their business, the “elephant in the corner” were the colleges. Texas, Alabama, Ol’ Miss; the Southeastern Conference, the SWC, all throughout Dixie, collegiate athletics remained virtually all white, with mere token exceptions.
In 1966, Texas Western shocked the world when they started five blacks against all white Kentucky, winning the NCAA basketball title. Four years later, integrated USC with Sam “Bam” Cunningham and a black tight end who grew up hearing about Tom Seaver in Fresno (Charles Young), beat Alabama in Birmingham, essentially ending segregation in college sports south of the Mason-Dixon Line.
The black players who played on the Hawks, Braves, Falcons, Cowboys, and Texans had to walk a fine line, which meant: do not get out of hand, do not get drunk in public, and do not parade around town with white women, as football stars Jim Brown and Fred “the Hammer” Williamson were oh-so-conspicuously doing in Cleveland, Kansas City . . . and Hollywood.
Baseball had seemingly ignored the social plight of the South, stocking minor leagues with Dixieland teams, even calling the Atlanta franchise the Crackers, for God’s sake. After Jackie Robinson broke the “color barrier,” they sent all those black players down there to suffer any manner of indignities. The Cardinals’ Curt Flood, a gentle soul from a mixed-race Oakland neighborhood, was shocked at what life was like there. Even Branch Rickey continued to operate Dodgers farm clubs in the Deep South. In Spring Training the blacks lived like refugees on the outskirts of a rural Florida town until Dodgertown was built in Vero Beach, ostensibly to give them cover.
The really crazy part of this quilt was that the South was 100 percent Democrat (a century-long reaction to the Republican Abraham Lincoln). This meant that Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan, George Wallace, Bull Connor, “segregation forever” and the Confederate flag were all somewhere between official and de facto wings of the same party as Franklin Roosevelt, John and Bobby Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, and for all practical purposes Martin Luther King, the ACLU, the NAACP, and the New York Times. Go figure.
In 1966, Georgia elected the racist Democrat, Lester Maddox as Governor. It was one of the last acts of the dying, unholy alliance sometimes referred to as “Dixiecrats” (from Senator Strom Thurmond’s 1948 Presidential campaign). Enter Jimmy Carter: Annapolis graduate, submarine officer in the Hyman Rickover nuclear Navy, peanut farmer, liberal Democrat (but considered conservative by 1960s standards). He was elected Governor of Georgia in 1970.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 had really kicked in by then, giving blacks the vote. Carter courted blacks like they were his best friends. He was a born again Christian, determined to treat others as he would have them treat him. The entire racial-social dynamics of the Republican and Democrat Parties headed toward a paradigm shift. Atlanta became the face of the “New South.” A decade later the leader of the KKK, David Duke, used modern public relations and advertising methods to “sell” his message. 26 years after Carter’s election, the Olympics, the ultimate multi-cultural event, came to Atlanta. Every major Southern city acquired successful professional sports franchises. Black athletes became heroes. Blacks were elected to state, Federal, and to Mayoral offices.
The South went to the GOP. Three Southerners, at least according to voter registration, held the Presidency (LBJ, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, Texas; Bill Clinton, Arkansas); two held the Vice-Presidency (LBJ, Texas; Al Gore, Tennessee); not to mention a border state (V.P. Spiro Agnew, Maryland). Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon of California derived some of their strongest support from the South. The “Southern strategy” swung the 1968 election to Richard Nixon. Ronald Reagan opened his 1980 run in Mississippi. Southern evangelism became the dominant religious influence in this nation. Major corporations filled the skylines of Southern downtown’s, which became economic hubs.
Jeff Prugh, the L.A. Times’ beat writer who covered the seminal 1970 USC-Alabama game in 1970, later became the Times’ Atlanta bureau chief. He said that the difference he saw in the South between 1970 and 1978, when USC returned to play at Birmingham, was cataclysmic. It can be said that the South made a greater social change for the better than any region in a similar period of time in all the history of Mankind. They did not change when they were beaten in a war and a “way of life” was shoved down their throats by fiat. They did it on their own, by their own free will. It was a change of hearts, minds and souls.
“I also found that by the late 1970s, Atlanta had black political leadership,” said Prugh. “At first, people cut black politicians a break because they wanted to be fair out of historical context. But over time, they demanded accountability. I found out that Atlanta – white and black – could be corrupt like anyplace else. In a strange way, the fact that Atlantans demanded accountability from black political leaders told me that change had taken place, and it happened faster than I ever imagined it could have.”
The social/political dynamic of Atlanta was also exploited in great detail in Tom Wolfe’s 1998 book, A Man in Full. In that book, a complete transformation of Southern society was dissected in biting detail by the satirist Wolfe, author of The Right Stuff. In A Man in Full, blacks are elevated to the highest status despite being quasi-criminals while hard-working whites – pillars of the community – find themselves blamed and framed for most social ills.
****
In October of 1969, a well-equipped army of Braves awaited the Mets in the hostile land of Atlanta, Georgia. The fact that the Atlanta Braves met the New York Mets in the 1969 National League Championship Series was ironic on many levels. First, there was the Tom Seaver connection. It was the Braves who drafted USC’s Seaver in 1966; the Mets who scooped him up when the Braves made perhaps the biggest mistake in that franchise’s history.
Had Seaver been a Brave between 1967 and 1969, Atlanta may well have won National League pennants. The 1969 Braves, adding Seaver’s 25 wins to the 93 they did achieve, would have been one of the best teams in history and may well have gone all the way. The club probably would have had a successful decade after that instead of getting lost in the wilderness until 1991.
Then there was Hank Aaron, the man Tom Seaver “chose” as his favorite baseball player. Seaver was awed to face “Bad Henry,” and to be his teammate in All-Star Games. Plus, there was the “Mobile connection.” No less than four residents of Mobile, Alabama were participating. Aaron and his brother, Tommie, who was close friends with Cleon Jones and Tommie Agee. To top it all off, the N.L.’s MVP that year, Willie McCovey was from Mobile.
There were also the strange social contrasts. First, the Braves’ franchise was presumably named after Indian tribes in Massachusetts (?), or perhaps because the Boston Tea Party dressed themselves as Indians. This name followed them to Milwaukee and Georgia, where other Indian tribes in both states made the name stick in a way that “Lakers” might not have been quite right for the desert that is Los Angeles.
This was a franchise that went from the bastion of the Union during the Civil War to the symbol of the Confederacy, the town famously burned in Gone With the Wind. A liberal Northeastern city to a conservative Southeastern one. From Irish Catholic to Southern Baptist, with the base of the anti-Communist Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy in between. A franchise in search of an identity. It was the first time a Southern city hosted post-season baseball, featuring two cities that might as well have been in different countries; not to mention, they seemed headed in different directions.
Manager Gil Hodges faced the baseball version of Union General William T. Sherman’s task in 1864-65, which was to enter the state of Georgia, wreak havoc, and thus achieve ultimate victory. By 1864, the Civil War had been going on for three years and people were sick of it. In 1863, after the Union won at Gettysburgh, there was no chance of Confederate victory. The South continued to fight; out of pride, and also hoping a political settlement could be agreed to that would allow them to maintain their “way of life.” Slavery was outlawed on January 1, 1863, so that was out of the question, but perhaps some kind of autonomy.
President Abraham Lincoln was determined to achieve total victory. He needed it to demonstrate the war meant something other than a waste of lives resulting in stalemate. Unpopular, he faced a losing re-election bid in 1864. Lincoln turned to Sherman, who proposed a risky invasion plan of Georgia. Sherman had almost resigned, but was talked into sticking out his commission by General U.S. Grant, who faced a similar low point during the early part of the conflict. Most of Lincoln’s advisors warned that Sherman’s “march to the sea” through Georgia was fraught with peril, but Lincoln needed a splash, a victory – or at least light at the end of a long tunnel – in order to win re-election in 1864. He gave Sherman the go-ahead.
“I’ll make Georgia howl,” Sherman famously told the President. He did just that, cutting a swath through the Confederacy that brought the South to its collective knees. Part of Atlanta was burned. Crops were destroyed. All chance at resistance was obliterated and victory was attained, finally. Sherman is viewed through history as a hero by some, a terrorist in the South. The details of his march indicate he was no terrorist, as many of the “atrocities” were exaggerated over a century of Southern mythmaking. Nevertheless, he represented all that the South resented about the North.
The South hated Northern, i.e., government meddling with their “states’ rights.” Sporting events between Southern and Northern teams always carried with it a political and social edge: the 1956 USC-Texas football game; the 1966 “Catholic vote” that awarded Notre Dame the National Championship over Alabama, just to name two events. But most of these athletic contests were college games, infused by the local pride that comes with seeing players, mostly from the same geographical region, play against young men representing another region.
The 1969 Mets-Braves match-up did not have that. New York featured the two “Mobile boys,” although that carried certain connotations. Tommie Agee and Cleon Jones left a segregated world to enter pro baseball, eventually ending up in the most diverse of all cities, New York. The Georgia they found in 1969 was legally integrated, but their “hearts and minds” were still struggling to get there.
The Braves featured blacks and Latinos aplenty, from south of the border, from the American North and South. Their fans were not quite sure how to deal with this “Brave” new world, but they did know that the “magic” team coming to play them wore shirts that read “NEW YORK” on them. That was enough to fire them up.
Gil Hodges had no intention of burning cities, pillaging villages, or destroying crops, but he needed to replicate Sherman’s “march to the sea” in the baseball sense if he intended to win this “war.”
All the social angst and history lessons revolving around the Braves’ franchise and the city of Atlanta could not compare to the bizarre nature of the games themselves. The Mets might have been nominal favorites, since they won seven more regular season games and had the pitching. Despite their success, installing the Mets as favorites - anytime, anywhere - was a hard concept to grasp. Atlanta was a 13-10 favorite, despite the fact that Seaver was 3-0 vs. the Braves, while Atlanta ace Phil Niekro was 0-3 against them. Atlanta had finished 93-69, but they were just as hot towards the end as New York (17 of their last 21, almost every one of them clutch). It was possible that the Braves were worn out from their West Division death struggle with San Francisco, Cincinnati, L.A. and Houston. This always brings up the debate, which is whether it is better to coast in, as the Mets had basically done, or to come in all hot ‘n’ bothered, as the Braves still were.
“Let’s get one thing straight at the start,” 79-year old Casey Stengel stated. “The Mets will play all the way to the end of the World Series because they have more pitchers and they throw lightning. And you can look it up, that’s best for a short series . . .”
Stengel clarified his “all the way to the end of the World Series” statement. “Don’t forget, I say it goes the limit to the World Series for the Mets.”
A three-game sweep did not seem likely, but since New York had won 38 of 49, the heat of their momentum did not make that such an impossibility. What made the series bizarre was the complete lack of adherence to form. The Mets were a light-hitting team, winners of 1-0 and 2-1 games. They did it with pitching, speed and defense. Their pitching was 90 percent of their success. If their pitching failed, they would fail.
“Our attitude going in the series was that we just didn’t want to get embarrassed,” said Swoboda.
Their pitching failed. They still swept the series. Amazin’.
The 1969 post-season was a first in a number of ways. The advent of play-offs coincided with what by then was universal color television. Over the course of the decade, baseball and other sports revolutionized via color TV. Many people had old back-and-white sets, but by 1969 most had color. The play-offs opened on a Saturday, meaning it was a sports extravaganza. Some felt ratings would suffer all the way around, since viewers would be forced to choose between two baseball games (Baltimore and Minnesota in the early play-off), meaningful college football (the conferences were in full swing), and on Sunday the NFL.
The Mets opened in a place where college football has been called “religion.” Atlantans had transistor radios pressed to their ears during the baseball games, listening to Georgia beating South Carolina, 41-16; Clemson knocking off Georgia Tech, 21-10; and on Sunday the Falcons losing to Baltimore, 21-14. The lobby of the Regency Hyatt House featured a band and majorettes. Television interviewees featured mostly college football coaches.
Most people still needed to physically get up to change stations, unlike the “channel surfing” that goes on today, but the combination of sports was and would continue to be a huge success. Stadiums were full, ratings good. Football seemed to play off of baseball, and vice-versa. One thing was for sure: baseball had not taken a back seat to football, as people feared it would in 1968.
The cover of the Braves’ game program featured an Atlanta player descending from a LEM onto a home plate resting on the Moon, with the legend, “One Step for the Braves, One Giant Leap for the Southeast.”
The Mets beat the Braves eight of 12 times in the regular season, but the Braves had a bunch of guys who could beat you. They were formidable. First baseman Orlando “Cha Cha” Cepeda had broken up Seaver’s perfect game in 1968, won the N.L. Most Valuable Player award in 1967, and was the epitome of a clutch RBI man who hit 22 homers and drove in 88 in 1969. Cepeda was one of those brash Latino players who always seemed to wear out his welcome, as he had in San Francisco and St. Louis. Oh, yeah. Wherever he got traded to, his new team won championships while his old one watched on the tube.
The Puerto Rican Cepeda was part of the great flow of players from Puerto Rico, Cuba, Venezuela, Mexico and the Dominican Republic that followed Roberto Clemente’s successful entrance into the league in the 1950s. He was a fan favorite in San Francisco, a bachelor who danced the night away in The City’s Latin nightclubs. He and Willie Mays did not hit it off. The Benicio Del Torro-Wesley Snipes tete-a-tete in The Fan was loosely based on them. The Giants trade of Cepeda to El Birdos had the immediate effect of transferring power in the National League from San Francisco to St. Louis. His trade from St. Louis effectively made them also-rans, and now here were the Braves playing October baseball.
Second baseman Felix Millan was a defensive wizard who turned in some masterful glove work to beat New York earlier in the season. Catcher Bob Didier was something out of a noir movie. If Dan Jenkins wrote about baseball instead of football, he would have created characters like Didier . . . and his wife.
Didier was born in Mississippi. His father coached baseball at Southwest Louisiana State University. Bob Didier was the walking embodiment of Dixie: Cajun accent, tobacco-chewing, beer-drinking, good-lookin’ cat with an eye for the ladies. After an excellent rookie year with the 1969 Braves, his career never materialized. Like his old man, he became a coach. He married a beauty queen, but they had an “arrangement.” Bob did what he wanted to do, she did what she wanted to do. When Didier was on Billy Martin’s coaching staff at Oakland in the 1980s, she would wear an eeni-weeni thong bikini, sitting in the lotus position on top of the home dugout at Phoenix Municipal Stadium during batting practice before Spring Training games. Slathered in tanning oil, bronzed to a golden brown, Mrs. Didier was temptation personified, hotter than the 100-degree Arizona sun she smoked under, and I don’t mean cigarettes. Asked what she was up to, she said she was “trolling” for ball players, displaying herself and her considerable wares not unlike certain ladies in Amsterdam storefront windows, only her charms were presumably obtained via a little smooth talk and a shot of tequila. True story.
Outfielder Rico Carty was another Dominican; a big, muscular man who belied the previous image of Latino players as wiry middle infield types. He mashed, night and day; .342 in 1969 after recovering from an injury that kept him out all of 1968. The next year he hit .366. Like Manny Sanguillen, Clemente, and others from the Caribbean, he swung at everything, lining liners off walls as if stadiums were pinball machines. He could care less about Tom Seaver’s reputation. He saw it, he hit it.
Outfielder Felipe Alou was another Dominican danger. The scouting report on Alou was about the same as Carty: if the pitch was in the same area code as his bat, he would swing and likely hit something you could hang your clothes on.
Henry Aaron was out in right field. All he was, was the all-time greatest home run hitter in history until Barry Bonds lost his fear of needles. Seaver had asked Aaron for his autograph, having “Bad Henry” sign a copy of his autobiography, Hank Aaron RF: “To Tom Seaver. Sorry we missed you, Best wishes. Henry Aaron.” “Sorry we missed you” was in reference to the 1966 draft.
The Braves did it with hitting. Knuckle ball pitcher Phil Niekro won 23 with a 2.57 ERA. He was tough as nails, but the rest of the staff were retreads. Pitching is supposed to be 90 percent of the game, and good pitching is supposed to beat good hitting. The Mets were counting on it, but if there was a team that could get under their skin – mainly via free swinging – it was the Braves. They were not like the Giants or the Pirates. Seaver would challenge those long-ball guys and win the bet. These guys could not be strategized against. Grote and Seaver could discuss pitch location to Carty, Alou and Cepeda all morning but it might not matter. “Bad Henry” was capable of taking Seaver’s mythical Cooperstown plaque and putting it you-know-where.
The opener was as unpredictable as snowfall in San Diego. Tom Seaver, fresh as a daisy, with Gil Hodges having lined up his rotation perfectly, took the mound. Was any pitcher, ever, hotter at that point in time than Tom Seaver? He had won 10 straight, but they were not just wins. They were masterpieces, artistic concepts, clinics. He threw so hard “blind people come out to hear him pitch,” as Reggie Jackson famously said of him. He was so devastating that Mets fans simply assumed he could throw his hat on the mound and two hours later another shutout was accomplished. Grote never moved his glove, Seaver’s control was so good. His slider was wicked, his curve buckled knees, and his fastball broke bats. Measly grounders were gobbled up, “can o’ corn” pop-ups gathered in like so many nuts at harvest. Umpires’ arms shot up time after time: strike one, strike two, strike three . . . and you are outta there!
Batters gave up, as they had when Koufax was at his best, Gibson took control. It was “good night, Irene.” See ya. Bye-bye, time. Just avoid embarrassment. Take your strikeout, your oh-fer, and be glad not all the pitchers were such gods, such immortals. Seaver was not a pitcher, he was a Hall of Fame plaque built out of flesh and blood.
So what did this living embodiment of pitching dominance do in game one? He got hit around like a little leaguer, his mighty fastball reduced to straight batting practice fodder. Instead of 99-MPH heat, it came in steady and straight around 87, or so it seemed. His breaking stuff didn’t. Dennis Hopper had better control on the set of Easy Rider. The Braves teed off on him. He wound up, dropped, drove; then strained his neck watching his fielders scramble for Braves line drives and home runs that traveled so far they needed a stewardess.
It was a perfect example of the very nature of unpredictability, the human element of sports, why athletics are so much darn fun. You just never know. It was just like the opener against the expansion Expos, when Seaver and his “high hopes” were batted about in a foul barrage of “bad feedback,” in the form of well-hit shots off Montreal bats.
Oh, one more thing. Seaver was the winning pitcher. It was that kind of year.
Seaver woke up the night before the opener with a severe case of Aaron-induced insomnia, rolling around his bed at the Marriott Hotel. In the morning he ate lightly. For some reason, Seaver was incredibly nervous pitching in Atlanta. He kept thinking about “Bad Henry,” how he got him out the first time he faced him only to give up a homer the next time up. His worst fears, it turned out, were justified.
It was hot in Atlanta. Seaver and the Mets battled the summer weather in New York, Chicago, and St. Louis, but had gotten used to the mild Northern climes of September. Plus the game started at four for TV, so Seaver was off his usual pattern; neither a night game nor a day game.
Warming up he felt jerky and panicked. His mouth was dry. He could not spit. He had this terrible nightmare that he would wake up in a boxcar in Fresno, packing raisins. Some wizard would emerge and tell him, “None of it was real, boy. Not the Mets, not the pennant. Ha, ha.” Rod Serling would be off to the side and Seaver would be this week’s cautionary tale on The Zone.
Felix Millan stepped to the plate. Seaver was about as smooth as the parent McFly in Back to the Future. He had no plan, no stuff, nothin’. He tossed up a batting practice fast ball, hoping it would be over the plate by chance and that Millan’s liner would be hit at somebody. By no reason other than luck, really, despite bouncing curves and throwing fast balls that had Grote leaping out of his crouch, he somehow retired the side. The Mets scored two runs and Seaver thought maybe this would be the catalyst, he would recover and be Tom Seaver, for God’s sake.
The crowd of more than 50,000 cheered, oddly puzzled that the man they heard so much about, the man they expected to dazzle them with this legendary heater and marksmanlike control, looked like a guy in the Sally League. Seaver struggled, his body totally discombobulated, and gave a run back in the second.
In the third Millan jumped on him like a hobo on a ham sandwich, slapping a “fastball” for a double. His curve – more like a wrinkle - was like a ball on a tee for Tony Gonzalez, who roped a double off the wall to tie it. When Aaron came up, Seaver felt like the Wehrmacht general ordered to “stop Patton at the Rhine” despite a lack of gas or ammunition. Double off the wall, 3-2.
With the bases loaded, he got lucky when Bob Didier missed a fast ball down main street for a strikeout. But Niekro was no more effective. The pundits had seen the two best pitchers in the league and predicted a low-scoring affair, but Harrelson got a cheap hit and they scored two cheap runs to take a cheap 4-3 lead.
As Slim Pickens once said in Blazing Saddles, “What in the wide, wide world of sports is goin’ on here?”
In the fourth Tom changed from the pitching motion that had earned him success at Fresno City College, the Alaska Goldpanners, USC, Jacksonville and New York City. Grote came out and said something like, “Are you out of your mind? What’s the matter with you? Is this an act? Did gamblers pay you off?”
Gil Hodges turned to Rube Walker as if to say, “Did you see what I see?” 24 Mets and 25 Braves just looked out at the car wreck that was Tom Seaver. It was not the beginning anymore but he was literally choking from nerves. He was the embodiment of all that athletes despise the most, the man whose courage fails his team. In the fifth, Seaver threw a “fastball,” maybe 83 MPH. NASA scientists could not have centered it in Tony Gonzalez’s kill zone any better than it was. It took off like Apollo 11, over the left field fence. 4-4.
The game droned on. In the seventh, Seaver thew a slow curveball to Aaron. It was the kind of pitch he specialized in when he toiled for the Fresno High junior varsity in 1961. It was slightly less effective than the “deuce” Kevin Costner throws to Ray Liotta’s “Shoeless Joe” Jackson when they take batting practice in Field of Dreams. Aaron’s homer landed in the middle of a Civil War battle re-enactment somewhere. 5-4.
Seaver entered the dugout. If anybody still thought he was “perfect,” he made sure the part about “swearing” when he said, “I drank beer and swear” was made perfectly clear. Niekro was still out there in the eighth. His knuckleball was more like a lame duck. The Mets jumped on it like it was skeet practice, pushing two runs across. Seaver got up from the on-deck circle, waiting for the inevitable. Hodges pinch-hit for him with J.C. Martin. In keeping with the theme of the whole year, Martin hit a single, driving in two, and an error let a third in. Five runs scored and the Mets led, 9-5. By nothing less than a miracle, Seaver stood to be the winning pitcher. Somehow, Niekro was worse than he was.
Ron Taylor entered the game. He was everything Seaver was not. Effective, good, a worthy big league pitcher. He closed out the 9-5 win, perhaps the ugliest on record, with the “great” G. Thomas Seaver credited with the “victory.” Then again, a win is a win. Truer words have never been spoken. To a team that had turned losing into an art form like the New York Mets, this was especially true.
Seaver’s sudden post-season mediocrity was by no means unheard of. Don Newcombe was a regular season ace for years, but deemed so unreliable with the chips on the line that managers went with rookies and second-tier guys instead of him. Don Drysdale won 25 games for the 1962 Dodgers, but when his team needed him at the end, exhausted physically and mentally, he failed. One year earlier, Denny McLain set new standards of pitching excellence, but got bounced around in his first two World Series starts against St. Louis.
“We got five runs off Tom Seaver,” Hank Aaron, slumped before his cubicle, said disconsolately to the writers. “That should win it for us. There is something wrong.”
“Could there really be ‘Met magic?’ ” one writer asked him. Henry suggested an anatomical location for the “Met magic,” but the Braves were stunned. Fate was not on their side.
Seaver spoke to the press as if he was the losing pitcher, trying to explain why he had pitched so poorly. Theories were propounded that he was rusty from not having pitched between September 27 and October 4. But Seaver had no excuses.
“I tried to control my nerves and I couldn’t,” he said in a frank confession. “I couldn’t get my fastball and curve together. It is very hard to explain.”
Seaver thought about it some more. “It rubs me, it frustrates me,” he continued. “I know what I can do but I just couldn’t do it. It happens to me all the time, except that the tension dissipates itself after my first pitch usually . . .
“I was more tense than usual and more nervous. It’s a progressive thing that happens to me all the time . . . but today my state mentally led me to rush my pitching motion physically. My hips were more open when I was throwing the ball and my arm dropped lower. Jerry came out to the mound several times and told me to get my arm back higher. It just seemed that I couldn’t throw that many good pitches in a row. Some of them were good, and I guess that’s what made me keep my sanity. The crux of the whole thing, though, was that I just felt more nervous than usual.”
Then Seaver smiled. “Mind if I ask a question?” he said to a reporter.
“Feel free,” was the reply.
“Who won?” Seaver asked rhetorically, and everybody chuckled. He had a point. Then Seaver stood up and announced, “I gave up five runs and still won the game. God truly is a Met.” It was a variation on a theme gaining more support daily.
So what happened in game two? Jerry Koosman, every bit Seaver’s equal down the stretch, came on and blew Atlanta away with a brilliant display, right? Wrong. He was worse than Seaver, and yes, the Mets won anyway.
Another huge crowd showed up at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium to see Koosman square off with 18-game winner Rick Reed. Atlanta was shakier than the Mets, making three costly errors in an 11-6 loss. New York knocked Reed out early and took a seemingly insurmountable 8-0 lead in the fourth, 9-1 in the fifth. All that was left was to watch Koosman cruise along and complete his October masterpiece, but after the Braves nicked him for a run in the fourth they scored five in the fifth, all after the first two Braves had been retired. Aaron homered, but after that Koosman came totally unglued; a walk, a double, and that was just the beginning. Hodges was forced to relieve him before he could get the required five innings to get credit for the victory, bringing in Taylor. Koosman’s line was poor: 4 2/3 innings, sevens hits, six runs (all earned). Aaron went yard on him. It was a terribly sloppy game. The Mets made physical and mental mistakes, but Atlanta played like bush leaguers; missed cut-offs, throwing to the wrong base.
Suddenly, with the game not yet half over, a blowout had become “nervous Nellie” time. In the seventh inning, with New York hanging on with a 9-6 advantage, Agee was on third with Jones at bat. Cecil Upshaw, a side-arming right-handed reliever, delivered while Agee took off for home plate. Jones took a mighty cut and hit a searing line drive that missed Agee’s head by a foot.
Some people thought it was a missed sign, a mix-up in which either Agee thought he got the steal sign, or a “suicide squeeze” sign missed by Jones. Oddly, it was neither. Agee went on his own. Jones claimed he swung, intentionally trying to miss to “keep the catcher occupied.” Agee could have been killed. They just stood and glared at each other after the play, too stunned to contemplate what could have been. In this year of “Met magic” the ball missed him. Of course Jones then homered to make it 11-6, which stood up. Taylor got the win. McGraw came in, shut the door and picked up the save.
The Mets had played poor, sloppy ball two days in a row. Their two aces had been hit around. They still led two games to none and were headed home. Their bright spot had been their bats, a real surprise.
“We’ve got one foot in the grave and the gravediggers are going for their shovels,” said Atlanta manager Luman Harris.
“The Mets are unconscious,” said Braves third baseman Clete Boyer, a veteran of many Octobers with the Yankees. “They don’t know where they are. They don’t understand the pressure.” Hank Aaron, for instance, had been to two World Series early in his career (1957-58), then struggled for 11 seasons to get back, only to be denied by these upstarts.
The flight from Atlanta to New York was “sweet,” according to Art Shamsky. The Mets were one win away from the World Series. The creation of the play-offs had disrupted the usual routine, whereby a team won the league, as New York would have done with the best record absent divisions. They had not allowed themselves to think such a thing. The Series, the highest mountaintop in sports. Just like Joe Namath’s Jets in the Super Bowl. The Jets’ victory over Baltimore had made the Super Bowl what it is today. The World Series was the ultimate sporting event long before the Mets sniffed it.
When the team arrived in New York City, the excitement was off the charts. Every radio and TV program featured the Mets. The newspapers could not get enough of them. Every little detail was covered. Students, teachers, parents, cabbies, bartenders, waitresses, corporate execs, whites, blacks, Puerto Ricans, gays, straights, hardhats, Republicans, Democrats; everybody was taken with a full case of Mets fever.
The third game was played the very next day, a Monday, with no off day for the Braves to rest or the Mets to contemplate a sense of reality. It was sunny and cool, a contrast to the muggy Georgia heat, and more to the Mets’ style. Pat Jarvis started for Atlanta against Gary Gentry. A frenzied, capacity crowd arrived hours before the game. Gentry was no more effective pitching at home than Seaver or Koosman on the road. It was the same kind of sloppy game, with the lead changing hands three times on homers in the first five innings. Cepeda went deep. Agee and Boswell homered for New York.
Gentry never made it out of the third inning. Hank Aaron, playing on national television, had one of the best play-off series of all time in 1969. It is not remembered because his team could not win, but he was red hot, homering again in the third game, this time off of Gentry. This game might be considered the “debut” of Nolan Ryan, the first time he displayed his true brilliance, also on national television. Atlanta took a 4-3 lead, but Ryan pitched out of a bases load jam to hold it down. In the fifth, Ryan got a hit. Then Wayne Garrett homered. Ryan pitched the last seven innings, giving up just two runs on three hits in the 7-4 victory. The last out was a grounder to Garrett, who threw to Kranepool and the Mets were the champions of the National League, three games to none in what in those days was a best-of-three N.L.C.S. format.
“When Nolan pitched those great seven innings of relief, it was huge,” said Koosman. “It gave us another guy on our roster that we could go to with confidence, another body developed on our ball club. Nolan had been up and down all year, his season interrupted by both injury and military service. But Gil was doing these things throughout the year, showing us how to play the game, and because of him we found out we were capable of doing more than we knew we could.”
“Our pitching got battered in that series, but it was amazing the way we outhit them,” said Swoboda. “Gil stuck to his guns and platooned, so I didn’t get a single at-bat in the Atlanta series because of their predominantly right-handed pitching.” The Mets, he said, “weren’t great players who will go on to the Hall of Fame,” but “just guys who made themselves useful.”
Ryan was “untouchable,” added Koosman. “It was a laughing matter. Every pitch he threw was intimidating.”
It was also an example of Hodges’s playing all the right hunches in this year of magic. He kept Ryan in the game instead of pinch-hitting for him and did not remove Garrett when he faced left-hander George Stone. Everything paid off. It was amazin’. 100-to-one longshots, the Mets beat those odds.
“We couldn’t do anything wrong,” said Koosman. “We couldn’t lose a game.”
“The Mets really are amazing,” said a gracious Hank Aaron, who no longer told writers what kinds of physical contortions they could do with “Met magic.”
“We ought to send the Mets to Vietnam,” said Atlanta general manager Paul Richards. “They’d end the war in three days.” They had taken care of Atlanta faster than General Sherman had.
Thousands of fans poured onto the field, tearing everything up, undoing all the work done by the groundscrew after the division clinching of September 24. It was absolutely out of control; a wild, chaotic, celebratory scene infused by an utter sense of disbelief. People grabbed each other, asked whether they could believe it, was it real, how did it happen? In bars and homes and schoolrooms all over the city, the state and the nation, people cheered and expressed jubilation and total shock. It was unreal.
The clubhouse was a mad scene of champagne mixed with machismo and near-religious awe, grown men rendered unable to contemplate the glory of it all. Into this mix arrived Mayor Lindsay, presumably wearing a suit he had chosen as one he could afford to get messy, because the bubbly was flowing and spurting in every direction.
“I poured the champagne on him and Grote was scrubbing his head,” recalled Rod Gaspar. “I got in the limelight doing it and it helped get him re-elected.”
When Mrs. Payson entered the clubhouse, she was intimidated, smiled and left before taking a champagne shower. Writers struggled to get quotes and protect their notepads amid the sea of champagne. The celebration lasted for three hours. It was a day game, so the press had enough time to delve into every story without being rushed by a deadline. When the players finally showered and dressed, 5,000 fans were waiting for them in the parking lot area beyond right field.
In Manhattan, mass hysteria was the order of the day. Churches were filled with people praying for miracles, because the Mets were living proof of such things. Men and women kissed each other on the streets like those old V-J Day photos. Bars were filled, confetti dropped from office buildings, Wall Street awash with people dancing in the streets. Bus boys and corporate chieftains shared the glory equally. Probably because baseball is a game played daily, in which victory builds over time, each step on top of the other, the reaction by the city was even more spectacular and spread over a longer time than it had been for the Jets. It was a miracle. It was amazin’.
Lindsay’s re-election probably could be traced to the next day’s front-page pictures showing him doused in champagne by Grote and Gaspar. He attached himself to every public celebration of the team. Angst over racial strife, Vietnam and New York’s fiscal crisis faded in light of the Mets’ victory. Union members found common ground with city negotiators.
“They beat the hell out of us,” said Luman Harris.
“Now I’ve done it all,” said first base coach Yogi Berra. “I’ve played, managed, and now will coach in a World Series. That is all, isn’t it?”
“I had them <the Mets> a lot of times this year, but this was the greatest thrill,” said umpire Ed Sudol. “They’re appropriately named the Amazin’ Mets. They’ve come from the depths of despair to the celestial. I studied literature and made that up myself.”
“The team has come along slow, but fast,” was Casey Stengel’s inimitable description.
“We’re gonna beat Baltimore and then I’m goin’ fishin’,” said Cleon Jones of their World Series opponents.
“We’ve come this far, we might as well fool the whole world, including Baltimore,” said Buddy Harrelson.
“I’ll walk down the street in New York now and people will say, there’s Art Shamsky of the Mets,” Shamsky was quoted in the New York Daily News. “People used to laugh. They won’t anymore.”
“After beating Atlanta, I think the Mets had a feeling they could beat anybody,” recalled Ralph Kiner.
“The Mets made people care again,” wrote Larry Merchant in the New York Post. “They hadn’t for so long, they had forgotten they once did.”
“We were being toasted by Mayor Lindsay, Governor <Nelson> Rockefeller, and it was exciting,” recalled Swoboda. “Everything was happening at Shea.”
“The tension of the world was on us,” said Koosman. “Everybody wanted to be on the bandwagon. Rockefeller and Lindsay and numerous big names were suddenly appearing in our clubhouse.”
New York did it by slugging the ball. In the Championship Series, Agee hit .357, Jones .429, Shamsky .538, Garrett .385, and Boswell .333.
“The play-off series against the Braves was one of the few times our pitchers had faltered like that and allowed an unusual number of runs,” said Ed Charles.
Certainly, the Atlanta series was important because it allowed the entire team to truly share in the incredible run. Until that time, there was a strong sense that New York was an updated version of the 1948 Braves: “Spahn and Sain and pray for rain.” Call them
“Seaver, Koosman or lose ‘em.” It separates them from the Dodgers of the mid-1960s, who won pennants and World Series on dominant pitching with little else. The Mets were – and after this series it was very apparent – a team. Seaver, the king of the hill, their hero who stood head and shoulders above his teammates, had been picked up by them when he finally faltered.
“The feeling of having clinched the pennant was great, especially because none of us had ever been there before,” said Harrelson. “We knew we would have a very tough nut to crack in the World Series, but there was a feeling of momentum building among us. It was almost spiritual, that we were just moving forward to the next place, that it was meant to be.”
God may not have been a Met, but He was looking to by some Manhattan real estate.
25 groundskeepers immediately went to work on the Shea Stadium turf, described by one writer as resembling a “World War I battlefield.” Because the Mets had made it to the post-season, the Jets had to play a “home game” in Houston instead of the baseball-occupied Shea. Also, the week in between the play-offs and World Series, the New York Knickerbockers won their fifth exhibition game in preparation for the 1969-70 NBA season.
Despite all the joy over the Mets, life went on. A big dose of reality was the bombing of the Army Induction Center in lower Manhattan, the site of so-called “pacifist” demonstrations over previous months.
David vs. Goliath
“So David prevailed over the Philistine with a sling and with a stone, and smote the Philistine, and slew him; but there was no sword in the hand of David.”
- I Samuel 17: 50
The Chosen People escaped Egypt, wandered in the wilderness, invaded the land of Canaan, and over time prevailed in battle with the Midianites and other dwellers of the land of Israel. Among those were the Philistines, probably pre-cursors to the modern Palestinians. They controlled the land and were determined to destroy the Jews. They featured a giant warrior named Goliath, and appeared formidable.
A mere boy named David stepped forth to do battle with Goliath. Against all odds, he slung a rock from a sling, slaying Goliath, and leading his people to victory. Just like the ancient Jews, the 1969 New York Mets had emerged from a seven-year wilderness, invaded Chicago, prevailing in battle with the Giants, Pirates, Braves and other dwellers of the land of the National League. Now they faced a modern Goliath: the Baltimore Orioles.
Poor Baltimore, Maryland. Talk about an inferiority complex. Baltimore was an established American port. Then the Founding Fathers decided to move the capitol from New York City to a swamp along the Potomac River. New York had everything, and most important, it was a Northern city. The agrarian South wanted some recognition, so they decided to build a “Federal city” in a centrally located place that was half-Northern, half-Southern. Washington, D.C. was therefore created.
Little old Baltimore, just a day’s carriage ride away, suddenly found itself in Washington’s shadow. When the Civil War broke out, Baltimore was like Berlin during the Cold War. Officially, Maryland and Baltimore were part of the Union, but the proximity to Virginia, its harbor and a series of waterways, made it strategically important. Baltimore was said to be “sympathetic” to the Confederacy. Spies ran rampant in its midst. President Abraham Lincoln was warned not to set foot there. It was a de facto staging ground for any rebel assault on the capitol, which found itself more or less “surrounded.” Confederate General Robert E. Lee schemed of ways in which his Army of Northern Virginia could take it, and from there capture the capitol. Union generals knew they needed to defend the Baltimore-Washington corridor at all costs.
When Lee’s army finally made their move, Union forces did not meet them in direct battle, but rather shadowed them, forcing Lee to by-pass Baltimore-Washington and take on the Union in Gettysburgh, Pennsylvania. When the South fell there, the war was lost, although it dragged on for almost two more years.
With the war won, Baltimore had an image problem to contend with. Many of the conspirators in the Lincoln assassination had come out of Baltimore. Baltimoreans tried to revise their history, like the French replacing their German flags with American ones once somebody else did the liberating. Other cities were deemed more important in the 19th and early 20th centuries: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and of course Washington. The West grew, with Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles becoming important hubs of political and economic concern. There was always something vaguely rebellious about Baltimore. In the 1920s and 1930s, there was an inordinate amount of Communist espionage centered in Baltimore, because of its strategic proximity to D.C.
In the 20th Century, Baltimore was stuck for the most part in the 19th. There was, as Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, California, “No there there.” They had little skyline, not much of a business center. They were not a town of movers or shakers. Storefronts, some boarded up. It did not look much like a “city,” rather like a small ante-bellum town. It was hot as all get-out in the summer; humid, sticky, with giant mosquitoes. In the winter, the winds blew in cold and freezing off of Chesapeake Bay.
Baltimore had a lot of blacks, too, because of its proximity to the New Deal bastion of Washington, and by 1969 there had been many riots. The 1968 Baltimore riots after Martin Luther King’s assassination were among the nastiest in the country.
Baltimore was nothing. New York was everything. Tom Seaver, who always had a touch of elitist in him, said that his own dusty hometown of “Fresno is Paris compared to that place.” Other cities had made their mark, or were on the rise. Among towns previously “conquered” by the New York Mets, Chicago was still a major metropolis and business hub of the Midwest. Atlanta was the face of the growing New South, finally ready for an economic revival after 100 years of “Reconstruction.”
The California cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco could boast that they had the old New York teams, the Dodgers and Giants. They were glamour towns of their own, what with Hollywood, the Golden Gate Bridge, and “California Dreamin’.”
But Baltimore? All they had were their sports teams.
Baltimore had a baseball team called the Orioles. They featured a Hall of Fame outfielder named “Wee Willie” Keeler, who “hit ’em where they ain’t,” and a fiery infielder named John “Mugsy” McGraw. But when the century turned, and baseball reconstructed itself in a modern image that now included two eight-team Major Leagues with a World Series to determine a “World Champion,” Baltimore found itself left out of the equation. It became a minor league town, better known for crab cakes and its neighbor, the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis.
It was a football town. In 1951, the University of Maryland should have been the National Champions when the unbeaten Terrapins beat Oklahoma in the Sugar Bowl, but the Associated Press and United Press International already awarded an illegitimate title to the Sooners prior to the bowl game. In 1953, the tables were turned. Maryland’s “National Championship” was illegitimatized by a loss to the Sooners in the Orange Bowl.
Basketball was big in the Baltimore area. The Bullets were popular. Lefty Driesel built a powerhouse at Maryland. High school hoops were big-time, with the likes of Cardinal Gibbons and De Matha High Schools emerging as national powerhouses. In Baltimore proper, an Italian restaurant called Mama Leone’s sponsored one of the best semi-pro baseball outfits ever. They produced the likes of Reggie Jackson and Ron Swoboda.
But big league ball was always tenuous. Washington had the Senators, but they were “first in war, first in peace, and last in the American League,” but attendance in Washington was always poor, and over time crime near Griffith Stadium became intolerable.
In 1961, Griffith took off for Minnesota, turning the Senators into the Twins. There was enough political pressure revolving around the need to maintain Our National Pastime in the District of Columbia to attract Bob Short and a new expansion franchise, also named the Washington Senators. They failed miserably, even though Gil Hodges was their manager for a few years in the mid-1960s.
In 1972, Short moved the Senators to Arlington, Texas. The South had changed for the better and was the future. Baseball never returned to Washington until 2005, when the Montreal Expos moved there and became the Nationals. The distinctive “W” on their caps, along with the presence of big-time baseball fan (and former Rangers owner) George W. Bush, led them to be referred to as the “Dubyas.”
After World War II, pro football expanded. The National Football League merged with the All-American Football Conference and expanded to the West Coast. The Baltimore Colts featured one of the first great African-American stars, Lenny Moore. Then they acquired little-regarded quarterback named Johnny Unitas. Johnny U. had grown up in Pittsburgh, one of the first in a long line of great quarterbacks from western Pennsylvania that included Joe Namath, Joe Montana, Jim Kelly and Dan Marino. The unheralded Unitas played at the University of Louisville. The hometown Steelers took a pass on him, but he managed to make it in Baltimore.
In 1958, Johnny U. was the best quarterback in football. He led the Weeb Eubank-coached Colts to the NFL championship game at Yankee Stadium against Frank Gifford and the New York Giants. Televised nationally, it has been called the “greatest game in pro football history,” with Johnny U. leading Baltimore to a thrilling overtime win. It put Baltimore on the map.
In the 1960s, Unitas was the best signal-caller in the game, but Bart Starr’s Green Bay Packers dominated. When Vince Lombardi left, there was a void, and the Colts filled it. Unitas, however, had a sore arm and Earl Morrall led the 1968 Colts to a 13-1 record under youthful head coach Don Shula. After powering through the NFL Play-Offs, Baltimore was installed as 18-point favorites over Joe Namath and the New York Jets in the 1969 Super Bowl.
Namath, however, said any number of AFL quarterbacks, including himself, were better than Morrall. He guaranteed a win over the Colts. Just when people thought that New York had lost its luster, its sense of dominance, here they were again. Had nobody reminded the powers that be that the Big Apple was now rotten to the core, a butt of jokes; dirty, crime-infested, corrupt, unpatriotic, beset by labor and financial woes. So yesterday.
The Yankees were has-beens. The Dodgers and Giants had fled to California, leaving the laughable Mets. The Knicks were just a team on Boston’s schedule. The Rangers were barely more than a team on Montreal’s schedule. College football had long abandoned New York. There were no more Notre Dame-Army epics.
The Jets? They were a distant third, at the very best, in a league dominated by Western Division rivals Oakland and Kansas City. In the old days, victory in the NFL Play-Offs meant a World Championship, but now the Colts had to get by these upstarts, who had been lucky to beat Daryle Lamonica and the Raiders, aided by a hometown freeze in the AFL title game. It seemed simple enough. Green Bay had done it without breaking a sweat the previous two years.
Namath was right. The Jets did win, 16-7; he and any number of AFL quarterbacks were better than Morrall. The Jets’ win crushed the fragile sports ego of Baltimoreans. It was bad enough that it had come against the brash Namath, but New York!? When Namath whipped the Colts in Miami, it was more than a football defeat. It marked bitter humiliation. The one thing they were better at than New Yorkers, they had lost in brutal fashion. It was like Alabama losing to Harvard. New York had everything!
There were several two-team cities in baseball, but by the 1950s the concept seemed a failed one. In Chicago, the Cubs were more popular than the White Sox. In New York, the Yankees finally won a seeming “war of attrition,” driving the Dodgers and Giants out of the state. In Boston, the Braves – despite winning the World Series as late as 1948 – made for the friendly confines of Milwaukee. In Philadelphia, the Phillies stayed but the A’s – a vastly superior team on the field in the early years, but a dud of late – took off for Kansas City in 1955.
Then there was St. Louis. The Cardinals owned the town. They epitomized baseball. Their players were gods, their image one of success and colorful characters. They were champions who put the town on the map. They also shared Sportsman’s Park with the lowly St. Louis Browns.
Of all the American League teams who were mere cannon fodder of the lordly Yankees, none were less competitive than the Browns. They were just someone for Philadelphia, Boston, Detroit and especially New York to fatten up their statistics on for off-season contractual negotiations.
There were a few bright spots. Branch Rickey managed the Browns. George Sisler was his first baseman, and he was fabulous, except that he played at the same time as Lou Gehrig, which is like trying to win a science fair competition against Albert Einstein.
The Browns managed to win the 1944 American League pennant, but even that was a laugh. So many players were serving in the war that the Browns won it only because their roster was loaded with old-timers deemed unfit for military service. To make matters worse, they lost to the Cardinals in the World Series.
The Browns were ready to move to Los Angeles. On December 7, 1941 they were all set to make the announcement. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, that plan was set aside, and the West Coast was deemed off-limits. But after the 1953 season, the 54-100 St. Louis Browns had had enough. They moved to Baltimore.
In 1954, the new Baltimore Orioles were . . . 54-100. They played at Memorial Stadium, which was okay for football but always looked like a minor league baseball facility. Baltimore was “Colts country.” Johnny U. owned the town. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, the Orioles made steady improvement. Their mastermind was Paul Richards, a hard-nosed, an old school guy with new ideas about how to develop a farm system and a contender. Years before Billy Beane and Moneyball, Richards was an innovator who made key trades, always looking to improve his team with in-season moves and key rookies.
He was not to be trifled with. During Spring Training in Miami, 1961, the Orioles had a particularly rowdy group of testosterone-filled youngsters. This included three wild left-handers, both on and off the field. Steve Barber was a hard-throwing prospect. Steve Dalkowski was a legend. He was short, squat, wore horn-rimmed glasses, and did not look like an athlete. He was also said to have thrown upwards of 110 miles an hour. Years later, Tom Seaver said he was the hardest-throwing pitcher who ever lived; and Seaver never saw him throw. Such was his legend that old-timers swear he threw faster than Nolan Ryan, Bob Feller, Sandy Koufax, or any name. The Orioles took him to the Aberdeen Proving Grounds to have Army machines record the speed of his pitches, but he was so erratic he could not get the ball into the zone necessary for the equipment to properly record it.
The third southpaw was Bo Belinsky, a pool hustler from Trenton, New Jersey. If Dalkowski was the “fastest pitcher ever,” then Belinsky was the “greatest playboy” in sports history. If half the stories are half true, Bo Belinsky made Joe Namath look like a trappist monk.
Barber, Dalkowski and Belinsky liked to drink and chase girls together. Mainly, Barber and Dalkowski drank and tried to get Bo’s “leftovers.” As fate would have it, the reigning Miss Universe of 1961 was a Venezuelan beauty queen who, as a reward, was sent on an all-expenses paid trip to Miami, Florida. There she and her mother – a domineering woman worthy of the KGB or the Gestapo – had a hotel room . . . right next door to Bo Belinsky’s room.
Barber and Dalkowski got one look at Miss Universe and almost had heart attacks on the spot. A plot was hatched: drill holes in Bo’s wall so they could stare at Miss Universe, “peeping Tom” style, in the next room. Word spread, and the entire Baltimore Orioles’ minor league organization was in Belinsky’s room to stare at Miss Universe. When the beauty queen turned off the lights to go to bed, one of the Orioles got the bright idea of shining a flashlight on her, which looked like tracer fire coming through the tiny hole. All hell broke loose when she and her mother began to scream like bloody murder.
About 50 Orioles farmhands scattered into the night like rats abandoning a sinking ship, but it was Belinsky’s room. Paul Richards was summoned and quickly deduced what happened. Bo was shipped to the Los Angeles Angels, Dalkowski to the minor leagues. Barber, the only one deemed a real prospect at the time, was kept and became a sterling, albeit injury-riddled, pitcher for Baltimore.
Also in the Orioles minor league organization during this time was a young manager named Earl Weaver. Weaver managed Belinsky in Aberdeen, South Dakota. One night after a game, he observed Bo and Yankee farmhand Joe Pepitone get into a car Bo had. It fishtailed out of the parking lot, kicking up rocks and dust like something out of a Paul Newman movie, screeching onto the road.
Weaver just stared, thinking, “There ain’t nothin’ to do in Aberdeen, South Dakota, but if anybody could find it, it was these two guys.”
“Oh, man they were pistols,” he recalled.
Weaver was not a baseball manager; he was a Damon Runyon character, a caricature. He was a continuation of the harmonically perfect set of match-ups that marked the 1969 Mets’ season. First, there was Leo Durocher; amoral to the point of being almost immoral, the perfect bad guy. Then there were the Braves, which was like getting a second chance at Bull Run . . . Manassas . . . II? Finally, Earl Weaver.
“Let’s see,” the producer at the script meeting might have said, “we have the Mets: shiny, bright, youthful heroes of American youth. Let’s line ‘em up against some nasty, crusty, cigarette-smoking, whiskey-drinkin’, foul-mouthed baseball cretin. The guy you love to beat.”
“Oh, you mean Earl Weaver.”
“Get him.”
Earl Sidney Weaver was born on August 14, 1930 in St. Louis. He was 5-7, and weighed anywhere between 180 and 210 pounds depending on how many cigarettes he smoked to keep his appetite low. Weaver’s skill as a ball player made Billy Martin look like Rogers Hornsby. He really had no business even playing in the low minor leagues, but baseball was his life, all he knew how to do.
He looked like Mickey Rooney. He held his own at second base when big guys came flying in, spikes high to break up double-plays. At the plate he was all “punch ‘n’ Judy,” but he drew walks or got hit by pitches on purpose. He never got hurt, never complained, and played decent defense. He officially played minor league baseball between 1948 and 1965 and never hit more than .294 in 37 games as a player-manager at Dublin of the Georgia-Florida League in 1958.
Weaver never made it as high as triple-A. He was a denizen of the low minors at a time when a song of the time asked, “How low can you go?” He was low and stayed low: West Frankfort, St. Joseph, Winston-Salem, Houston (his shot at the big-time for all of 13 games, although it was the double-A Texas League at the time), Omaha, Denver, New Orleans, Montgomery, Knoxville, Fitzgerald, Aberdeen, Fox Cities, and Elmira. This was the Illinois State League, the Western Association, the Carolina League, the Texas League, the Southern League, the Sally League, the Georgia-Florida League, the Northern League, the Eastern League, and something that The Sporting News 1975 Official Baseball Register calls simply the I.I.I. (?).
By 1956, his never-promising career was as dead as a doornail, so he went into managing. He was a player-manager at first, still inserting himself into games as late as 1965, probably because somebody was hurt, called up, or in jail. That was the way minor league life was. Pat Jordan wrote about the pre-draft era low minors in A False Spring. It was a world unto its own; a world of racism, drunkenness, sexual depravity, bugs as big as fists, flannel uniforms stuck to bodies in humid conditions that cannot be explained unless endured.
Today, a sleek kid is drafted off a baseball campus where he played in a multi-million-dollar facility worthy of big league comforts. A hero since his earliest youth, his every need is taken into consideration, until he is drafted and signs for a bonus large enough to fund a small country. Then he enters modern minor league life, which is now beautiful stadiums, family-friendly atmospheres, and packed crowds enticed by modern marketing strategies. This youngster is coddled like a Ferrari that just gets taken for a test drive on Saturdays. Waiting for him after the game are “blondes with brains,” to quote Crash Davis in Bull Durham.
In Weaver’s day, nobody used ice except to keep beer cold. A request for a rub down was met by an open can of Analgesic balm, to be administered by the player himself using contortions worthy of a circus performer.
Girls in these little towns were often farmer’s daughters or town trashies who showed the guys a good time, then blackmailed them with rape allegations. Weaver was always losing his best slugger or an ace pitcher because he was gettin’ busy with some chick whose mother was “close” with the local PO-leece chief. Weaver had to pitch eight times in his minor league career, probably for this reason.
Black and Latino players lived brutal existences, forced to stay in the shack out back of the shack where a local family of their ethnicity lived on the wrong side of the tracks. If he even dared look at one of the farmer’s daughters he could be the Tom Robinson character from To Kill a Mockingbird.
The Sally League and the Georgia-Florida League were the worst, but big league clubs continued to operate there, wanting to maintain a Southern “fan base” perhaps, without any consideration for the health or well being of a Curt Flood, a Vic Power or a Roberto Clemente. The theory was that if they could not cut this barefoot walk on hot coals, they did not have the stuff for the Major Leagues.
Certainly the guys who survived intact had more than the “right stuff.” Jim Bouton’s Ball Four pointed out that in the late 1960s, black and Latino ball players made up a fairly low percentage of all big leaguers, but a high percentage of the top hitters in most offensive categories. This indicated that only the best minorities were allowed to play in the Majors; if a guy was marginal, the white player was chosen, and that was only after they had played in the Georgia-Florida League or some other version of The Heat of the Night.
In 1960 Weaver managed Fox Cities, wherever that was, to a first place record (82-56). In 1962 he got the job at Elmira, Baltimore’s double-A club in the Eastern League, a significant improvement in living conditions on and off the field. He won the title there in 1964, and in 1966 found himself at Rochester of the triple-A International League.
It was a big year in the Baltimore organization. The big club under ex-Marine Hank Bauer won the World Series. Weaver won the International League with an 83-64 record (although they lost in the play-offs). Rochester seemed like gay Paree to Weaver after all those years in Smalltown, USA, but with Bauer’s team going all the way it seemed unlikely he would ascend to the job at Baltimore. He was an organization man, so he just kept his nose to the grindstone.
A funny thing happened at Baltimore in 1967 and early 1968: they were bad. Young superstar pitcher Jim Palmer got hurt and they did not compete in 1967, nor were they competing when Bauer was fired on July 11 of the next year. Weaver was in the right place, having been elevated to a spot on Bauer’s staff in 1968. He was named manager.
Weaver made sure it was not an interim position, steering the Orioles to a 48-35 record down the stretch. Detroit dominated and nobody came close, but the O’s were a solid second and Earl Weaver had himself a job in the big leagues.
Weaver drank, chain-smoked, and his language was coarse. He did not care about the Vietnam War, civil rights or the economy, and was perplexed by the “new breed.” In October of 1969 he was only 39. Today, a 39-year old man may well be a young, urban hipster. Weaver was already The Old Man and the Sea.
But his years of harsh minor league life had taught him not just toughness, but a respect for those who had survived them, too. Like Durocher, if he harbored any ill will toward blacks, it was not bigger than the respect he had for hard-nosed baseball players. He had one of the hard-nosednest in Frank Robinson.
Frank Robinson and Earl Weaver did not need to see eye-to-eye, but they were both no-nonsense guys, competitors of the highest order who would do everything in their power to win at all costs. F. Robby’s natural skills were so magnificent that he probably could have been an All-Star if he had been a drunk, a libertine, and a slacker.
His work ethic, professionalism and desire was such that he probably could have survived as a big leaguer had he only been given Weaver’s tools. Weaver and Robinson respected each other, which was a good thing for Weaver. If F. Robby sensed a lack of respect he had fists and knew how to use ‘em.
Weaver was a colorful umpire baiter who turned “the argument” into an art form. His purpose was not to win the close call in question, but swing the next couple his way by virtue of making the umpire endure his foul vocabulary while smelling his cigarette breath. He was often tossed out of games on purpose.
Weaver’s strategy was simple: hit a three-run homer in the seventh inning. He resembled Durocher in that starters finished what they started. His bullpen consisted of guys who were washed up or not good enough to start. He did not like to bunt, steal, or hit ‘n’ run. He did not platoon. He was the anti-Hodges. With Robinson mashing home runs, and his pitchers stopping the opposition dead cold, Weaver’s strategy paid off time and time again.
Frank Robinson’s career in Baltimore was a form of redemption. Robinson grew up in a time and place – Oakland, California in the 1950s – that may have produced more incredible athletes in a smaller geographical area over a shorter period of time than any other location in the world. There was Jackie Jensen, Cal’s All-American halfback and the 1958 American League Most Valuable Player with Boston. Len Gabrielson was an All-American at USC who played in the bigs for Los Angeles and San Francisco. Vada Pinson was an All-Star teammate of Robinson’s at Cincinnati. Joe Morgan became a Hall of Fame second baseman. Curt Flood was an All-Star in St. Louis. Also from the greater East Bay Area over the years: Dutch Ruether, Maureen Connelly, Lefty Gomez, Billy Martin, Bill Rigney, Dick Bartell, Bill Russell, Willie Stargell, Bud Harrelson, Joe Caldwell, Paul Hackett, Norv Turner, Jim Turner, Charlie Weaver, John Lambert, Rickey Henderson, Dave Stewart, Gino Torretta, Ken Dorsey, Dennis Eckersley, Jack Del Rio, Jason Kidd, Bobby Rollins, and Dontrelle Willis.
Oakland was a gritty industrial town, just across the water from the shining lights of San Francisco. Oakland and the East Bay had an inferiority complex, and guys like Robinson were driven to succeed because they felt they needed to be better than the other guy. It was a mixed neighborhood in those days. Blacks moved in to Oakland and Richmond to work at the shipyards during World War II, but before that the area had a rural feel to it, its citizens possessing a touch of the farmer mentality. It was a waterfront town, too; Jack London’s Oakland, home to many a sea captain and merchant marine, its dockside bars filled with ugly versions of the famed, musical Brandy, “who serves them whiskey and wine,” and stories like "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” by Gordon Lightfoot.
Like his namesake, Jackie Robinson, Frank entered pro baseball having played with and against whites. He was neither fearful of them nor resentful, as he had known plenty that were good guys. But he was black, the odds were stacked against him, and he used this chip on his shoulder to make himself the best. He was smart, highly articulate, loved movies and music; earning respect (as well as demanding it). Jackie had paved Robinson’s path, and by the time F. Robby got to the big leagues he was not afraid to air his opinions, take out a shortstop, or go after a pitcher who hit him intentionally.
At 6-1, 194 pounds, Robinson was a specimen, but his strength was less massive power and more, like Hank Aaron, the result of quick wrists. He had a slightly unorthodox swing, although not as crazy as Aaron’s hit-off-the-front-foot style. Robinson stood, pigeon-toed, feet close together, right on top of home plate, daring pitchers to come inside. He took a lot of hit-by-pitches that way, and probably missed a few lifetime homers because of it.
Robinson dominated every level of the minor leagues, enduring two years at Columbia, South Carolina of the Sally League. His response to racism was on-field excellence: 25 homers, 110 RBIs and a .336 average in 1954. Despite that, he was sent back in 1955. Cincinnati was a highly conservative, all-white city; not the most hospitable of big league towns. It was so conservative, in fact, that at one point the Reds felt the need to change their name to “Red Legs” so as to avoid connotation with Communism during those McCarthyism days. New York, Brooklyn, Chicago, or Detroit would have been an easier sell than the Queen City.
In 1956 he could not be denied. Robinson enjoyed one of the four or five best rookie seasons ever up until that time (Joe DiMaggio, 1936; Ted Williams, 1939; one or two others), tying Wally Berger’s rookie record for home runs with 38 (since broken by Mark McGwire, 49 in 1987). He also set the rookie record for getting hit by pitches, and would break the all-time mark over the years for most seasons leading the league in this category.
Over the next decade, Robinson was as dangerous a hitter as anybody in baseball. He was the equal of all the great contemporaries that mark his as quite possibly the golden era of baseball history: Willie Mays, Orlando Cepeda, Willie McCovey, Mickey Mantle, Duke Snider, Ted Williams, Roberto Clemente, Willie Stargell, Hank Aaron, Eddie Mathews, Al Kaline, Ernie Banks, Carl Yastrzemski, Richie Allen, Pete Rose, Johnny Bench, Harmon Killebrew, and Reggie Jackson.
In 1959 he hit 36 home runs, drove in 125 and batted .311. In 1961 Robinson powered Cincinnati into the World Series, earning the MVP award by hitting 37 homers with 124 RBIs while batting .323. Perhaps his greatest season was 1962, when Robinson produced a line that historians consider one of the most beautifully even offensive years ever: 162 games played, 609 at-bats, a league-leading 134 runs scored, 208 hits, a league-leading 51 hits, 39 home runs, 139 runs batted in, and a .342 batting average. In1965, Robinson hit 33 home runs while driving in 113, but he had worn out his welcome with Reds’ owner Bill DeWitt.
His outspoken attitude was not well received in all circles. He was viewed as an agitator, a clubhouse lawyer. His intellect was off-putting. He was naturally abrasive; his personality clashes in part his fault. He was a hard-ass, no two ways about it.
In the early 1960s, Robinson had been arrested for carrying a concealed weapon. He carried it in response to death threats, but it did not help his image. He squabbled with the owner over money, and prior to the 1966 season was traded to the Orioles for outfielder Dick Simpson, pitcher Milt Pappas and Jack Baldschun. In the entire history of the great game of baseball, it may be the very worst trade ever made . . . from Cincinnati’s point of view.
“He’s an old 30,” DeWitt said of the man who would tear up baseball for another eight years.
Baltimore had no history before that. They were the Browns, then a non-contender in the 1950s. Finally in the 1960s under Richards, Baltimore began to show signs of a successful franchise, but Robinson’s arrival had an effect not unlike Babe Ruth’s in New York.
In 1966, Robinson won the American League Triple Crown, leading the league in homers (49), RBIs (122) and batting average (.316). It was one of the finest all-around seasons ever. He was a Hall of Famer before 1966; a first ballot electee after it. The Orioles stuck around the .500 mark until mid-season, then put on a hot streak in the second half to win the title going away.
Prior to game one of the 1966 World Series at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, photographers snapped pictures of Robinson with white third baseman Brooks Robinson, a native of Arkansas.
“Better hope they don’t show these down home,” Robinson joked, but only half-way.
In a series dominated by pitching, Robinson was for all practical purposes all the offense Baltimore had, or needed. They swept the Dodgers of Koufax and Drysdale in four straight games. Robinson was the Most Valuable Player in the league and the Series. He became the first man to win the MVP award in both leagues. In 1968, an injury to Robinson prevented Baltimore from making a more serious run, but in 1969 he enjoyed one of his most productive years, hitting 32 homers with 100 runs batted in while hitting .308 while playing in right field.
He and Brooks Robinson were the undisputed leaders of the Birds, linked forever by their common last names (F. Robby and B. Robby), Cooperstown-level greatness, and the symbolism of friendship between a white Southerner and black Californian.
Brooks Calbert Robinson came out of Little Rock, Arkansas. He was 32 in 1969, still in his prime. At 6-1, 190 pounds, Robinson was a superb athlete. He was a country boy who liked to hunt and fish, but was at ease with big league life.
He made his Major League debut in 1955, the year he turned 18 on May 18. Robinson’s career, as an Oriole, an infielder on the left side, and as a man, mirrors that of Cal Ripken. He, too, was an “ironman” who led the league in games played between 1961 and 1964, and again in 1968. He was a solid hitter with good power. Robinson was a pro’s pro; dedicated, perfect attitude, a team guy all the way. The fans adored him. Thousands of children in Maryland were named Brooks after him. If his Southern upbringing had steered him to find fault with the black Frank Robinson or any number of minority teammates – Richards put together a diverse team from the beginning – Robinson belied it. The truth is, nobody is that good an actor. He was just a good, fair man; an American hero.
But Brooks Robinson has a plaque in Cooperstown, New York not because he was a fair man; a line drive hitter with power; or a reliable professional. He has a plaque because, quite simply, he is and may well always be regarded as the greatest defensive third baseman who has ever played baseball; bar none, end of argument.
Graig Nettles of the Yankees may be second. Aurelio Rodriguez was a contemporary glove hero of Robinson’s, as was New York’s Clete Boyer and his brother Ken of the Cardinals. Billy Cox of Brooklyn was a wizard over at the hot corner, but Robinson was from another planet. Whether it was spectacular dives to his left or right; a gun for an arm coming out of a short-arm throwing motion designed to reduce a fraction of a second; or the slow roller; B. Robby was tops. Highlight reels of his defensive prowess leave the clueless wondering if the film was doctored. Nobody could make the plays he made. The advantage he provided Baltimore pitchers on so many levels was immeasurable.
Robinson could hit, but he had consistency problems. In 1964 he was the Most Valuable Player, driving the O’s down the stretch in a pennant race between New York, Chicago and Baltimore, ultimately won by the Yankees. He batted .317 with 28 homers and 118 runs batted in. He was a fixture as the A.L.’s starting third baseman in every All-Star Game from 1960 onward, won Gold Gloves yearly, and made The Sporting News All-Star Team each season, as well. He always led the league in assists. But in 1969 he only batted .234, although he still hit 23 home runs and drove in 84. It was an uncharacteristic slump that bore no explanation, but his team was so good it was scarcely noticed. Besides, his defensive contributions were so great that it would not be an exaggeration to say that if he batted .100 he would still have started and been valuable to the Oriole cause.
Despite the two Robinson superstars, in 1969 the Orioles’ most valuable weapon was first baseman John Wesley “Boog” Powell. As a child, his family called him “Booger” because he was always getting into mischief, and as he matured it was shortened to “Boog.” Powell was a big, hulk of a man – 6-4 1/2, at least 246 pounds – from Florida. He was given a $25,000 bonus to sign with Baltimore out of high school and in 1961 led the International League with 32 home runs at Rochester.
After a September 1961 call-up he stuck in 1962, displaying power and a penchant for striking out that kept his average down. He slammed 39 homers in 1964, but broke out in a big way with 34 home runs, 109 RBIs and a .287 average for the 1966 World Champion O’s. He and Frank Robinson provided the only offense Baltimore needed in the sweep of Los Angeles. However, he slumped in 1967 and 1968. 1969 was a big year that would determine the overall value of his career. He responded with his best season: 37 home runs, 121 RBIs and a .304 average. Defensively, he was not Vic Power or “Prince Hal” Chase, but he scooped up errant throws and blocked hard shots with his massive body.
His personality matched his nickname. He looked like big ol’ teddy bear and had an easygoing Florida disposition. As a left-handed slugger, he posed the most immediate concern to the right-hander Tom Seaver.
Second baseman Davey Johnson was also born in Florida but attended college at Texas A&M, eventually earning his degree in mathematics from Johns Hopkins. He enjoyed life and was known to party heavily. As might be expected, he was a smart player, knew how to position himself, and was a rock defensively. He was a clutch hitter but not a major threat. He got on base, could bunt, and ran the bases well.
Shortstop Mark Belanger was one of the pre-eminent defensive players at his position at that time. He was wiry, a typical middle infielder in the days before Ripken, Alex Rodriguez and others redefined what kind of size, strength and offensive capability can be expected of a shortstop (Ernie Banks had set that standard but had been made into a first baseman in 1962).
Andy Etchebarren and Elrod Hendricks platooned behind the plate. It was the only position Weaver platooned. Neither was a great hitter or extraordinary behind the dish. It was the closest thing the Orioles had to a weakness.
Center fielder Paul Blair was deemed expendable by the 1962 Mets, and thus drafted by Baltimore. It was one of the few real player development mistakes during the George Weis era. At 25, Blair had his breakout year in 1969, hitting 26 homers with 76 runs batted in while batting .285. Blair was, like Brooks Robinson, Davey Johnson and Mark Belanger, simply the best defensive center fielder in the American League. With Willie Mays showing his age, he may well have been the best in baseball, leading the league with 407 putouts.
In left field was the former football player from the University of Southern California, Don Buford. For some reason, Buford’s name became attached to a trivia question: who played in both a Rose Bowl and a World Series? In fact, Buford lettered two years at USC, but did not play on the 1962 Trojans’ National Championship squad that beat Wisconsin in the Rose Bowl. In 1969, he did play in the World Series.
Weaver could have used the speed of Blair and Buford, but held them back. Buford, the leadoff man, stole 27 bases in 1968 but only 19 in 1969 when the strategy was pretty much “just mash.” He was not considered a great outfielder. His arm was semi-weak. A sharp college guy, he was not one of those black players who felt the game was their only ticket to success.
Baltimore had great defense. Hitting something past the O’s was like “trying to throw hamburgers threw a brick wall,” said Detroit manager Mayo Smith. They had power, some speed, good righty-lefty balance, clutch hitters, and superstars. But the 1969 Orioles were threatening to go down in history as one of the greatest baseball teams ever because they had pitching! They had a staff that could not be touched. Baltimore pitching was the equal of Los Angeles pitching in the Koufax-Drysdale era, or the Yankees of Whitey Ford, Vic Raschi and Allie Reynolds.
Top to bottom, Baltimore’s staff looked to be better than the Mets, which was saying something. It was starter-heavy, true, but Weaver did not seem to have need of a bullpen. Pitching was a Baltimore trademark; like USC’s running backs or Penn State’s linebackers. In later years, the Braves and the A’s built their teams with pitching like that.
Steve Barber had been a phenom until his arm went bad. Wally Bunker came out of San Mateo, California, making a big splash as a teenager before injuries did him in. If there was a chink in their pitching armor, perhaps it was the injury factor. They did not adhere to the Gil Hodges theory; five days in between starts, with set-up men and closers (even if those roles were not defined, or were rotated).
Case in point number one was Jim Palmer. It is not an exaggeration to state that as good as Tom Seaver was, Jim Palmer was somewhere between almost as good, and just as good. In some ways, he may have been better, and it does not get better than that.
Palmer was born in New York City in 1945, then made an orphan. He was adopted by a wealthy businessman, and raised in the lap of luxury on Park Avenue. Later, the family moved to Beverly Hills. He lived in a mansion. His next door neighbors were Tony Curtis, his wife Janet Leigh, and their daughter Jamie Leigh Curtis. His adopted father passed away when he was nine. His mother re-married and the family moved to the posh Phoenix suburb of Scottsdale, Arizona. There, the rich kid established himself as the greatest schoolboy pitcher in the long history of Arizona prep baseball. Oh, one other thing: John Wooden offered him a scholarship to play basketball at UCLA when the Bruins were about to start their dynasty.
He was 6-3, 195 pounds, and simply one of the best lookin’ dudes ever to play baseball. He looked better than Robert Redford when Redford made Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Later, he modeled underwear and was a legitimate sex symbol. Women swooned before him, but Palmer always had the upper crust airs of a British royal. He was unfazed by anything, whether it be beautiful women throwing themselves at him or Carl Yastrzemski stepping in to hit against him.
He had one of the most unorthodox of pitching styles, not unlike the high-kickin’ Juan Marichal. The best way to describe it is to say that no pitcher should ever try it at home. Nobody could get away with pitching like Palmer unless you had . . . Jim Palmer’s stuff. He would bend his back, kick out like a Rockette, then let loose with a full-throttle, straight-overhand fast ball, delivering pitches constantly around the letters or even higher. His location screamed “hit me . . . tomahawk me . . . what’s the matter, I’m right in your face.”
Hitters would see it headed right into their wheelhouse, dig in, and take a mighty cut. The baseball, however, would defy gravity, seemingly rising and, if possible, getting faster the closer it got to the strike zone, finally whooshing past swinging bats. Palmer made hitters look bad. Then he would throw a yak curve, or pinpoint a fast one low and away. He was insane, one of the toughest pitchers who ever graced the diamond. If that was not enough, he outsmarted all those dumb hitters. In his prime, they had little chance when he was on, and he was rarely off.
Palmer got scooped up by the Orioles for $60,000 and made his Major League debut in 1965 at the age of 19. He tried to go to school in the off-seasons, taking classes at Arizona State, USC and Towson State College, but unlike Seaver he did not have those three years of basic course work as a head start. Trying to get a degree over a decade or more of part-time classwork was too daunting, despite his pedigree and collegial upbringing.
In 1966 he was not yet 20 when he beat Sandy Koufax and Los Angeles 6-0, to become the youngest shutout artist in World Series history. A brighter future had never been known by any pitcher ever. In keeping with the Orioles’ sore arm history, it all came crashing down overnight. He was injury prone, hurt his shoulder, and was virtually out of baseball, forgotten, in 1967 and 1968. Palmer pitched a few minor league rehab innings, but most people just figured it was a good thing he came from money, because baseball was not in his future.
Palmer may have been a pretty boy who grew up with a silver spoon in his mouth, but he was a stubborn one who refused to give up. In 1969 he showed up healthy and dominant. He scared the Orioles when he went on the disabled list again (mysterious back problems that Weaver never quite understood) from June 29 to August 9. When he came back on August 13 he no-hit the talented Oakland A’s, 8-0. In 1969, Palmer was 16-4 with 123 strikeouts and just 64 walks in 181 innings. His .800 winning percentage led the league and his ERA was a sterling 2.34. He was on his way to Cooperstown.
Oh, and by the way; Palmer and Weaver could not stand each other. Weaver was the ultimate “dead end kid,” the hard luck grinder who came from nothin’, had nothin’, and had scrapped for everything he ever had. Palmer was a guy who waltzed through life with every gift handed to him like Manna from Heaven.
Even Palmer’s work ethic, which was not in question, was questioned by Earl. Jim simply had a different way of doing things. To Weaver, a pitcher ran his wind sprints, did his sit-ups, took his rollers, pitched 15 minutes in between starts, and that was that. Palmer had all kinds of funky, new-fangled training methods.
Palmer was a genuine hypochondriac. He would tell Earl he could not pitch; take me out, my arm is sore; my back hurts; it’s my big toe; a hangnail; a headache. Weaver was exasperated but what made it even more frustrating was that when all was said and done, Palmer would pitch – he rarely missed a start – and throw with his usual dominance. Then he would complain to Earl some more. They were like oil and water.
Weaver would come out to the mound and they almost needed the catcher to interpret, or mediate, or break them apart. Palmer literally looked down on Earl, physically and intellectually. He had no respect for people who were dumb, lacked the ability to speak decent English, and were simpletons. He lacked much respect for little people, period.
“The only thing you know about pitching is you couldn’t hit it,” Palmer told Weaver.
Teammates did not know what to make of Palmer. It was like the Dan Akroyd character from Trading Places (Louis Winthorpe III) asking to play, then displaying a 95-mile an hour fastball with attitude to back it up. But Palmer had no fear or the slightest awe. Seaver was a fan living a dream. Palmer had been the greatest pitcher anybody who ever saw him pitch had ever seen. He had been this way since age five. Big league ball was like his inheritance, an expected thing, but he also wanted to learn.
At 19 he would sit in the bullpen or the dugout asking endless, jabbering questions of veterans, trying to learn every possible edge, every advantage on hitters, whatever he could gain. He was a nice guy, not stuck up despite his rearing. He simply disarmed with charm, intelligence and a pure desire to learn.
While Palmer would go on to a Hall of Fame career that paralleled Tom Seaver’s on and off the field, in 1969 it could be argued that he was the third pitcher on Earl Weaver’s staff. Palmer was prevented from winning 20 games because of his June-to-July stint on the disabled list.
The de facto ace of the staff was a journeyman screwball pitcher from Cuba named Miguel Angel Cuellar. Prior to Fidel Castro’s takeover in the winter of 1958-59, Cuba was an island paradise, albeit one controlled by the likes of Meyer Lansky and the Mafia. It was a land of women legendary in their beauty. Stories of sexual decadence available to those with a little money in their pockets in Cuba reached mythological proportions. The other mythology in Cuba was beisbol.
Baseball was made popular in Cuba and the Dominican Republic in the 1930s. Various dictators and strongmen in control of those nations invited Negro League stars to play there in the winter. Totalitarian Dominican leader Rafael Trujillo once instructed the black American stars playing for his “national” team that they had better win all their games or . . . face a firing squad? At least that was the message that legendary Negro League outfielder James “Cool Papa” Bell got, as related in a long Sports Illustrated essay.
Cubans took to baseball with the same enthusiasm as the Dominicans, and apparently with less “lobbying” from the government. Pirates third baseman Don Hoak played winter ball in Cuba and recalled a game in which Castro, then a young revolutionary lawyer, came down from the stands, interrupted the game, and took the mound to throw a few pitches to him. According to Hoak, he almost skulled him. Castro was said to be a fair left-handed pitcher who was scouted and even offered contracts by the New York Giants and possibly the Washington Senators.
Castro, a Washington Senator? Talk about “what ifs?”
Fabulous baseball players came out of Cuba. Tony Oliva and Camillo Pasqual of the Minnesota Twins were All-Stars, among many others. While the Dominican is known for producing tremendous players, Cuba was on a path towards producing just as many if not more. The pipeline ended with Castro’s Communist takeover. In the succeeding years, the Cuban national team has dominated Olympic and amateur competition. Occasionally one of their stars makes it over to the States via a life boat and plays with some success, but the waste of talent in Cuba has been monumental.
Mike Cuellar was born on May 8, 1937 in Santa Clara, later the scene of a major battle between Castro’s and President Fulgencio Batista’s forces. He started with the Havana club in the International League, but struggled for 10 years. At 5-11, 178 pounds he did not throw very hard. Cuellar reached the big leagues when expansion created jobs for otherwise-minor league hurlers. In 1966 he won 12 games with the Houston Astros, and followed that up with 16 in 1967. But in 1968 Cuellar was only 8-11. Lost in that record was the fact that his earned run average was a sparkling 2.74 in 171 innings of work. The 1968 Astros were a woeful offensive unit during the “Year of the Pitcher.”
Earl Weaver had been everywhere and seen everybody. He knew Cuellar could be a winner. The Cuban southpaw had perfected his “out” pitch, a screwball that broke away from right-handed hitters. A trade was consummated in which Cuellar came to Baltimore for Curt Blefary.
Over the next five years, Cuellar was one of the most effective pitchers in baseball, but his greatest season was 1969 when won 23 games with a 2.38 ERA, and shared the Cy Young award with Detroit’s Denny McLain.
Weaver’s pitching staff was a myriad combination of the elitist Palmer; the Cuban immigrant, now a “man without a country” (Cuellar); and the Montana country boy, Dave McNally.
McNally’s high school in Billings did not have a baseball team, since the snow was still on the field by the time school let out. But in those days before the Internet, video games, cable TV and other pre-occupations, the number one source of entertainment in his town was American Legion ball, and they took it seriously. It was not unlike Appleton, Minnesota, where Jerry Koosman’s high school did not field a team.
Like Cuellar, McNally hardly broke a pane of glass with his fast ball. He and the Cuban had none of Palmer’s immense natural gifts, but statistically they were Jim’s equal in the 1960s and early 1970s. McNally was one of those young Orioles, often of the left-handed variety, favored by Paul Richards. He moved up the ladder and in 1966 won 13 games for the American League champions.
In the first game of the World Series, McNally started against Don Drysdale of Los Angeles at Dodger Stadium. Games one and two were a couple of the strangest ever played. McNally was so wild he had to be removed with one out in the third inning of the opener. Drysdale was battered about and removed, too. Journeyman reliever Moe Drabowsky took over. Drabowsky was described as looking like “a cab driving down the street with the car doors open.” A fun-loving sort, he would call a restaurant in Tokyo from the bullpen phone and order take-out, or have pizza delivered during the game. That day, a better description of him would have been “a modern imitation of Cy Young,” when he struck out a Series relief pitcher-record 11 futile Dodgers to win it, 5-2.
In game two, Sandy Koufax was betrayed by center fielder Willie Davis, one of the best defensive players in the game. Davis lost all semblance of the ball in the hot, smoggy Indian summer L.A. haze. His defense was described by Roger Angell in The Summer Game thusly: a short fly fall subjected “Davis to further corona observation, and he dropped it. Still shuddering under the weight of so many footcandles, Davis now pounced on the ball and made his first really unforgivable play – an angry Little League heave into the Dodger dugout that scored the second run.” Later, caustic Dodger Stadium pavilionites cheered Davis for catching throws during between-inning warm-ups.
The beneficiary of Davis’s “Little League heave” was Palmer, who shut out L.A. to beat “Dandy Sandy” Koufax in game two, 6-0. In Baltimore, there were no defensive relapses or stretches of wildness, just pitching so airtight it could have sailed to Europe underwater. In game four, McNally shut out Drysdale and Los Angeles with the dispatch of a commuter waiting for the 5:15 to Greenwich, 1-0. Baltimore had a World title.
McNally won 22 games in 1968 and 20 in 1969. In the process, he won 17 straight decisions between September 22, 1968 and July 30, 1969, a league record. His 15-0 start in 1969 was also a record. He was a mirror image of Whitey Ford, with a compact motion, a delivery between sidearm and three-quarter, consisting of sinkers, curves, scuffed and illegal pitches, all delivered via pinpoint control. On another team, McNally might have been a .500 pitcher. With F. Robby and Blair pulling down outfield drives; Belanger and Johnson stopping all manner of ground balls up the middle; and Brooks Robinson totally denying any hope on the far left side of the infield, he was an ace.
The Orioles were a “team without a weakness,” wrote Baltimore sportswriter Doug Brown. They were so powerful that Merv Rettunmund, The Sporting News’ 1968 Minor League Player of the Year, could not crack their line-up.
They were 109-53. Only the 1927 Yankees (110) and 1954 Indians (111) had more wins in American League history. The 1906 Cubs had won 116 and the 1909 Pirates 110. In a portent of the future, they had both lost in the World Series. The 1961 Bronx Bombers had the same 109-53 mark. The 1969 Orioles were unbeatable in Spring Training (19-5), started 16-8, and left defending World Champion Detroit in the dust by June. They won the East by 19 games, holding onto first place from April 16 on.
But as great as it was, 1969 was a strange year for Baltimore. In a season in which baseball came alive again like “a leaping corpse,” in the words of Roger Angell – with huge attendance increases and fever pitch excitement over division races – Baltimore drew a mere 1,058,168 fans to Memorial Stadium. There seems no plausible explanation. The team had won the Series three years earlier and finished a solid second in 1968, so they did not come without warning. They were so astonishingly good, winning the East so easily, that fans found may have no drama in the Oriole way.
Enthusiasm over the Colts might explain it, although that makes little sense since. It would mean fans sitting on their hands from April to August at least; to do what? Daydream about Johnny Unitas? Perhaps social unrest is the best explanation, since Baltimore burned after the 1968 King assassination, but that was still a year earlier.
Baltimore led the East by six and a half games in mid-June, 14 by mid-July, 15 1/2 by mid-August, and clinched on September 12. Weaver, the little man with the little man’s complex, bristled under the suggestion that anybody could have managed this crew to the title. When the club gave him a raise and some job security, he suggested they were fair but “could have been fairer.”
The Orioles were utterly confident and self-assured. With veteran superstars Brooks and Frank Robinson, they resembled the old Yankees. The 1966 “Baby Birds” were a team of untested youth, but the 1969 edition was absolutely impregnable. They began a ritual called the “Kangaroo Court,” held after all wins. F. Robby donned an English barrister-style wig (actually a mop), used a bat as his gavel, and assessed “fines” (usually about a dollar) for such “crimes” as eating at the post-game spread in the nude, missing the laundry basket with a thrown sweatshirt, or bad cowboy boots. At season’s end, the accumulated $475 was donated to the children of Cincinnati catcher Pat Corrales, whose wife died in childbirth that summer.
Like the 1968 Tigers, Baltimore did it late and often, the Weaver/Oriole way: come back from the seventh inning on (44 times), usually via a big hit. If Frank Robinson had ever been in anybody’s shadow before, he firmly established and separated himself from Mays, Aaron, Yaz, or the other stars. Batting coach Charlie Lau was given much of the credit for the club’s offensive improvements over 1968. Lau would become a legend, teaching a downcut, line drive style with a one-armed follow-through that George Brett credited with making him a star.
Baltimore actually had some pitching beyond Palmer, Cuellar and McNally. Tom Phoebus won 14. The bullpen was sufficient: Eddie Watt, Pete Richert, Dick Hall, Dave Leonhard, and Marcelino Lopez (29-15, 36 saves combined).
The American League Championship Series started in Bloomington, Minnesota’s Metropolitan Stadium. The Twins, 1965 A.L. pennant winners, had experienced ups and downs, but under brash new manager Billy Martin they captured the West Division. But Baltimore out-pitched, out-fielded and out-hit Minnesota to easily capture the play-offs in three straight games.
Cuellar and Minnesota’s Jim Perry hooked up in a pitcher’s duel in the first game, won by Baltimore in 12 innings, 4-3. Perry led in the ninth until Powell homered to tie it up. Baltimore won it, oddly, on a bunt by Blair in the 12th that was not reacted to by third baseman Harmon Killebrew or catcher John Roseboro, allowing Belanger to score. The play was not called by the bunt-phobic Weaver. Blair did it on his own.
Game two was a classic between 20-game winners McNally and Dave Boswell, who managed to make the mistake of drinking in the same bar as Martin. Somehow they got in a fight, the reason for Martin’s first of many firings over the years. Curt Motton, another one of Seaver’s teammates with the Alaska Goldpanners, won the game for the Orioles with a pinch-single in the 11th, 1-0. McNally allowed three hits in going the distance, utterly untouched by the powerful Minnesota offense.
Back in Baltimore, Brooks Robinson had four hits and Palmer breezed to an easy 11-2 victory. Attendance in Minnesota and Baltimore was below capacity despite good weather. The play-off concept somehow had not caught on in the American League, re-generating talk about saddling the public with extra baseball games in the middle of the college and pro football seasons.
The 1969 Orioles were an even better baseball team than the 1968 Colts were a football team. In every way, they were thought to be superior to the Mets. If the National League champions had any chance, it would have to come from superior pitching by Seaver and Koosman. Their respective mediocrity against Atlanta made this problematic.
Mets fans certainly hoped against hope for “magic,” a “miracle,” some kind of out-of-the-ordinary occurrence that would give their club a chance at an upset. They had experienced the joy of clinching the division and Championship Series on their home turf, resulting in wild on-field celebrations. That possibility seemed remote, since if the Mets were to beat Baltimore, it would surely take six or seven games. The last two would be at Memorial Stadium. A four- or five-game Mets win was not in the cards.
Despite their disappointing attendance, Baltimore had a core of enthusiastic, knowledgeable fans. A World Series against the Mets represented a great opportunity to gain some revenge and earn pride for their beleaguered city against the “New Rome,” the mighty fortress of the American Empire, New York City. They were modern day Gauls, Huns, Barbarians, Carthaginians.
The tables were turned when it came to the teams, however. These were not the old New York Yankees; dominant and domineering. The Mets were David, the Biblical boy-warrior. Baltimoreans saw their team, the modern version of the Philistine Goliath, and wondered if Seaver or Koosman might just be able to sling a rock at their “giant” with enough force to knock them down. There was this disquieting notion that the Mets really were “magical.” Could Baltimore stomach still another loss to a New York team on the world stage?
****
As the Mets were boarding a plane at La Guardia Airport after a short workout at Shea Stadium, the National Guard was moving in on demonstrators in Chicago, protesting the trial of the “Chicago Eight,” who had stirred the riots at the previous year’s Democrat National Convention.
“New York City, on the other hand, became our kingdom,” wrote Art Shamsky in The Magnificent Seasons: How the Jets, Mets, and Knicks Made Sports History and Uplifted a City and the Country. “Everyone was into the Mets. Newspapers, television, and radio were covering our every move. Feature stories on the manager, coaches, and players were everywhere and in every medium. Governor Rockefeller invited the players and their families to his ‘apartment’ on Fifth Avenue for a cocktail party the night before we left for Baltimore. Now that was someone who was rich. With famous paintings galore and an apartment as big as an estate, the Governor and his wife were great hosts. To my best recollection, I didn’t remember the team being invited to the Governor’s apartment the year before when we finished near the bottom of the standings.”
Mayor Lindsay was not to be one-upped by Rocky. He showed up at La Guardia with an eight-piece band, and read a poem, written by Jeff Greenfield:
“Ode to the New York Mets
“Oh, the outlook isn’t pretty for the Orioles today.
They may have won the pennant, but the Mets are on their way,
And when manager Gil Hodges’ supermen get through with Baltimore,
They’ll be the champions of the world – they’ll win it in four.
The experts say they cannot win, but they’ll just eat their words.
When Jones and Koos and Agee pluck the feathers off those Birds,
When Gentry shuts out Robinson and Ryan does the same,
The world will know the Mets have come to dominate the game,
With Harrelson and Kranepool, with Gaspar and with Weis,
With Grote, Shamsky, Boswell – we’ve got the games on ice,
And when we’ve got a manager like Gilbert Raymond Hodges
We’ve got a team that makes up for the Giants and the Dodgers.
So good luck in Baltimore, New Yorkers place your bets,
We know we’ve got a winner – with our Amazin’ Mets.”
Somehow, the poem omitted Tom Seaver.
The Mets arrived in Baltimore and thought they were in triple-A. Then they arrived at the Sheraton-Belvedere. It was as old as the Confederacy, or so it seemed; shabby and run down. The team complained to traveling secretary Lou Niss, and in the backs of their minds tucked away the thought that, if possible, they did not want to come back. The Orioles that day were having a parade, as if they had already won!
Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium held 52,137 fans, but there were empty seats on Saturday, October 11, game one of the 1969 World Series between the Orioles and New York Mets. 50,429 came out to see a match-up between the fireballing college boy, Tom Seaver, and the junk-throwing Cuban émigré, Mike Cuellar.
Baltimore’s unfilled stadium was “explicable only when one recalls that two other league champions from Baltimore – the football Colts and the basketball Bullets – had been humiliated by New York teams in post-season championships this year,” wrote Roger Angell in The New Yorker. “Baltimore, in fact, is a city that no longer expects any good news. In the press box, however, the announcement of the opening line-ups was received in predictable fashion (‘Just no way . . .’), and I could only agree. The Orioles . . . topped the Mets in every statistic and, man for man, at almost every position.”
Gil Hodges had lined his pitching staff up so that Seaver started game one of the play-offs. When New York swept, he did not need to go back to his ace against Atlanta. It also meant another seven-day lay-off in between starts. It was only Seaver’s third start since September 27. He, and his team for that matter, were too well rested.
A hot team does not want days off. They want to play, to go for the kill like a lion going after an injured hyena. The Mets’ had been as hot as a pistol before the All-Star break, but after taking three days off came back struggling.
Pitching, their strength, was a possible question mark. Nobody expected the Mets to hit Cuellar, McNally and Palmer the way they hit Atlanta’s Phil Niekro, Rick Reed and Pat Jarvis. However, the Atlanta series portended the grim chance that the Robinson boys and Boog Powell could touch Seaver, Koosman and Gentry as forcefully as had Hank Aaron, Orlando Cepeda, and Rico Carty.
“I hear the Mets have six good pitchers,” said Weaver. “Well, we’ve got 10.”
All the Mets really wanted was a split in Baltimore. It was an intimidating scene and a crazy time. Seaver had the dual job of preparing for Baltimore while dealing with celebrity status rivaling John Wayne, Elvis Presley and Neil Armstrong. Nancy stayed with him in their Baltimore hotel and was given an “assignment,” a diary in the form of a column for the New York Post to be written with the help of Maury Allen.
“The Mets became winners when they began believing they could win,” Hodges told the press in Baltimore.
One local newspaper headline read, “Miracle of Mets Near End.” Weaver was quoted in the New York Times that the Mets had, “Two pitchers, some slap hitters and a little speed.” Most of his quotes had to be censored in a family paper.
“I sensed the Orioles were overconfident,” said Swoboda, adding that his main motivation was to “not embarrass ourselves if we don’t win it.”
A poll of adults in the country showed New York was the sentimental favorite. It sure was not like “rooting for U.S. Steel.”
On Saturday morning, Seaver awoke, pleased that he was not as nervous as he had been at Atlanta. In fact, he felt loose, which worried him just as much. He wanted to find his center. He met up with Bud Harrelson for a 9:30 breakfast, but the coffee shop was jammed with customers in town for the game, so they gave up. So did most of the team. The club boarded a bus for Memorial Stadium, still on empty stomachs. Clubhouse man Nick Torman ordered sandwiches for the hungry team, but their routines had been thrown off.
Aside from hunger pangs, Seaver questioned his body. He had been derailed from his usual routine by the October schedule and pulled a muscle running in the outfield at Atlanta. Unable to do his usual wind sprints, he had fallen slightly out of shape, at least by the standards of a finely tuned professional athlete. He mentally prepared himself to go six or seven innings before running out of gas. It was Indian summer in Maryland, and still humid.
Seaver ate, went through his pre-game routines, getting tinctures put on his feet to help absorb the pounding they would go through. He liked to take his time, putting on his uniform one piece of clothing at a time while attending to details; reading the paper, drinking coffee, having a dip of snuff, checking out a football game on the tube, or going over scouting reports.
Finally, he walked out for batting practice. Cuellar was already there, and the photographers clamored for pictures of the two pitchers. Memorial Stadium was like a plain girl dolled up to look pretty for her wedding, with flags, banners, bunting and a band playing, all giving off the aura of a college football Saturday.
Ohio State was the number one college team in the Associated Press poll at that time, followed by Texas and Arkansas. On the day Seaver pitched against Baltimore, his USC Trojans, in contention for the National Championship, were tied by Joe Theismann and Notre Dame at South Bend, 14-14. It would be the only blemish in an unbeaten, Rose Bowl-victory season, costing them the number one spot that Texas eventually attained.
In pro football, both the Colts and the Jets had strong, talented, slightly disappointing teams. Joe Namath had “retired” when Pete Rozelle told him he had to choose between Bachelors III and the Jets. Eventually he came back, but in the AFL the Kansas City Chiefs and Oakland Raiders were the dominant teams of 1969. Seaver was a little torn. The Raiders, Chiefs and Jets all featured rooting interests of his. The Raiders were his “hometown team” of sorts, and their last two quarterbacks, Tom Flores and Lamonica, were Fresno boys. His Trojan pal, Mike Garrett, was the starting running back for Kansas City, but Seaver was a New Yorker now. That meant rooting for Broadway Joe and His Super Jets. George Allen’s Los Angeles Rams were dominating the NFL, but another central Californian, the ex-Cal Bear signal-caller from John Steinbeck’s Salinas, Joe Kapp, would lead Minnesota to their first Super Bowl. In the end, Kapp’s Vikings would lose to Garrett’s Chiefs in New Orleans.
An army of reporters were on hand. Mrs. Richard Nixon – another USC alum – was in attendance. The nature of baseball – batting practice, players mingling with reporters – provided festivities not found in the more rigid pre-game preparations of a football contest. Seaver was in the middle of the biggest sporting spectacle there was.
Finally, the field was cleared and Seaver went out to warm up. He did not feel quite right. Something was gnawing at him, but he could not put his finger on it. He could not count on luck as he had in Atlanta. He tried to calm himself.
In the top of the first inning, Cuellar retired the Mets with little effort. Seaver removed his jacket and walked, plowboy-style, to the Memorial Stadium mound. He was, as President Theodore Roosevelt had once sad, the “man in the arena.” Up stepped Don Buford, a left-handed hitter, and not a power threat. It was immediately apparent to Seaver, Buford and the Trojan Nation that here were two USC players facing each other in the Fall Classic.
Seaver’s first pitch was a ball, but as Grote returned it he suddenly felt himself again. He had the confidence to give Buford his best inside heat. He went into his wind-up, and delivered just that, right where he wanted it in on Buford’s letters. Seaver was stunned to see Buford turn on it, his rising bat meeting the ball and sending a drive to right field. An easy fly ball to Ron Swoboda, finally in the line-up against the left-hander Cuellar. Swoboda drifted back a couple of steps, pounded his glove, back a couple more, then his back was against the fence, and the baseball, as if driven by unseen forces, drifted over the fence for a home run. Not a homer by F. Robby, B. Robby or Powell, but by Buford. One batter, two pitches, 1-0 Baltimore. Here we go. It was like fumbling the opening kick-off and the other team recovers it in the end zone for six points.
“Confirmation” of Baltimore superiority, “seemed instantaneous when Don Buford, the miniature Baltimore left fielder” took Seaver deep, wrote Angell. Swoboda said he could have caught the ball, but did not time his leap, the ball touching his glove “at my apogee.”
Swoboda’s back was to a fence with a gate that actually could be pushed back two or three feet, but he was in unfamiliar territory and did not take advantage of it. Swoboda watched film of that play many times and was always disappointed at his stutter-step approach, letting a catchable ball go over the fence. Swoboda told writer Bill Gutman that he was totally disoriented by the first game of the World Series, comparing it to parachute jumps that he later made. He was “petrified.” Over time, Ron became aware of his surroundings during a jump, and compared that eventual orientation to playing in the Series. He said he felt like “a mechanical man” going back on Buford’s drive.
At least against the Braves, Seaver got out of the first unscathed. Seaver retired the next two hitters, but Powell found no mystery to him, rapping a jarring base hit. Brooks Robinson tapped out to end the inning.
Cuellar was untouchable, mainly because he induced half the Mets to hit grounders gobbled up by Brooks Robinson. Seaver knew he needed to be at his best in order to give his team a chance. He settled into a rhythm and set Baltimore down in the second and third in the same fashion as he dominated the National League all year. He was back. However, his legs, weakened by the inability to run between starts as usual, were giving way. In the fourth, he got the first two men out, but lost the hop on his fast ball.
Elrod Hendricks stepped to the plate. All season, hitters like Hendricks were unable to get around on Seaver’s heat, but Ellie stroked a single, pulling it to right field. Brooks and Frank just saw a blur. Buford and Hendricks were all over him. Go figure.
Davey Johnson came to the plate, an unthreatening pose, but Seaver worked him like he was Hank Aaron. Four balls later and there were men on first and second. Then Belanger came up. Prior to 1969 he could not hit his way out of a paper bag, but in that year he improved from .208 to .287. Seaver pitched to him like he was still the .208 Belanger, but the .287 Mark delivered a single on a hanging curve and it was 2-0. Then, the unforgivable sin: a chest high nothing pitch to Cuellar, of all people, who drilled it into center field for an RBI single. Un-bee-lievable!
Buford up. Little Don, tired of the golden boy getting all the USC praise, slapped one down the right field line. The runners advanced, all station to station baseball that Earl Weaver normally eschewed but on this occasion he welcomed. 4-0, and the crowd, as they say, “went wild.”
“When Tom is pitching and giving up hits like this, I feel like a voodoo doll,” Nancy Seaver explained. “I feel as if someone is sticking a needle in me with every hit.”
In the Met fifth, Brooks retired Al Weis on a tough, deep chance. In the bottom of the fifth, Seaver felt like a man who had just finished a marathon after running a triathlon. He was completely jarred by the entire experience, the crushing blows of Oriole hits coming on the heels of such excitement and anticipation. Laboring, his knees buckling, the exhausted Mets’ ace gave all he had to retire Baltimore, knowing he was done for the day via a pinch-hitter in the next inning.
Cuellar was a mystery all afternoon. The game had no further excitement except for the seventh inning. New York scratched a run. With runners on first and second with two outs, Rod Gaspar pinch-hit, producing a “swinging bunt” roller towards third. Brooks Robinson came swooping in, barehanded it, and threw the man out at first base. It was a spectacular play, but as common in Baltimore as crab cakes and beer.
Robinson puts pressure on right-handed batters “with his aggressive stance (the hands are cocked up almost under his chin), his closeness to the plate, his eager appetite for the ball,” wrote Angell. “His almost supernaturally quick reactions are helped by the fact he is ambidextrous; he bats and throws right-handed, but eats, writes, plays ping-pong, and fields blue darters with his left.”
That was that. Cuellar completed the six-hitter, a dominant performance by Baltimore as a team with one small blip, not considered particularly noteworthy at the time. The two Robinson’s and Powell were a combined one-for-12. Mets fans had a difficult time finding much solace. If they were to have a chance, it had to be with Seaver, and now he was gone, a loser having pitched two straight underperforming games. The pipe dream of a Shea celebration was as distant as Apollo 11 on July 20.
But confident Ed Charles walked up to Baltimore pitching coach George Bamberger after the game, telling him, “George, this is the last game you guys are gonna win.”
“(Expletive deleted),” replied Bamberger, a skilled member of the Earl Weaver School of Oratory.
“Whoa, this isn’t going to take long,” Swoboda remembered thinking. The Baltimore native had relatives at the game. He said the whole experience was a “strange feeling . . . woo, baseball of this magnitude is very different.”
Seaver was a stand-up guy in the post-game clubhouse, admitting that he “ran out of gas.” That night, Tom, Nancy, his parents, brothers, sisters and their families went out to dinner at the Chesapeake House. His relatives were surprised at his cheerfulness. The fan in him could not be contained. He had pitched in the World Series!
As Tom made his way to the table, he saw the legendary Raoul “Rod” Dedeaux, his college coach at Southern Cal. His son, Justin, who roomed with Seaver at USC, was with him. They were dining with . . . Don Buford.
“Front-runner,” Seaver hissed. In jest.
On Sunday, the Mets picked up the papers and read Frank Robinson’s cutting remarks. The veteran showed little respect for the Mets. After all, this was a man who had earned his living doing battle with Aaron’s Braves, Mantle’s Yankees, Mays’s Giants, Koufax’s Dodgers, Yaz’s Red Sox, and McLain’s Tigers; veteran teams all. Worthy opponents. Rod Gaspar? Ron Swoboda? Al Weis? The Mets had sat on their hands in the dugout, too, Robinson wondered aloud. He thought these youngsters would at least be enthusiastic.
Gaspar, probably high on champagne and in a moment of temporary insanity during the play-off celebration, told somebody the Mets would sweep four straight. It got back to the Orioles. “Bring on Ron Gaspar,” said Frank.
“Not Ron,” Merv Rettenmund corrected him. “That’s Rod – stupid.”
“Okay, bring on Rod Stupid,” said Robby.
“Robby was one of those guys who was all business, all the time, once the game started,” stated Art Shamsky. “He played hard and the opposition knew it. If he didn’t like a player on the other team, particularly a pitcher, he would get on his case, usually from the dugout. He was tough.”
Robinson and Bob Gibson were among that breed of ball players who frowned upon pre-game or post-game fraternization. Even at All-Star Games, Robinson was hard to talk to. He gave nor took no quarter. Off the field he was fair to everybody, but he was like one of those linebackers who pretend the opposing running back impregnated his little sister, even if he did not, just for extra motivation.
Donn Clendenon tried to stir things up a bit. He knew Robinson from the National League. During batting practice, he tried to introduce Rod Gaspar and Robinson. They just stared at each other. Gaspar took off for the outfield, trying to avoid trouble.
Shamsky and Robinson had been teammates in Cincinnati. During a series, ironically enough against the Mets in 1965, the Reds held a big lead. Robinson taunted the Mets and was retaliated against by being hit by a pitch. When New York brought in a right-handed sidearm reliever known for hitting right-handed hitters, Reds manager Dick Sisler did not want to risk injury to his star. He sent Shamsky in to pinch-hit for Robinson.
“You talking to me?” Shamsky asked Sisler, incredulous that he might be asked to hit for Frank Robinson. “This was like a scene right out of the movie Taxi Driver,” was Shamsky’s description of it. Shamsky grabbed a bat. He always called Frank “Mr. Robinson.” Somebody told Shamsky, “Good luck.” He was not talking about the at-bat. F. Robby was kneeling in the on-deck circle, unaware of Sisler’s move.
“What the (expletive deleted) are you doing here?” Robinson asked Shamsky.
“Dick wants me to hit for you,” said the rookie.
“You can’t be serious,” Robinson said in his best John McEnroe imitation. “Get out of here!”
Shamsky went back to the dugout. “G-g-go back out there and hit,” Sisler, who stuttered but was also nervous about pinch-hitting for Robinson, said to Shamsky.
“He doesn’t want me to hit for him,” Shamsky replied.
“J-j-just go back out there and hit,” Sisler, who certainly did not want the job of replacing his star face-to-face, said to Art.
Shamsky made the trek back to the on-deck circle, whereupon Frank said, “Get out of here,” not unlike the mustachioed reliever in Little Big League who tells the kid manager, “Go away!”
“But Mr. Robinson, he wants me to hit for you,” said Shamsky, not sure if he was going to get swung on. He also had a bat in his hands, and that was the year Juan Marichal clobbered John Roseboro over the head with one.
Sisler made some inaudible sound. Robby looked at him in the dugout. The manager touched his forearm, a sign for a pinch-hitter. “(Expletive deleted),” said Frank. Then he turned to Shamsky and said, “You better not embarrass me.”
“Talk about pressure,” recalled Shamsky.
Shamsky hit the first pitch over the center field fence for a home run. He was on Cloud Nine. In the dugout, his teammates all glad-handed him, except for Robinson. Finally, Art sat down, and Robinson appeared before him.
“Okay,” said Robinson, smiling and extending his hand. “Now you can call me Frank.”
It was like being initiated into the Rat Pack. “It’s a day I will never forget,” was Shamsky’s memory of it.
Earl Weaver “was one of those guys like Leo and Gene Mauch, who took so much obvious glee in beating you and worked so hard at it,” recalled Swoboda. “You loved to beat him because you knew how much he burned inside. You knew Earl had no graceful acceptance of losing, that it ate him up . . . you knew he died a little inside.”
Shamsky had played against Weaver when he was with Topeka and Earl managed at Fox Cities. “Earl was a fiery little guy with sort of a gravelly voice, the complete opposite of Gil Hodges,” Shamsky recalled. Hodges carried a beef until it could be aired behind closed doors. Weaver would get in a player’s face, an umpire’s mug, and especially a pitcher’s grill . . . especially if his name was Jim Palmer.
Writer Peter Golenbock, author of Amazin’: The Miraculous History of New York’s Most Beloved Baseball Team, wrote that the Mets harbored the feeling that theirs was the better league. Hodges made a point of reminding them of this, telling them he had managed in Washington and knew it for a fact.
The odds after the first game were now 5-16 in favor of Baltimore. “I was a little worried,” said Ralph Kiner. “I thought (the Mets) could lose in four.”
“Doesn’t four of seven mean that you have to win four games?” asked Yogi Berra, putting it all in perspective.
“Seaver couldn’t blacken your eye with his fast ball” in game one, said Clendenon, “but we had Koosman” ready to go in the second contest.
“Baltimore wasn’t intimidating,” said Cleon Jones.
“Two things came to my mind after the first game,” said Seaver. “We were this group of so-called brash individuals that had no right to be in the World Series against the big, bad Baltimore Orioles with all the big names on that team. After we lost the first game I remembered here were these big, bad Orioles and they were jumping up and down in celebration. For some reason I expected them to be much more serene in victory. I was thinking, ‘Why are they so jubilant?’ Donn Clendenon came walking toward me, put his arm around me walking toward the clubhouse and said, ‘We’re going to beat these guys.’ It was the same thought I had in my mind. I pitched lousy relative to how I pitched during the regular season, yet Clendenon was feeling the same thing I was.”
The Mets had none of the wide-eyed wonder of World Series fans by this point. They were grim, prepared to play a grim game, and they did just that. It was a match-up of pitching and defense. Baltimore came with their “A game” in this regard. B. Robinson made some fine plays. Belanger executed an extraordinary catch-and-throw. The Mets responded, with Harrelson making a hit-robbing grab. Angell wrote that Harrelson was “gaunt,” noting that the “tensions of the season had burned Harrelson down from a hundred and sixty-eight to a hundred and forty-five pounds.”
Koosman, the young fireballing southpaw, opposed McNally, the veteran lefty control artist. McNally entered the game with 21 consecutive scoreless innings in post-season play, going back to the 1966 Series with L.A. Donn Clendenon reached McNally in the fourth for a wrong-field homer to make it 1-0, Mets. From there, New York was determined to hold their ground. They felt like the famed American “lost battalion” that refused to give up its strategic position in the Argonne, despite complete German encirclement, in the closing days of World War I.
Grim.
Amid this, Koosman had everything he did not have against Atlanta. In the seventh, he was nursing a no-hit game and a perilous lead. His stated goal since he was kid watching Don Larsen’s 1956 masterpiece was to pitch a perfect game in the World Series. Blair ended Koosman’s no-no dreams, leading off with a single, but Koosman worked two more outs. The Baltimore crowd urged action. They were strangely mystified that the rout they expected was not forthcoming. Blair seemed to pick up on the exchange between Grote and Koosman, stealing on a change-up curve. Brooks Robinson singled up the middle. It was tied.
Now what?
A “LET’S GO, METS!” banner was unfurled in the aisle behind h
