THE 1969 MIRACLE METS: THE IMPROBABLE STORY OF THE WORLD’S GREATEST UNDERDOG TEAM (3 page)

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.