THE 1969 MIRACLE METS: THE IMPROBABLE STORY OF THE WORLD’S GREATEST UNDERDOG TEAM (33 page)

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.