THE 1969 MIRACLE METS: THE IMPROBABLE STORY OF THE WORLD’S GREATEST UNDERDOG TEAM (70 page)

“I almost didn’t make the play,” said Agee.
“The ball nearly went though the webbing of my glove.”

The crowd cheered him as if he was Neil
Armstrong having returned from orbit. He “carried it all the way
back to the infield like a trophy, still stuck in the topmost
webbing of his glove,” wrote Angell . . . “The eerie crowd – all
56,335 of us – jumped to its feet in astonished, shouting tribute
as he trotted off the field.”

In the sixth, Ken Boswell singled and was
moved over on a grounder, a typical Mets play all year; sacrifice,
fundamentals, team play. Grote then doubled to score him. In the
seventh, Gentry began to tire. He walked three batters and, with
two outs, Paul Blair came to the plate. Hodges brought in Nolan
Ryan. Despite his having pitched so well in the play-offs, it was
thought to be risky. With his control problems, Ryan was likely to
walk a run in.

“Maybe Gil knows something I don’t know,”
said Grote. That was precisely the point in 1969.

“As a player I never questioned Gil Hodges’
judgment,” said Jones. “He made all the right decisions that
year.”

Ryan got two strikes on Blair. The tension
was unbearable. Then Blair got one to his liking and hit a shot to
deep right-center. Agee and Shamsky went after it, but neither
seemed to have a chance. They looked to be on a collision course at
first, but Agee was faster and got close, pounding his glove. Then
the wind got to it and drove it downward. He dove, skidded, and
snagged it. At that moment, the New York Mets, the City of New
York, and the Baltimore Orioles, knew the Mets were going to be
World Champs. If Agee did not make those catches, Baltimore would
have won the game, “And I don’t think I want to be down to the
Orioles,” said Swoboda.

It was probably the defining moment of the
whole, improbable extravaganza. The emotions, the sound; mere words
on a page cannot explain what it was like. It was phantasmagoric,
almost hallucinatory. Blair was shocked. Later he was so frustrated
he made light of Agee’s two catches, which was like the Germans
saying Patton just got a few good breaks. Baltimore was a whipped
crew. From that point on, everything that happened was a Mets
parade, which is not to say there was no more drama remaining. But
this was
The Last Miracle
. It was foreordained.

In the bottom of the eighth, having disposed
of one of baseball’s all-time greats – Palmer – as if he was a
busher, the Metsies added a run on a homer by Kranepool. Once
booed, he now symbolized Mets redemption. In the ninth, the O’s
loaded the bases again. Hodges, continuing to make every perfect
call, stayed with Ryan, who buckled Blair with a called strike
three curve ball to end the game.

The press treated Agee as if he had just
discovered the cure for cancer, which by the way was one of
President Nixon’s highest priorities in this, his first year in the
White House. “To me, he was our MVP,” said Jones. “The way he hit
in 1969 and the way he played center field, particularly at Shea
Stadium.”

“I thought the first catch was the hardest
because I had to run farther,” Agee was quoted in the
Daily
News
.

“I thought the second catch was harder,”
said Hodges, who added that it was “the greatest I’ve ever seen in
the World Series.”

The immediate talk after the game continued
all off-season, and in fact is debated today, by fans and on shows
like Fox Sports’s
The Sports List
, centered on which of the
two was better; whether it/they were better than Mays’s “The
Catch,” and all other defensive plays throughout history. In a 5-0
victory, it unquestionably saved five runs from scoring. From a
clutch standpoint, Agee’s plays are hard to argue against.

“The final score was 5-0, or, more
accurately, 5-5 – five runs for the Mets, five runs saved by Tommie
Agee,” wrote Angell. “Almost incidentally, it seemed, the Orioles
were suddenly in deep trouble in the Series.” It actually may have
been 5-6. Blair’s drive, had it skidded past Agee and considering
his speed, might have been an inside-the-park homer.

Palmer said the scouting reports on New York
were all wrong. Gentry was said to have “average” stuff, but he was
not average in game three. He was also said to be no offensive
threat. Based on that Palmer felt Blair was out of position on his
double. After that game Palmer began to famously move his
outfielders around, a constant source of frustration for Earl
Weaver. Agee’s home run would prove to be the only one Palmer ever
surrendered to a batter leading off a game. Curiously, he and
Seaver – two of the star pitchers of the next decade – both allowed
leadoff homers in the World Series.

“I thought the third game of the Series was
the most important,” recalled Frank Robinson. “We had Palmer going
against Gentry. I didn’t even think about losing. It was a perfect
match-up for us.”

“We were all surprised when Gentry pitched
so well,” said Dave Johnson. “I definitely think that was a key
game.”

“I’ve never seen two such catches by the
same player in the same game,” said Weaver afterward.

“I knew Tommie from the American League,” Ed
Charles said. “He had a lot of talent, but above all, he was always
a go-for-broke type of player. Because of that, he never gave up on
a ball in the outfield and had a propensity to make that great
catch.”

The crowds at Shea during the 1969
post-season were a revelation in that previous World Series crowds
did not resemble regular season ones. There is a famous photo of
Chuck Hiller hitting a home run for San Francisco against New York
in the 1962 World Series at Yankee Stadium. The fans behind home
plate are easily identified. The men and women resemble
sunglass-wearing stockbrokers and heiresses.

When Carl Yastrzemski emerged from the
Fenway Park dugout before the first game of the 1967 World Series,
he looked at the people in the stands and asked, “Where
is
everybody? These aren’t the people who were here all year.”

The Shea crowds were “uncharacteristically
elegant” yet boisterous, according to Roger Angell. There were a
fair number of men in suits, at least in the best, most expensive
seats, but more women than usual, certainly more minorities than
were ever seen at Yankee Stadium, and of course the unprecedented
placard-wavers.

That night at Madison Square Garden, the
Knicks opened the NBA season with a 126-1-1 win over the Seattle
Supersonics.

Sandy Koufax: “Tom, is God a Met?”

Tom Seaver: “No, but He’s got an apartment
in New York.”

- TV interview during the 1969 World
Series

In 1970, a book called
The Perfect
Game
by Tom Seaver with Dick Schaap was published. The book had
double, maybe even triple meaning. It referred, first and most
specifically, to Seaver’s fourth game, 2-1 10-inning victory over
Baltimore. It was an
imperfect
game, by no means the finest
Seaver ever pitched. He did not have his very best stuff, certainly
not like his July 9
near
-perfect game against the Cubs, most
of the 10 wins he notched down the stretch, or many games he
pitched in subsequent years (including most of his starts in the
first half of 1970). But it was the lack of perfection, which
required a great deal of great, grim determination, and a little
“Mets magic,” that indeed made it the seminal single-game
performance of the 1969 World Series. Considering all its
implications, it was
The Perfect Game
for Tom Seaver, the
Mets and New York City.

The book of course details that
imperfecto
against Chicago, plus Seaver’s near-perfect game
against the Cardinals in 1968. But the genesis of its title goes
back to a perfect game Seaver pitched in the Fresno Little League,
and the quest for perfection in his life and career all the years
since. Seaver was and is a perfectionist as was Gil Hodges. It was
the way he dealt with baseball and everything else, sometimes to
the irritation of his more fly-by-night teammates.

When Seaver threw his perfect Little League
game, having tasted it he endeavored to attain it again. Never, in
Babe Ruth League League, high school, junior college, Alaska, USC,
the minors, or in New York, did he get there. He obviously came
close. Calling his win over the Orioles
The Perfect Game
was
Seaver at his most whimsical, Quixoteesque self. A few years later,
he sat down with
Sports Illustrated’s
Pat Jordan (later a
chapter in the fabulous book
The Suitors of Spring
), and
verbalized his impossibly high standards, which were reflected in
his work ethic, desire for consistency, game preparation, approach
to pitching, relationship with his family, the amount of logs he
put on a fire, how he pet dogs, his wine cellar, and general
philosophy of life. It was one of the most telling athlete profiles
ever written; oddly a
paean
to Seaver’s at-the-time
unmatched greatness as a man and athlete, while at the same time a
slightly biting portrait.

The beginning of
The Perfect Game
is
telling, and maybe a little bit planned. The night before game
three (the Mets having beaten Baltimore, 5-0 to take a two games to
one lead that afternoon), Seaver describes reading
The Glory of
Their Times
. Perhaps this was juts a coincidence, but there may
have been just a touch of spin. Seaver was an intellect, a reader,
a
New York Times
front-section-and-op/eds-before-the-sports-section guy. He read
The Wall Street Journal
, knew stock market trends, and
discussed political affairs with the aplomb of Richard Nixon. He
was seen reading
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
on an
airplane, a book he surely did read and understand, yet some saw
calculation in his making sure everybody saw him doing it.

The Glory of Their Times
is one of
the greatest baseball books ever written, but it is no comic book.
It is a true American history document, as surely any tome about
the Revolutionary or Civil Wars. It had a Ken Burns feel to it and
is not for the dim-witted.

Then Seaver described his wife, Nancy,
calling him “Prince Valiant” when inviting him to sit down for
dinner in their apartment in Bayside, Queens. While Nancy did call
him this – she also called him George, his given first name, not
his middle name of Thomas – it was Seaver’s way of saying without
saying, “I really
am
Prince Valiant.” At that point in time,
he was. Terms like Sir Galahad, Sir Lancelot, savior, “man on a
white horse,” Jack Armstrong, Frank Merriweather, “reincarnation of
Christy Mathewson,” and other appellations describing not merely a
heroic but
perfect man
were routinely bandied about.

Seaver played to it by denying it, claiming
the human faults of swearing, beer drinking and chewing tobacco,
while saying in so many words he was not Jesus Christ, who
was
perfect. In verbalizing a denial it was like saying he
was, well, not
perfect
, you know, but pretty darn
extraordinary, wink-wink. Seaver was in some ways setting himself
up for a fall, because his image was impossible to maintain
throughout the bumps and grinds of life, certainly in the rough ‘n’
tumble world of the baseball clubhouse. So many things could go
wrong, first and foremost the fact that he played a game in which
people fail.

After 1969, it was Cooperstown or bust for
Tom Seaver. Plus, there was this idyllic marriage he lived in
public with his beautiful wife, and it is simply human nature to
find something to criticize about
that
. Seaver was a great
teammate, a clubhouse cut-up, a funny fellow with an infectious
laugh, but the high horse he rode, whether he mounted it, the
public put him there – or both – made for natural carping from the
Ron Swobodas, the Tug McGraws and the rest of the all-too-human New
York Mets; not to mention the
New York press
, which last
anybody checked had a reputation for being . . . difficult.

Seaver described that Tuesday night before
his start against Baltimore in
Ozzie and Harriet
terms.
While the world around them was going insane with Mets fever, he
and his wife were the most calm, composed people in the world. They
splurged for some ice cream after a healthy dinner, despite the
sense that the minute he showed his face anywhere in New York it
had the effect of a John Lennon or Mick Jagger sighting. Aside from
reading
The Glory of Their Times
, he managed to find what
must have been the only TV channel not doing wall-to-wall Mets
coverage, a serious news show about alleged Marine brutalities,
stirring his liberal side while at the same time reminding him
that, as Marine he was a lifelong brother of all those in the
Corps.

Wednesday, October 15 was a perfect day for
baseball; a little cool, blue skies, what New Yorkers almost
self-righteously call “World Series weather,” the way Golden Domers
make the environment part of the fall football ritual at Notre
Dame.

When Seaver arrived at the Shea Stadium
clubhouse, he found good-natured banter; the kind that, had it been
expressed in
The Bronx Zoo
atmosphere of Billy Martin’s 1977
Yankees, would have resulted in a fistfight. Donn Clendenon
“warned” coach Joe Pignatano that “our boys,” i.e., angry black
militants, were coming to his house to “carve you up.”

Piggy retorted that his guys, apparently a
combined force of “the Mafia” and the KKK, were “just one” phone
call away, and Clendenon would find himself strung up by his heels
in Georgia with “machine gun bullets.”

“And they both laughed,” wrote Seaver. It
was not the kind of conversation Elston Howard ever would have had
with Yankees pitching Jim “The Colonel” Turner. It showed the times
were definitely changing.