Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion (16 page)

The Mets—ah, the Mets! Superlatives do not quite fit them, but now, just as in 1969, the name alone is enough to bring back that rare inner smile that so many of us wore as the summer ended. The memory of what these Mets were in mid-season and the knowledge of what they became suggest that they are in the peculiar position of being simultaneously overrated and patronized in our recollection. Their microscopic winning margin at the end of the regular season and their frightful, groaning struggles to get their chin up over the .500 bar should not obscure their startling march from the bottom to very nearly the top of the baseball world in the space of two months. This sustained burst of winning, stouthearted play took them to within a single game of the world championship, though they appeared to have been frighteningly outmanned all along the way. They were lucky and persevering and optimistic, but far less inspired by their own unlikelihood than the startled young heroes of ’69 were. This time was a lot harder. “I’ve never known a season that was any more work than this one,” shortstop Bud Harrelson said one night near the end. “We played our asses off.
No one
in this club had an easy year, and almost every game—even the big wins—seemed like hard, hard work. We deserve everything we get this time.” Rusty Staub, just after his splendid four-hit, five-runs-batted-in performance in the fourth game of the World Series, soberly explained that it was the result of “concentration and hard work,” and Wayne Garrett, after an essential September win over the Pirates, made a pushing, snowplow gesture with both hands and said, “Games like this—all these games—you’ve got to …
wedge
it out.”

In the middle of August, hard work did not appear to offer much of an answer. Dead last in their division, the Mets were a team flattened by injuries and abandoned by their fans. At one time or another, eight of their players were on the disabled list. Catcher Jerry Grote broke his wrist. Bud Harrelson broke his hand and then his breastbone. Left-handed ace Jon Matlack was struck by a line drive and suffered a hairline fracture of the skull. John Milner, Cleon Jones, Rusty Staub, George Theodore, and Willie Mays were sidelined with ailments, and ace reliever Tug McGraw, with an earned-run average over the past two seasons of 1.70, was suddenly and mysteriously unable to get anybody out—and, in the words of Manager Yogi Berra, “if you ain’t got a bullpen, you ain’t got nothin’.” Yogi himself was said to be on the way out—a charming relic, insufficient in ideas and words. His one tenet was the repeated and miserably evident observation that the Mets had not yet made their move.

The first tiny stirring was McGraw’s good outing against the Giants on August 11—in a game the Mets finally lost in the thirteenth inning. On August 18, Bud Harrelson, the infield’s main man, returned to the lineup, and the Mets whacked the powerful Reds by 12–1. That began the time of hard labors—a close, heartening win or two, a terribly discouraging loss—but now the pitching (Seaver, Matlack, Koosman, George Stone, and McGraw and rookie Harry Parker in the bullpen) was clearly terrific at last, and everybody knew that if this club was going to go anywhere it would be on its pitching. Weirdly, though the Mets were still twelve under the .500 level late in the month, they trailed the division-leading Cardinals by a mere six and a half games. On the last day of August, the Mets climbed over the Phillies and into fifth place. Belief (“You gotta be-leeve!”—
The Sayings of Chairman McGraw
) had begun.

In September, the NL East was a crowded and dangerous tenement. The Cardinals led for a while and then gave way to the Pirates, who had made a hunchy late change of managers, replacing Bill Virdon with his predecessor, Danny Murtaugh. The Cubs, a team of elders that had wasted an enormous early-summer lead, had still not expired, and in among them all was the true surprise of the year—the Montreal Expos, who were suddenly getting wonderful pitching from a rookie named Steve Rogers and from relief man Mike Marshall, and some long-ball hitting by a former Met, Ken Singleton. On September 7, the Mets won a chilly, edgy doubleheader in Montreal by 1–0 and 4–2; the nightcap was 1–1 through fourteen innings, and that Met run had come in after Expo infielder Pepe Frias dropped an easy pop fly. The next day, Steve Rogers outpitched Seaver, winning 3–1, and the ravished, wintry Montreal fans dreamed their
drapeau
dreams again.

A week later, the Mets beat the Cubs, 4–3, at Shea on a suicide squeeze bunt by Jerry Grote. They were in fourth place, but only two and a half games behind the first-place Pirates, and the five immediately upcoming games with Pittsburgh—two away and then three back at home—would settle
something.
An insupportable something, perhaps, for the Pittsburgh sluggers bombed Tom Seaver that opening Monday, winning by 10–3, and then the next night the Pirates led again, by 4–1, in the top of the ninth. Here, however, the Mets pushed across five runs—the essential hits coming from benchpersons Jim Beauchamp and Ron Hodges. Since Tug McGraw had already completed his evening’s outing, Yogi now entrusted this trembling lead to Bob Apodaca, a youngster just one day up from the minors, who instantly walked the first two major-league batters of his life, and was succeeded by Buzz Capra, who gave up a sacrifice, a run-scoring infield out, an intentional walk, an unintentional walk, and (to Manny Sanguillen, with the bases loaded) a strike, three balls, and, at excruciatingly long last, the fly-ball out that ended the game. Every Met, from that evening on, claimed that this was the inning that did it all.

Back to Shea then, and a brisk, heartening 7–3 Metsian victory that brought them to third place, one and a half back. Heartening because Cleon Jones, their brooding and enigmatic left fielder, whacked two homers and drove in five runs. Jones, one of the streakiest hitters imaginable, had apparently ended his season-long unstreak. The next night, the Mets came from behind three times, scoring one run each time, to tie at 3–3—more hard work—but then suddenly the sea parted, as it did so often in 1969, and one could sense that this week was going to be shining and famous. In the top of the thirteenth, the visitors’ Richie Zisk singled off Ray Sadecki, and then Dave Augustine rocketed a deep, high sailer over Cleon Jones’ head in left; the ball, descending implacably toward the bullpen, struck the very top of the fence—a fraction of an inch shy of a home run—and rebounded on a line into Cleon’s grasp. Startled, Jones whirled and threw to Garrett, who relayed to Ron Hodges at the plate, who collided with the sliding and truly startled Richie Zisk and tagged him out. One knew—one
knew
—that Hodges would then drive in the winning run in the bottom of the same inning.

This kind of baseball electrification changes everything, and the Pirates never looked like the same team after that ricochet. At Shea the next night, you could see fans—and, in their dugout, Pirates, too—pointing to the landmark spot just above the “5” in the middle of the “358” sign on the fence, where the Augustine carom shot had struck. Wayne Garrett then singled on the first Pittsburgh pitch of the evening, and the Mets ripped out eight hits and six runs in the first three innings, providing Tom Seaver with his first easy ride in weeks. An enormous crowd, most of them trooping in late after an epochal traffic jam, came to roar in exultation, and there were Met hits that bounced up into the faces of Pirate infielders and through the pitcher’s legs and off the bag at third base, and there were resounding homers by Milner and Garrett and Staub, and the fans shouted “We’re No. 1!” and Jane Jarvis played “You’re the Top” on the organ, and the sign man held up a sign that said
“ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK!”
and the scoreboard showed that Montreal had lost again—their fifth straight defeat—and when it was over (Mets 10, Pirates 2), the Mets really
were
No. 1: the first team in baseball history to go into first place and arrive at the .500 level on the same evening in September.

From then on—a week and a little more—every Met fan was caught up in a double sport, simultaneously catching the out-of-town news on the scoreboard and watching the dangerous business at hand. It was a time of almost continuous baseball excitement—hazard and reward, silence and shouted relief—from which each of us could select games and moments to store away: Matlack fanning the first three batters of the day, all swinging, and then utterly stifling the Cardinals in a swift, almost eventless 2–0 shutout; an enormous Sunday conviviality as the biggest crowd of the year celebrated a comeback 5–2 win over the Cards, nailed down at last by Garrett’s triple and Cleon’s homer and sterling long relief by Parker and short relief by Tug McGraw and the cheerful air full of windblown paper and hundreds upon hundreds of migrating monarch butterflies; Willie Mays Night—he was retiring at last, at the end of the season—with speeches and tears and awkwardness and felicity (Willie, wiping his eyes: “I look at the kids over here, and the way they’re playing and the way they’re fighting for themselves, and that say one thing to me: ‘Willie, say goodbye to America’”), and finally the release of the game, against Montreal and Steve Rogers, a 2–1 bleeder won twice by Cleon Jones, first with a homer and then with a breathtaking running catch in the deepest left-field corner, to save two runs; and then the sad, heavy letdown of an ominous loss to the Expos in the last regular-season game at Shea, with Seaver tired and wild and gone after two, and the Mets’ fine comeback from a five-run deficit all for nothing, and the suddenly revived awful doubt (with the cushion down to a bare half game) about whether there would be any more baseball back here this autumn after all.

The crucial final weekend, it will be remembered, was not so crucial after all, because the Pirates miserably and helpfully lost three close games in a row while the Mets waited through two rainouts in Chicago, and by the time play finally resumed there on Sunday the four barely breathing contenders—and the distant, astounding possibility of a five-way final tie—seemed to offer only a statistical menace. Matlack lost a painful 1–0 duel with the Cubs’ Rick Reuschel, but then Koosman had a happier time of it in the nightcap—an error-filled 9–2 affair that finally did in the Cubs, as Montreal expired, too, in Pittsburgh. Tom Seaver pitched the clincher in the rain on Monday—6–4 over the Cubs (with whole sectors of the wet, shining stands there absolutely empty)—and Cleon fittingly hit another home run (his seventh in eleven days), and McGraw fittingly got the save (his twelfth, plus four wins, in his last seventeen outings), and the champagne corks flew at last. A final scoreboard study suggests that four teams certainly lost this tattered half pennant but that the fifth just as surely won it. From mid-August on—after August 20, that is—the Cardinals (who finished second, one and a half games back) won 18 games and lost 20, while the terrible exertions of the Pirates, Expos, and Cubs brought them respective records of 21–21, 20–20, and 19–19—deadly, dead-even ball. The Mets, by contrast, went 27–13 after August 20, including 21 victories in their last 29 games, which translates out to .675: championship work in any league.

Since it was clear to this experienced fan that the opening games of the American League playoffs between the Oakland A’s and the Baltimore Orioles would offer a not-to-be-missed collision between the two best pitching staffs in baseball, I hopped the Metroliner to Baltimore, confidently postponing the Mets and Reds until the Shea Stadium part of their playoffs—and thereby missing, it turned out, the two best-pitched games of the month. In Baltimore, on an incomparable autumn afternoon and before the customarily comparable hometown crowd, Jim Palmer, the presiding Oriole right-hander, fanned six Oakland batters in the first two innings and went on to whiff six more in the course of shutting out the hairy green-and-gold defending champs by 6–0. This result was not wholly unexpected, since Palmer had won twenty-two games this year (it was his fourth straight twenty-game season) and his earned-run average of 2.40 was the best in his league. Dick Williams, the Oakland cogitator, attempted to counter these odds by opening with Vida Blue, the third-best of his three twenty-game winners. The presence of Blue, a southpaw, would deprive the Birds of Rich Coggins and Alonza Bumbry, two swift rookie outfielders, who both batted well above .300 this year, but who, being lefties, regularly played only against right-handed pitchers. This was typical baseball strategy, deeply moving in its beauty and profundity, and almost typical in its results: Baltimore batted around in the first inning, driving out Vida and scoring four runs, two of which were registered by Bumbry’s and Coggins’ replacements. Palmer’s only difficulties were with his control—he threw more than 150 pitches—and with a terrifying line single by Oakland’s Reggie Jackson, which he barely deflected, throwing himself backward on the mound just before it struck him in the face.

The next afternoon, Bumbry and Coggins combined in the first inning to help fashion a Baltimore run, and in the top of the third Bumbry gathered himself at the foot of the left-field fence—staring up and tensing and poising like a cat about to leap onto a bureau—and ascended perfectly to pluck back Sal Bando’s drive just as it was departing the premises. Bando found balm for this disappointment by knocking two subsequent pitches a good deal higher and deeper, both well beyond Bumbry’s reach and into the seats; the second of these was the fourth Oakland homer of the afternoon, and was sufficient to do in the Oriole pitcher, Dave McNally, on the wrong end of an eventual 6–3 score. Catfish Hunter, the splendid Oakland ace (he was 21–5 this year), gave us a characteristically low-key winning performance—working in and out, flicking the corners, tugging on his oversized cap between pitches, and, in the hard places, striking out batters with his dipping curve.

What I was missing was even better, of course. By the time I got back to my hotel-room TV set on the first afternoon, it was the seventh inning in Cincinnati, and I found that, for the first time in weeks, Tom Seaver’s fastball was alive and well. He was leading by 1–0 and had fanned nine batters, and within a minute or two he added numbers ten and eleven. My heart sank. Seaver’s hummer comes in to a batter about letter-high; at its best, it is very nearly untouchable, and the way Tom throws it past a hitter—with his powerful body dropping low and driving forward at the instant of delivery—is one of the ornaments of modern baseball. He relies heavily on the fastball on its good days, always seeming to challenge a batter to beat his best with one blow. As strategy, this is straightforward, courageous, and stubborn—and also, in view of Seaver’s record and proud nature, probably unarguable. It is extremely scary to watch, and sometimes, in the late innings of a low-score game against a team of proud and famous sluggers,
too
scary. With one out in the eighth, Pete Rose hit a homer; with one out in the ninth, Johnny Bench hit another, to win it.