THE 1969 MIRACLE METS: THE IMPROBABLE STORY OF THE WORLD’S GREATEST UNDERDOG TEAM (35 page)

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.