THE 1969 MIRACLE METS: THE IMPROBABLE STORY OF THE WORLD’S GREATEST UNDERDOG TEAM (45 page)

Seaver was a
New York Times
guy, so he saw
the front page headline declaring the 4-3 victory the previous day.
Some guys were
Post
readers, or the
Daily News
, or
any number of other papers in and around the tri-state,
Metropolitan New York area. Some players – most probably most -
were not newspaper guys at all.

Seaver was a man who read the front page first,
whether his team was the lead story or not. He needed his fix of
politics, world events, and human interest. In the summer of 1969,
the Moon launch was big news, just 11 days away as it would turn
out. There were the “body count” stories from Vietnam; President
Nixon trying to turn up the pressure on the North Vietnamese;
behind-the-scenes machinations of the National Security Advisor,
Henry Kissinger, who seemed to have a bigger role than Secretary of
State William Rogers.

This guy Kissinger, he was an odd one. He seemed
capable of playing either side of the fence. He had come down from
Harvard to work for Nelson Rockefeller (a moderate Republican),
then offered his services to the Kennedys (liberal Democrats),
apparently been spurned by the Johnson Administration (hawkish
Democrats), and now had fallen in with Nixon (conservative
Republicans). He was Jewish. Nixon was not known to be all that
fond of Jews. Then again, Kissinger was not religious. His German
accent never diluted despite having come to New York City as a
refugee from Hitler at age nine. It was disquietly reminiscent of
the Peter Sellers character in
Dr. Strangelove
. Or was that
based on Wernher von Braun? It got confusing.

Seaver liked to read the editorials, too. The
Times
was solidly Left-wing, anti-war, against Nixon, and
made no bones about it. Seaver, the Marine and son of a business
executive, was a patriot who supported his country, but the
casualty rates from Vietnam were very hard to live with, and had
been for a few years now. Seaver was just not sure anymore.

But the sports section gave him reason to smile;
something to be carefree about. He was living a dream, he and his
teammates. He sometimes had to pinch himself. Seaver embodied the
confident athlete with the press, a leader among teammates, but
deep down he was still a fan watching Sandy Koufax from the Dodger
Stadium fans, or struggling even to get high school hitters out on
the dusty fields of Fresno.

The previous day Seaver came home and watched the
Yankees lose to Baltimore on television with his father Charles,
the one-time champion of a golf tournament named after one of the
Mets’ minority owners, Herbert Walker. Tom and his dad stayed up
until after midnight catching up.

“Seaver is educated, amiable, articulate, which
separates him from the majority,” wrote Dick Schaap and Paul
Zimmerman in the entertaining book
The Year the Mets Lost Last
Place
, which detailed the nine crucial days in mid-July of 1969
when the club materialized into a contender.

“Two or three times a year,” Seaver was quoted in
the book, “I can throw the ball just where I want, as hard as I
want, with just the right motion. Two or three times a year, you
put it all together.”

In the early afternoon of July 9, two events
occurred. Schaap and Zimmerman noted that they would not have
happened in previous years. A
New York Daily News
photographer arrived at Ed Kranepool’s home to take pictures of his
family. In Central Park, Tommie Agee (batting .279 on July 9) and
several teammates conducted a baseball clinic before rows and rows
of teenaged boys. A year before, nobody wanted to take Kranepool’s
photo, and the kids “would have been trying not to laugh” at Agee
telling them to hit while he himself batted .217 with only 17 runs
batted in. At one point, Agee went 34 at-bats without a hit.

“I wanted to explode when the season ended,” said
Agee.

Agee, who played football at Grambling, spent the
winter of 1968-69 in a batting cage in Mobile, Alabama with Cleon
Jones and Hank Aaron’s brother, Tommy.

“The old Mets are dead,” he said as the season began
to play out. “The ‘new breed’ is here, baby. I brought it here with
me. It took me a year to get it going, but it’s here.”

Agee fancied himself, the “new breed,” part of
something that Joe Namath had started.

“I met him at Bachelors III one day last winter,”
Agee told Dick Schaap and Paul Zimmerman. “I go up to him and
introduce myself. He’s sitting at the bar with a beautiful girl on
his right. She’s dressed in chinchilla. Joe leans over after a
while and, you know, he’s talking to me like a hippie or
something.”

“You know, Tommie,” Namath told Agee. “I’ve got a
problem, I’m in a fix. You see this girl on my right. Well, she’s
waiting for me to take her home. You see that girl at the end of
the bar. Well, she’s waiting for me to take her home. But that’s
not all. I just got a phone call from my girlfriend and she says
she’s on the way down here.”

“Joe says he’s got a problem,” the bachelor Agee
said, shaking his head. “I mean, I’d like to have a problem like
that.”

If anybody was jealous, it must have been Mickey
Mantle. Married to his high school sweetheart, he wanted to live
like the swinger Namath, but every time he went out on the town
with a girl other than his wife the tabloid columnists wrote about
it.

At the Waldorf-Astoria that afternoon, a press
conference was held in Ron Santo’s room. The subject: cutting
remarks he made of his teammate, Don Young. Dressed in a black knit
sports shirt and checkered-and-black slacks, Santo expressed
remorse.

“Don Young and I talked for an hour today,” said
Santo. “I apologized to him then and I want to make a public
apology now for what I said yesterday. I was upset. There had been
a lot of pressure before the game from newsmen, radio and
television. Then we lost the game the way we did and when I saw
Donnie walking out of the clubhouse five minutes after the game was
over, I just lost my head. I said he’d put his head down between
his legs because of his hitting. I was wrong. I said it because it
had happened to me when I was on a losing ballclub. I fought myself
so hard at the plate that when I went to the field I forgot about
fielding and I caused the team to lose ball games. I thought the
same thing had happened to Donnie, but it really didn’t.

“Donnie has done too much for us. He’s too good a
kid and too good a competitor. You’ve got to be a competitor to get
as mad as he got at himself yesterday. He walked out of the
clubhouse because he couldn’t bear to face his teammates.

“We had a long talk. Very emotional. I knew I was
wrong. I couldn’t sleep last night thinking about it. I tried to
convince myself that I was right but I knew I wasn’t.”

When Ken Boswell arrived at Shea Stadium that day,
he relaxed with a newspaper before preparing for the pre-game
rituals. When he read the story about Frank Graddock killing his
wife so he could watch the ninth inning the day before, it began to
seep into him that the Mets were bigger than they realized they
were.

With Seaver on the hill, he was naturally the
subject of many of the pre-game queries. His ex-high school and
Mets teammate, Dick Selma, now with Chicago, was approached for
some obligatory comments.

“I was the guy who told the Mets about Tom,” Selma
told Dick Schaap at Shea Stadium. “I told Al Lyons scout> that this kid could pitch in the biggies when Tom was at
USC. I knew he was ready ‘cause I knew what he had
inside
.
He’s a good pitcher now, but he’s really no better than when he
came up. That’s how good he was to start with.”

Seaver’s opponent on that day was Ken Holtzman, the
man he beat out for the last roster spot on the Alaska Goldpanners.
That meant Ron Swoboda would get the start in right field. Rod
Gaspar knew that this meant he might get some playing time. Up
until July 9, he had thrown out seven runners with his strong
throwing arm, including the Cardinals’ Lou Brock in a 1-0 New York
win.

By 5:45 P.M., Shea Stadium’s parking lot was full
and the stands were mostly full. The excitement and air of
anticipation was at a fever pitch. It was a World Series
atmosphere. Leo Durocher, who saw it all long before this night,
was non-plussed, playing gin rummy in his office with old friend
Barney Kremenko of the
New York Journal-American
. With a
mass of writers and TV people on hand, Joe Reichler, an assistant
to new Commissioner of Baseball Bowie Kuhn, entered to ask if,
maybe, possibly, could he, uh, come out and say a few words?
Durocher gave Reichler the “bum’s rush” in favor of his gun rummy
match. Reichler asked if Durocher would sign on to a post-season
tour of Vietnam. Durocher ignored him.

Since Durocher’s firing in New York after the 1955
season, his great protégé Willie Mays had played for five
successors, and not without problems. Alvin Dark, who skippered San
Francisco’s 1962 pennant winners, was a Southerner who apparently
had problems with black and Latino ballplayers.

“They just a different
kine
,” he drawled.

Durocher was asked about a recent run-in between
Mays and his new manager, Clyde King, succeeding Herman Franks
after four years.

“Anybody who tries to manage Willie is crazy,” said
Durocher. “You don’t manage Mays. You just put him in the line-up
every day and let him play. When I wanted to say something to him
about something he’d done wrong in the field, I never took a smile
off my face while I was talking.”

Once Durocher and Mays attended a father-and-son
dinner in Hackensack, New Jersey. Durocher drove to Mays’s
apartment up on Coogan’s Bluff, where he was playing stickball with
about 150 kids. Mays jumped into Durocher’s back seat and said,
“Drive on.”

At the dinner a small boy asked Mays who the
greatest center fielder was. Like Dennis Quaid playing Gordo Cooper
in
The Right Stuff
, Mays just dead-panned, “You’re looking
at him.”

Durocher was reminded of pitcher Sal Maglie.
Durocher abused Maglie’s Italian heritage. “When I went to the
mound,” he recalled, “I used to call Maglie everything I could
think of and get him so mad the veins on his neck would bulge.”

Maglie would be so peeved at Durocher he would pitch
out of jams just to spite him, then offer to fight Leo in the
dugout. Leo would just smile to himself. Durocher was a 1940s and
‘50s guy, managing in the 1960s. The profound difference in these
eras was far more than just the passage of 10 or 20 years. His
players were now the “new breed.” If he thought his old school
ways, his psychology with Durocher or handling of Mays, would work
with this bunch, he would discover it did not. It certainly had not
worked with Don Young.

After batting practice, the Cubs held a player’s
only meeting in which Santo apologized to Young in front of his
teammates. Many managers would have put Young back in the line-up
to boost his confidence. Not so Leo. A little-known nobody named
Jimmy Qualls was penciled in to start in center field. Durocher was
Durocher, and he was back in New York, his old stomping grounds.
Finally, he relented and gave some time to the reporters.

“I didn’t ask Young what happened on those fly
balls. I never criticize a kid for making a bad play in the field,”
he said 24 hours after having done precisely that. “Don’s still my
center fielder against left-handed pitchers.”

Qualls was a 22-year old rookie who had just been
called up from Tacoma of the Pacific Coast League. He was only now
starting to get his swing down, having missed two weeks to serve
with his Reserve unit in Stockton, California. In the Mets’
clubhouse, Qualls’s surprise start left Seaver, Grote and pitching
coach Rube Walker looking for a scouting report. Without any
computer databases or Internet searches available, they had to rely
on Bobby Pfeil, the only one to have seen him hit. Pfeil
recommended “hard stuff” – fast balls and sliders – as opposed to
curves and change-ups.

“He can get his bat on the ball,” he told
Seaver.

Seaver, preparing to go out for his warm-ups, passed
coach Eddie Yost, catching up on his reading; the
Daily News
and
Sports Illustrated
. SI featured a spread on Oakland’s
Reggie Jackson, in his second full year and enjoying a breakout
season. At the time, he was well ahead of Roger Maris’s pace for 61
home runs. The magazine depicted a shirtless, highly-buffed Jackson
- a former Arizona State football player – who possessed the kind
of muscles players in the later “steroid era” would have. Seaver
saw the photo and instinctively “defended” his teammates.

“Not built as well as Jones and Agee,” he said, even
though Reggie’s body was superior.

As Seaver prepared for the game, one of “Leo’s
friends” arrived at Shea Stadium. Burt Lancaster, wearing a dark
sports jacket and slacks, had prime seats behind the Cubs’ dugout,
where everybody could see him hob-nob with Leo. Still a presence in
1969 – his signature film,
Seven Days in May
by John
Frankenheimer, was now six years old – Lancaster told Schaap and
Zimmerman, “I’m an old Met fan. After all, I’m a native New Yorker.
But tonight I’m here as a guest of Leo Durocher so I’ll be cheering
for the Cubs – and pulling for the Mets. I have to cheer for the
Cubs. Otherwise my life would be in danger.”

Said in jest. It was a veiled reference to Leo’s Mob
ties, which were as shadowy as his pal Frank Sinatra’s were. The
Cubs were used to Mafiosi coming out to cheer them on. One famed
photograph showed a nervously smiling Cubs’ catcher, the great
Gabby Hartnett, shaking Al Capone’s hands in the 1930s. Ernie Banks
emerged from the dugout and shook Lancaster’s hand.

“Beautiful,” said Mr. Cub. “Beautiful.”

At 7:48, Seaver began to get loose, but he was
experiencing trouble. There was a twitch in his shoulder. He went
through 103 pitches, trying to get the kinks out. “It still feels a
little stiff,” he told Rube Walker as he made his way to the
dugout.