THE 1969 MIRACLE METS: THE IMPROBABLE STORY OF THE WORLD’S GREATEST UNDERDOG TEAM (2 page)

Steve's a literate ex-athlete, an ex-Trojan
and a veteran of Hollywood, too.

- Lee “Hacksaw” Hamilton/XTRA Radio, San
Diego

A great book about a great player.

- KTHK Radio, Sacramento

A gem.

-
Roseville Press-Tribune

Here's the man to talk to regarding the
subject of Barry Bonds.

- John Lobertini/KPIX TV, San Francisco

He's enlightened us on the subject of Bonds,
his father, and Godfather, Willie Mays.

- Brian Sussman/KPIX TV. San Francisco

I hate Bonds, but you're
okay.

- Scott Ferrall/Syndicated national and New
York sportstalk host

One of the better baseball books I've
read.

- KOA Radio, Denver

. . . .the "last word" on Barry Bonds . .
.

- Scott Reis/ESPN TV

. . . a hot new biography on Barry Bonds . .
.

- Darian Hagan/CNN

. . . one of the great sportswriters on the
current American scene, Steve Travers . . .

• Joe Shea/Radio talk host;
  Bradenton, Florida and editor,
  www.American-Reporter.com
  

To a real pro.

- Jeff Prugh,
former
Los Angeles Times’
Atlanta bureau chief

It was a good read.

- Lance
Williams/Co-author,
Game of
Shadows

You’ve done some good writin’, dude.

- KFOG Radio, San Francisco

A very interesting read
which is not your average . . . book . . . Steve has achieved
his
bona fides
when it comes to having the credentials to write a book like
this.

- Geoff Metcalfe/KSFO Radio, San
Francisco

Steve Travers is a true USC historian and a
loyal Trojan!

- Former USC football player John
Papadakis

Pete Carroll calls you “the next great USC
historian,” high praise indeed.

- Rob Fukuzaki/ABC7, Los Angeles

You’re a great writer and I always enjoy
your musings. . . particularly on SC football - huge fan!

- Oakland A’s general manager Billy
Beane

A's Essential: Everything
You Need To Be a Real Fan
offers a breezy
history (with emphasis on the Oakland years), player biographies,
Top 10 lists, trivia questions and more about the Athletics'
franchise that has resided in Philadelphia, Kansas City and, since
1968, Oakland.

- Bruce
Dancis/
Sacramento Bee

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Introduction: The glory of their times

If you can make it there, you can make it
anywhere

“Can’t anybody here play this game?”

The eve of destruction

High hopes

Meet the Mets

The leaping corpse

The first crucial day

The wrath of Gil

Resurrection

The march to the sea

The Promised Land

The empire strikes back

Whatever happened to . . .?

Those Amazin’ Mets

A shining city on a hill

Index

My thanks go to Gene Brissie at The Globe
Pequot Press and my wonderful literary manager, Peter Miller of PMA
Literary and Film Management, Inc. in New York City. Also to John
Horne of the Baseball Hall of Fame, the great Tom Seaver, Matt
Merola, the New York Mets, as always to my wonderful daughter,
Elizabeth Travers, and my supportive parents.

Above all others, my greatest thanks go to
my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, the source of all that is decent
and true. I am proud to say that whereas I was once obsessed with
Tom Seaver and the Mets, I am now obsessed with Jesus Christ.
Furthermore, while this book may be titled
The Last Miracle
,
I know that He performs a miracle every time a child is born.

“Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of
America had better learn baseball.”

- Jacques Barzun

There are baseball fans, and then there are
baseball fans!
I was a
baseball fan!
Growing up in
California, I took to Our National Pastime like nobody else I know.
I was obsessed. It was crazy, borderline insane. This . . . game!
Oh, how I loved this game.

In those days, there was no ESPN, no Fox
Sports, no cable TV. Teams usually televised about 25, maybe 30
road games a year. They never put home games on TV. In New York,
most of the Mets and Yankees games were on the tube, but Dodgers’
owner Walter O’Malley did not want to give something away for free
that fans otherwise were willing to pay for. Other West Coast teams
– the Giants, Angels and A’s – followed his lead. California was a
“car culture.” We drove the freeways instead of riding the subways.
Our baseball appetites were wetted through great radio broadcasts,
often heard in the car, courtesy of Vin Scully of the Dodgers, or
Lon Simmons and Russ Hodges of the Giants

For a kid, often my only amusement was
baseball on the radio. There was no Internet. We had one television
in the house. I had no TV in my room. If I did not like what my
parents watched, tough. I had no video games. Eventually, I got
into the Strat-o-Matic baseball board game, playing an entire
season in which I broadcast the games into a tape recorder, kept
detailed records and typed up AP-style dispatches on an old
Olivetti, but in the late 1960s that was still a few years
away.

I could not wait to get home from school on
Fridays, not because it was the weekend, but because that was the
day
The Sporting News
arrived in the mail. I lapped up every
word. I liked football, particularly the University of Southern
California Trojans, and was also a fan of John Wooden’s UCLA
basketball dynasty. I enjoyed track because my dad was into it, but
all of that was just prep time for
baseball.

I would listen to baseball on the radio. I
do not mean it was on in the background while I did something else.
I mean I would sit next to the radio and
keep score
. When
the announcer said, “For those of you scoring at home that’s an
error on the shortstop and therefore an unearned run,” he was
talking to me.

In 1967, the All-Star Game was played at
Anaheim Stadium. Tied at one, the game went into extra innings.
Rookie right-hander Tom Seaver of the Mets came on to face the
American League. The rule was that every team had to be
represented, which was the only reason the Mets had a player in the
game, or so I thought. Seaver was stocky, boyishly handsome, and
threw
heat
. He sure did not look like a charity case, some
kind of “affirmative action” All-Star meant to fill a “quota.” He
belonged, demonstrating that by setting the junior circuit down to
save the National’s victory. They said he had pitched college ball
for coach Rod Dedeaux at nearby USC, which perked my ears up, that
was sure. A Trojan!

In 1967, Seaver was as effective as any
pitcher in the league. Sandy Koufax was retired by then. Don
Drysdale had an off year. So did Juan Marichal. Bob Gibson was
injured. Mike McCormick of the Giants won the Cy Young award. If
Seaver had gotten more run support he would have won 20 instead of
16, and possibly the Cy Young as well as the Rookie of the Year
honors that went to him.

I gravitated to Seaver. He was not on my
hometown team. I had to scrape for any information I could find on
the guy.
The Sporting News
was a big help. Sportswriter Jack
Lang’s reports were great. If
Sports Illustrated
or
Sport
did anything on him, I cut out the articles and put it
in a scrapbook, adding my own “editorials” in crayon. The Mets were
so bad
, though. The NBC
Baseball Game of the Week
, a
staple of Saturday TV fare, usually featured champion teams of the
era: the Red Sox, the Tigers, the Cardinals, but not the Mets.
Seaver was like some kind of a legend; you heard about him, knew he
was out there some place, like Geronimo beyond the horizon planning
his next hit ‘n’ run, but I almost never saw the guy. If he was
pitching against the local team on the radio, I was glued to it.
Seaver.

I was not into the Mets. They were 3,000
miles away and terrible anyway. I rooted for California teams. My
natural inclinations were towards things of a West Coast variety. I
was not Motown or Harlem cool; I was more Beach Boys. Seaver’s USC
connection was the original hook, but there was more to it than
that.

In 1966 an NYU historian named Lawrence S.
Ritter wrote a book called
The Glory of Their Times
. It may
just possibly be the greatest baseball book ever written. Ritter
went around the country interviewing old-time baseball players from
the late 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, maybe early 1930s at the very
latest. These guys now ranged in age from 65 to 90. The book was
the fabulous “story of the early days of baseball told by the men
who played it.” It was awesome. Just awesome. I still have my
tattered, dog-eared copy with my mother’s inscription, “To our
wonderful boy. Love – Mommie & Daddy. X-Mas 1967.”

I
devoured
that book. What this says
about me, I do not really know. I was eight, nine years old,
completely infatuated with a book that told the story of a game
played 50 or 60 years prior to my birth. I was a freak, a hybrid.
Who cares, I loved it. Then the record came out, with the actual
interviews recorded. A cantankerous Rube Bressler said of pitcher
Dazzy Vance, “You couldn’t him ‘im on a
Mundy
.” Vance (whose
photos revealed a man who looked 60 when he was 30) would wear a
white sweatshirt with a tattered right sleeve, causing the white
baseballs to blend in with the white sheets flapping from tenements
beyond the center field fence at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn on
Mondays . . . laundry day!

The Glory of Their Times
told the
story of an East Coast game. There was no Major League ball in
California in the 1900s. There were three teams in New York City –
the Yankees, Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers – and the preponderance of
the book’s stories revolved around the mythology of the Big Apple’s
baseball heritage.

I cared about baseball and little else, but
through baseball I came to understand America because the game was,
as James Earl Jones said in
Field of Dreams
, something that
stood the test of time, always something good, something resolute
and unchanging even when America has “been erased like blackboard,
re-built, and erased again.”

So a young boy in California learned about
New York City; the hotels, the subways, the streets, the ambience
of the town. The Polo Grounds, Bed/Stuy, Yankee Stadium. I was
fascinated by all of it. The players all dressed in suits and ties,
with starched collars and bowler derbies, when they were out of
uniform. I came to love the concept of the well-dressed athlete
away from the ballpark, especially since in my day by this time
players were beginning to resemble anything from golf pros to
ragamuffins in terms of their casual attire.

The thing I came to admire was the
intelligent athlete. All the old-timers talked about Ty Cobb, who
they mostly despised but nevertheless admired for his brains and
competitiveness. Cobb was described as a “scientific hitter” who
out-thought the opposition. The game itself was one of bunts, hit
‘n’ runs, and little ball. The players were contemptuous of
baseball in the modern era – then the 1960s – because it was to
their way of thinking a game of free-swinging “home run or bust”
guys who eschewed the game’s more nuanced side.

Cobb came from Southern wealth. He was
educated and knew Shakespeare, Greek philosophy, religion,
mathematics and history. He dressed impeccably, like a Wall Street
banker. Indeed he was an expert stock market manipulator who used
“inside information” to buy and often sell short, just as Boston
financier Joseph P. Kennedy had done. Cobb got in on Coca-Cola
stock at the beginning. It made him rich beyond his dreams.

I was an O.J. Simpson fan when he was
running wild at USC. I liked John Havlicek of the Celtics because
he epitomized the hard-working athlete who was always in better
shape than his opponents. Pete Maravich was like the circus coming
to town. But football and basketball paled in comparison to
baseball. Out west, I came along too late for Sandy Koufax and
never got into Willie Mays. Tom Seaver was a baseball player, and
more to the point, a pitcher. I was a budding Little League
pitching star. Seaver seemed to resemble some of those old-time
baseball players described in
The Glory of Their Times
.
Photos of Tom more often than not showed him dressed in a
three-piece suit, not the 13
^th
hole look of his
contemporaries, or worse the “Summer of Love” hair styles
popularized a few years later by the Oakland A’s.

This guy was clean-cut, dressed for success,
had a beautiful wife, and spoke the King’s English like a
professor, not a ball player. He was a college man, of course, well
read with political savvy and a social conscience. His interests
included books like
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
. He said
self-deprecating things like, “I’m not perfect because I drink beer
and I swear. There’s been only one perfect person and He lived
2,000 years ago.” He had served in the Marine Corps, so when he
spoke about Vietnam he had credibility. He came from an affluent
family, his brothers and sisters each having attended one of
California’s great universities, California, Stanford and UCLA,
with Tom’s USC pedigree making it four-for-four. His father was a
Stanford man, a corporate executive. In his day he had been one of
the countries’ finest golfers, the winner of the prestigious Walker
Cup. Despite his well-rounded
persona
, Seaver was known to
be the hardest-working player on the Mets, if not all of baseball.
He was one of the first baseball players to benefit from weight
training, which he had started doing with his USC teammate, a
baseball player who also won the Heisman Trophy, Mike Garrett.