THE 1969 MIRACLE METS: THE IMPROBABLE STORY OF THE WORLD’S GREATEST UNDERDOG TEAM (40 page)

Harrelson tried college at San Francisco State but
unlike Seaver did not finish up. He missed two weeks doing his Army
duty in 1968 and was slated to miss parts of June and July in 1969
doing the same thing.

Johnny Murphy was a Yankee pitcher, a durable
right-hander saddled with the enigmatic nickname “Grandma Murphy”
when he toiled for Joe McCarthy’s champions of the 1930s. He played
a dozen years at Yankee Stadium and was one of the first “relief
specialists” as bullpen roles evolved.

Murphy posted 12 wins out of the bullpen in 1937 and
1943; had 107 career saves and 73 lifetime victories. He was very
effective in World Series play, compiling a 1.10 ERA in six
separate Series. He finished with Boston in 1947 and went into
player development with the Red Sox.

While George Weiss, Bing Devine and others helped
develop the Mets - their “college philosophy” after going with
veterans early – Murphy is the man who ultimately built the 1969
Mets (with great help from assistant Whitey Herzog, who never
missed the chance to tell anybody who wants to listen how great
that help was).

The ownership wanted Gil Hodges, but he was under
contract with Washington and it was easier said than done. It was
Murphy, friends with Washington GM George Selkirk from their
Yankees days, who made it happen. Officially, Devine was still the
general manager when it occurred, but it was Murphy (who replaced
him shortly thereafter when Devine when to St., Louis) who arranged
a “trade” for Hodges, a rare but not unheard-of event for managers.
Hodges came back to New York for $100,000 and pitcher Bill Denehy.
The Mets had been rumored to be after Hodges since Casey Stengel’s
1965 retirement.

Murphy also made one of the biggest trades in all of
Mets history, the acquisition of Tommie Agee and utilityman Al Weis
from the Chicago White Sox after the 1967 campaign.

Some of the most famous baseball announcers over the
years have included Vin Scully and Red Barber of the Dodgers; Mel
Allen of the Yankees; Lon Simmons, Russ Hodges and Jon Miller of
the Giants; Harry Caray of the Cubs; Harry Callas of the Phillies;
Bob Prince of the Pirates; Bob Elson of the White Sox; Bill King of
the A’s; Dick Enberg of the Angels; and Ernie Harwell of the
Tigers. Add to that list the name of Lindsey Nelson, who eventually
won the Ford C. Frick award and a place in the Hall of Fame.

Nelson is one of the “giants of baseball
broadcasting,” wrote Peter Bjarkman in
The New York Mets
Encyclopedia
. He saw it all, beginning with the 1962 campaign.
Just being able to keep an audience through so many long, losing
games was an art.

Nelson started after World War II in his native
Tennessee. He re-created baseball for the Liberty Broadcasting
System and became popular when night games came into being on a
regular basis, which had a big effect on the listening audience
size. He honed his skills with NBC and became adept at all
sports.

Nationally, Nelson was well known as a college
football announcer, especially as Notre Dame’s game announcer and
for many years their Saturday (and Sunday) man, when Irish games
were truncated across the country.

“Purdue failed to sustain a drive, so after punting
we pick up action with the Irish taking over at their own 45,”
Nelson always seemed to be intoning in a staccato-yet-smooth, very
distinctive yet not-quite-Southern accent. For years, Nelson’s
voice was synonymous with the Cotton Bowl.

Nelson came on board with the expansion Mets in 1962
and gave them imprimatur. The hiring of Southern broadcasters was a
long tradition in New York that included the likes of Allen and
Barber. Nelson’s voice could not be pinpointed. To many he even
sounded like a native New Yorker. It was a somewhat nasal accent,
but lively and knowledgeable. His colorful, checkered sportjackets
were his trademark.

Nelson’s partner from the beginning was Bob Murphy,
another Hall of Famer. He became Boston’s play-by-play man in 1954,
covering the great Ted Williams in his twi-light years along with
Curt Gowdy. Like Nelson he was adept at college football. His older
brother, Jack Murphy was a renowned San Diego sports columnist
whose efforts brought big league ball to that city. The stadium was
named after him.

The third Mets’ broadcaster in 1969 was also a Hall
of Famer, which had to be a record (“You could look it up,” Casey
would advise). Like Nelson, Ralph Kiner wore snazzy sportcoats. In
1951, Kiner hit 51 home runs for Pittsburgh. He led the National
League in homers for five straight seasons. Only Babe Ruth and Mark
McGwire surpass his lifetime ratio of one home run per every 14.1
trips to the plate.

Kiner was a minor league general manager in the
Pacific Coast League before entering the broadcast booth with the
Chicago White Sox. He, Nelson and Murphy had been intact since the
1962 inception. He was by 1969 a mainstay on Mets TV and radio
broadcasts, hosting the well-known “Kiner’s Corner.” His
“Kinerisms” and malapropos, sometimes unfit for print, included,
“We’ll be right back after this word from Manufacturer’s
Hangover.”

The leaping corpse

“Pastime, National, 99; after a lingering illness.
Remains on display at Cooperstown, N.Y.”

- Roger Angell,
The Summer Game

May is a special month in New York. The seasons
change on the East Coast. After a long, hard winter, the sun shines
through, the girls start breaking out the mini-dresses, and in the
spring, a young man’s fancy turns to baseball. Also a middle-aged
man named Roger Angell.

Angell took “baseball road trips” every year, then
wrote marvelous articles about his experiences in
The New
Yorker
.
The Summer Game
(1972) chronicles this odyssey
from 1962 to 1971. He went to SpringTraining in Florida, watched
the 1963 World Series in various Manhattan taverns, and checked out
Dodger Stadium the year it opened. Angell’s essays included the ’62
pennant chase and rain-delayed Fall Classic; Gibson’s epic 1964
“coming out party”; the Dodgers of Koufax and Drysdale; an
absolutely eloquent, poetic
paean
to New England during the
“Impossible Dream” 1967 campaign, and a brilliant depiction of the
tense, unpredictable 1968 Tigers-Cardinals battle.

Angell has a following, but it should be a bigger
following. He was to the written word what Vin Scully was to the
spoken one, which is the ultimate compliment. I write about sports
in large part because of Angell, Jim Murray, and Pat Jordan. If my
efforts are pale imitations call it
homage
. Angell put
himself in the story, like a clean Hunter S. Thompson. He sat in
the stands with his daughter, quoted her, described the people he
talked ball with, and gave a perspective the “knights of the
keyboard,” as Ted Williams derisively called the beat writers,
never did. Angell spurned controversy. He was in love with
baseball, with its purity, and he captured it.

Angell was a New Yorker, of course. He grew up with
all of it, but fell for the National League. He favored the little
guy, and saw the Yankees as a corporate entity. His baseball
sensibilities allowed him to admire their greatness, but it was
more like the Dutch or the Belgians watching the Americans stomp on
the
Wehrmacht
in their back yards. It was great and all, but
it was not
their
team. His team was Brooklyn. When they
left, he was heartbroken and went to Yankee Stadium to get his
baseball jones, but that was all it was. He showed up at the Polo
Grounds in 1962, sat through a double-header bludgeoning by the
mighty Dodgers over the lowly Mets, and loved every minute of it.
So did his fellow fans in the sold-out stadium, which stayed full
and boisterous to the end. Angell was hooked on the Mets.

In 1968, Angell heard all about the “death of
baseball.” “Broadway Joe” was all the rage. “Hey, have you
seen
the crowds at the Jets’ games lately?” a syndicated
columnist friend of his said over the phone that December.
“Unbelievable! It’s exactly like the old days at Ebbets Field. Pro
football is the thing, from now on. Baseball is finished in this
country. Dead.”

Angell said baseball’s death knell almost led him to
the
New York Times
obituaries to find something that read
like this: “Pastime, National, 99; after a lingering illness.
Remains on display at Cooperstown, N.Y.”

The combination of
Broadway Joe and His Super
Jets
, as compared to the distressing “Year of the Pitcher,” a
seemingly endless string of 1-0 and 3-0 baseball games played in
empty old stadiums, all seemingly in dangerous neighborhoods on
dead nights, led
The New Republic
, the
Wall Street
Journal
; even some foreign publications to declare that “Our
National Pastime” was now football.

1969 was the 100
^th
anniversary of
professional ball, going back to the Cincinnati Red Stockings of
1869. An “all-time all-star team” was announced, and looking back
it said a lot about the state of the game that year. For one thing,
the center fielder and “Greatest Living Ball Player” was not Willie
Mays, it was Joe DiMaggio. DiMag held to that like a survivor to
his life raft, for years never accepting any invite anywhere unless
it was preceded by the introduction of “The Greatest Living Ball
Player.”

Now, Di Maggio was great, no doubt. A winner, yes,
but Mays was better. The statistics and the eyes tell us that. The
team was mostly comprised of
very old
old-timers; mostly
guys from the 1900s to the 1920s and ‘30s: Ty Cobb, Pie Traynor,
Bill Dickey, Honus Wagner, Walter Johnson, Lefty Grove, Rogers
Hornsby. No Ted Williams, Hank Aaron, Mickey Mantle or Roberto
Clemente. No Sandy Koufax, not to mention Bob Feller, Warren Spahn
or Bob Gibson. Conspicuously absent were any Negro League stars.
The research tells us that Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige probably
should have been on that team.

Was Gibson better than Babe Ruth? Many say yes. He
probably was not, but the fact that such an argument is valid says
all that needs be said of Gibson. Paige was probably a notch better
than Johnson, Christy Mathewson and Grover Alexander. Some argue
that “Cool Papa” Bell should have been in there, but he was
probably just below that level.

The selectors placed all their credence on the
statistics of a very by-gone era, as if Cobb could possibly have
hit .420 in the 1960s, or Ruth would have put up those numbers
facing Gibby’s heat, Jim Bunning’s slider, and Warren Spahn’s
curve. As if Cy Young’s 511 wins were possible in this new era.
There was a lot of old man bluster. Lefty O’Doul once said Cobb
would hit “about .320” in the modern era. Asked, “Why only .320?”
he replied, “Well, the man is 70 years old now.”

The people who selected this “all-time all-star
team” were effected in large measure by the desultory offensive
statistics of 1968. It was if nobody could hit anymore.
The
Glory of Their Times
by Lawrence Ritter was a very popular book
of the era. Most of the old-timers clung to the archaic idea that
their game was better than what the modern boys were doing in the
1960s, not seeming to realize that in 1910 nobody brought it like
Koufax or Seaver.

But because the team was so old-timer heavy, the
impression was that the game’s best days were long gone. These kids
in this new-fangled era? Forget them. Looking back, the 1960s and
1970s are seen by many to be the golden era. The 1971 All-Star Game
in Detroit is hailed as a confluence of Cooperstown talent like
none other. Time has provided new perspectives, but it is important
to understand that baseball was not popular at the beginning of the
1969 baseball season.

In 1968, the Mets were second in National League
attendance with 1,781,657. This would be considered a very poor
year by today’s standards. Population is greater, but not by the
degree of attendance increase the game has seen, really beginning
in 1969. St. Louis broke 2 million with a pennant winner. L.A., a
team that draws well over 3 million most years now, drew 1,581,093.
The famed Wrigley Field faithful, with a young, exciting club,
barely cracked a million. Philly and Pittsburgh, playing in ancient
edifices, drew pitifully. A team attracting less than 700,000 today
would have to file for bankruptcy. San Francisco semi-contended
before finishing second, but Candlestick Park was a wasteland with
only 837,220 showing up.

The Tigers thrilled Detroit and broke 2 million in
1968. Boston had it goin’ on, but it was nothing compared to the
2000s: 1.9 million. The Angels had been a near-failure in Los
Angeles and Orange County despite a huge population and every
natural advantage, but they barely cracked a million. Washington,
playing in a very bad criminal environment in tense, racially
charged times, drew flies: 546,661. Oakland (837,466) split the Bay
Area market in half, peeving a lot of people in San Francisco and
the Commissioner’s office.

The Yankees were happy to break a million with a
pretty good team, but what had happened to the pinstripers was a
shock to the system. Chicago and Cleveland were baseball wastelands
in falling-apart parks.

New Commissioner Bowie Kuhn came from Wall Street
and was strictly the owner’s man. The divisional set-up gave he
people hope that it would generate more excitement. For some
reason, the idea that New York needed a champion did not really
register with people yet.

It certainly should have. Baseball was monumental in
1962 and 1963, when the Yankees squared off first against San
Francisco, then against Los Angeles. After the demise of the
Yankees a series of champions emerged in the American League:
Minnesota, Baltimore, Boston and Detroit. Baltimore had never
really caught on and their attendance was poor. Despite a solid
club in 1968 they drew less than 1 million to Memorial Stadium. The
Twins and Tigers were strictly regional. 1967 had been a big year,
with four, even five contenders late in the season; the Bosox,
Tigers and Twins all in it until the last weekend, so baseball
fever took hold. But there were problems. Riots in Detroit spoiled
the fun for a lot of people. Tiger Stadium was in the heart of a
decaying city. The perception in 1968 was that the old man was
ready for pasture. Overall, baseball declined from 25,132,209
in1966 attendance to 23,105,345 in 1968.