THE 1969 MIRACLE METS: THE IMPROBABLE STORY OF THE WORLD’S GREATEST UNDERDOG TEAM (44 page)

With J.C. Martin on deck, the percentage play would
have been to walk him, but Durocher was not playing percentages. He
stuck with the laboring Jenkins and showed disdain for Kranepool by
ordering his man to pitch to him.

In Queens, Frank Graddock punched his wife so hard
she had to crawl into her room. He switched from
Dark
Shadows
back to the game. Margaret’s injuries were fatal. The
next day Graddock would be charged with first-degree murder.

Jenkins missed high on the first pitch. Then he came
back low and outside. Kranepool normally would have taken it, but
he was guessing that way and wanted to punch an opposite-field hit
between Kessinger, playing towards the middle, and Santo. But the
pitch was farther out of his hitting zone than he thought, and his
efforts were weak. The bat almost left his hand, but contact was
made, resulting in a lazy pop that eluded Kessinger, landing in the
outfield grass. Jones romped home.

The Mets raced out of their dugout. Koosman was the
unlikely winning pitcher. The celebration had all the earmarks of a
World Series victory, and the roar of the crowd was
mind-boggling.

It was 4:14 P.M. on the afternoon of Tuesday, July
8, and at that
precise instant
, the Mets became the official
passion of New York City;
the team
relegating the mediocre
Yankees to backpage status; and the miraculous nature of the 1969
baseball season manifested itself as self-evident truth!

The 11-game winning streak of May and June; beating
the Dodgers and Giants; all of that had been important, but now the
ghosts of “Willie, Mickey and the Duke,” as the song goes, were
replaced by a new generation, a “new breed.” It was like John
Kennedy’s “new frontier” come to life. It was the “great
beginnings” from the opening of Stanley Kubrick’s
2001: A Space
Odyssey
, embodied by Richard
Strauss’s
“
Sprach Zarathustra.”

No metaphor, no description is too hyperbolic to
describe what was happening. It was that huge. In a city that had
seen
everything
, it was, if not new, so different, so
refreshing and wonderful as to be a . . .
miracle!

Clendenon, Jones and Kranepool went on “Kiner’s
Corner,” but nobody, not even Ralph Kiner, seemed able to put into
words what was going on. Jerry Koosman was equally flabbergasted in
the winning clubhouse, muttering with a wide-eyed smile,
“Unbelievable, unbelievable.”

After sipping some beer, he tried to do better than
that. “They were marvelous,” he said of his teammates. “I was wild
all day. I felt sure of myself, but I didn’t have good control. I
was battling myself.”

Then, for the very first time, the question was
dared ask: “Do you think the club’s going all the way now?”

Koosman looked stunned, as if the idea had not
occurred to him, but instead of giving a cliché like, “We’re just
playing one day at a time,” he told the reporter what was in his
heart: “I don’t see why we just can’t keep winning and
winning.”

“The Cubs went out there patting their pockets when
they took the field in the ninth,” Cleon Jones said. “They were
already starting to count that 25 grand.” The potential share for
each player in the upcoming league Championship Series and World
Series was estimated at $25,000.

“Nobody gave up,” he continued, talking about his
teammates. “This is a young club and it believes it can win. We’ve
got the momentum now. We beat their big man. Now we’ve got our big
man. We’re in command now. We can relax.”

“Hey, don’t save the fireworks until the ninth
inning for me,” said the Mets’ “big man,” Tom Seaver, dressing a
few stalls away. “I’ll take a 9-0 lead in the first inning any
time. I’ll finesse it the rest of the way.”

At Camp Drum in Watertown, New York, Seaver’s
“Buddy,” now known as Sergeant Derrel McKinley Harrelson, heard
that the Mets pulled their game out. He thought he was being
kidded, since the last he heard they trailed 3-1.

****

In 1962, the Los Angeles Dodgers held what looked to
be a safe lead with a week to go, but the San Francisco Giants came
back and caught them, forcing a play-off. After blowing a 4-2 lead
in the ninth inning at Dodger Stadium to lose the National League
pennant in the third game of the play-off, the Dodgers trudged into
their clubhouse and engaged in what has been described as the
all-time “meltdown” in baseball history.

Walt Alston locked himself in his office like one of
the survivors in
Night of the Living Dead
while Don Drysdale
pounded on the door, trying to get at him with his fists. Booze
flowed and with it all the frustrations, mostly aimed at poor
Walter, who despite having won the 1955 and 1959 World Series had
as much respect in Hollywood as the original screenwriter of a
movie on its eighth re-write.

Leading the chorus against him was the Dodgers’
“celebrity coach,” Leo Durocher. The whole sordid affair was
detailed the following year by famed L.A. sportswriter Melvin
Durslag in an article penned for
Look
magazine called
“Manager with a hair shirt.” Alston fended off the encroachments of
ex-manager Charlie Dressen, brought in as a coach, when he won the
1959 World Series, but that was followed by two disappointing
seasons as the club transitioned from the Brooklyn veterans to the
Los Angeles youth movement.

Durocher, fired a few years earlier by the New York
Giants, looked like a baseball exile in Elba, er, Beverly Hills. He
did some broadcasting, but nobody hired him to manage. The word was
out, that he was being “blackballed.” Durocher got Durslag, who had
a reputation for writing nasty articles advocating the positions of
various people – Durocher, Lakers owner Jack Kent Cooke – to write
an article called “An Explanation to My Friends.” In it, Durocher
explained that he was available, not being hired was not his idea,
and that since he lived in Beverly Hills, why, the job of the
expansion Angels or the Dodgers would suit him just fine, thank
you.

Angels owner Gene Autry, a decent man, wanted
nothing to do with Durocher and hired Bill Rigney. Walter O’Malley,
who was not a particularly decent man, wanted to steal some thunder
from the Angels when the team moved into Dodger Stadium. He hired
Durocher as a “celebrity coach.”

“Though Alston had nothing to do with Leo’s
appointment, he was solicited to make the announcement,” wrote
Durslag. “After a flight from Darrtown to California, he had the
privilege of revealing to the world the newest candidate for his
job.”

Whenever the club performed below expectations,
Alston was allowed to twist in the wind amid rumors of Durocher’s
impending hiring. “The Dodgers never plan to fire Alston,” said one
observer. “They prefer to torment him.”

Durocher got tired of Durslag’s constant lobbying
for Leo and rebuked him, saying, “You’re pretty sensitive about
Durocher’s feelings. What about mine?” But that was rare. Alston
was as stoic as they come.

When the 1962 pennant was blown, the Dodgers’
players were furious over the loss of the $12,000 World Series
share, real money back then. Durocher stoked their insecurities
like Huey Long at a Bayou political rally, portraying Alston as the
man taking food out of their families’ mouths. He was like Javert
in
Les Miserables
, playing the baseball version of
j’accuse
, his goal being Alston’s head under a symbolic
guillotine
.

The Dodgers retained Alston, probably because they
had just set the all-time Major League attendance record. The
strange Kabuki theatre between Alston and Durocher existed until
1964, when after winning a
third
World Series Alston finally
had control of the Dodgers. Durocher, like Napoleon, just went off
to plot his comeback until Chicago came calling in 1966.

Now, on July 8, 1969 he presided over a clubhouse
that had repercussions of that classic Dodger Stadium meltdown
seven years earlier. This time,
he
was on the hot spot.
Unlike Alston, who took it like a man and accepted blame whether he
deserved it or not, Durocher always looked for somebody to blame,
to project his own sins upon. His target: Don Young.

Several of his teammates came by to offer some
condolence to Young, but not Durocher. The atmosphere was toxic.
Young endeavored to dress and leave as soon as possible. One
teammate suggested drinking as the best option. When reporters
confronted Durocher, he exploded.

“That kid in center field,” he told the Chicago
writers. “Two little fly balls. He just stands there watching one,
and he gives up on the other.” A string of obscenities followed;
foul words from a foul man.

“If a man can’t catch a fly ball, you don’t deserve
to win he,” continued Leo, motioning to the dejected Fergie
Jenkins. “Look at him. He threw his heart out. You won’t see a
better-pitched game. And that kid in center field gives it away on
him. It’s a disgrace.”

Ron Santo picked up on his manager’s theme and threw
his teammate “under the bus.” “He was just thinking about himself,
not the team,” he said of Young. “He had a bad day at the bat, so
he’s got his head down. He’s worrying about his batting average and
not the team. All right, he can keep his head down, and he can keep
right on going, out of sight for all I care. We don’t need that
kind of thing.”

Santo fired his spikes against the floor. “I don’t
know who Leo has in mind to play center field, but I hope I can
sell him on Jim Hickman,” he continued, “Any ball Jim reaches, you
can bet your money he’ll hold onto.”

Santo was on a roll. “It’s ridiculous,” he stated.
“There’s no way the Mets can beat us. Just no way. It’s a shame
losing to an infield like that. Why, I wouldn’t let that infield
play in Tacoma.”

Jenkins showed class, unlike Durocher or Santo.
“With all those people on a bright day, the center fielder is in a
constant battle with the sun,” he said. “I thought Young recovered
quickly. After all, he had to find it before he could chase
it.”

That night, Young returned to his hotel room at the
Waldorf-Astoria and, as advised, did a “little bit o’ drinkin’ ”
with teammate Rich Nye. Aside from his fielding blunders, Young’s
batting average at this point in the 1969 season was a measly .228.
Chicago sportswriter Rich Talley called him on the phone to ask
whether he lost the ball in the sun? Did his two strikeouts and two
pop outs affect him on defense, as Santo alleged?

“No,” said Young. “I just lost the game for us.
That’s all.”

Talley’s column of July 9 read: “Young has a history
of ‘getting down’ on himself. He is not a confident ballplayer. He
has been happy with the Cubs, but never quite believed it and
always seemed to be wondering when it was going to end. It may have
ended yesterday.”

****

That night, the Yankees lost the second game of a
twi-night doubleheader to fall 19 back of Baltimore. As the Yankees
were trudging back into their desultory clubhouse, the first
edition of the
New York Times
was about to go on sale. The
Mets were the front page story in the “paper of record,” the paper
that publishes, “All the news that’s fit to print.” The
Times
had not even deemed the Mets to be a
sports
story
in their early years, preferring to make the comical
Casey and his quotations a series of features on the art of
losing.

Three years earlier, respected
Times
sportswriter Leonard Koppett wrote a lengthy essay titled, “A
Yankee Dynasty Can Never Come Back” when the Bronx Bombers finished
dead last, 28 1/2 games behind the Orioles. In 1968 the Yankees
appeared to have made a comeback of sorts, but by mid-1969 they
folded their tents. Koppett’s premise, at least for now and for a
number of years to come, was as right as rain.

The previous front page treatment given the Mets by
the
New York Times
had been in 1962, when they lost their
first nine games. This was their first
winning
front page.
It was a glorious day for the Mets and their fans. They were filled
with optimism, having won the first crucial baseball game in their
history, pulling within four games of the Chicago Cubs, a team just
beginning to come apart at the seams.

Scheduled to start the next night: Tom Seaver.

The birth of a true New York Sports Icon

On July 9, 1965, the Houston Astros defeated the New
York Mets for the seventh straight time that season, 6-2, behind a
sensational teenager named Larry Dierker. Houston scored five runs
in the second inning when Mets second baseman Chuck Hiller and
shortstop Roy McMillan made errors.

29 hours and 45 minutes after Lindsey Nelson
announced, “It’s absolute bedlam. You could not believe it. It’s
absolute bedlam,” when Ed Kranepool drove in Cleon Jones to beat
Chicago 4-3, another event occurred which utterly eclipsed that
one. It was at 9:55 P.M. on Wednesday, July 9, the Year of Our Lord
1969. In the pantheon of greatness reserved only for that most
heroic of all heroes, the New York sports superstar; “in the arena”
as Theodore Roosevelt liked to call it, the bright lights of
Broadway, the Great White Way . . . and Shea Stadium illuminating
him in all his splendor; well, he is rare indeed and rarer still is
his debut.

Olivier as
Othello
, the audience gasping in
astonishment at his range.

MacArthur returned from the wars, our freedoms his
gift, our thanks washing over him.

Gehrig telling a full house of sobbing mothers, kids
and grown men that he was the “luckiest man on the face of the
Earth.”

. . .

It started, maybe not as a normal day for George
Thomas Seaver, previously a resident of Fresno, California; a
Marine recruit and student at the University of Southern
California; happily married husband of the former Nancy Lynn
McIntyre; and now popular resident of a pleasant apartment complex
in Bayside, Queens. He knew when he woke up on this morning that
his task would be to stop the angry, talented offensive powerhouse
that was the 1969 Chicago Cubs. He knew he and his team had some
momentum. At 46-34, they trailed Chicago (52-32) by four games. A
win meant three out, a loss five. Simple math.