THE 1969 MIRACLE METS: THE IMPROBABLE STORY OF THE WORLD’S GREATEST UNDERDOG TEAM (60 page)

Baseball had seemingly ignored the social
plight of the South, stocking minor leagues with Dixieland teams,
even calling the Atlanta franchise the
Crackers
, for God’s
sake. After Jackie Robinson broke the “color barrier,” they sent
all those black players down there to suffer any manner of
indignities. The Cardinals’ Curt Flood, a gentle soul from a
mixed-race Oakland neighborhood, was shocked at what life was like
there. Even Branch Rickey continued to operate Dodgers farm clubs
in the Deep South. In Spring Training the blacks lived like
refugees on the outskirts of a rural Florida town until Dodgertown
was built in Vero Beach, ostensibly to give them cover.

The really crazy part of this quilt was that
the South was 100 percent Democrat (a century-long reaction to the
Republican Abraham Lincoln). This meant that Jim Crow, the Ku Klux
Klan, George Wallace, Bull Connor, “segregation forever” and the
Confederate flag were all somewhere between official and
de
facto
wings of the same party as Franklin Roosevelt, John and
Bobby Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, and for all practical purposes
Martin Luther King, the ACLU, the NAACP, and the
New York
Times.
Go figure.

In 1966, Georgia elected the racist
Democrat, Lester Maddox as Governor. It was one of the last acts of
the dying, unholy alliance sometimes referred to as “Dixiecrats”
(from Senator Strom Thurmond’s 1948 Presidential campaign). Enter
Jimmy Carter: Annapolis graduate, submarine officer in the Hyman
Rickover nuclear Navy, peanut farmer, liberal Democrat (but
considered conservative by 1960s standards). He was elected
Governor of Georgia in 1970.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 had really
kicked in by then, giving blacks the vote. Carter courted blacks
like they were his best friends. He was a born again Christian,
determined to treat others as he would have them treat him. The
entire racial-social dynamics of the Republican and Democrat
Parties headed toward a paradigm shift. Atlanta became the face of
the “New South.” A decade later the leader of the KKK, David Duke,
used modern public relations and advertising methods to “sell” his
message. 26 years after Carter’s election, the Olympics, the
ultimate multi-cultural event, came to Atlanta. Every major
Southern city acquired successful professional sports franchises.
Black athletes became heroes. Blacks were elected to state,
Federal, and to Mayoral offices.

The South went to the GOP. Three
Southerners, at least according to voter registration, held the
Presidency (LBJ, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, Texas; Bill
Clinton, Arkansas); two held the Vice-Presidency (LBJ, Texas; Al
Gore, Tennessee); not to mention a border state (V.P. Spiro Agnew,
Maryland). Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon of California derived
some of their strongest support from the South. The “Southern
strategy” swung the 1968 election to Richard Nixon. Ronald Reagan
opened his 1980 run in Mississippi. Southern evangelism became the
dominant religious influence in this nation. Major corporations
filled the skylines of Southern downtown’s, which became economic
hubs.

Jeff Prugh, the
L.A. Times’
beat
writer who covered the seminal 1970 USC-Alabama game in 1970, later
became the
Times’
Atlanta bureau chief. He said that the
difference he saw in the South between 1970 and 1978, when USC
returned to play at Birmingham, was cataclysmic. It can be said
that the South made a greater social change for the better than any
region in a similar period of time in all the history of Mankind.
They did not change when they were beaten in a war and a “way of
life” was shoved down their throats by fiat. They did it on their
own, by their own free will. It was a change of hearts, minds and
souls.

“I also found that by the late 1970s,
Atlanta had black political leadership,” said Prugh. “At first,
people cut black politicians a break because they wanted to be fair
out of historical context. But over time, they demanded
accountability. I found out that Atlanta – white and black – could
be corrupt like anyplace else. In a strange way, the fact that
Atlantans demanded accountability from black political leaders told
me that change had taken place, and it happened faster than I ever
imagined it could have.”

The social/political dynamic of Atlanta was
also exploited in great detail in Tom Wolfe’s 1998 book,
A Man
in Full
. In that book, a complete transformation of Southern
society was dissected in biting detail by the satirist Wolfe,
author of
The Right Stuff
. In
A Man in Full
, blacks
are elevated to the highest status despite being quasi-criminals
while hard-working whites – pillars of the community – find
themselves blamed and framed for most social ills.

****

In October of 1969, a well-equipped army of
Braves awaited the Mets in the hostile land of Atlanta, Georgia.
The fact that the Atlanta Braves met the New York Mets in the 1969
National League Championship Series was ironic on many levels.
First, there was the Tom Seaver connection. It was the Braves who
drafted USC’s Seaver in 1966; the Mets who scooped him up when the
Braves made perhaps the biggest mistake in that franchise’s
history.

Had Seaver been a Brave between 1967 and
1969, Atlanta may well have won National League pennants. The 1969
Braves, adding Seaver’s 25 wins to the 93 they did achieve, would
have been one of the best teams in history and may well have gone
all the way. The club probably would have had a successful decade
after that instead of getting lost in the wilderness until
1991.

Then there was Hank Aaron, the man Tom
Seaver “chose” as his favorite baseball player. Seaver was awed to
face “Bad Henry,” and to be his teammate in All-Star Games. Plus,
there was the “Mobile connection.” No less than
four
residents of Mobile, Alabama were participating. Aaron and his
brother, Tommie, who was close friends with Cleon Jones and Tommie
Agee. To top it all off, the N.L.’s MVP that year, Willie McCovey
was from Mobile.

There were also the strange social
contrasts. First, the Braves’ franchise was presumably named after
Indian tribes in Massachusetts (?), or perhaps because the Boston
Tea Party dressed themselves as Indians. This name followed them to
Milwaukee and Georgia, where other Indian tribes in both states
made the name stick in a way that “Lakers” might not have been
quite right for the desert that is Los Angeles.

This was a franchise that went from the
bastion of the Union during the Civil War to the symbol of the
Confederacy, the town famously burned in
Gone With the Wind
.
A liberal Northeastern city to a conservative Southeastern one.
From Irish Catholic to Southern Baptist, with the base of the
anti-Communist Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy in between. A
franchise in search of an identity. It was the first time a
Southern city hosted post-season baseball, featuring two cities
that might as well have been in different countries; not to
mention, they seemed headed in different directions.

Manager Gil Hodges faced the baseball
version of Union General William T. Sherman’s task in 1864-65,
which was to enter the state of Georgia, wreak havoc, and thus
achieve ultimate victory. By 1864, the Civil War had been going on
for three years and people were sick of it. In 1863, after the
Union won at Gettysburgh, there was no chance of Confederate
victory. The South continued to fight; out of pride, and also
hoping a political settlement could be agreed to that would allow
them to maintain their “way of life.” Slavery was outlawed on
January 1, 1863, so that was out of the question, but perhaps some
kind of autonomy.

President Abraham Lincoln was determined to
achieve total victory. He needed it to demonstrate the war meant
something other than a waste of lives resulting in stalemate.
Unpopular, he faced a losing re-election bid in 1864. Lincoln
turned to Sherman, who proposed a risky invasion plan of Georgia.
Sherman had almost resigned, but was talked into sticking out his
commission by General U.S. Grant, who faced a similar low point
during the early part of the conflict. Most of Lincoln’s advisors
warned that Sherman’s “march to the sea” through Georgia was
fraught with peril, but Lincoln needed a splash, a victory – or at
least light at the end of a long tunnel – in order to win
re-election in 1864. He gave Sherman the go-ahead.

“I’ll make Georgia howl,” Sherman famously
told the President. He did just that, cutting a swath through the
Confederacy that brought the South to its collective knees. Part of
Atlanta was burned. Crops were destroyed. All chance at resistance
was obliterated and victory was attained, finally. Sherman is
viewed through history as a hero by some, a terrorist in the South.
The details of his march indicate he was no terrorist, as many of
the “atrocities” were exaggerated over a century of Southern
mythmaking. Nevertheless, he represented all that the South
resented about the North.

The South hated Northern, i.e.,
government
meddling with their “states’ rights.” Sporting
events between Southern and Northern teams always carried with it a
political and social edge: the 1956 USC-Texas football game; the
1966 “Catholic vote” that awarded Notre Dame the National
Championship over Alabama, just to name two events. But most of
these athletic contests were college games, infused by the local
pride that comes with seeing players, mostly from the same
geographical region, play against young men representing another
region.

The 1969 Mets-Braves match-up did not have
that. New York featured the two “Mobile boys,” although that
carried certain connotations. Tommie Agee and Cleon Jones left a
segregated world to enter pro baseball, eventually ending up in the
most diverse of all cities, New York. The Georgia they found in
1969 was legally integrated, but their “hearts and minds” were
still struggling to get there.

The Braves featured blacks and Latinos aplenty, from
south of the border, from the American North and South. Their fans
were not quite sure how to deal with this “Brave” new world, but
they did know that the “magic” team coming to play them wore shirts
that read “NEW YORK” on them. That was enough to fire them up.

Gil Hodges had no intention of burning
cities, pillaging villages, or destroying crops, but he needed to
replicate Sherman’s “march to the sea” in the baseball sense if he
intended to win this “war.”

All the social angst and history lessons
revolving around the Braves’ franchise and the city of Atlanta
could not compare to the bizarre nature of the games themselves.
The Mets might have been nominal favorites, since they won seven
more regular season games and had the pitching. Despite their
success, installing the Mets as favorites - anytime, anywhere - was
a hard concept to grasp. Atlanta was a 13-10 favorite, despite the
fact that Seaver was 3-0 vs. the Braves, while Atlanta ace Phil
Niekro was 0-3 against them. Atlanta had finished 93-69, but they
were just as hot towards the end as New York (17 of their last 21,
almost every one of them clutch). It was possible that the Braves
were worn out from their West Division death struggle with San
Francisco, Cincinnati, L.A. and Houston. This always brings up the
debate, which is whether it is better to coast in, as the Mets had
basically done, or to come in all hot ‘n’ bothered, as the Braves
still were.

“Let’s get one thing straight at the start,”
79-year old Casey Stengel stated. “The Mets will play all the way
to the end of the World Series because they have more pitchers and
they throw lightning. And you can look it up, that’s best for a
short series . . .”

Stengel clarified his “all the way to the
end of the World Series” statement. “Don’t forget, I say it goes
the limit to the World Series for the Mets.”

A three-game sweep did not seem likely, but
since New York had won 38 of 49, the heat of their momentum did not
make that such an impossibility. What made the series bizarre was
the complete lack of adherence to form. The Mets were a
light-hitting team, winners of 1-0 and 2-1 games. They did it with
pitching, speed and defense. Their pitching was 90 percent of their
success. If their pitching failed, they would fail.

“Our attitude going in the series was that
we just didn’t want to get embarrassed,” said Swoboda.

Their pitching failed. They still swept the
series.
Amazin’.

The 1969 post-season was a first in a number
of ways. The advent of play-offs coincided with what by then was
universal color television. Over the course of the decade, baseball
and other sports revolutionized via color TV. Many people had old
back-and-white sets, but by 1969 most had color. The play-offs
opened on a Saturday, meaning it was a sports extravaganza. Some
felt ratings would suffer all the way around, since viewers would
be forced to choose between two baseball games (Baltimore and
Minnesota in the early play-off), meaningful college football (the
conferences were in full swing), and on Sunday the NFL.

The Mets opened in a place where college
football has been called “religion.” Atlantans had transistor
radios pressed to their ears during the baseball games, listening
to Georgia beating South Carolina, 41-16; Clemson knocking off
Georgia Tech, 21-10; and on Sunday the Falcons losing to Baltimore,
21-14. The lobby of the Regency Hyatt House featured a band and
majorettes. Television interviewees featured mostly college
football coaches.

Most people still needed to physically get
up to change stations, unlike the “channel surfing” that goes on
today, but the combination of sports was and would continue to be a
huge success. Stadiums were full, ratings good. Football seemed to
play off of baseball, and vice-versa. One thing was for sure:
baseball had not taken a back seat to football, as people feared it
would in 1968.