THE 1969 MIRACLE METS: THE IMPROBABLE STORY OF THE WORLD’S GREATEST UNDERDOG TEAM (61 page)

The cover of the Braves’ game program
featured an Atlanta player descending from a LEM onto a home plate
resting on the Moon, with the legend, “One Step for the Braves, One
Giant Leap for the Southeast.”

The Mets beat the Braves eight of 12 times
in the regular season, but the Braves had a bunch of guys who could
beat you. They were formidable. First baseman Orlando “Cha Cha”
Cepeda had broken up Seaver’s perfect game in 1968, won the N.L.
Most Valuable Player award in 1967, and was the epitome of a clutch
RBI man who hit 22 homers and drove in 88 in 1969. Cepeda was one
of those brash Latino players who always seemed to wear out his
welcome, as he had in San Francisco and St. Louis. Oh, yeah.
Wherever he got traded to, his new team won championships while his
old one watched on the tube.

The Puerto Rican Cepeda was part of the
great flow of players from Puerto Rico, Cuba, Venezuela, Mexico and
the Dominican Republic that followed Roberto Clemente’s successful
entrance into the league in the 1950s. He was a fan favorite in San
Francisco, a bachelor who danced the night away in The City’s Latin
nightclubs. He and Willie Mays did not hit it off. The Benicio Del
Torro-Wesley Snipes
tete-a-tete
in
The Fan
was
loosely based on them. The Giants trade of Cepeda to
El
Birdos
had the immediate effect of transferring power in the
National League from San Francisco to St. Louis. His trade
from
St. Louis effectively made them also-rans, and now here
were the Braves playing October baseball.

Second baseman Felix Millan was a defensive
wizard who turned in some masterful glove work to beat New York
earlier in the season. Catcher Bob Didier was something out of a
noir
movie. If Dan Jenkins wrote about baseball instead of
football, he would have created characters like Didier . . . and
his wife.

Didier was born in Mississippi. His father
coached baseball at Southwest Louisiana State University. Bob
Didier was the walking embodiment of Dixie: Cajun accent,
tobacco-chewing, beer-drinking, good-lookin’ cat with an eye for
the ladies. After an excellent rookie year with the 1969 Braves,
his career never materialized. Like his old man, he became a coach.
He married a beauty queen, but they had an “arrangement.” Bob did
what he wanted to do, she did what she wanted to do. When Didier
was on Billy Martin’s coaching staff at Oakland in the 1980s, she
would wear an eeni-weeni thong bikini, sitting in the lotus
position on top of the home dugout at Phoenix Municipal Stadium
during batting practice before Spring Training games. Slathered in
tanning oil, bronzed to a golden brown, Mrs. Didier was temptation
personified, hotter than the 100-degree Arizona sun she smoked
under, and I don’t mean cigarettes. Asked what she was up to, she
said she was “trolling” for ball players, displaying herself and
her considerable wares not unlike certain ladies in Amsterdam
storefront windows, only her charms were presumably obtained via a
little smooth talk and a shot of tequila. True story.

Outfielder Rico Carty was another Dominican;
a big, muscular man who belied the previous image of Latino players
as wiry middle infield types. He mashed, night and day; .342 in
1969 after recovering from an injury that kept him out all of 1968.
The next year he hit .366. Like Manny Sanguillen, Clemente, and
others from the Caribbean, he swung at everything, lining liners
off walls as if stadiums were pinball machines. He could care less
about Tom Seaver’s reputation. He saw it, he hit it.

Outfielder Felipe Alou was another Dominican
danger. The scouting report on Alou was about the same as Carty: if
the pitch was in the same area code as his bat, he would swing and
likely hit something you could hang your clothes on.

Henry Aaron was out in right field. All he
was, was the all-time greatest home run hitter in history until
Barry Bonds lost his fear of needles. Seaver had
asked Aaron for
his autograph
, having “Bad Henry” sign a copy of his
autobiography,
Hank Aaron RF
: “To Tom Seaver. Sorry we
missed you, Best wishes. Henry Aaron.” “Sorry we missed you” was in
reference to the 1966 draft.

The Braves did it with hitting. Knuckle ball
pitcher Phil Niekro won 23 with a 2.57 ERA. He was tough as nails,
but the rest of the staff were retreads. Pitching is supposed to be
90 percent of the game, and good pitching is supposed to beat good
hitting. The Mets were counting on it, but if there was a team that
could get under their skin – mainly via free swinging – it was the
Braves. They were not like the Giants or the Pirates. Seaver would
challenge those long-ball guys and win the bet. These guys could
not be strategized against. Grote and Seaver could discuss pitch
location to Carty, Alou and Cepeda all morning but it might not
matter. “Bad Henry” was capable of taking Seaver’s mythical
Cooperstown plaque and putting it you-know-where.

The opener was as unpredictable as snowfall
in San Diego. Tom Seaver, fresh as a daisy, with Gil Hodges having
lined up his rotation perfectly, took the mound. Was any pitcher,
ever, hotter at that point in time than Tom Seaver? He had won 10
straight, but they were not just wins. They were masterpieces,
artistic concepts, clinics. He threw so hard “blind people come out
to hear him pitch,” as Reggie Jackson famously said of him. He was
so devastating that Mets fans simply assumed he could throw his hat
on the mound and two hours later another shutout was accomplished.
Grote never moved his glove, Seaver’s control was so good. His
slider was wicked, his curve buckled knees, and his fastball broke
bats. Measly grounders were gobbled up, “can o’ corn” pop-ups
gathered in like so many nuts at harvest. Umpires’ arms shot up
time after time: strike one, strike two,
strike three . . .
and you are outta there!

Batters gave up, as they had when Koufax was
at his best, Gibson took control. It was “good night, Irene.” See
ya. Bye-bye, time. Just avoid embarrassment. Take your strikeout,
your oh-fer, and be glad not all the pitchers were such gods, such
immortals. Seaver was not a pitcher, he was a Hall of Fame plaque
built out of flesh and blood.

So what did this living embodiment of
pitching dominance do in game one? He got hit around like a little
leaguer, his mighty fastball reduced to straight batting practice
fodder. Instead of 99-MPH heat, it came in steady and straight
around 87, or so it seemed. His breaking stuff didn’t. Dennis
Hopper had better control on the set of
Easy Rider
. The
Braves teed off on him. He wound up, dropped, drove; then strained
his neck watching his fielders scramble for Braves line drives and
home runs that traveled so far they needed a stewardess.

It was a perfect example of the very nature
of unpredictability, the human element of sports, why athletics are
so much darn fun. You just never know. It was just like the opener
against the expansion Expos, when Seaver and his “high hopes” were
batted about in a foul barrage of “bad feedback,” in the form of
well-hit shots off Montreal bats.

Oh, one more thing. Seaver was the winning
pitcher. It was that kind of year.

Seaver woke up the night before the opener
with a severe case of Aaron-induced insomnia, rolling around his
bed at the Marriott Hotel. In the morning he ate lightly. For some
reason, Seaver was incredibly nervous pitching in Atlanta. He kept
thinking about “Bad Henry,” how he got him out the first time he
faced him only to give up a homer the next time up. His worst
fears, it turned out, were justified.

It was hot in Atlanta. Seaver and the Mets
battled the summer weather in New York, Chicago, and St. Louis, but
had gotten used to the mild Northern climes of September. Plus the
game started at four for TV, so Seaver was off his usual pattern;
neither a night game nor a day game.

Warming up he felt jerky and panicked. His
mouth was dry. He could not spit. He had this terrible nightmare
that he would wake up in a boxcar in Fresno, packing raisins. Some
wizard would emerge and tell him, “None of it was real, boy. Not
the Mets, not the pennant. Ha, ha.” Rod Serling would be off to the
side and Seaver would be this week’s cautionary tale on
The
Zone
.

Felix Millan stepped to the plate. Seaver
was about as smooth as the parent McFly in
Back to the
Future
. He had no plan, no stuff, nothin’. He tossed up a
batting practice fast ball, hoping it would be over the plate by
chance and that Millan’s liner would be hit at somebody. By no
reason other than luck, really, despite bouncing curves and
throwing fast balls that had Grote leaping out of his crouch, he
somehow retired the side. The Mets scored two runs and Seaver
thought maybe this would be the catalyst, he would recover and be
Tom Seaver
, for God’s sake.

The crowd of more than 50,000 cheered, oddly
puzzled that the man they heard so much about, the man they
expected to dazzle them with this legendary heater and marksmanlike
control, looked like a guy in the Sally League. Seaver struggled,
his body totally discombobulated, and gave a run back in the
second.

In the third Millan jumped on him like a
hobo on a ham sandwich, slapping a “fastball” for a double. His
curve – more like a wrinkle - was like a ball on a tee for Tony
Gonzalez, who roped a double off the wall to tie it. When Aaron
came up, Seaver felt like the
Wehrmacht
general ordered to
“stop Patton at the Rhine” despite a lack of gas or ammunition.
Double off the wall, 3-2.

With the bases loaded, he got lucky when Bob
Didier missed a fast ball down main street for a strikeout. But
Niekro was no more effective. The pundits had seen the two best
pitchers in the league and predicted a low-scoring affair, but
Harrelson got a cheap hit and they scored two cheap runs to take a
cheap 4-3 lead.

As Slim Pickens once said in
Blazing
Saddles
, “What in the wide, wide world of sports is goin’ on
here?”

In the fourth Tom changed from the pitching
motion that had earned him success at Fresno City College, the
Alaska Goldpanners, USC, Jacksonville and New York City. Grote came
out and said something like, “Are you out of your mind? What’s the
matter with you? Is this an act? Did gamblers pay you off?”

Gil Hodges turned to Rube Walker as if to
say, “Did you see what I see?” 24 Mets and 25 Braves just looked
out at the car wreck that was Tom Seaver. It was not the beginning
anymore but he was literally choking from nerves. He was the
embodiment of all that athletes despise the most, the man whose
courage fails his team. In the fifth, Seaver threw a “fastball,”
maybe 83 MPH. NASA scientists could not have centered it in Tony
Gonzalez’s kill zone any better than it was. It took off like
Apollo 11, over the left field fence. 4-4.

The game droned on. In the seventh, Seaver
thew a slow curveball to Aaron. It was the kind of pitch he
specialized in when he toiled for the Fresno High junior varsity in
1961. It was slightly less effective than the “deuce” Kevin Costner
throws to Ray Liotta’s “Shoeless Joe” Jackson when they take
batting practice in
Field of Dreams
. Aaron’s homer landed in
the middle of a Civil War battle re-enactment somewhere. 5-4.

Seaver entered the dugout. If anybody still
thought he was “perfect,” he made sure the part about “swearing”
when he said, “I drank beer and swear” was made perfectly clear.
Niekro was still out there in the eighth. His knuckleball was more
like a lame duck. The Mets jumped on it like it was skeet practice,
pushing two runs across. Seaver got up from the on-deck circle,
waiting for the inevitable. Hodges pinch-hit for him with J.C.
Martin. In keeping with the theme of the whole year, Martin hit a
single, driving in two, and an error let a third in. Five runs
scored and the Mets led, 9-5. By nothing less than a miracle,
Seaver stood to be the
winning pitcher
. Somehow, Niekro was
worse than he was.

Ron Taylor entered the game. He was
everything Seaver was not. Effective, good, a worthy big league
pitcher. He closed out the 9-5 win, perhaps the ugliest on record,
with the “great” G. Thomas Seaver credited with the “victory.” Then
again, a win is a win. Truer words have never been spoken. To a
team that had turned losing into an art form like the New York
Mets, this was especially true.

Seaver’s sudden post-season mediocrity was
by no means unheard of. Don Newcombe was a regular season ace for
years, but deemed so unreliable with the chips on the line that
managers went with rookies and second-tier guys instead of him. Don
Drysdale won 25 games for the 1962 Dodgers, but when his team
needed him at the end, exhausted physically and mentally, he
failed. One year earlier, Denny McLain set new standards of
pitching excellence, but got bounced around in his first two World
Series starts against St. Louis.

“We got five runs off Tom Seaver,” Hank
Aaron, slumped before his cubicle, said disconsolately to the
writers. “That should win it for us. There is something wrong.”

“Could there really be ‘Met magic?’ ” one
writer asked him. Henry suggested an anatomical location for the
“Met magic,” but the Braves were stunned. Fate was not on their
side.

Seaver spoke to the press as if he was the
losing pitcher, trying to explain why he had pitched so poorly.
Theories were propounded that he was rusty from not having pitched
between September 27 and October 4. But Seaver had no excuses.

“I tried to control my nerves and I
couldn’t,” he said in a frank confession. “I couldn’t get my
fastball and curve together. It is very hard to explain.”

Seaver thought about it some more. “It rubs
me, it frustrates me,” he continued. “I know what I can do but I
just couldn’t do it. It happens to me all the time, except that the
tension dissipates itself after my first pitch usually . . .