THE 1969 MIRACLE METS: THE IMPROBABLE STORY OF THE WORLD’S GREATEST UNDERDOG TEAM (62 page)

“I was more tense than usual and more
nervous. It’s a progressive thing that happens to me all the time .
. . but today my state mentally led me to rush my pitching motion
physically. My hips were more open when I was throwing the ball and
my arm dropped lower. Jerry came out to the mound several times and
told me to get my arm back higher. It just seemed that I couldn’t
throw that many good pitches in a row. Some of them were good, and
I guess that’s what made me keep my sanity. The crux of the whole
thing, though, was that I just felt more nervous than usual.”

Then Seaver smiled. “Mind if I ask a
question?” he said to a reporter.

“Feel free,” was the reply.

“Who won?” Seaver asked rhetorically, and
everybody chuckled. He had a point. Then Seaver stood up and
announced, “I gave up five runs and still won the game. God truly
is a Met.” It was a variation on a theme gaining more support
daily.

So what happened in game two? Jerry Koosman,
every bit Seaver’s equal down the stretch, came on and blew Atlanta
away with a brilliant display, right? Wrong. He was worse than
Seaver, and yes, the Mets
won anyway.

Another huge crowd showed up at
Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium to see Koosman square off with
18-game winner Rick Reed. Atlanta was shakier than the Mets, making
three costly errors in an 11-6 loss. New York knocked Reed out
early and took a seemingly insurmountable 8-0 lead in the fourth,
9-1 in the fifth. All that was left was to watch Koosman cruise
along and complete his October masterpiece, but after the Braves
nicked him for a run in the fourth they scored five in the fifth,
all after the first two Braves had been retired. Aaron homered, but
after that Koosman came totally unglued; a walk, a double, and that
was just the beginning. Hodges was forced to relieve him before he
could get the required five innings to get credit for the victory,
bringing in Taylor. Koosman’s line was poor: 4 2/3 innings, sevens
hits, six runs (all earned). Aaron went yard on him. It was a
terribly sloppy game. The Mets made physical and mental mistakes,
but Atlanta played like bush leaguers; missed cut-offs, throwing to
the wrong base.

Suddenly, with the game not yet half over, a
blowout had become “nervous Nellie” time. In the seventh inning,
with New York hanging on with a 9-6 advantage, Agee was on third
with Jones at bat. Cecil Upshaw, a side-arming right-handed
reliever, delivered while Agee took off for home plate. Jones took
a mighty cut and hit a searing line drive that missed Agee’s head
by a foot.

Some people thought it was a missed sign, a
mix-up in which either Agee thought he got the steal sign, or a
“suicide squeeze” sign missed by Jones. Oddly, it was neither. Agee
went on his own. Jones claimed he swung, intentionally trying to
miss to “keep the catcher occupied.” Agee could have been killed.
They just stood and glared at each other after the play, too
stunned to contemplate what could have been. In this year of “Met
magic” the ball missed him. Of course Jones then homered to make it
11-6, which stood up. Taylor got the win. McGraw came in, shut the
door and picked up the save.

The Mets had played poor, sloppy ball two
days in a row. Their two aces had been hit around. They still led
two games to none and were headed home. Their bright spot had been
their bats, a real surprise.

“We’ve got one foot in the grave and the
gravediggers are going for their shovels,” said Atlanta manager
Luman Harris.

“The Mets are unconscious,” said Braves
third baseman Clete Boyer, a veteran of many Octobers with the
Yankees. “They don’t know where they are. They don’t understand the
pressure.” Hank Aaron, for instance, had been to two World Series
early in his career (1957-58), then struggled for 11 seasons to get
back, only to be denied by these upstarts.

The flight from Atlanta to New York was
“sweet,” according to Art Shamsky. The Mets were one win away from
the
World Series
. The creation of the play-offs had
disrupted the usual routine, whereby a team won the league, as New
York would have done with the best record absent divisions. They
had not allowed themselves to think such a thing. The Series, the
highest mountaintop in sports. Just like Joe Namath’s Jets in the
Super Bowl. The Jets’ victory over Baltimore had
made
the
Super Bowl what it is today. The World Series was the ultimate
sporting event long before the Mets sniffed it.

When the team arrived in New York City, the
excitement was off the charts. Every radio and TV program featured
the Mets. The newspapers could not get enough of them. Every little
detail was covered. Students, teachers, parents, cabbies,
bartenders, waitresses, corporate execs, whites, blacks, Puerto
Ricans, gays, straights, hardhats, Republicans, Democrats;
everybody
was taken with a full case of Mets fever.

The third game was played the very next day,
a Monday, with no off day for the Braves to rest or the Mets to
contemplate a sense of reality. It was sunny and cool, a contrast
to the muggy Georgia heat, and more to the Mets’ style. Pat Jarvis
started for Atlanta against Gary Gentry. A frenzied, capacity crowd
arrived hours before the game. Gentry was no more effective
pitching at home than Seaver or Koosman on the road. It was the
same kind of sloppy game, with the lead changing hands three times
on homers in the first five innings. Cepeda went deep. Agee and
Boswell homered for New York.

Gentry never made it out of the third
inning. Hank Aaron, playing on national television, had one of the
best play-off series of all time in 1969. It is not remembered
because his team could not win, but he was red hot, homering again
in the third game, this time off of Gentry. This game might be
considered the “debut” of Nolan Ryan, the first time he displayed
his true brilliance, also on national television. Atlanta took a
4-3 lead, but Ryan pitched out of a bases load jam to hold it down.
In the fifth, Ryan got a
hit
. Then Wayne Garrett homered.
Ryan pitched the last seven innings, giving up just two runs on
three hits in the 7-4 victory. The last out was a grounder to
Garrett, who threw to Kranepool and the Mets were the champions of
the National League, three games to none in what in those days was
a best-of-three N.L.C.S. format.

“When Nolan pitched those great seven
innings of relief, it was huge,” said Koosman. “It gave us another
guy on our roster that we could go to with confidence, another body
developed on our ball club. Nolan had been up and down all year,
his season interrupted by both injury and military service. But Gil
was doing these things throughout the year, showing us how to play
the game, and because of him we found out we were capable of doing
more than we knew we could.”

“Our pitching got battered in that series,
but it was amazing the way we outhit them,” said Swoboda. “Gil
stuck to his guns and platooned, so I didn’t get a single at-bat in
the Atlanta series because of their predominantly right-handed
pitching.” The Mets, he said, “weren’t great players who will go on
to the Hall of Fame,” but “just guys who made themselves
useful.”

Ryan was “untouchable,” added Koosman. “It
was a laughing matter. Every pitch he threw was intimidating.”

It was also an example of Hodges’s playing
all the right hunches in this year of magic. He kept Ryan in the
game instead of pinch-hitting for him and did not remove Garrett
when he faced left-hander George Stone. Everything paid off. It was
amazin’. 100-to-one longshots, the Mets beat those odds.

“We couldn’t do anything wrong,” said
Koosman. “We couldn’t lose a game.”

“The Mets really are amazing,” said a
gracious Hank Aaron, who no longer told writers what kinds of
physical contortions they could do with “Met magic.”

“We ought to send the Mets to Vietnam,” said
Atlanta general manager Paul Richards. “They’d end the war in three
days.” They had taken care of Atlanta faster than General Sherman
had.

Thousands of fans poured onto the field,
tearing everything up, undoing all the work done by the groundscrew
after the division clinching of September 24. It was absolutely out
of control; a wild, chaotic, celebratory scene infused by an utter
sense of disbelief. People grabbed each other, asked whether they
could believe it, was it real, how did it happen? In bars and homes
and schoolrooms all over the city, the state and the nation, people
cheered and expressed jubilation and total shock. It was
unreal.

The clubhouse was a mad scene of champagne
mixed with
machismo
and near-religious awe, grown men
rendered unable to contemplate the glory of it all. Into this mix
arrived Mayor Lindsay, presumably wearing a suit he had chosen as
one he could afford to get messy, because the bubbly was flowing
and spurting in every direction.

“I poured the champagne on him and Grote was
scrubbing his head,” recalled Rod Gaspar. “I got in the limelight
doing it and it helped get him re-elected.”

When Mrs. Payson entered the clubhouse, she
was intimidated, smiled and left before taking a champagne shower.
Writers struggled to get quotes and protect their notepads amid the
sea of champagne. The celebration lasted for three hours. It was a
day game, so the press had enough time to delve into every story
without being rushed by a deadline. When the players finally
showered and dressed, 5,000 fans were waiting for them in the
parking lot area beyond right field.

In Manhattan, mass hysteria was the order of
the day. Churches were filled with people praying for miracles,
because the Mets were living proof of such things. Men and women
kissed each other on the streets like those old V-J Day photos.
Bars were filled, confetti dropped from office buildings, Wall
Street awash with people dancing in the streets. Bus boys and
corporate chieftains shared the glory equally. Probably because
baseball is a game played daily, in which victory builds over time,
each step on top of the other, the reaction by the city was even
more spectacular and spread over a longer time than it had been for
the Jets. It was a miracle. It was amazin’.

Lindsay’s re-election probably could be
traced to the next day’s front-page pictures showing him doused in
champagne by Grote and Gaspar. He attached himself to every public
celebration of the team. Angst over racial strife, Vietnam and New
York’s fiscal crisis faded in light of the Mets’ victory. Union
members found common ground with city negotiators.

“They beat the hell out of us,” said Luman
Harris.

“Now I’ve done it all,” said first base
coach Yogi Berra. “I’ve played, managed, and now will coach in a
World Series. That is all, isn’t it?”

“I had them a lot of times
this year, but this was the greatest thrill,” said umpire Ed Sudol.
“They’re appropriately named the Amazin’ Mets. They’ve come from
the depths of despair to the celestial. I studied literature and
made that up myself.”

“The team has come along slow, but fast,”
was Casey Stengel’s inimitable description.

“We’re gonna beat Baltimore and then I’m
goin’ fishin’,” said Cleon Jones of their World Series
opponents.

“We’ve come this far, we might as well fool
the whole world, including Baltimore,” said Buddy Harrelson.

“I’ll walk down the street in New York now
and people will say, there’s Art Shamsky of the Mets,” Shamsky was
quoted in the
New York Daily News
. “People used to laugh.
They won’t anymore.”

“After beating Atlanta, I think the Mets had
a feeling they could beat anybody,” recalled Ralph Kiner.

“The Mets made people care again,” wrote
Larry Merchant in the
New York Post
. “They hadn’t for so
long, they had forgotten they once did.”

“We were being toasted by Mayor Lindsay,
Governor Rockefeller, and it was exciting,” recalled
Swoboda. “Everything was happening at Shea.”

“The tension of the world was on us,” said
Koosman. “Everybody wanted to be on the bandwagon. Rockefeller and
Lindsay and numerous big names were suddenly appearing in our
clubhouse.”

New York did it by slugging the ball. In the
Championship Series, Agee hit .357, Jones .429, Shamsky .538,
Garrett .385, and Boswell .333.

“The play-off series against the Braves was
one of the few times our pitchers had faltered like that and
allowed an unusual number of runs,” said Ed Charles.

Certainly, the Atlanta series was important
because it allowed the entire team to truly share in the incredible
run. Until that time, there was a strong sense that New York was an
updated version of the 1948 Braves: “Spahn and Sain and pray for
rain.” Call them
“Seaver, Koosman or lose ‘em.” It separates them from the Dodgers
of the mid-1960s, who won pennants and World Series on dominant
pitching with little else. The Mets were – and after this series it
was very apparent – a
team
. Seaver, the king of the hill,
their hero who stood head and shoulders
above
his teammates,
had been picked up
by
them when he finally faltered.

“The feeling of having clinched the pennant
was great, especially because none of us had ever been there
before,” said Harrelson. “We knew we would have a very tough nut to
crack in the World Series, but there was a feeling of momentum
building among us. It was almost spiritual, that we were just
moving forward to the next place, that it was meant to be.”

God may not have been a Met, but He was
looking to by some Manhattan real estate.

25 groundskeepers immediately went to work
on the Shea Stadium turf, described by one writer as resembling a
“World War I battlefield.” Because the Mets had made it to the
post-season, the Jets had to play a “home game” in Houston instead
of the baseball-occupied Shea. Also, the week in between the
play-offs and World Series, the New York Knickerbockers won their
fifth exhibition game in preparation for the 1969-70 NBA
season.