THE 1969 MIRACLE METS: THE IMPROBABLE STORY OF THE WORLD’S GREATEST UNDERDOG TEAM (63 page)

Despite all the joy over the Mets, life went
on. A big dose of reality was the bombing of the Army Induction
Center in lower Manhattan, the site of so-called “pacifist”
demonstrations over previous months.

“So David prevailed over the Philistine
with a sling and with a stone, and smote the Philistine, and slew
him; but
there
was no sword in the hand of David.”

The Chosen People escaped Egypt, wandered in
the wilderness, invaded the land of Canaan, and over time prevailed
in battle with the Midianites and other dwellers of the land of
Israel. Among those were the Philistines, probably pre-cursors to
the modern Palestinians. They controlled the land and were
determined to destroy the Jews. They featured a giant warrior named
Goliath, and appeared formidable.

A mere boy named David stepped forth to do
battle with Goliath. Against all odds, he slung a rock from a
sling, slaying Goliath, and leading his people to victory. Just
like the ancient Jews, the 1969 New York Mets had emerged from a
seven-year wilderness, invaded Chicago, prevailing in battle with
the Giants, Pirates, Braves and other dwellers of the land of the
National League. Now they faced a modern Goliath: the Baltimore
Orioles.

Poor Baltimore, Maryland. Talk about an
inferiority complex. Baltimore was an established American port.
Then the Founding Fathers decided to move the capitol from New York
City to a swamp along the Potomac River. New York had everything,
and most important, it was a Northern city. The agrarian South
wanted some recognition, so they decided to build a “Federal city”
in a centrally located place that was half-Northern, half-Southern.
Washington, D.C. was therefore created.

Little old Baltimore, just a day’s carriage
ride away, suddenly found itself in Washington’s shadow. When the
Civil War broke out, Baltimore was like Berlin during the Cold War.
Officially, Maryland and Baltimore were part of the Union, but the
proximity to Virginia, its harbor and a series of waterways, made
it strategically important. Baltimore was said to be “sympathetic”
to the Confederacy. Spies ran rampant in its midst. President
Abraham Lincoln was warned not to set foot there. It was a
de
facto
staging ground for any rebel assault on the capitol,
which found itself more or less “surrounded.” Confederate General
Robert E. Lee schemed of ways in which his Army of Northern
Virginia could take it, and from there capture the capitol. Union
generals knew they needed to defend the Baltimore-Washington
corridor at all costs.

When Lee’s army finally made their move,
Union forces did not meet them in direct battle, but rather
shadowed them, forcing Lee to by-pass Baltimore-Washington and take
on the Union in Gettysburgh, Pennsylvania. When the South fell
there, the war was lost, although it dragged on for almost two more
years.

With the war won, Baltimore had an image
problem to contend with. Many of the conspirators in the Lincoln
assassination had come out of Baltimore. Baltimoreans tried to
revise their history, like the French replacing their German flags
with American ones once somebody else did the liberating. Other
cities were deemed more important in the 19
^th
and early
20
^th
centuries: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and of
course Washington. The West grew, with Chicago, San Francisco and
Los Angeles becoming important hubs of political and economic
concern. There was always something vaguely rebellious about
Baltimore. In the 1920s and 1930s, there was an inordinate amount
of Communist espionage centered in Baltimore, because of its
strategic proximity to D.C.

In the 20
^th
Century, Baltimore
was stuck for the most part in the 19
^th
. There was, as
Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, California, “No there there.” They
had little skyline, not much of a business center. They were not a
town of movers or shakers. Storefronts, some boarded up. It did not
look much like a “city,” rather like a small ante-bellum town. It
was hot as all get-out in the summer; humid, sticky, with giant
mosquitoes. In the winter, the winds blew in cold and freezing off
of Chesapeake Bay.

Baltimore had a lot of blacks, too, because
of its proximity to the New Deal bastion of Washington, and by 1969
there had been many riots. The 1968 Baltimore riots after Martin
Luther King’s assassination were among the nastiest in the
country.

Baltimore was nothing. New York was
everything. Tom Seaver, who always had a touch of elitist in him,
said that his own dusty hometown of “Fresno is Paris compared to
that place.” Other cities had made their mark, or were on the rise.
Among towns previously “conquered” by the New York Mets, Chicago
was still a major metropolis and business hub of the Midwest.
Atlanta was the face of the growing New South, finally ready for an
economic revival after 100 years of “Reconstruction.”

The California cities of Los Angeles and San
Francisco could boast that they had the old New York teams, the
Dodgers and Giants. They were glamour towns of their own, what with
Hollywood, the Golden Gate Bridge, and “California Dreamin’.”

But Baltimore? All they had were their
sports teams.

Baltimore had a baseball team called the
Orioles. They featured a Hall of Fame outfielder named “Wee Willie”
Keeler, who “hit ’em where they ain’t,” and a fiery infielder named
John “Mugsy” McGraw. But when the century turned, and baseball
reconstructed itself in a modern image that now included two
eight-team Major Leagues with a World Series to determine a “World
Champion,” Baltimore found itself left out of the equation. It
became a minor league town, better known for crab cakes and its
neighbor, the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis.

It was a football town. In 1951, the
University of Maryland
should have been
the National
Champions when the unbeaten Terrapins beat Oklahoma in the Sugar
Bowl, but the Associated Press and United Press International
already awarded an illegitimate title to the Sooners
prior
to the bowl game. In 1953, the tables were turned. Maryland’s
“National Championship” was illegitimatized by a loss to the
Sooners in the Orange Bowl.

Basketball was big in the Baltimore area.
The Bullets were popular. Lefty Driesel built a powerhouse at
Maryland. High school hoops were big-time, with the likes of
Cardinal Gibbons and De Matha High Schools emerging as national
powerhouses. In Baltimore proper, an Italian restaurant called Mama
Leone’s sponsored one of the best semi-pro baseball outfits ever.
They produced the likes of Reggie Jackson and Ron Swoboda.

But big league ball was always tenuous.
Washington had the Senators, but they were “first in war, first in
peace, and last in the American League,” but attendance in
Washington was always poor, and over time crime near Griffith
Stadium became intolerable.

In 1961, Griffith took off for Minnesota,
turning the Senators into the Twins. There was enough political
pressure revolving around the need to maintain Our National Pastime
in the District of Columbia to attract Bob Short and a new
expansion franchise, also named the Washington Senators. They
failed miserably, even though Gil Hodges was their manager for a
few years in the mid-1960s.

In 1972, Short moved the Senators to
Arlington, Texas. The South had changed for the better and was the
future. Baseball never returned to Washington until 2005, when the
Montreal Expos moved there and became the Nationals. The
distinctive “W” on their caps, along with the presence of big-time
baseball fan (and former Rangers owner) George W. Bush, led them to
be referred to as the “Dubyas.”

After World War II, pro football expanded.
The National Football League merged with the All-American Football
Conference and expanded to the West Coast. The Baltimore Colts
featured one of the first great African-American stars, Lenny
Moore. Then they acquired little-regarded quarterback named Johnny
Unitas. Johnny U. had grown up in Pittsburgh, one of the first in a
long line of great quarterbacks from western Pennsylvania that
included Joe Namath, Joe Montana, Jim Kelly and Dan Marino. The
unheralded Unitas played at the University of Louisville. The
hometown Steelers took a pass on him, but he managed to make it in
Baltimore.

In 1958, Johnny U. was the best quarterback
in football. He led the Weeb Eubank-coached Colts to the NFL
championship game at Yankee Stadium against Frank Gifford and the
New York Giants. Televised nationally, it has been called the
“greatest game in pro football history,” with Johnny U. leading
Baltimore to a thrilling overtime win. It put Baltimore on the
map.

In the 1960s, Unitas was the best
signal-caller in the game, but Bart Starr’s Green Bay Packers
dominated. When Vince Lombardi left, there was a void, and the
Colts filled it. Unitas, however, had a sore arm and Earl Morrall
led the 1968 Colts to a 13-1 record under youthful head coach Don
Shula. After powering through the NFL Play-Offs, Baltimore was
installed as 18-point favorites over Joe Namath and the New York
Jets in the 1969 Super Bowl.

Namath, however, said any number of AFL
quarterbacks, including himself, were better than Morrall. He
guaranteed a win over the Colts. Just when people thought that New
York had lost its luster, its sense of dominance, here they were
again.
Had nobody reminded the powers that be that the Big
Apple was now rotten to the core, a butt of jokes; dirty,
crime-infested, corrupt, unpatriotic, beset by labor and financial
woes. So yesterday.

The Yankees were has-beens. The Dodgers and
Giants had fled to California, leaving the laughable Mets. The
Knicks were just a team on Boston’s schedule. The Rangers were
barely more than a team on Montreal’s schedule. College football
had long abandoned New York. There were no more Notre Dame-Army
epics.

The Jets? They were a distant third, at the
very best, in a league dominated by Western Division rivals Oakland
and Kansas City. In the old days, victory in the NFL Play-Offs
meant a World Championship, but now the Colts had to get by these
upstarts, who had been lucky to beat Daryle Lamonica and the
Raiders, aided by a hometown freeze in the AFL title game. It
seemed simple enough. Green Bay had done it without breaking a
sweat the previous two years.

Namath was right. The Jets did win, 16-7; he
and any number of AFL quarterbacks were better than Morrall. The
Jets’ win crushed the fragile sports ego of Baltimoreans. It was
bad enough that it had come against the brash Namath, but
New
York!?
When Namath whipped the Colts in Miami, it was more than
a football defeat. It marked bitter humiliation. The one thing they
were better at than New Yorkers, they had lost in brutal fashion.
It was like Alabama losing to Harvard. New York had
everything!

There were several two-team cities in
baseball, but by the 1950s the concept seemed a failed one. In
Chicago, the Cubs were more popular than the White Sox. In New
York, the Yankees finally won a seeming “war of attrition,” driving
the Dodgers and Giants out of the state. In Boston, the Braves –
despite winning the World Series as late as 1948 – made for the
friendly confines of Milwaukee. In Philadelphia, the Phillies
stayed but the A’s – a vastly superior team on the field in the
early years, but a dud of late – took off for Kansas City in
1955.

Then there was St. Louis. The Cardinals
owned
the town. They epitomized baseball. Their players were
gods, their image one of success and colorful characters. They were
champions who put the town on the map. They also shared Sportsman’s
Park with the lowly St. Louis Browns.

Of all the American League teams who were
mere cannon fodder of the lordly Yankees, none were less
competitive than the Browns. They were just someone for
Philadelphia, Boston, Detroit and especially New York to fatten up
their statistics on for off-season contractual negotiations.

There were a few bright spots. Branch Rickey
managed the Browns. George Sisler was his first baseman, and he was
fabulous, except that he played at the same time as Lou Gehrig,
which is like trying to win a science fair competition against
Albert Einstein.

The Browns managed to win the 1944 American
League pennant, but even that was a laugh. So many players were
serving in the war that the Browns won it only because their roster
was loaded with old-timers deemed unfit for military service. To
make matters worse, they lost to the
Cardinals
in the World
Series.

The Browns were ready to move to Los
Angeles. On December 7, 1941 they were all set to make the
announcement. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, that plan was
set aside, and the West Coast was deemed off-limits. But after the
1953 season, the 54-100 St. Louis Browns had had enough. They moved
to Baltimore.

In 1954, the new Baltimore Orioles were . .
. 54-100. They played at Memorial Stadium, which was okay for
football but always looked like a minor league baseball facility.
Baltimore was “Colts country.” Johnny U. owned the town. Throughout
the 1950s and early 1960s, the Orioles made steady improvement.
Their mastermind was Paul Richards, a hard-nosed, an old school guy
with new ideas about how to develop a farm system and a contender.
Years before Billy Beane and
Moneyball
, Richards was an
innovator who made key trades, always looking to improve his team
with in-season moves and key rookies.

He was not to be trifled with. During Spring
Training in Miami, 1961, the Orioles had a particularly rowdy group
of testosterone-filled youngsters. This included three wild
left-handers, both on and off the field. Steve Barber was a
hard-throwing prospect. Steve Dalkowski was a legend. He was short,
squat, wore horn-rimmed glasses, and did not look like an athlete.
He was also said to have thrown upwards of 110 miles an hour. Years
later, Tom Seaver said he was the hardest-throwing pitcher who ever
lived; and Seaver never saw him throw. Such was his legend that
old-timers swear he threw faster than Nolan Ryan, Bob Feller, Sandy
Koufax, or any name. The Orioles took him to the Aberdeen Proving
Grounds to have Army machines record the speed of his pitches, but
he was so erratic he could not get the ball into the zone necessary
for the equipment to properly record it.