THE 1969 MIRACLE METS: THE IMPROBABLE STORY OF THE WORLD’S GREATEST UNDERDOG TEAM (75 page)

“I remember being tongue-tied and on the
verge of tears,” recalled Koosman. “There was so much emotion I
didn’t even think about the magnitude of our achievement, about the
great upset and coming from nowhere. We were just so happy that we
had reached that point. “

“It’s beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, what
else can I say?” yelled Seaver. “It’s my biggest thrill. The club
played to win all year long. We never quit. We’d come from behind
to win. We did it today.” He added that pitching with this team,
with these teammates, was “a pleasure.”

“I never heard anyone on the Baltimore team
say we were lucky,” said Buddy Harrelson. “They took it like men
and just said the bastards beat us.” History would judge that they
were ultimately champions, too, but this was not the day.

In five games, Baltimore collected 23 hits
and batted .146. They scored nine runs. New York only hit .220, but
scored 15, mostly in the clutch. Form played out, unlike the
Championship Series: New York had a1.80 ERA for the Series.
Baltimore’s staff was still an excellent 2.72.

“It was just one of the magical moments that
can never be duplicated,” wrote Bill Gutman.

“So, at last, we came to the final game, and
I don’t suppose many of us who had watched the Mets through this
long and memorable season much doubted that they would win it, even
when they fell behind, 0-3, on home runs by Dave McNally and Frank
Robinson off Koosman in the third inning,” wrote the redoubtable
Roger Angell, perhaps the best of all Mets chroniclers. The
Orioles, he added, suffered from “badly frayed nerves.” One fan
produced a sign that read, “WHAT NEXT?” Angell said he had no
answer, describing Shea as “crazily leaping crowds, the showers of
noise and paper, the vermilion smoke-bomb clouds, and the vanishing
lawn signs . . .” They won it with “the Irregulars” (Weis’s
first-ever homer at Shea, as if he had a plethora of long balls in
other parks; Clendenon and Swoboda). They combined to hit .400 with
four homers and eight RBIs. Powell and the Robby’s were held to a
.163 average, one homer and a single RBI.

Defensive plays that “some of us would
remember for the rest of our lives” gave the “evident conviction
that the year should not be permitted to end in boredom” (Angell’s
chapter on the 1969 Mets was called, “Days and Nights with the
Unbored” in
The Summer Game
.)

He was prescient, too, acknowledging the
“awareness of the accompanying sadness of the victory – the
knowledge that adulation and money and winter disbanding of this
true club would mean that the young Mets were now gone
forever.”

“This is the first time,” said Swoboda (amid
Moet et Chandon). “Nothing can ever be as sweet again.”

Pearl Bailey came in the clubhouse and
planted a big kiss on Koosman, which his teammates thought was more
than just a little bit friendly on her part. She had predicted the
“number eight.” The score: 5-3. Supposedly, Jones gave the final
out ball to Koosman, but that has been an on-going question over
the years.

“
If the Mets can win the
World Series, we can get out of Vietnam,” Seaver said in the
clubhouse. “I just decided to say it,” he later told Shamsky.
“History proved that they couldn’t figure a way politically to get
out.”

In the corridor outside the clubhouse,
Seaver met with Nancy, his father and family. “We’ll never forget
this day,” said Charles Seaver. “None of us will.”

“
Who’s stupid now?” Gaspar
said to anybody who would listen. Somebody asked Yogi Berra if it
was “over now?” Berra said he did not actually know how many World
Series rings he now had. “Too many for my fingers,” he said. Poor
Ernie Banks, on the other hand, had never played meaningful October
baseball! The post-game celebration was “the best in the history of
baseball, and probably will never be duplicated,” recalled Ralph
Kiner.

“No team ever drank, spilled and wasted as
much champagne as the Mets who, within a space of little more than
three weeks, had three clinchings to celebrate as they won first
the East Division championship, then the National League
championship, and finally the big one,” wrote Jack Lang, who
maintained that “through it all, the calmest man in all the world
was Gil Hodges . . .”

“I was able to bring a championship back to
the greatest fans in the world,” said Hodges.

The MVP of the Series could have been
Seaver, Koosman, Weis, Jones or Swoboda. Clendenon won it, having
hit three long balls. What a team effort! The city continued to go
wild. Ken Boswell invited all Mets fans to the team party at Mr.
Laffs, a well known sports bar on First Avenue in Manhattan where
ex-player Phil Linz tended bar. A couple thousand showed up.

On Broadway, at the Copa, Toots Shors, P.J.
Clarkes, 21, Jilly’s, the Forum of the Twelve Caesars, McSorley’s
Old Ale House, Eamonn’s, the Central Bar, the Latin Quarter;
everywhere in Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx; in Westchester
County, Long Island, way out on The Hamptons; in Albany, upstate,
in western New York, in Rochester and Buffalo; in Connecticut and
Jersey, from the shore and all over the Garden State; it was a
celebration. From Wall Street to Main Street, America was “Mets
country.” “In country,” which was what the GIs called Vietnam, word
spread, and unless you from Baltimore, the Mets were the toasts of
Saigon, Hue and N’Trang. From Paris to London to Berlin,
ex-patriate New Yorkers celebrated and Europe now knew about the
Mets.

First Avenue was blocked off. Only one lane
could get north to 64
^th
and First. People were dancing
in the streets. Car horns blasted all over the city. Confetti was
everywhere. All bars and restaurants celebrated. Mobsters partied
with prosecutors. Gays toasted hard hats. Blacks and whites, Jews
and Gentiles, Puerto Ricans and Orientals, young and old, Democrats
and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, Christians, atheists,
Israelis and Arabs all cheered each other; again. Even Yankees
fans, people who thought baseball was boring, men and women –
especially men and won - celebrated long into the night. “Luck,” as
Sinatra sang, “is a lady tonight.”

“Never before – not for the one-time
perennial World Champion Yankees, not for the Moon men, not for
Charles A. Lindbergh, not for anyone,” Bill Gutman quoted one
writer in
Miracle Year, 1969
. “Never before had New Yorkers
exploded in quite the way they did yesterday in a spontaneous,
unrestrained outpouring of sheer joy when the Mets, their Mets,
copped the World Series.”

The city threw a ticker tape parade, and in
keeping with that theme, it surpassed previous such spectacles for
Charles Lindbergh, Doug MacArthur, John Glenn, Namath’s Jets, Neil
Armstrong; astronauts, athletes, war heroes. In 1969, there were
three ticker tape parades: the Jets in January, Armstrong and the
Apollo 11 astronauts after the July Moon landing, and the Mets. The
third totally eclipsed the other two. It was the biggest parade in
New York City history. The motorcade went from Battery Park to
Bryant Park behind the main library at 42
^nd
Street.
Banners and confetti were everywhere.

The players rode in open cars, fans held
back by barricades. Girls threw themselves at them as if each were
Joe Namath or Robert Redford. The cops, somehow sensing that it was
joy, not a riot, restrained themselves. They instinctively realized
this was the last of 1960s innocence. Later New York celebrations
were like jail breaks, or the overthrow of dictators. There was
very little vandalism in October of 1969. The people of this great
metropolis were all like little children. They were in awe, like
the saved entering the Kingdom of Heaven.

At city hall, Mayor Lindsay presented them
with keys to New York. Mrs. Payson and M. Donald Grant accepted on
behalf of the players at Gracie Mansion. Lindsay announced that a
street in Brooklyn was named after Hodges. It was declared “Mets
Day.” More than a million people lined the streets. Koosman and his
wife were in the same car with Tom and Nancy. Gil and Joan Hodges
were in the front car.

“The thought absolutely floors me – the
World Champion Mets,” Nancy told reporters. “Six month ago the
thought would have made me wonder if I should consult a
psychiatrist.”

Sometime the most poignant moments come from
the losers. When the New York Giants captured the 1951 pennant,
every writer and photographer made a beeline for their clubhouse.
One solitary cameraman won a Pulitzer Prize capturing Ralph
Branca’s despondency. In the visitor’s clubhouse after the fifth
game at Shea, Earl Weaver, released from the pressure and possibly
pinching himself a little – after all his minor league years he had
managed a team in the
World Series
– kicked his feet up and
started in on the beer. He was asked about holding a late lead.

“No, that’s what you can never do in
baseball,” said Earl. “You can’t sit on a lead and run a few plays
into the line and just run out the clock. You’ve got to throw the
ball over the (expletive deleted) plate and give the other man his
chance. That’s why baseball is the greatest game of them all.”

Weaver also shed doubt on the shoe polish
incident, saying that the ball had somehow made its way into the
Mets’ dugout, and that Hodges may have already had a “plant” in
there, waiting for just such an event. “How did that happen?” asked
Weaver. “It was just another thing that went against us.”

The next year in a game at Chicago, Weaver
came out to argue a play with A.L. umpire DiMuro. Afterward he
grabbed a ball, rubbed it against his shoe to get a mark on it, and
left it at home plate. “It was hysterical,” recalled Palmer.

Weaver said he was rooting for the Mets to
win the 1970 National League pennant, so that his Orioles could
gain their revenge for the “terrible mistake” of 1969.

“I thought we had the better team,” said
Brooks Robinson. “But people fail to realize (the Mets) won 100
games during the season and beat a very good Braves team in the
play-offs . . . You win sometimes when you’re not supposed to and
lose sometimes when you’re not supposed to. That’s what makes
baseball such a great game.”

Frank Robinson ranked the 1969 Orioles the
best team he ever played on – better than the 1966 or 1970 World
Champions – and denied taking the Mets lightly. He felt the key was
game three, because Gentry was better than expected. “When you play
good baseball you make your own breaks,” he said.

“In these five games, the Mets played as
good as a team can play,” said Weaver. Mike Cuellar said that at
some point Baltimore started to “become anxious.”

Baltimore Mayor Thomas D’Alessandro (father of U.S.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D.-California), said the loss had
negative effects on the city, coming on the heels’ of the Colts’
defeat.

Barry Levinson is a noted film director
(
Diner
) and Baltimore native. “Coming from Baltimore we
despised New York teams,” he said. “For both Baltimore teams to
lose in 1969, especially as they were both looked upon as the best
in their sport, was devastating. I constantly find myself saying,
what if?”

“Below midtown office windows, scraps and
streamers of torn paper still litter the surrounding rooftops,
sometimes arranging and re-arranging themselves in an autumn
breeze,” wrote Angell. Four days after the Series he had to
re-assure himself that it was true, the Mets were World Champs.

“The Mets,” he wrote. “The New York
Mets?
. . . This kind of disbelief, this surrendering to the
idea of a plain miracle, is tempting but derogatory. If in the end
we remember only a marvelous, game-saving outfield catch, a key hit
dropped in, an enemy fanned in the clutch, and the ridiculous,
exalting joy of it all – the smoke bombs going off in the infield,
and the clubhouse baptisms – we will have belittled the makers of
this astonishment. To understand the achievement of these Mets, it
is necessary to mount an expedition that will push the games
themselves, beyond the skill and the luck. The journey will end in
failure, for no victorious team is entirely understandable, even to
itself, but the attempt must always be made, for winning is the
ultimate mystery that gives sport its meaning.”

Hodges was asked, “Gil, how did it all
happen? Tell us what it all
proves.”

“Can’t be done,” said the Mets’ skipper.

“Disbelief persists, then, and one can see
now that disbelief itself was one of the Mets’ most powerful assets
all through the season,” wrote Angell, who recounted that fans
sitting next to him (his vantage point was usually as a fan in the
stands, not a dispassionate sportswriter in a sterile press box)
would fill out their scorecards and make a familiar refrain that
there was “just
no
way” their line-up could be expected to
beat whatever club of Clementes, McCoveys, Banks’s, Aarons or
Robinsons opposed them on any given evening. What usually followed
was another game won, a series swept. How they won it had a
mystical quality to it, for even in the post-season, a review of
line-ups usually revealed that very disbelief. This somehow was
their secret formula; underdogs, overlooked and underestimated time
after time. Wars have been won and empires conquered based on such
a formula.

Somehow, the only team that did not fall for
the spell was Houston. They were almost as bad as the Mets (who
entered 1969 having lost 737 games between 1962 and 1969; a total
of 228 1/2 games out of all collective first places) prior to that
season. The Astros beat New York 10 of 12 games.

Each fan who attended a Mets game may well
have felt they were there the day the teamed turned a corner: the
15-inning 1-0 victory over Los Angeles; Seaver’s imperfect game;
Hodges’s removal of Jones; the black cat in front of the Chicago
dugout . . . it went on and on.