THE 1969 MIRACLE METS: THE IMPROBABLE STORY OF THE WORLD’S GREATEST UNDERDOG TEAM (78 page)

Nolan Ryan threw as hard. Randy Johnson and
perhaps Roger Clemens in the 1980s threw as hard. The list is that
short, regardless of the oohs and aahs of fans reading inflated
radar readings in the 2000s.

In 1970, Seaver’s display had fans, writers
and opponents in awe, realizing that they were observing a
once-in-a-lifetime talent. Between April of 1970 and August of that
year, Seaver was an untouchable as any pitcher could be. He was on
pace to have one of if not the best season any pitcher had ever
achieved. He struck out 19 vs. San Diego on April 22 at Shea
Stadium. That tied the big league record set by Steve Carlton in a
4-3 loss to the Mets in 1969. Seaver won his game, 2-1.

He began the year 6-0, running his regular
season winning streak to 16 straight games. Seaver finally lost to
Montreal, 3-0 on May 11. Later he lost again to Expos pitcher Carl
Morton, 2-0 on May 20.

“We beat Seaver last week and maybe he was
trying too hard to make up for it,” Morton said,

“Is that what he said?” Seaver spouted when
told in the heat of a post-game defeat. “It just shows how stupid
he is.”

“Losing appear to be getting to Seaver,”
Lang wrote in a biting
Sporting News
piece, shocking readers
whose expectations of Seaver as a pitcher and man were sky high.
Only perfection was expected of him, on and off the field. “He is
not reacting to adversity as well as he did to success. He appeared
in his first three seasons to be impervious to faults, but in his
fourth season he is showing another side of Tom, a not-so-pleasant
side.”

Lang theorized he was on a pursuit of
perfection since the imperfect Cubs game of July 9, 1969. Now he
immediately became annoyed after walking his first hitter or giving
up the first hit of a game. Still, losing two games in which he
gave up an average of 2.5 runs in games his team was shut out
certainly did not constitute any lack of effectiveness or
“adversity.”

But this was New York; the media swirl. He
was an icon, “public property,” living in a fish bowl at the height
of his fame. It was a tabloid existence. Seaver gave the press none
of the scandals they salivated over; drunk driving, strip club
infidelities, criminality. They had to nit-pick, which certainly
did not endear them to Seaver. Writers made caustic note of his
reading material. Milton Grossman mentioned that he publicly read
The Agony and the Ecstasy
, as if to insinuate that he took
to such high brow material in order to impress people.

Seaver’s expectation level was impossible to
maintain. He would strike out 15 but kick himself over a walk. He
would pitch a shutout and call it an average game, what he
expected. In his mind, he was not supposed to issue any walks or
allow any hard-hit balls. He expected no-hitters and perfect games.
Anything less was cause for self-analysis, a desire for
improvement. Naturally, Seaver’s drive for perfection wore on
teammates, because they could not relate to it nor come close to
performing it themselves. Opponents were irritated that Seaver
seemed to view them as bit players on a stage he starred on, as if
any hit or run scored against the great Seaver was not the result
of their skill, but Seaver’s own temporary lack of concentration,
or a rare mistake.

His statistics piled up. He led the league
in every category, dominating the N.L. with gaudy strikeout numbers
on the way to the aforementioned 30-win plateau. He did it despite
a disturbing trend; one that would, for the most part, dog his
entire career in New York and, to a lesser extent, his years with
the Cincinnati Reds. His team stopped scoring for him.

Many teammates have examined the psychology
behind this phenomenon over the years. The Mets were never much of
an offensive club in the Seaver years, not even in 1969, but they
hit better for the rest of the staff than they did for him. The
only explanation – Joe Morgan said as much in Cincinnati – was that
with Seaver on the hill, they let down because, knowing he would
give up zero or one run at the most, they did not need to score.
The result was that they did not. In 1970, Seaver was such an
inexorable force that he kept winning anyway.

Hodges selected him to start the All-Star
Game at Cincinnati’s new Riverfront Stadium. The ace right-hander
put on a power pitching display, dominating the best sluggers in
the junior circuit with a scoreless three-inning, four-strikeout
display. After the All-Star Game, Hodges made the kind of mistake
he never made in 1969. With the team struggling but still in a
heated pennant race against Pittsburgh and Chicago, he decided to
revert back to a four-day rotation. He asked Seaver to pitch with
one day less of rest for each of his remaining starts in the 1970
season. Seaver agreed, for the good of the team, and also because
it would increase his opportunity to win 30 games. On August 14 his
record stood at 17-6. He stood an excellent chance at winning those
additional 13 games, and if so, the Mets would likely capture the
East again.

On a hot, muggy night at Atlanta, Seaver led
2-1 in the ninth inning with two outs and runners at second and
third. Jerry Grote called for a curveball against Bob Tillman, who
could not touch breaking stuff. Seaver saw the sign and nodded, but
his intensity level was such that, despite agreeing to the curve,
his muscle memory told him to revert to the high, hard one. Seaver
delivered an impossible-to-hit fast ball, a blur to Tillman for
strike three. It was a blur to Grote, too. Expecting a curve, he
was crossed up by the heat and it got away from him.

Seaver was so stunned and shocked at his own
mental error, the strike-three-passed-ball, and the tying runner
scoring from third, that he stood like a spectator on the mound.
The runner from second alertly raced past third and scored, too. It
was the dumbest move Seaver ever made in a career of rare dumb
moves. It was a terrible double-whammy of
defeat-snatched-from-the-jaws-of-victory; a sure 18-6 record on the
road to 30 wins instead now a 17-7 mark; and perhaps worst of all,
a brutal, debilitating loss in the middle of a desperate pennant
race. Combined with the intense heat of Atlanta, the recriminations
from jealous teammates who felt Seaver had become too full of
himself, it spelled doom for the 1970 Mets.

It was the very opposite of all that had
happened in 1969. Hodges, the “infallible genius” had embarked on a
disastrous four-days-of-rest pitching rotation after his five-day
strategy had worked so well in the past. Seaver was unable to
recover, mentally or physically, from the Atlanta game. The
pressures in the clubhouse and his own strained relations with
teammates were too big a burden to carry.

Seaver won only once in his last 11 starts.
His 17-6 record of August finished at 18-12 in October. He still
led the league with a 2.83 earned run average, and his 283
strikeouts set the new league mark for right-handers. But the final
symbolic indignity of the 1970 campaign came on the season’s last
day. Out of the race, New York played the Cubs for second place. A
few thousand dollars were at stake in an age when a few thousand
dollars meant something to big league ball players. Seaver opted
not to pitch, citing arm strain. The Mets lost to Ferguson Jenkins,
4-1. His teammates bitterly complained that had he pitched, they
might have won and gotten the extra money. Seaver was seen as
selfish. With his huge contract he already had his. Larry Merchant
of the
Post
wrote that Seaver seemed more concerned with the
“image of perfection that he has worked so hard to achieve in his
professional and personal life” than he was concerned about the
team. Many players were “disenchanted” with him.

“He has always tried hard, perhaps harder than
most,” wrote Milton Grossman of the
Post
. “But things came
so easily to him, within himself there may really have been the
image of the perfect young man who finds it impossible to accept
that he can be flawed with imperfection.”

Grossman’s assessment had merit, and perhaps
accurately reflected Seaver’s mindset by 1970. However, things had
not come “so easily to him” in his life. His high school struggles,
Marine training, tough test in Alaska just to earn a scholarship to
USC, where Seaver said “I had to work hard just to be a starter,”
did not reflect any sense of “ease.” On the other hand, the Tom
Seaver of 1967 to August of 1970; in particular the Cooperstown
level superstardom of July 1969 and the 12 months that followed;
may well have engendered in his mind the false sense of
invulnerability in a very, very vulnerable profession.

“The 1970 season taught me a lesson, and out
of everything negative that ever happens to me, I try to find
something positive,” he said to Jack Lang. “In this case I think I
have. You shouldn’t expect too much from yourself. You should
remember at all times that you are a human being with certain
limitations . . .”

In the winter of 1970-71, Tom and Nancy
traveled across America, re-creating the adventures from one of his
favorite books,
Travels with Charlie
by John Steinbeck. The
author was, like the Seavers, a central Californian with an
affinity for that rural, agrarian world.

“I realize now that all of America doesn’t live the
way we do,” Seaver told Joe Durso. “To them money isn’t the biggest
goal . . . I realize that there’s no need to push myself. Instead
of flowing downriver with the current I must sit back and evaluate
things and I think I have that ability.” He added, “You can’t be
greedy. You can’t go out and beat everybody in the world pitching
every other day.”

Seaver regenerated that off-season. He got
back to lifting weights, one of the keys to his success not just in
terms of physical strength, but for mental discipline as well. He
signed a new $90,000 contract for 1971, and the couple’s first
baby, daughter Sarah Lynn, was born that early spring.

Perhaps the greatest evidence that the 1969
New York Mets were indeed
The Last Miracle
came in examining
the 1970 Mets. They were a pretty good baseball team. They were the
natural progression of Gil Hodges’s club, which was making strides
in 1968, expected to be a .500 club in 1969, and had enough youth
for a bright future.

The 1969 Mets probably were an 81-81 club,
maybe an 84- or 85-win team; the numbers bandied about during the
hopeful fishing trips at St. Pete. If all had played to form, the
1970 Mets probably were an 85-to-93 win team. They finished 83-79.
Inability to hit for Seaver; Seaver’s September slump; and the
team’s personal failings after a winter of press clippings and
idolatry; probably account for their finishing somewhere between
five and 10 games below their best expectations. However, after the
1969 campaign, the 1970 Mets were one of the most disappointing
baseball teams in the game’s history. The letdown could be heard
from Long Beach, New York to Long Beach, California.

The East Division was up for grabs. Nobody
ran away with it. Chicago lost 10 straight at one point but never
fell out of contention. The Mets were still in the hunt in
September, but in two home-and-home series with Pittsburgh lost six
of seven games, stranding 59 runners in the combined defeats.
Seaver failed in key games, which was their ultimate death knell.
Pitching on the Saturday
Game of the Week
, the kind of
spotlight that in the past had always brought out his best, he
lost.

Koosman had arm problems and missed nearly
two months. Gentry, like so many Arizona State pitchers who were
overthrown in Tempe, experienced the arm troubles that would
eventually sideline his career years before it should have. Tug
McGraw had major emotional troubles and ultimately a disappointing
season.

Cleon Jones stopped hitting. His average was
below .250 until mid-August, and his late recovery was too little,
too late. Agee had a good season but could not carry the Mets with
his 24 home runs. Clendenon drove in 97 runs. New third baseman Joe
Foy was a complete bust replacing Ed Charles, who was
retired/released after the 1969 campaign.

New York, utterly and totally infatuated by
the Mets in 1969, came out in droves, still watching meaningful
pennant-contention baseball until the last few weeks. Their
attendance of 2,697,479 was the second greatest in baseball
history, just shy of the Dodger Stadium attendance mark of
1962.

Pittsburgh ultimately won the East with a
pedestrian 89-73 record. Losing on the last day to Chicago allowed
the Cubs to finish one game better, in second place with an 84-78
mark. The Pirates were swept by Cincinnati’s “Big Red Machine” in
the play-offs. The Reds were then beaten in five games by Baltimore
in the World Series.

The 1970 season was a cautionary tale about
success and ego, but it also evened out the law of averages. If in
1969 the Mets were just lucky, over and over and over, then it
stood to reason that in 1970 they could not continue to roll aces.
If the 1969 team was a team of destiny, then the 1970 squad was
God’s way of demonstrating that the Good Lord giveth, and He taketh
away.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident . .
.”

- Declaration of Independence

On the first Tuesday in November 1969, Mayor
John Lindsay was re-elected Mayor of New York. Lindsay defeated
Mario Procacino after having lost the Republican Primary, then
switching to the underfunded Liberal Party.

“As always, John was fighting for survival,”
recalled aide David Garth. “We never had an easy time in the years
he was Mayor. But, after the Jets’ win, John became a little bit of
a symbol of the city getting off the mat. Even though he was not a
sports fan and didn’t really know the rules in any sports,
including tennis which he played badly, he figured out to start
playing off the success of the city’s sports teams.”