THE 1969 MIRACLE METS: THE IMPROBABLE STORY OF THE WORLD’S GREATEST UNDERDOG TEAM (8 page)

In later years, Seaver said he was
“prejudiced” growing up in Fresno; that to look down upon black
people was accepted. Perhaps Seaver was correct, but what he
considered prejudice in the 1950s and early 1960s was moderate by
American standards. It did not stop him from admiring Hank Aaron;
at least as an athlete. Inter-racial dating and full-scale
integration may not have been subjects on his radar screen, but
whatever pre-disposed social constructs he was raised with did not
effect his view of black baseball stars.

“It mush have been his form that made me
pick him,” he said. “I sat through entire ball games, just looking
at Henry Aaron, nothing else, fascinated by him, studying him at
the plate and on the bases and in the field.”

Seaver once expressed some question as to
why he, a pitcher, chose as his “idol” an outfielder. Later, when
he went to USC, he attended many Dodgers games on season tickets
owned by his uncle.

“Sandy Koufax became my hero,” he said. “But
he never really replaced Aaron.”

The choice of the Jewish Koufax is also
emblematic. Tom Seaver became a race-neutral white man. As he
matured and broadened his horizons, he chose his heroes, idols,
associations, roommates and friends strictly on merit and personal
commonalties. At USC his roommate would be Mike Garrett, a black
running back on the football team (also a baseball outfielder who
later played professionally for the Dodgers organization) from the
inner city Los Angeles neighborhood of Boyle Heights. Seaver would
bring his California attitude with him to New York. He would be
part of the “new breed” of modern athletes in the late 1960s.

But that was all a long ways away in 1962.
The dream of big league glory was gone. Tom had no reason to
believe he had a chance, but his love of the game would never go
away. There was also the matter of college. Coming from a solidly
middle class family his father undoubtedly could have paid his
tuition, but he had already put Tom’s three older siblings through
school, interestingly enough each attending three of the four great
California universities: UCLA, California and Stanford.

Tom had his heart set on the fourth college,
USC, a private school with steep tuition costs and one of the best
dental schools in the nation. He wanted to spare his father from
fronting the money. A plan was hatched: instead of college after
high school he would serve in the U.S. Marines. He would save and
earn some money, getting some help from the GI Bill. That would
only assuage a little bit of the cost. A tiny voice in the back of
Tom Seaver’s mind would not go away.

What about a baseball scholarship?

This seemed to be a ludicrous proposition.
USC had the best baseball program in the nation, led by legendary
coach Rod Dedeaux. They had their choice of the best players. If a
hot prospect did not wish to go directly into professional
baseball, his college choices were basically USC, SC, Southern
California or Southern Cal; at least it seemed that way. Dedeaux
had no more interest in a junk-baller from Fresno than the pro
scouts who ignored him did.

First things first. While waiting to report
for Marine Corp basic training, Tom worked for the Bonner Packing
Company. It was not an internship in his father’s plush office
suites. Rather, he got up each day before dawn and spent the day
wrestling enormous boxes of raisins along a loading platform. Two
or three men were needed to lift the “sweat boxes.” The temperature
in the un-air-conditioned warehouse was 100 degrees in the summer
time. Sometimes snakes, rats and spiders slithered out of the
boxes.

“After six months it was almost a relief to
go into the Marines,” he stated. At night, Tom pitched for an
American legion team. Something was already happening to Tom
Seaver. As he approached his 18
^th
birthday, he was
getting taller, putting on weight, and was stronger after lifting
“sweat boxes.” Tom could feel his clothes tightening on his body,
his pants becoming too short. He could not help but think that he
was throwing harder in July than he had in April. His baseball
dreams would not die.

He joined the Marines with his boyhood
friend, Russ Scheidt. First came three months at Camp Pendleton,
the famed home of the so-called “Hollywood Marines” (as opposed to
those who train in Parris Island, South Carolina) near San
Diego.

“I hated the Marine Corps boot camp,” Seaver
wrote in
The Perfect Game
, an autobiographical review of his
1969 World Series victory over Baltimore, written in collaboration
with Dick Schaap. Caught with a dirty rifle, for three-and-a-half
hours he had to do an exercise called “up-and-on shoulders, first
holding out my rifle, which weighed 11 pounds, then lifting it over
my head, then holding it out again.”

“No, no, no, you don’t stop ‘til
I get
tired!”
” the drill instructor yelled in typical Southern-Marine
voice cadence, when Seaver seemed too exhausted to go on.

The DI in fact
did
get tired and
several had to take turns “supervising” Seaver, who “thought I was
going to die.” After getting caught whispering to Scheidt,
verboten
during chow time, one DI jumped on the table,
running towards him, food and plates flying everywhere. He took
Seaver outside, kicking him over and over again. By this time
Seaver had been in boot camp for 10 weeks. He was a
“trained-to-kill Marine, and nothing could hurt me short of an M-14
rifle in the chest.” He had tears in his eyes . . . to keep from
laughing!

Seaver graduated from boot camp, joined a
Reserve unit, and by the fall of 1963 enrolled at Fresno City
College. For more than a year since high school, he had eaten three
squares a day, done countless push-ups, pull-ups and “up-and-on
shoulders.” As he got older he had grown. In this period of time he
had gone from 5-10, 165 pounds to 6-1, 195 pounds. He was a grown
man, physically and mentally. He had not picked up a baseball since
the summer of 1962, but he had a sneaking suspicion that when he
did he would be able to throw it harder than ever, and if so . .
.

Strolling down the street in Fresno, Tom
passed a man he had known all his life. The man did not recognize
him.

“Hey, remember me?” he called out to
him.

“My God,” he said. “Is that little Tom
Seaver?”

There still seemed no hope of that
scholarship from USC, and none of Major League glory, but Seaver
had the indomitable optimism of his mother.

The Little Engine That Could.

The Fresno City College Rams have one of the
greatest J.C. baseball traditions in the country. Maloney,
Ellsworth and Selma all pitched there before going to the big
leagues. Scouts and college coaches paid attention to them. In
September of 1963, a couple months shy of his 19
^th
birthday, Seaver came out for what the coaches and players call
“fall ball.” He was known for having made all-city pitcher at
Fresno High, even if it had been “because there wasn’t anyone else
to choose.”

But his new height, the 30 pounds of muscle,
the newfound strength, gave Tom confidence that he could not help
but be noticed by coaches and players alike. After the initial
period of conditioning came the moment of truth: try-outs on the
mound. After warming up, Seaver got set, went into his motion, and
delivered
a 90-mile per hour fast ball
.

The ball sailed up and in, smacking into the
catcher’s mitt with a loud thud. Suddenly, USC did not look like
such a pipe dream. In the spring of 1964, freshman right-hander Tom
Seaver was the ace of the Fresno City College team, compiling an
11-2 record against stiff competition, earning team MVP honors.

What was happening to Seaver was less a
phenomenon and more common than many realize. The high school blue
chipper is accorded great attention, but many times he has
physically matured sooner than his peers have. Sometimes he peaks
at the age of 17 or 18. Others, like Seaver, grow, gain strength,
and mature in more ways than one. Few make the kind of transition
that Tom Seaver would ultimately make, but many high school
“suspects” in various sports go on to become “prospects” in
college, in the minor leagues, and in their 20s. Some attain
stardom. Scouting is a very tricky, unpredictable business.

The impossible seemed to have occurred.
Seaver’s 11-2 record at Fresno City College earned the recruiting
attention of Rod Dedeaux. He was a legitimate fastball artist.
Dedeaux called him the “phee-nom from San Joaquin.”

But Dedeaux needed to know for sure that he
could compete for the Trojans. “I only have five scholarships to
give out,” the coach told him. Before the ride would be offered,
Seaver would have to prove himself with the Fairbanks, Alaska
Goldpanners.

Today, collegiate summer baseball is a
well-known commodity. Many scouts place more credence on a player’s
performance in one of these leagues than they do on their college
seasons. The Cape Cod League uses only wooden bats, which proves to
be a great equalizer for pitchers and a shock for aluminum-bat
sluggers who find themselves batting .250 on the Cape. Summer ball
has a long tradition in Canada, where American collegians test
themselves in such exotic locales as Red Deer, Alberta, Calgary and
Edmonton. The Kamloops International Tournament in British Columbia
has attracted some of the fastest baseball for decades. The Jayhawk
League, consisting of teams from Boulder, Pueblo, Colorado Springs,
plus Kansas and Iowa, was once a leading destination for college
players. The California Collegiate Summer League, consisting of
teams from the Humboldt Crabs in the north to the San Diego Aztecs
in the south, has produced many stars in its various forms over the
years.

But the Alaskan Summer Collegiate League is
the most legendary. Over time, the league became the Alaska-Hawaii
League, with teams flying in for extended road trips on the islands
and the “land of the midnight sun.”

“The team was put together by a man named
Red Boucher,” said former Met pitcher Danny Frisella, who was a
teammate of Seaver’s in Fairbanks. Boucher was the Mayor of
Fairbanks. “He got all the best young ball players up there.” Andy
Messersmith of the University of California became a 20-game winner
with the California Angels. Mike Paul pitched for Cleveland. Graig
Nettles played for Minnesota. USC quarterback Steve Sogge, a
baseball catcher, played on that team. Rick Monday was an
All-American at Arizona State, where he was a teammate of Reggie
Jackson and Sal Bando in a program that captured the 1965 National
Championship (also producing Mets’ pitcher Gary Gentry). In the
very first amateur draft ever held in 1965, Monday became the first
player chosen, by the Kansas City A’s.

“Monday was there the year I was and he
couldn’t even make our team,” said Frisella. “I think 13 guys were
signed off that team. It was semi-pro ball, and we played eight
games a week. We didn’t get paid. Not for playing ball. But I
earned $650 a month for pulling a lever on a dump truck. And I
didn’t have to pull the lever too often.”

The man most responsible for the growth of
summer collegiate baseball was Dedeaux. In 1963, when his Trojans
won their fourth national championship, the press dubbed his team
the “New York Yankees of college baseball.” He eventually retired
with 11, having produced such stalwarts as Ron Fairly, Don Buford,
Bill “Spaceman” Lee, Jim Barr, Dave Kingman, Rich Dauer, Steve
Kemp, Fred Lynn, Steve Busby, Roy Smalley, Mark McGwire and Randy
Johnson. His successor, Mike Gillespie, won the school’s
12
^th
College World Series in 1998 (Texas is second with
five) while producing such talented stars as Bret Boone, Aaron
Boone, Jeff Cirillo, Geoff Jenkins, Jacque Jones, Morgan Ensberg,
Barry Zito and Mark Prior.

If a young player wanted to test himself
amongst the best of the best, he could find no more competitive
environment than the USC baseball program. For Tom Seaver, having
tasted real success for the first time in his life at Fresno City
College, it represented the ultimate challenge. He needed that
scholarship; not just to save his father from paying the steep
tuition, but also to give himself imprimatur as opposed to “walk
on” status.

Dedeaux had come out of Hollywood High
School to become the captain of the Trojan baseball team. He had
the briefest of Major League “careers” with the Brooklyn Dodgers,
but befriended his manager, Casey Stengel. Later, Stengel brought
his Yankees to Los Angeles for exhibition games against USC, giving
college players the chance to play against Mickey Mantle and Whitey
Ford. After retirement from managing the Mets, he became a banking
executive in Glendale, the L.A. suburb where Dedeaux lived. For
years Casey was a regular at Trojan baseball games.

Dedeaux was a key figure in organizing and
growing the popularity of the College World Series. The first CWS
was held in Kalamazoo, Michigan and featured the University of
California Golden Bears beating Yale for the national title. Yale’s
first baseman was a war veteran named George H.W. Bush. Bush and
Yale came back the next year, only to be beaten this time by
Dedeaux’s Trojans. Eventually, the CWS found a permanent home in
Omaha, Nebraska.

“He never looked like a ball player, but he
had eyes in the back of his head,” said Bill Lee, who played four
years under him from 1965 to 1968, earning All-American pitcher
honors and a National title in his senior year. “He knew in the
first inning what would happen in the fifth; in the fifth what to
expect in the eighth.” The greatest teams Lee ever saw were “the
1975 Cincinnati Reds, any Taiwanese little league team, and the
1968 USC Trojans!”

“Dedeaux was the sharpest tack in the box,”
recalled Mike Gillespie, who played on his 1961 College World
Series champions.