Excerpted from "The Last Icon: Tom Seaver and His Times," by StEven Travers, now available from Taylor Trade, a division of Rowman & Littlefield

SUMMER 1969

The contrast from the Florida sun to wintery conditions had its effect on Seaver, whose high 90s heat, exploding and moving, came in flat at around 88 MPH, perfect batting practice fodder for Montreal in the very first game in Expos history. The Expos went after the two-time All-Star like they were the 1961 Yankees. Hodges stuck with his ace in the opener, thinking each inning that the guy would settle down.
It was not all Tom's fault. When he needed a break to get out of a jam he did not get it. Liners were misjudged in the windy sky, grounders booted by clunky gloves. “I think I've seen all this before,” said veteran sportswriter Maury Allen. “Another bad ball club.”
Then there were the Mets' bats, last in the league the previous year (.228), only today they made Shea look like a pinball arcade. It remains one of the ugliest games in New York Mets history, the antithesis of tight, taught baseball rhapsodized over by the likes of The New Yorker's Roger Angell.
There is an expression: “all's well that ends well.” Or “a win's a win.” In baseball, in all sports, coaches and managers take it any way they can get it. Despite the ugliness, they could have been winners anyway. Seaver was ordinary, giving up two runs in the first inning. New York came back. Seaver struggled, throwing 105 pitches. He told Hodges he was done (as if it was not obvious) and departed with a 6-4 lead. He still could have gotten credit for the lackluster victory.
Al Jackson and Ron Taylor were roughed up. Rusty Staub went deep and Montreal forged an 11-6 lead. The Mets still could have pulled it out, finally giving their fans an Opening Day win, and gotten 1969 off to a decent, even exciting start. Alas, they fell just short after Duffy Dyer's three-run pinch-homer in the ninth, losing 11-10.
“My God, wasn't that awful?” Seaver said to the writers afterward. They agreed and the next day's columns were negative, expressing little confidence that the high hopes of St. Pete would translate into a winning spring start, not to mention summer or fall. The most frustrating thing was to finally get real run support and waste it.
“You know Seaver is a better pitcher than that,” Gil Hodges told the press. “The next time we get 10 runs when he's pitching, I think we'll win.”
Shortly thereafter, the Mets took on the defending National League champion St. Louis Cardinals. The third game was a classic Bob Gibson-Tom Seaver duel. Lou Brock and Curt Flood manufactured two runs off Seaver in the first. The two settled down after that, but Gibson was untouchable in the 3-1 complete game victory. It ran his lifetime record vs. New York to 22-3. The Mets were 2-4, with Pittsburgh leading the East at 5-1.
“Early in the season we realized we had to win low-scoring games,” Koosman said. If the Mets scored two runs, “then you had to win.” This would be the formula eventually, but in the beginning the Mets were inconsistent. There was improvement over the 1968 offensive numbers, but the rest of the league was better with the bat, as well.
Seaver was their “stopper.” He out-dueled Gibson in their re-match, 2-1. Facing Gibson early in his career defined Seaver's legacy and view of himself. Speaking of a game against Gibby on an overwhelmingly hot day, Seaver “struggled to concentrate but held on to win by a run,” adding that, “Such bracing competition is the lifeblood of our craft. All real pitchers thrive on it, live for it.”
Ferguson Jenkins of the Chicago Cubs used nasty inside heat to defeat Tom, who was effective but got touched, losing 3-1. If Montreal thought they had Seaver's number after batting him around in the Shea Stadium opener, they saw the real “Tom Terrific” at Jarry Park. Seaver overpowered them 2-1.
On May 2 and 3, Chicago defeated New York, 6-4 and 3-2 before wild cheering at Wrigley Field. The Cubbies were the toast of the Northside. The whole, early shaky Mets' season was seemingly always on the line, and Seaver would be asked to respond each time. On May 4 he came through with a 3-2 win over Billy Hands. In the second game of the double-header, the Mets made a statement, winning 3-2 again to split the series.
Seaver's game was key. It was a Sunday, the crowd loud and boisterous, drinking beer, the “bleacher bums” in full force, May weather starting to break the Chicago winter. Leo Durocher was in the other dugout. The Mets were the baseball image of nice guys, and everybody knew what Leo predicted for that. Hodges was a churchgoing fellow; quiet, unassuming.
Chump, thought Leo. Gil had a bunch of college guys, frat boys. Seaver, the preppie, faced Ron Santo. He was the face of the Cubs, the Italian guy, outspoken, a hard-ass. The time had come. No provocation really, other than Leo's presence in the home dugout. Seaver let one fly right at Santo's batting helmet. It flipped him. Santo stared out at Tommy Tom Tom.
So that's how it's gonna be, eh?
It was a baseball code, the way the game is played. The Cubs' star brushed himself off, the crowd booing. Did Leo scream obscenities at Seaver, the home plate umpire, turn to Billy Hands and tell him to “Stick it in his ear”? No. He sat in stony silence. This situation required no words.
When Seaver stepped in against Hands, he got nicked on the arm. It was on. Hands got one in the leg. The benches looked to clear, players on the steps, ready to rumble. The umpire stepped halfway out to the mound. He warned Seaver, a $50 fine. Seaver knew he had reached the tolerance limit, and could not afford another one lest he be thrown out. He needed to stay in to win.
Pitch after pitch. Cheese. Hard, hard sinkers, the kind that wore out Grote's hand, left him black and blue, broke bats, made the ball hit wood like shot-puts, induced grounders struck by noodles. Good old country hardball. Tom accepted the $50 fine as a small price to pay for victory and respect.
“That was my first really satisfying game,” he told the media after the hard won victory.
“I tried to brush him back in New York but I didn't do much of a job,” Tom told Larry Merchant of the New York Post when asked about the Santo brushback. “He was hitting me well. Possibly he's taking the bread out of my mouth. I had to make sure he respects me. You can't let hitters dominate or intimidate you. The hitter shouldn't intimidate the pitcher and the pitcher shouldn't intimidate the hitter, but there has to be respect. I had to let Santo know I knew what he was doing to me. Then Leo had Hands hit me. What do I do, throw a bat at Leo? I had to do what I did. It's a part of baseball. It's a good hard game.”
“This is the code,” wrote Merchant. “But the thing is someone can get hurt or maimed with a baseball . . . The man who shoots back and kills may not know the first man was just issuing a warning. They are fooling with bullets.”
“You would have thought it foolish to throw at us when we had Tom and myself and the other guys, who could throw hard, but we weren't that well known yet,” Koosman recalled. “But they helped get the fire going. They generated a lot of energy. That was one club you loved to beat.”
Seaver saw no ethical quandaries. “There's a fine dividing line between throwing at someone or brushing him back. It's the difference between good hard baseball and dirty baseball . . .”
But the Mets would face Chicago again down the road, and Leo Durocher played “dirty baseball.” Durocher “was a Chicago kind of guy: dapper, brash, and a night owl - perfect for day baseball,” was how Seaver remembered him.
“Leo was a daring manager,” was how Gil Hodges described him. “He'd take chances, and sometimes they'd work, and sometimes they wouldn't. But, more than any manager I ever knew, Leo was the guy that other managers managed against.”
After a sloppy loss to Atlanta, Hodges dressed the team down. Seaver agreed, saying “We needed that.” When he shut out the Braves, 3-0, the Mets reached the .500 mark at 18-18. It was celebrated as a major accomplishment in the New York press. Seaver had the perfect reaction to it.
“.500 is nothing to celebrate,” he said. The tone was set.
Then the Mets got off to an 11-game winning streak in late May and early June, beating Los Angeles and San Francisco. Seaver beat San Francisco, 4-3 on May 30. The streak included victories over their old nemeses, the Giants and Dodgers, both in New York and on the West Coast, including a scintillating 1-0 win highlighted by an incredible defensive save by second baseman Al Weis. It was a seminal moment. It had been important beating the old New York teams, but now the ghosts of “Willie, Mickey and the Duke,” as the song goes about former Big Apple icons Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle and Duke Snider, were replaced by a new generation, a “new breed.”
“We found ways to win games as opposed to finding ways to lose,” wrote outfielder Art Shamsky in The Magnificent Seasons.
Shamsky had missed much of Spring Training with an injury. He spent the early part of the season at triple-A Tidewater before getting called up to the big leagues.
“We were learning how not to beat ourselves,” recalled second baseman Ken Boswell, who was trying to debunk his reputation as a defensive liability.
“I thought if we could just start winning some close games you never know what could happen,” said Grote. There was that computer analysis, and Gil's admonition too: 36 one-run losses in 1968. Win half of those, that is 18 wins added to the 73 of the previous year . . .
“I'm tired of the jokes about the old Mets,” Seaver told Jack Lang and the assorted writers. “Let Rod Kanehl and Marvelous Marv laugh about the Mets.”
After the Wichita Dreamliners had beaten him in 1965, Rod told the young Goldpanner pitcher he was destined for the big leagues, and now here he was. When Seaver announced the “celebration” would come about only when a pennant was won, Maury Allen shrugged and said, “I'll be too old to enjoy it.”
On July 8, the Cubs visited Shea Stadium. The press dubbed it the “first crucial series” in Mets history. At 45-34, New York trailed Chicago (52-31) by five games. A three-game Mets sweep could pull them to within two games. If the Cubs beat them three in a row all the air would be out of their tires.
Koosman squared off against Ferguson Jenkins in the first game. Jenkins looked unhittable, carrying a 3-1 lead into the ninth, but the Mets strung a few hits together, combined with a mis-play by Chicago's rookie center fielder, Don Young. A bloop single by Ed Kranepool ignited wild enthusiasm, giving Koosman a complete game 4-3 win.
The crowd, indeed the entire city, went crazy, but it was only the start. Tom Seaver was scheduled to start the next evening.

29 hours and 45 minutes after Lindsey Nelson announced, “It's absolute bedlam. You could not believe it. It's absolute bedlam,” when Ed Kranepool drove in Cleon Jones to beat Chicago 4-3, another event occurred which utterly eclipsed that one. It was at 9:55 P.M. on Wednesday, July 9, the Year of Our Lord 1969. In the pantheon of greatness reserved only for that most heroic of all heroes, the New York sports superstar, beyond that the American hero; “in the arena” as Theodore Roosevelt liked to call it, the bright lights of Broadway, the Great White Way . . . and Shea Stadium illuminating him in all his splendor; well, he is rare indeed and rarer still is his debut.
Olivier as Othello, the audience gasping in astonishment at his range.
MacArthur returned from the wars, our freedoms his gift, our thanks washing over him.
Gehrig telling a full house of sobbing mothers, kids and grown men that he was the “luckiest man on the face of the Earth.”
. . .

By 5:45 P.M., Shea Stadium's parking lot was full and the stands were mostly full. The excitement and air of anticipation was at a fever pitch. It was a World Series atmosphere. After batting practice, the Cubs held a player's only meeting in which Santo apologized to Young for comments he made about the outfielder's failure to catch a key ninth inning fly ball the previous day. Many managers would have put Young back in the line-up to boost his confidence. Not so Leo. A little-known nobody named Jimmy Qualls was penciled in to start in center field. Durocher was Durocher, and he was back in New York, his old stomping grounds. Finally, he relented and gave some time to the reporters.
Qualls was a 22-year old rookie who had just been called up from Tacoma of the Pacific Coast League. He was only now starting to get his swing down, having missed two weeks to serve with his Reserve unit in Stockton, California. In the Mets' clubhouse, Qualls's surprise start left Seaver, Grote and pitching coach Rube Walker looking for a scouting report. Without any computer databases or Internet searches available, they had to rely on Bobby Pfeil, the only one to have seen him hit. Pfeil recommended “hard stuff” - fastballs and sliders - as opposed to curves and change-ups.
“He can get his bat on the ball,” he told Seaver.
At 7:48, Seaver began to get loose, but he was experiencing trouble. There was a twitch in his shoulder. He went through 103 pitches, trying to get the kinks out. “It still feels a little stiff,” he told Rube Walker as he made his way to the dugout.
“Do the best you can,” Walker replied.
Outside the stadium, a group of about 50 kids, described by a policeman as a “raving mob,” managed to sneak into the park when Jerry Koosman's wife, Lavonne arrived and the gate was opened for her. It was a portent of future events. The game was a sell-out - 59,083 - with standing room only packed shoulder to shoulder, some fans having waited since 7:30 in the morning. Baseball was back.

Finally Tom Seaver, now stiffness-free and throwing easily, took the mound. His fastball simply exploded. The Cubs' hitters stared at it, or at what they heard of it, since they could not actually see the thing. They went down like the French Army circa 1940, one-to-two three in the first inning.
Bobby Pfeil doubled into the left field corner, giving Seaver a 1-0 first inning lead.
“I have been to every ball game here, and I have never seen anything like this,” broadcaster Lindsey Nelson told the hundreds of thousands tuned into the television broadcast. “People are everywhere.”
Seaver retired Chicago one-two-three in the second inning, causing Rube Walker to tell Gil Hodges that he had “no-hit” stuff. Indeed, Mets fans were seeing something very, very rare.
Many a well-pitched game marks an average baseball season, but Seaver was out of his shoes, above and beyond even his best games over the course of his first two-and-a-half years. He was bringing it in the high 90s, maybe breaking 100 miles per hour, with perfect control and rhythm. What these fans were seeing was Koufax on his best night; Gibson in full domination mode; or any of the all-time legends, whether it be Walter Johnson, Lefty Grove or Bob Feller. They say “good pitching beats good hitting.” It does, but it has to be exceptional. Seaver was beyond exceptional. He was simply unhittable. His stuff could not be touched, merely waved at, gawked at, stunned by.
Seaver tomahawked a line drive between first and second base, scoring Jerry Grote. Then Agee doubled off the right field fence, scoring Weis and moving Seaver to third. 3-0, New York. Shea was frantic. With Seaver knocking the eyelashes off flies from 60 feet, six inches, plus swinging the bat like he was Bobby Clemente, the outcome of the game was utterly without doubt. It was full throttle momentum and Chicago was as done as an overcooked Thanksgiving turkey.
“Break up the Mets!” began to be heard. It was a strange plea that fans occasionally chanted in Seaver's rookie year, when he for the first time demonstrated such unaccustomed excellence that the people conceived in jest that he had made them too good for the rest of the league.
Seaver mowed through Chicago in the third, one-two-three. In the fourth inning, Seaver faced the top of the Cubs' order - Don Kessinger, Glenn Beckert and Billy Williams - for the second time. A strikeout and two easy grounders to Ed Charles made quick work of them. In the fifth, Santo, Banks and Al Spangler went down; a fly ball, a grounder to shortstop and Seaver's eighth strikeout. In the sixth, as he went through the Cubs' order for the second time, Ed Kranepool said it: “He's got a perfect game.” The tradition in the dugout of a pitcher with a no-hitter, much less a perfect game, is to say nothing, but it was obvious to every player and fan in Shea Stadium that evening.
At the offices of the Associated Press in mid-town Manhattan, baseball writer Ed Schuyler was dispatched to Shea Stadium in case Seaver pitched a perfect game. Schuyler had done the same thing in 1968, arriving just as Orlando Cepeda of St. Louis broke it up.
On Long Island, Nelson Burbrink, the scout who signed Tom Seaver off of the USC campus a mere three years earlier, got in his car after scouting a prospect. As the car eased onto the Long Island Expressway, he heard Lindsey Nelson on WJRZ say, “Tom Seaver will get quite a hand when he comes up to bat here. He's faced 18 Cubs and retired them all.”
Sitting in a box seat near first base, Nancy Seaver began to cry. Seaver glanced at her and saw the emotions start to spill out. The atmosphere was utterly electric, almost indescribable, a buzz of sound and anticipation bubbling to the surface, threatening to swallow up a stadium, a whole city.
Kessinger led off the seventh; the top of the order for the third time. Seaver had been pounding fastballs on Chicago all night, but thinking that he should give them a little wrinkle he curved the Cubs' shortstop, who sliced a liner to left field. At first Seaver thought it was their first hit, but the ball hung and Jones grabbed it easily. Beckert popped to Swoboda, sweating bullets of nerves in right. Williams bounced to Charles. Shea exploded.
With one out in the top of the seventh, Jones lined a homer, an “insurance” run on a night Tom Seaver did not need it. The score was 4-0. In the bottom half of the inning Hodges sent Rod Gaspar to right field in place of Swoboda; Wayne Garrett to second; and Bobby Pfeil moved to third, replacing Charles.
“You go into a game like this, cold and everything, and you're just hoping you can do the job if the ball is hit to you,” Gaspar was quoted saying in The Year the Mets Lost Last Place. “It's a perfect game. We're going for first place. All the people in the park. It's frightening.”
In the eighth, Seaver induced Santo to fly to Agee. Then, facing Banks and Spangler, he seemed to jet it up a half a notch. The middle innings were over, his pitch count low, the game in hand. There was no holding anything back. Incredibly, he started throwing harder. The Mets fans watched; loud, crazy, boisterous, yes, but by now in awe. They were observing a baseball Michelangelo, a sculptor of the mound. Seaver, who admired his brother the sculptor, and wanted to somehow duplicate in baseball what he could do with clay, was now accomplishing this task.
“It was like having a magic wand that night, reaching out and touching the ball to a spot I had picked in my mind,” was Seaver's description.
Old-timers, who had seen it all over the past 50 years of baseball in the golden age of New York, knew instinctively that the 24-year old Californian was a new Koufax, a Ford, a Newcombe; maybe better than any of those guys! A “new breed.” After Seaver rocketed a heater past Al Spangler to end the eighth, he walked off the mound to insane cheering. Announcer Bob Murphy then stated, “LADIES AND GENTLEMAN, AFTER EIGHT INNINGS, TOM SEAVER IS WALKING INTO THE DUGOUT WITH A PERFECT BALL GAME.”
Grote grounded out but Weis singled. Seaver donned a batting helmet, undid the donut from his bat, and gave his warm-up jacket to the batboy. It was 9:55 P.M., Wednesday, July 9, the Year of our Lord 1969. The seminal moment in which George Thomas Seaver entered the pantheon.
The crowd rose; they had been continuously cheering all through Seaver's dominant eighth inning, building to a crescendo that rocked the five-year old stadium to its very core. It was the sound Marilyn Monroe wished she heard when she gyrated before the boys in Korea. The sound Joe DiMaggio had heard when he was at his heroic best at Yankee Stadium, the knowledge of which he so contemptuously informed the breathless Marilyn when she tried to tell him, “Joe, Joe, you never heard such cheering.”
This was the biggest of the big time, the ultimate stage, the winning over with the most impressive of all bravura performances the most cynical, loud-mouthed, hardcore, hard-to-please sports aficionados on the face of the Earth. In this we get to the heart of what made this different, what made this a miracle. The winning over of the crowd, the total, childlike exuberance of the hard-bitten seen-it-alls, had a Pentecostal touch to it. They were children, all of them. The middle-aged men, who toiled for big bucks on Wall Street or union wages in a delivery truck; the grandmothers wondering what was happening to kids these days - all the drugs and sex and lack of respect - yet it all came together here, with Seaver a Pied Piper who did not quite know what was happening himself, so magical and mystical was it. The young man whom old folks related to, the sex symbol who was faithful to his wife, the sports hero who seven years earlier was 6-5 pitching for the Fresno High varsity.
“I know a thousand things were running through my mind,” he recalled years later. “The fans were absolutely unbelievable. I grew up in Los Angeles where the fans clap softly when someone hit a home run or pitches a great game. Here the noise gets right into your system. You tingle all over. I could hear my heart pounding, feel the adrenaline flowing. My arm felt light as a feather. I know I thought about my wife, and once looked over to where my father was sitting. And I remember sitting in the dugout and looking into the upper deck and seeing people standing, screaming in the aisles. I can't explain what that did to me. It was like being in a marvelous dream . . .
“And I thought to myself, moments like these are reserved for other people; they're for the Sandy Koufax's, the Mickey Mantles, the Willie Mays's of this world - not for the Tom Seaver's and the New York Mets.”
“If Woodstock was a happening, so were the Mets, game after every wonderful, energy-filled game,” wrote sportswriter Peter Golenbock.
Swododa said Shea “resonated in a way that you can't hardly describe . . . It literally vibrated. It was awesome.”
“The noise gets in your system,” added Seaver. “I could hear my heart pounding, feel the adrenaline flowing. My arm felt light as a feather. It was like being in a dream.”
So the sound washed over Tom Seaver. 9:55 passed into 9:56, and it kept coming like baptismal firewaters, like a revival, like the Holy Spirit. Above the stadium, Christy Mathewson, John McGraw, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Branch Rickey, and Mel Ott formed a ghostly Hall of Fame, granting approval, imprimatur to the newest member. Ruth called Seaver “Keed.” Matty told McGraw, “He reminds me of me.” Rickey saw the perfect harmony of black and white teammates, the stands a diverse mix of New Yorkers, and nodded approval over that which he had wrought.
The latest true New York sports icon, the savior then laid down a perfect sacrifice bunt. The runner moved to second as he jogged off the field, cheered as if he had just moved a mountain.
An estimated two-and-a-half million New Yorkers were now watching Seaver trot off the field. “Housewives not the least interested in baseball have been dragged to the set by their husbands to watch history,” wrote Dick Schaap and Paul Zimmerman.
Nancy Seaver wept as she watched her husband take the mound for the ninth. Next to her was Tom's father, Charles. Tom's body was floating with pure adrenaline. He had thrown a perfect game as a little leaguer, then had all his hopes and dreams for a baseball future seemingly dashed when he made the move to the “big diamond”; then high school, where the likes of Dick Selma - now a spectator sitting in the opposing team's dugout - had surpassed him by leaps and bounds.
59,000 fans chanted “Seav-uh, Seav-uh.” It was beyond incredible, beyond heady. He later said his arm was light, as if detached from his body. He was in touch with his feelings. His heart pounded furiously, but the crowd noise was somehow so great as to be silent. He was in a zone. Few ever reach such a zenith.
But with all of this going on, Seaver still had a job to do, and it required concentration. Amid all the furor, he dropped, drove and delivered furious heat to Randy Hundley. Hundley, as if acknowledging that to actually swing and hit Seaver was by now beyond conception, tried to bunt his way on. The ball came right back to Seaver, the easiest play in the world, except that under such intense pressure some people stiffen right up. Grote told him he had plenty of time, and Seaver threw out Hundley as if he did not have a care in the world.
Bud Harrelson, his best friend on the ball club, was watching the game at a restaurant called Giovanni's in Watertown, New York, where he was stationed for two weeks of summer training. Nobody knew who he was. Now, he was hollering like everybody else.
At seven minutes after 10 Jimmy Qualls strode to the plate. Qualls was the only Cub to get decent wood on a Seaver pitch all night, hitting a sharp line drive caught at the warning track, then a liner to first base. A left-handed batter, he had 47 Major League at-bats prior to his stepping in against Tom Seaver. Tommie Agee in center fielder was not sure where to play him. Seaver was throwing so hard that it seemed implausible that Qualls would pull him, but he seemed to be on Tom's pitches in a way no other Cub was on that night.
Bobby Pfeil's “scouting report” - hard stuff - was all Grote and Seaver had to go by. Seaver had dominated with the best fastball in the game, and that was what he and Grote agreed on. As he nodded yes to the sign, Ed Schuyler of the Associated Press arrived in the Shea Stadium press box.
Tom Seaver went into his wind-up, dropped, and delivered. Instead of sinking action, down and away, the pitch came in waist high. He was just a quarter-inch off with his fastball. Qualls's bat connected, solidly, and the ball carried on a fly to deep left-center field. New York Mets center fielder Tommie Agee broke after the ball, but quickly snuck a look at his boyhood pal from Mobile, Alabama, Cleon Jones, as if to say, “Hey man, you better get to it 'cause I ain't got it.”
Jones just shook his head.
More than 59,000 people groaned as the ball dropped in for a single. Seaver, now a solitary figure on a mound of dirt surrounded by green grass, received another prolonged standing ovation. Seaver later called it the biggest disappointment of his life, “within my grasp,” knowing he might not, probably would not, ever get another chance at something this close to perfection.
With a 4-0 lead, Seaver straightened up, took the mound and worked to the next two Cubs hitters, retiring them easily. Seaver was immediately met by Nancy, still battling tears. “I guess a one-hit shutout is better than nothing,” she told him. Tom Seaver's greatest triumph was a melancholy moment.
“After the game my wife, Nancy, met me in tears, but the fact that I kept my composure and got the last two outs showed we were a team of maturity - a team ready to win more 'big ones,' ” was he how assessed the situation.
“I'm sure there was huge disappointment, but when you talk about Seaver, you're talking about someone whose emotion and skill were always under control,” said Swoboda. “You had to pretty much go out and beat him. He wasn't going to give you much.”
“There was no pressure on me at all,” Qualls told reporters. “All I wanted to do was get a base hit and get something started.”
When Tom returned to the clubhouse after appearing on “Kiner's Corner,” Dick Selma, his teammate at Fresno High, now with the Cubs, met him.
“Who were you pulling for?” Seaver asked him jokingly,
“I was pulling for us,” Selma replied.
“Dear Diary, last night I sat in, with 60,000 other rabid believers, on the birth of a folk hero,” wrote sportswriter Ray Robinson “The folk hero . . . was Tom Seaver, a right-hander, possessing the virtues of Prince Valiant.”

After the “imperfect game,” Seaver was bidding to go beyond comparisons with other greats, like Bob Gibson and Juan Marichal. Rather, he was now seen as a “sure” Hall of Famer already, his fastball and all-around ability comparable to Sandy Koufax, Bob Feller, Lefty Grove, and a list so short it boggled the mind. His was a golden image that comes along once every century or so.
But as Seaver warmed up at Wrigley Field in his next start, a re-match with the Cubs, he felt a bothersome twinge in his shoulder. Wrigley Field was filled with placards and banners, fans singing and chanting. It had all the earmarks and regional pride of a World Cup soccer match. This being the summertime, a large contingent of New Yorkers was on hand, challenging the locals with signs of their own. The ushers and cops were all on edge.
The great Tom Seaver took the hill. Cubs fans booed, of course, but his appearance was a curious phenomenon. You could not help admiring this guy, his superlative ability. He was becoming a myth, a sighting. In the first, he was untouchable, appearing to be as unhittable as he had been at Shea Stadium. The first nine Cubs went down like doomed, blindfolded prisoners before a firing squad. In the sixth, Kessinger bunted for a hit and came around to score.
Seaver mowed Chicago down after that, but an imperceptible problem, unseen by average fans, began to make its presence known. His fastball slowed down imperceptibly, his curve hung just that much; and worse, his shoulder was stiff. Billy Hands and the Chicago bullpen held the 1-0 lead and Tom Seaver had been beaten! This concept seemed impossible, but here it was, right there at Wrigley Field in Chicago.
The next day the great Tom Seaver, the unhittable master, the superstar, the savior; was terribly distressed by severe stiffness, which became actual pain in his throwing shoulder. He lost a pedestrian 5-4 game to Montreal and it was off to the All-Star Game in Washington, D.C.
A black-tie dinner honoring the Greatest Team Ever for professional baseball's 100th anniversary, and a White House reception, highlighted the social calendar. President Richard Nixon was an enormous baseball fan who was reading the Washington Post Sunday statistics of all big league players when he was informed that President Dwight Eisenhower had suffered a heart attack in 1955, thus making him acting President. Seaver met the fellow Californian, whose wife was, like he, a USC alum (Nixon often courted her, sometimes even driving her when she dated other guys, at SC football games in the 1930s).
“Oh, you're the young man who won for the Mets when they were losing,” President Nixon said to him.
Seaver told him it was great to finally be a winner.
Nixon smiled. He had lost the 1960 Presidential election, the 1962 California Gubernatorial race, and was counted out by many before attaining the Presidency the previous November.
“I know what you mean,” he said to Seaver.
Doctors examined Seaver's shoulder. It was theorized that with all the adrenaline of the imperfecto against Chicago, he had simply thrown too hard for the human shoulder to endure. “It's only a muscle strain, maybe from throwing so hard in that one-hit game against Chicago,” one doctor told him. “It's not a muscle tear and there's nothing wrong with the joint. With proper treatment, it will be okay again.”
He was given Butazolidin pills and bathed the shoulder under heat lamps, but the pain would not go away. The unhittable master suddenly was very human, his record falling from 14-3 to 15-7. He lay awake at night, trying to convince himself it would be all right, but the harder he tried the more he worried. He used logic, refused to panic, thought it through, but came back to the basic question all athletes ask: What do I do if I can't play anymore?
One of his heroes growing up, Don Drysdale of Los Angeles, had been as healthy as an ox for years, never missing a start, even pitching victory after victory down the stretch in 1965 with broken ribs. Just last year, Big D had been as dominant as ever, throwing 58 straight shutout innings, but in 1969, without warning, a persistent pain in his arm forced him to retire years too soon.
After the Reds clobbered him, Seaver almost convinced himself he was done. He walked the streets of Cincinnati, reasoning that he would go back to college, that he had the intelligence to have success outside of baseball. Maybe he had earned enough notoriety in three years in New York to parlay that into broadcasting. But to have gone from the mountaintop of July 9, to be an icon only to fall so perilously fast was mind-boggling.
Seaver contacted USC and told them to expect him to start classes in early October, as the Mets would not be in the post-season after all. Down by nine-and-a-half games, however, Gil Hodges still demanded professionalism.
On July 30 the Mets faced old nemesis Houston. Like the Mets, for the very first time the Astros were in contention, in the “wild, wild West” Division with Atlanta, San Francisco, Cincinnati and Los Angeles, all neck-and-neck. During a terrible double-header loss to the Astros, Cleon Jones was perceived to have failed to hustle on a play in the outfield.
Hodges, seething, walked into the outfield grass, confronting Jones. After a few words, Hodges headed back to the dugout, a contrite left fielder a few steps behind him.
“Journalistically, it's conventional to want to look for turning points,” said Ron Swoboda when asked if Hodges's move was just that. “In a 162-game season there's no single turning point. There are a collection of things that turn you in another direction, and for us the collection was <Don> Cardwell, Koosman, <Gary> Gentry, and even <Jim> McAndrew getting physically well . . . They all had little things bothering them, and they didn't pitch very well in the first half of the year. Everyone but Seaver. Seaver was the same; dead steady.”
After the post-All-Star Game slump, despite the Jones incident, Seaver felt “we never stopped hustling and never stopped believing in the miracle. After all, it was the same year man walked on the Moon!” Indeed, fellow USC graduate Neil Armstrong had taken “one small step for man, one giant leap for Mankind” just a few weeks earlier.
Seaver felt the “key games” were played between August 16-19. They included two double-headers, all won by scores of 2-0, 2-1, 3-2, 3-2, and 1-0 (14 innings). On August 16, Seaver's arm, seemingly touched by an unseen hand and suddenly as strong as it had been on July 9, shut out San Diego, 2-0. In the second game, and in both of the next day's twin bill, New York pitching held up in tense one-run victories.
“As late as August 19, we were still nine-and-a-half games back, but then we started to make our move,” Koosman said. “Seaver and I won our last 15 starts.”
Koosman and Seaver challenged each other, acknowledging their one-upsmanship.
“We had so much confidence at that time,” said Koosman. “Tom and I started to get cocky between ourselves. If Seaver struck out 10 the night before, and if I was pitching the next day, I tried to strike out 11. Or if he got a base hit, I tried to get two hits.
“We started making little bets as to who could get the side out with three pitches. And if we accomplished what we said we were going to do, I'd look into the dugout at Seaver, and he'd acknowledge me. If he said he was going to saw somebody off on a certain count and he did it, I'd acknowledge him. That's the confidence we had. At that point the press were calling us 'the Tom and Jerry Show' - after the cartoon.”
“The difference between the physical abilities of the players in the Major Leagues is not that great and, something going hand in hand with that, the difference between the teams is not that great,” Tom Seaver surmised. “So what it comes down to is that the dividing factor between the one that wins and the one that loses is the mental attitude, the effort they give, the mental alertness that keeps them from making mental mistakes. The concentration and the dedication - the intangibles - are the deciding factors, I think, between who won and who lost. I firmly believe that. I really do.”
This was Seaver's logical, reasoning mind at work, and of course each word of it is true. He once explained his motivation, his desire for perfection, the driving force separating him from so many others.
“It's why you run wind sprints in 104-degree heat in the middle of the afternoon in St. Louis in the summer,” he said. “In the ninth inning with the game on the line, you draw strength from that.”
But logic and hard work were not the only factors afoot in September of 1969.

On August 31, Chicago (81-52) led New York (75-53) by three-and-a-half games. New York had gone from nine-and-a-half back to three-and-a-half, and while those games obviously represented a mathematical advantage for the Cubs, the psychology of momentum worked in New York's favor.
With friends and family from Fresno in attendance Tom tossed an 8-0 shutout at the powerful Giants, who were battling hard for the West Division crown. Over the next week, the Mets closed the gap every day. 58,436 came out to see Seaver vs. Jenkins in a game that defined why baseball still was and remains to this day Our National Pastime. The day-to-day tension, the spectacular hopes and expectations, the ebb and flow of a pennant chase cannot be duplicated; not by basketball with its 50 teams making the play-offs, not by soccer and its endless 0-0 scores, and obviously not by football and its need for a weekend climax followed by six days of wound licking/war preparation.
In baseball they play for real every day; not a press conference, not an injury report, not practice in full pads. They strap it on, the fans pay real money to see 'em play real ball, and on September 9 they got it in spades.
Now, the score tells us New York won, 7-1 behind Seaver's dominant pitching. Despite the standings, the division was won on September 9. Furthermore, with Seaver at the full height of his powers, mowing Chicago down with the sheer velocity of a cannon mixed with the accuracy of a Special Forces sharpshooter; the crowd, the atmosphere at Shea Stadium surpassed even the imperfecto of exactly two months earlier. Lastly, if on July 9 the crowd witnessed the birth of George Thomas Seaver as a true New York sports icon, then on September 9 he had his confirmation.
“Man for man, this was the best team in the National League in 1969,” Seaver recalled of the Cubs. “The Cubs' day had come. The only problem was, they ran into a team of destiny, the Amazin' Mets, my club, and we wound up finishing eight games ahead of them in what should have been a magical summer for Cub fans. The '69 Cubs are remembered in Chicago as the '69 Mets are in New York.”
Miracle followed miracle. There was a double-header sweep of Pittsburgh, two 1-0 victories, the winning run in each game driven in by the Mets' pitcher. Not even a record-breaking 19-strikeout performance by Steve Carlton of St. Louis could stop them.
A series of “miraculous things were indeed happening to us and everyone was expecting the unexpected every day,” Seaver recalled. “We were as hot as any ball club could be. It was a rainy afternoon in the new Busch Memorial Stadium, and the Cardinals . . . faced elimination.”
Carlton “served 152 pitches, and 150 of them stayed in the ball park,” except for two two-run homers by Swoboda in a 4-3 victory. The Mets took over first place and never looked back. After beating Carlton, New York led Chicago by four-and-a-half games. They had won 10 of 11 and were at .605.
“My God, the Mets have a 'magic number,' ” said Tom Seaver. They beat the Cardinals again to clinch the East Division. The crowd descended upon the Shea Stadium playing field. A wild Champagne celebration ensured in the clubhouse.
There was no let-up after the clinching, as often occurs. In Philadelphia, Koosman, Seaver and Gentry dominated the Phillies in a sweep. Koosman and Seaver tossed back-to-back shutouts.
“I think Tom and I won something like 18 of our last 19 starts that year,” recalled Koosman.
Seaver pointed out that they outscored only San Diego, Montreal and St. Louis but hit .360 with two outs and men in scoring position late in games. The Elias Sports Bureau said it was the best statistic in this category between 1957 and 1987.
Seaver finished 25-7 with a 2.21 earned run average, having won his last 10 decisions. He struck out 208 hitters in 273 1/3 innings. Seaver's .781 winning percentage was the best in the National League, followed by San Francisco's Juan Marichal (.656). Marichal led the senior circuit with a sparkling 2.10 earned run average, with Steve Carlton at 2.17, Bob Gibson at 2.18, Seaver at 2.21, and Koosman at 2.28. Seaver's 25 wins were the best in baseball. Phil Niekro of the Braves won 23. Marichal and Fergie Jenkins won 21 each.
Considering all the factors, it goes down as one of the finest pitching performances in history. Others have had more dominant statistics. Sandy Koufax (1963, 1965, 1966) won more games, struck out more batters, and posted a lower ERA (he also did it pitching from a higher mound). Seaver won more than Gibson did in 1968 (22 victories). Denny McLain's 1968 record looks better, on paper at least (31-6, 1.96 ERA). Dean Chance won 20 games with 11 shutouts and a 1.65 ERA in 1964. Luis Tiant's earned run average was 1.60 in 1968. All of these pitchers benefited from the aforementioned higher mound.
In subsequent years, Seaver posted lower earned run averages in 1971 and 1973. He struck out more hitters in numerous seasons. Mainly due to a lack of run support, he never won 25 games again. If later Mets clubs scored for him the way the Tigers scored for McLain in 1968, to use one example, Seaver may have been a 30-game winner.
Steve Carlton (1972, when the last place Phillies inextricably scored tons of run when he pitched), Steve Stone (1980), Roger Clemens (1986), Orel Hershiser (1988), Greg Maddux (1995), Pedro Martinez (1999) and Randy Johnson (2001) enjoyed seasons comparable to what Seaver did in 1969. Jim Bagby won 31 for Cleveland in 1920. Philadelphia's Lefty Grove (31-4, 2.06 ERA) was spectacular in 1931 during an era of heavy offense. Detroit's Hal Newhouser won 29 games in 1944. Whitey Ford (25-4) dominated for the 1961 Yankees. The old-timers of the “dead ball era” (Christy Mathewson, Grover Alexander, Walter Johnson) of course must be viewed in light of statistical relevance. There were other pitchers who enjoyed individual seasons comparable on paper to Seaver in 1969, but perhaps did not mean as much to their respective teams.
Seaver carried New York like the mythological figure on the cover of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, seemingly moving the world on his broad shoulders, honed under the hot Camp Pendleton sun doing “up-and-on shoulders.” Few if any pitchers were so important, stood out so spectacularly as the single true star of a team, as did Seaver. Koufax and Gibson; a few others. The list is short. But not even these mound heroes were so singularly identified with their club's success, played such an overall role of leader and inspiration. Perhaps no baseball player, maybe no athlete in any team sport has ever had the image Seaver had in 1969. He was seen as a pure hero, on and off the field, a near-perfect human being as well as athlete. This was false, of course, since as Seaver pointed out “I drink beer and I swear,” and “there's only been one perfect man and he lived 2,000 years ago.” No human can maintain the kind of saintly stature of his hallowed, magical 1969 season. Others, like UCLA basketball coach John Wooden have lived lives of such decency and respect that the glow of near-perfection resided with them until their passing, but Seaver never pretended to or sought such unattainable status.
Tom Seaver was seen as a modern Lancelot, riding a white steed to the rescue of a team, a city, and indeed a whole country. Subsequent reports of his ego, his human flaws, while few and far between, were magnified because in that one year he was seemingly flawless. There were some indications that his image was not quite what people perceived.
“Such a combination of Galahad-like virtues has caused some baseball old-timers to compare him to Christy Mathewson,” wrote Roger Angell in The New Yorker. “Others, a minority, see an unpleasantly planned aspect to this golden image - planned, that is, by Tom Seaver, who is a student of public relations. However, his impact on his teammates can be suggested by something that happened to Bud Harrelson back in July. Harrelson was away on Army Reserve duty during that big home series with the Cubs, and he watched Seaver's near-no-hitter (which Seaver calls 'my imperfect game') on a television set in a restaurant in Watertown, New York.”
“I was there with a couple of Army buddies who also play in the Majors, and we got all steamed up watching Tom work,” Harrelson said. “Then - it was the strangest thing - I began feeling more and more like a little kid watching that game and that great performance, and I wanted to turn to the others and say, 'I know Tom Seaver. Tom Seaver is a friend of mine.' ”
Koosman was lucky in that he was simply viewed as a fine pitcher. The weight of all the expectations Seaver carried never fell on him. He just went out and pitched. His first half was a mixture of spectacular success, a few nagging injuries, and some mediocrity mixed with a lack of support. In the second half, down the stretch, he was almost as good as Seaver, and this statement must be understood in its full meaning. Almost as good asSeaver was like an actor who was almost as good as Olivier, a writer who was almost as good as Hemingway, a political figure who was almost as good as Churchill.
Koosman finished 17-9 with a 2.28 earned run average, with 180 strikeouts in 241 innings pitched. Gary Gentry was 13-12 and everybody expected him to someday be a 20-game winner.
New York's 100-62 mark was the second best regular season record in baseball (.617). Chicago (92-70) finished second in the East, eight games back. Seaver was easily voted the Cy Young Award, but a major controversy came in the awarding of the National League MVP, which went to Willie McCovey. Tom Seaver was unquestionably the deserving winner of the 1969 MVP.
Two writers on the selection committee simply ignored Seaver on their ballots altogether. McCovey finished with 265 points, Seaver with 243. They both had 11 first place votes. Had both of the writers voted Seaver second, or if other writers who penalized him for being a pitcher, had voted him higher, he would have beaten McCovey.
It caused a howl in the New York press, and caused The Sporting News to editorialize that pitchers were the “step-children in the MVP poll,” reminding the Baseball Writers Association of America members that indeed hurlers are eligible. It caused the rules to be changed so that the vote would no longer be kept secret; writers would face accountability. Seaver never complained, expressing only class and admiration for “Stretch.”
Seaver led the Mets to victory in a manner so heroic as to be compared only to a very, very few athletic feats: Carl Yastrzemski of Boston in 1967 perhaps. Maybe Joe Namath and the Jets in 1968. DiMaggio in 1949 comes to mind. Bill Walton of the NBA's Portland Trailblazers cast a similar, singularly large shadow in 1977. Joe Montana's first Super Bowl title with the 1981 49ers is worthy of mention. Neither McCovey nor Willie Mays ever had that kind of take-the-team-on-my-shoulders season.
Seaver and the Mets revitalized the sport of baseball. They drew 2,175,373 fans to Shea Stadium, and 1,197,206 on the road (3,372,579 total). At the time, the 2 million mark in home attendance was what the 3 million mark became (inching towards 4 million as the new modern standard). However, as President Ronald Reagan later said, “You ain't seen nothin' yet.”

STEVEN R. TRAVERS
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