Homage to a Met

Tom Seaver saved the first ballgame I ever watched all the way through, the 1967 All-Star Game.  It lasted 15 innings but my father let me stay up to see all of it, which probably should have turned me off baseball forever.

The game was a royal snore.  One of the geniuses who ran major-league baseball even then decided that it should start at 5 p.m. in Anaheim, to maximize East Coast viewership, and as a result nobody could see the ball in the golden California dusk.  There were 30 strikeouts in all, and for a long time it looked like nobody would ever score again.

I loved it anyway.  But then Tony Perez homered and, in the bottom of the 15th at the Big A, Tom Terrific came in, and quickly worked his way through the inning, judiciously walking Yaz in that, his Wonder Year, but striking out Ken Berry (Ken Berry!) for the final out.

I was devastated.  A Met?  How could a Met do anything?  It was the one consolation for me, a fan of the 9th-place Yankees then still living in New Jersey that at least the Mets were still worse than my team!

Well, even worse—and better—was to come, and as I grew up I came to appreciate just how great Tom Seaver really was.

Besides his exploits on the field he was the first—and in many ways, the best—of the New Ballplayer.   A college man, he had also been a Marine Corps reservist, worked manual-labor jobs, and traveled widely by the time the Braves first drafted him.

Because that violated one of baseball's byzantine rules on amateurism, he was commanded to return to college—only to learn that the Lords of the NCAA had now deemed him ineligible to play for USC.  In the not-so-very-old days, that would have been that, and Tom Terrific would've had to just sit out a year.

But Seaver was nobody's fool, and his father was a corporate executive who knew very smart lawyers.  Baseball backed down, and Seaver ended up a Met—in a random drawing performed over the phone, by Lee MacPhail.

Hey, who knows, but Tom and Nancy did prove the perfect fit for New York.  Everyone wanted them—wanted to know them, wanted to use them.  With their clean-cut, all-American image (Nancy's meticulous, matching outfits at the World Series were stunning!), the establishment wanted to claim them.  So did the counterculture, trying to push Tom into coming out against the war.

But Tom Seaver was nobody's boy, as he would show again and again in his career, most famously in facing down Dick Young and the aristocrat-poseur running the Mets, M. Donald Grant.

The pity was that he did not into the postseason more often.  There were a couple of delicious what-ifs there.  The Mets, incredibly, bumbled him away a SECOND time after the 1983 season, when they would almost undoubtedly have won the 1985 and maybe the 1984 East Division titles with him in the rotation.

In 1985, had things gone just a little differently, he might have faced the Yankees in a 1985 Subway Series.  Thank goodness we were spared that.  Whatever the case, he might well have appeared in that Series with the other great Met pitching icon, Dwight Gooden.  For that matter, had he not been injured, he would have pitched in the 1986 World Series for the Red Sox, and against the Mets.

A shame we never got to see it.

But we did get to see him notch his 300th win on Phil Rizzuto Day at Yankee Stadium, the same day the cow knocked over Scooter, and what were the odds of those stars ever aligning?

I remember, that same day, Mike Lupica wrote a fanciful column that imagined Gooden, years later, winning his 300th game.  As it happened, Gooden never even got to 200, which is no knock on the Doc, just another measure of how very hard it is to be that good, for that long.

R.I.P., Tom Terrific.