The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (28 page)

DEFENSE—Gil Hodges, trying to put to rest the notion that his winners were somehow spawned out of sunshine, recently pointed out that last year’s team, which finished twenty-four games back, was almost never beaten badly. I looked it up: the 1968 club lost only ten times by six runs or more. Give No. 14 a lot of credit. Even while losing, the young Mets were taught the essentials of winning baseball—hitting the cutoff man, throwing to the right base, holding the runner close. The new Mets do not beat themselves, which is a failing far more common in baseball than one would suspect.

HITTING—Batting is very nearly unteachable, but it thrives on confidence. The Mets’ two most talented swingers, Cleon Jones and Tommie Agee, are lifelong friends from Mobile, Alabama; both, curiously, are subject to self-doubt and depression. Hodges has stuck with them for two seasons, patiently playing them in the top of the order and ignoring slumps and glooms. Agee, always a fine center fielder, came back from a terrible .217 season to a solid .271 this year, with twenty-six homers, while Jones, down to .223 at one point last year, was in the thick of the fight for the National League batting title this summer, finishing in third place, with .340. Shamsky, Boswell, Harrelson, and Grote all had surprising years at the plate (Shamsky’s .300 was sixty-nine points above his lifetime average), which may be due to example, or to the exuberance of winning, or to just plain

GOOD LUCK—Always, this is the identifying mark of a pennant winner. You can see it beginning to happen: Key hits start to drop in, fair by inches, while the enemy’s line shots seem to be hit straight into a waiting glove or to carom off the wall to produce an overstretched hit-and-out. These Mets, however, have been the recipients of several extra kisses of providence. This spring, Commissioner Bowie Kuhn persuaded Donn Clendenon to come out of a month’s retirement after he had been traded from Atlanta to Montreal, thus keeping him available for a trade to the Mets in June. Tom Seaver was illegally signed to a bonus by the Braves in 1966, thus making him available for a lucky draw from a hat by the Mets. The son of a Shea Stadium usher happened to write his father that there was a pretty fair sort of pitcher at his Army camp, thus bringing the name of Jerry Koosman to the attention of Met scouts.

YOUTH AND CHARACTER—The Mets’ locker room was a pleasant place to visit this summer—for once, a true clubhouse. These ballplayers are younger than most, the great majority in their mid-twenties, and their lack of superstars and supersalaries accounted for an absence of the cliques, feuds, and barracks irritability to be found on many ball teams. The Mets are articulate and educated (twenty-two of the twenty-six have attended college), and they seem to take pride in their varying life styles and interests, which include love beads and business suits, rock music and reading, the stock market, stewardesses, practical jokes, alligator shoes, and sometimes even world affairs. Donn Clendenon owns a night club in Atlanta and is a vice-president for industrial relations of Scripto, the pen company; Ron Taylor is an electrical engineer, who has been known to say, “Doubleheader tomorrow, barring nuclear holocaust”; Jim McAndrew is a psychologist; Ed Charles sends his inspirational poems to kids who write for autographs; Ron Swoboda talks of entering politics someday, because he wants to do something about racial tensions. Ed Kranepool is the only original Met still with the team, but Swoboda, to my mind, most typifies the change from the old Mets to the new. He arrived in 1965, at the age of twenty—an enormous young man with an enormous, eager smile. He hit prodigious homers and had appalling difficulties with outside curves and high flies. He fell down in the outfield, threw to the wrong base, lost his temper, and was involved in Metsian misadventures. Once, in Candlestick Park, he popped up with men on base, returned to the bench, and stamped so hard on his batting helmet that it could not be pulled off his spikes in time for him to return to the field for the next inning. The Shea fans have stuck with him through sulks and slumps and strikeouts (“
RON SWOBODA IS STRONGER THAN DIRT
,” one banner read), because he is
never
unsurprising—as the Baltimore Orioles will forever remember.

Tom Seaver, still only twenty-four, was the biggest winner in baseball this year (he finished at 25–7) and the undisputed leader of the Mets’ upsurge. Arriving two years ago to join a hopeless collection of habitual cellar mice, he made it clear at once that losing was unacceptable to him. His positive qualities—good looks, enthusiasm, seriousness, lack of affectation, good humor, intelligence—are so evident that any ball team would try to keep him on the roster even if he could only pitch batting practice. This is unlikely to happen. In his first three years, he has won fifty-seven games and has been voted onto three All Star teams, and he is now a prime favorite to win both the Cy Young and the Most Valuable Player awards for 1969. Such a combination of Galahad-like virtues has caused some baseball old-timers to compare him with Christy Mathewson. 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,” Harrelson said later, “and we all got steamed up watching Tom work. 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.’”

Most of the other Mets, it seems to me, are equally susceptible to enthusiasm. Young and alert and open, they are above all suggestible, and this quality—the lead-off hit just after a brilliant inning-ending catch; the valiant but exhausted starting pitcher taken off the hook by a sudden cluster of singles—is what made the Mets’ late innings so much worth waiting for this year. It is also possible that these intuitive, self-aware athletes sensed, however vaguely, that they might be among the few to achieve splendor in a profession that is so often disappointing, tedious, and degrading. Their immense good fortune was to find themselves together at the same moment of sudden maturity, combined skills, and high spirits. Perhaps they won only because they didn’t want this ended. Perhaps they won because they were unbored.

Something else—a sense of unreality, some persistent note of recognition of difference—stayed with me after all my visits to the Mets’ clubhouse this year. Only in the end did I realize what it was. Instead of resembling a real ball team, the new Mets reminded me most of a Hollywood cast assembled to play in still another unlikely baseball movie. They seemed smaller and younger and more theatrical than a real team, and their drama was hopelessly overwritten. Certainly the cast was right—Harrelson and Boswell (Bud and Ken), the eager, sharp-faced infielders; Wayne Garrett, the freckle-faced rookie with the sweet smile; Jerry Grote, the broken-nosed, scrappy catcher; Agee and Jones, the silent, brooding big busters; Jerry Koosman, the cheerful hayseed; Ed Charles, the philosophical black elder; Art Shamsky, the Jewish character actor with persistent back pains; Hodges and Berra, the seamy-faced, famous old-timers (neither, unfortunately, called Pop); and Tom Seaver, of course, the hero. And who can say that the Mets didn’t sense this, too—that they didn’t know all along that this year at Shea life was imitating not just art but a United Artists production?

The only bad luck suffered by the Mets this year was the collapse of their opposition. A few cynics will insist (I have heard them already) that the Mets did not win their divisional title but had it handed to them. They somehow overlook the fact that the Mets won thirty-eight of their last forty-nine regular-season games (twenty-nine of thirty-six when it really mattered), and point instead to the Cubs’ loss of ten out of eleven games in early September, to the Cubs’ blowing a nine-and-a-half-game lead in less than a month, and to the failure of the powerful Pirates and the pennant-holding Cardinals ever to mount a consistent assault on the leaders. We all wanted that culminating explosion of open warfare similar to the famous Trafalgar staged by the American League in 1967, but the major fleets seemed only to glide past each other in the night. One brief skirmish—a pair of evening games at Shea on September 8 and 9—sufficed to convince me, however, that the Mets would have won just as surely if the issue had come down to the last afternoon of the season. The Cubs by then were a badly rattled club, exhausted by the silences and rages of their manager, Leo Durocher, and apprehensive about the impending loss of their lead, which they had held too long (a hundred and forty-two days) and too easily. Cub pitcher Bill Hands opened the first game by decking Tommie Agee with an inside fast ball—a mistake against the Suggestibles. Jerry Koosman responded classically by hitting the next Cub batter, Ron Santo, on the wrist, and an inning later Agee banged a two-run homer. The Cubs tied it in the sixth, but Agee scored the winning run in the bottom half, sliding in ahead of a sweeping tag by catcher Randy Hundley, who then suggested that the umpire had blown the call. (I was watching at home, and Hundley’s enraged leap took him right off the top of my TV screen, leaving only his shoes in view, like Santa’s boots disappearing up the chimney.) The next night, Seaver threw a five-hitter, the Mets racked up ten hits and seven runs, and Durocher was treated to several dozen touching renditions of the new anthem, “Good-by, Leo!” The Mets took over first place the next day.

They went on winning—sometimes implacably, sometimes improbably. They won a doubleheader from Pittsburgh in which the only run in each game was driven in by the Met pitcher. They won again from the Pirates the next day, when Ron Swoboda hit the first grand-slam home run of his career. Against the Cardinals, they set an all-time mark by striking out nineteen times in one game, but beat the brand-new record-holder, Steve Carlton, on two two-run homers by Swoboda. Against the Pirates, a Pittsburgh pop single was converted into a sudden out when Swoboda scooped up the ball and fired it to catcher Jerry Grote, who had raced up the line to take the throw at first base just as the base-runner turned the corner. Had we but seen them, these games contained all the market indications of a brilliant investment coup in the coming playoff and Series.

Fittingly, the game that clinched the Mets’ half-pennant was against the old league champs, the Cardinals. Thoughtfully, the Cubs had won that afternoon, thus keeping the Mets from backing in. Appropriately, it was the last home game at Shea, and 54,928 of us had turned out. Undramatically, the Mets won it in the very first inning, bombing out Steve Carlton with two homers—a three-run shot by a new favorite, Donn Clendenon, and a two-run poke by an old favorite, Ed Charles, who clapped his hands delightedly as he circled the bases. It was a slow, humid, comical evening, presided over by a festive orange moon. Plenty of time to read the fans’ banners (“
QUEENS LITHO LOVES THE METS
,” “
YOU GUYS ARE TOO MUCH
!”), to read the scoreboard (“
METS WELCOME THE GOODTIME CHARLIE PHYSICAL FITNESS GROUP
”; “
METS WELCOME THE PASSIONIST RETREATISTS
”), to fly paper airplanes, to grin idiotically at each other, to tear programs into confetti, and to join in a last, loud “Good-by, Leo!” rendered
a cappella
, with the right-field tenors in especially good voice. Then, in a rush, came the game-ending double play, the hero-hugging (Gary Gentry had pitched a 6–0 shutout), the sprint for life (Met fans are not the most excited pennant locusts I have ever seen, but they are the quickest off the mark and the most thorough), and the clubhouse water sports (Great Western, Yoo-Hoo, Rise lather, beer, cameras, interviews, music, platitudes, disbelief). Ed Charles sat in front of his locker, away from the television lights and the screeching, and said, “Beautiful, baby. Nine years in the minors for me, then nine more with the Athletics and Mets. Never,
never
thought I’d make it. These kids will be back next year, but I’m thirty-six and time is running out. It’s better for me than for them.”

A few minutes later, I saw George Weiss, the Mets’ first general manager, trying to push his way through the mob outside Gil Hodges’ office. He got to the door at last and then peered in and waved to Hodges, who had played for the Mets in their terrible first season.

“Nineteen sixty-two!” Weiss called.

“Nineteen sixty-two!” Hodges replied.

Rod Kanehl and Craig Anderson, two other Original Mets, met in the middle of the clubhouse, cried “Hey!” in unison, and fell into each other’s arms. Soon they became silent, however, and stood there watching the party—two heavy men in business suits, smoking cigars.

The playoffs—the television-enriching new autumn adjunct known officially as the Championship Series—matched up the Orioles and the Minnesota Twins, and the Mets and the Atlanta Braves, who had barely escaped the horrid possibility of three-way or four-way pre-playoff with the Dodgers, Giants, and Cincinnati Reds in the National League West. Atlanta filled its handsome white stadium to capacity for its two weekend games against New York, but to judge from the local headlines, the transistor-holders in the stands, the television interviews with Georgia coaches, and the high-school band and majorettes that performed each morning in the lobby of the Regency Hyatt House hotel, autumn baseball was merely a side attraction to another good old Deep South football weekend. Georgia beat South Carolina, 41–16; Clemson beat Georgia Tech, 21–10; the Colts beat the Falcons, 21–14; and the Mets beat the Braves, 9–5 and 11–6. The cover of the official program for the baseball games displayed a photograph of the uniformed leg of an Atlanta Brave descending from a LEM onto a home plate resting on the moon, with the legend “One Step for the Braves, One Giant Leap for the Southeast,” but Manager Hodges saw to it that the astronaut never got his other foot off the ladder. Not wanting to lose his ace in the significant first game, he kept Tom Seaver on the mound for seven innings, while Seaver absorbed an uncharacteristic eight-hit, five-run pounding. Tom plugged away, giving up homers and doubles, and resolutely insisting in the dugout that the Mets were going to win it. The lead changed hands three times before this finally happened, in the eighth, when the Mets scored five times off Phil Niekro on three successive hits, a gift stolen base, a fearful throwing error by Orlando Cepeda, and a three-run pinch single by J.C. Martin. The next day’s match was just as sloppy. The Braves scored five runs with two out in the fifth, all off Koosman and all too late, since the Mets had already run up a 9–1 lead. Hank Aaron hit his second homer in two days, Agee and Jones and Boswell hit homers for the Mets, and the Braves left for Shea Stadium with the almost occult accomplishment of having scored eleven runs off Seaver and Koosman without winning either game.