They represented all the things that were good about baseball. I remember my dad waking me up twice during the summer of 1969 when I was eight years old. Once to see a man walk on the moon and the other time to see Tom Seavers near perfect game. I remember my dad telling me both times ....,"You have to watch this you're about to watch history."
I remember when I was a kid I used to deliver the Daily News.
Those were the days when you actually got your news from a newspaper that morning. And when I saw the headline that Mets had traded him I was devastated. I reluctantly followed his career and even felt a little bit of pride when he threw is no hitter with the Reds
He will always be Mr. Met.
Now please build this damn statue of Seaver in front of Citifield
Gary Dell'Abate
________________________________________
The Mets had a pitcher named Craig Anderson who lost 20 games two seasons in a row. To lose that many games, you have to be pretty good or they wouldn't have kept playing him.
But in 1962 he led the Mets in saves and appearances, and was the winning pitcher in both games of the first double-header the Mets ever won. How could I not be a fan? I didn't care that he spelled his last name incorrectly :)
I probably bumped into you at Shea Stadium a couple of times without realizing it.
Great writing, as usual.
Craig Anderton
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Great piece. The company I work for manages The Mets' archive, along with other teams. One of our founders, Charlie, was talking with Mike Piazza today. Today was a busy day for Mike and tomorrow is his birthday. Turns out that Mike and Tom are the only two Mets inducted into the Hall of Fame.
I forwarded your piece to Charlie and invited him to share it with Mike.
We built a nice tribute to Tom on the Mets virtual vault. You might enjoy it.
www.metsheritage.com/
All the best,
Daryl Faulkner
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As a child of the sixties growing up in New Jersey, the Mets were part of my DNA. Hell, I saw Sandy Koufax strike out 15 Mets at the Polo Grounds. When Tom Seaver came along, he transformed the Mets from a bunch of bums to 1969 World Series champions with a grace and skill that proved infectious to the rest of the team. Many of the 1969 Mets played at a level they never approached again. And Tom Seaver was very cool. I met him at "Autograph Day" at Shea Stadium (when there was such a thing), and to a young teenager, that was like meeting Babe Ruth. Years later at a charity event in Century City, Tom was seated at the table next to me. I introduced myself and thanked him for his autograph. He smiled and gregariously shook my hand. Still a world-class act. Thank you Tom Seaver and RIP.
Michael R. Morris
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I started following baseball as a six year old Met fan in '65. Tough to be a little kid when your team is a joke.
When I was eight we got our knight in shining armor. He could face anybody. He could face Bob Gibson.
My mother used to tell my father 'buy tickets for when Seaver is pitching" so we saw him many times. We saw him mow down Chicago in '69.
I cried when I heard the news. I had to explain to my wife that she was looking at an eight year old boy.
Michael Alex
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I was a gonzo Mets fan and loved Tom Seaver
Eric Greenspan
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THANKS..."YA GOTTA BELIEVE!" will be on my Tombstone. Appreciate that
Boomer Bobby Ekizian
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beautiful tribute Bob. my memory of watching seaver pitch is fuzzy compared to how i remember dwight gooden but even then, gooden did not have the sustained success seaver did. jacob degrom might if he stays healthy and keeps dominating like he does. but still, you pretty much knew the mets were winning when seaver pitched and I'm pretty sure I cried when he lost his no-hitter to the padres....with one out in the 9th to leron lee. was it 1972 or 73?
Mike Farley
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Thank you, a skilled piece of writing that still conjures up the feeling on a well trod field. I was there as well.
Jon Klein
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Beautiful tribute to Tom Seaver and the fluidity and instinctive nature of those decades. Baseball was magic with the transistors out at recess and everyone huddled around to listen to the Reds or the As or The Orioles. You captured that spirit of unity and loyalty that we felt together. I loved the As and not a big fan of the Giants eve though I respected all their playing including "say hey". Games on the radio at night trying to fall asleep. Magic times Bob
Scott Tavis
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Thanks Bob for the great article on Tom Seaver. One of my childhood heroes is now gone, but my memories of Tom "Terrific" will live on! #LGM!
JIm
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Yes, we did, indeed.
Tom Seaver. from Fresno HS, my old hometown.
Thanks, Bob, well said.
Michael Wright
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Well done Tom Seaver.
And Bob Lefsetz.
Don Matthews
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Thank you for your tribute to Tom Terrific and reminding me of the transistor radios! Everyone in my 6th grade class had one with those little white "earbuds" (mono, precursor to the real earbuds). I heard some great Mets World Series moments on those.
Regards,
David M. Ehrlich
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Bob, great piece. And it's great to see you point out that the "NLCS" acronym was never used back then. I'm not really sure when it started, exactly, but maybe sometime in the '90s or late '80s. To this day, when I hear it, I wince.
Charles Siegel
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61 years old.. raised in Merrick on the South Shore of L.I. and my hero's were Tom Seaver, Joe Namath and Bob Dylan. When Seaver news hit the other day, my phone lit up .This one hurt.
Brian Lukow
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Bob, thanks for the great tribute to one of my childhood heroes. I had sketches of the entire '69 team on my wall and knew the batting lineup backward and forward. Great players like Bud Harrelson, Wayne Garret, Cleon Jones, Tommy Agee and Tug McGraw Still Tom Terrific was was the heart and soul of the team in both '69 and in '73. It was a sad day when the Mets traded him away and a sad day now to say goodbye. May he Rest In Peace
Michael Weintraub
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This death hit very personal. As a 10 year old on Long Island I went to opening day '69 where Seaver pitched against the brand new Montréal Expos. I watched or listened to every game. Lindsey Nelson Ralph Kiner Bob Murphy. Pitched Tom Seaver fastballs into my pitch back with a whiffle ball.
And we knew every player on the starting 9. Still do. By number. An indelible part of my youth. A real coming of age that he is gone. RIP.
Kenneth Freundlich
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Your best bit of writing this year. Maybe ever. You captured what was right about Seaver, what was right about baseball, why it all snapped together in a time capsule we probably can't open again.
There's so much we've lost and not enough we've gained. I still love the game, walking into the stadium will always be true joy for me, but a school kid listening to the big game on a transistor radio that also played The Beatles, no way to know what that is unless it was you.
Seaver was a mensch, a larger than life hero to so many who needed one. You captured that. He matters a lot.
Ken Goldstein
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Thank you - Great post - I was 11 in 1969 and loved the Mets.
Lance Bakemeyer
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Dick Young, reporter for the Dailey News ran him out of town because Seaver had the audacity to ask for more money. Biggest hypocrite ever. Years later jumped to the NY Post for more money
Johnnie O'Connell
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Nice piece of writing. Rap on double hipness… Good to see there's still some intelligent life on the planet.
Victor Levine
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Great guy.
Not on the take- like you...
Tony Brummel
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Great read! Reminds me of the great baseball movies; the Natural, Love of the Game etc...
Reason why I loved baseball in the first place. This is the first year I've ignored MLB because of politics.
What ever happened to the great American pastimes that whether they had Heart or not, at least you believed they did?!
Robby Vee
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Hey Bob,
Thanks for the shout out to Tom Seaver. He was great. He was an innovator. He changed the game, in particular pitching, to analytics before analytics arrived. He played in the era when starting pitchers were expected to finish the game, even if it went extra innings. He was the first to figure out the percentages of situations and play accordingly. As opposed to going full bore effort and concentration with every pitch, he figured out to have three different speed fastballs. This would throw the batters timing off and help him to complete games. He also would work the first out of every inning as if the game was on the line; after getting that out he could "cruise" for the next two outs. He would later say the obvious (today) that the percentages of having a scoring inning were greatly reduced if the team at bat only had two outs to work with. Seaver was an innovator on the mound. The opposite (though equally as great) Nolan Ryan who would simply blow batters away with the first 100mph fastball. Oddly, perhaps because of Seaver's style, Seaver never really got credit for his best fastball; it was as hard as almost anybody in the league. I just wish that today's high schoolers would learn from Seaver that there is more to pitching than power.
Thanks for remembering Tom Seaver.
Matthew Grandi
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So in '69, I was a dj at the Temple U station, WRTI-FM. I somehow wangled a press ticket to the Mets v. Phillies game at old Connie Mack Stadium.
It was late in the season. It was a great game. Tom Seaver notched his 25th win. I sat up in the rickety old press box at the top of the stadium. Early in the game, Cleon Jones hit a foul ball that soared straight up over the first base line, hit the top of the press booth and miraculously dropped into my hand. It was the first time I'd ever caught a foul ball at a game. After years of attending Dodgers, Yankees and Mets games, this was my first. I decided to go down to the clubhouse after the game and get it signed.
This was my first time in a clubhouse. It was very unnerving to see your heores naked. I mean, baseball players were always seen with the head shot like on the baseball card. But here was Yogi, Gil, Rube, Tom, Cleon, Tommy, Ron, Bud all naked and showering. I tried not to look down.
Anyway, the ball was passed around the room and signed by the team. Seaver had the sweet spot and wrote "25" under his name.
About a month later, they won the World Series and I knew that my ball was a keeper. I preserved it in a clear plastic box and stashed in my locker. I never showed it to anyone.
Two years later, I was out in California. I sublet my apartment to a college friend. I would be gone for two months and when I returned, I would be moving back to New York and a post-college job at WNEW-FM. When I returned, I discovered that my apartment had been stripped bare. The guy I sublet it to had become the opposite of the hard-working young student I knew. He'd become a junkie, joined a motorcycle gang and had been kicked out of my apartment. He stole everything on his way out.
It took me months to track him down and to find out what he did with my stuff. His family had disowned him and didn't know where he was. I finally found him in jail outside of Scranton. He sold the stuff or threw it away and too bad. A few months later, out of prison, he overdosed and died.
Of all the things that I never saw again, only that baseball plagued me. It still does.
Rich Arfin
________________________________________
Wow Bob!
Brilliant piece of writing!
One of your best. Love how you wove in the cultural Zeitgeist. Born in 1970 so missed it all but I remember the vapors if the end of it all, but you just made me feel like I was there!
Thanks!
Dan Millen
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Before Shea Stadium was built, the expansion New York Metropolitan Baseball Club, more commonly known as the Mets, played two season in the Polo Grounds, located in Upper Manhattan. My grandfather took me to a game at the Polo Grounds during that 1962 inaugural, but I was far too young to remember. I only know that I was there. So, what choice did I really have in life but to become a diehard Mets' fan? The early years were painful and embarrassing. Their ace that 1st season was Al Jackson, who went 8-20. The team lost 100 games five out of the first six years of its existence, stumbling seemingly forever until Tom Seaver arrived in '67. "Tom Terrific," who generated power from his massive legs and torque, and would scrape his knee on the pitcher's mound with every delivery. 1969, that championship season, was a magical year for NY sports, between the Jets, Knicks and Mets. The Jets and Mets played at Shea Stadium, the Knicks at "The Garden." No New York sports star exhibited more grace and a competitive spirit than Tom Seaver, a 311 career game winner, a 3X Cy Young Award winner and a 1st round HOF-er. He once, unimaginably, struck out 10 consecutive batters in a game. Years later after his retirement, I met Seaver at a charity squash event my gf was running for Lehman Brothers, you know, the bank of ill repute. Seaver was to play tennis great John McEnroe in a charity match. Seaver played squash several times a week, McEnroe hardly at all. McEnroe won, and boy was Seaver pissed, though he never lost sight that he was there to raise money for charity. It was great to see, so many years after retirement, Seaver still had that competitive spirit and absolutely couldn't stand losing. That's cause all his life, Tom Seaver was a winner. RIP.
Stuart K. Marvin
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Tom Seaver's death is upsetting. He meant a lot to me as a young baseball fan.
I went to game 4 of the 1969 WS . It was October 15, 1969 and it was the first moratorium day against the Vietnam war - a national protest against the war and everyone was cutting school and going to an anti war demonstrations.
This school friend asks me if I wanna go to the WS game instead - his dad had tix and Seaver was pitching.
What baseball fan could say no to that ?
So, I say yeah and we bring a bunch of anti war leaflets with us that had a picture of Seaver proclaiming him to be against the war .
We get to Shea early and he and I begin handing out the fliers for a few hours , then we were all of a sudden promptly taken away by police. They were harassing us for having Seaver's picture on the leaflets.
Next thing you know, my friends dad comes by and gets the cops to let us go. The dad was Sy Berger -who was the founder and president of Topps baseball card company ( he is considered the father of the bb card) .
I had no idea who my friends Dad was . He took us inside the stadium down to our box seats by dugout (he kindly scolded us first) and gave us both a WS program signed by both teams . A few years ago I see on Wikipedia that...
"Game 4 was mired in controversy. Tom Seaver's photograph was used on some anti-war Moratorium Dayliterature being distributed outside Shea Stadium before the game, although the pitcher claimed that his picture was used without his knowledge or approval."
Pretty funny. RIP -Tom terrific - one of the best!
By the way ,you may already know this but the NY Mets original uniforms had both the blue of the Brooklyn Dodgers and the orange from the NY Giants , who fled NYC for somewhere out West and were never forgiven!
Regards and stay safe,
Steve Fenster
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If you remember, I was the high school Mets fan. It says so in the Yearbook, so I have a little credibility here! I had been to so many Mets games at the Polo Grounds and Shea Stadium, I could tell you where all the stops were by rail all the way from Fairfield Station all the way to Flushing and give you every year's roster and line up on the way. We were a National League family and my mother was a diehard Dodgers fan. The story has it that I saw my first ball game, in utero, at Ebbetts Field. She loved Roy Campanella, Jackie Robinson, Gil Hodges, the whole gang.
Then, in 1957, the great betrayal occurred; both National League teams fled for the coast, leaving us in the hands of those Yankee bullies. We had nothing left but to root against every team that played against the Yankees. We became big time professional major league Yankee haters. We had it so bad, we'd even watch a Bosox game and listen to Curt Gowdy on Channel 8 rather than give Phil Rizzuto the satisfaction over WPIX during important games. Who cares about Mantle and Maris!
Five years in the desert and then the skies opened up and the seas parted, the New York Mets were born. The Metropolitan Baseball Club of New York. Aside from the old timers brought onto the field by a decrepit Casey Stengel, Choo Choo Coleman (or Chris Cannizzaro), Marv Throneberry, Charlie Neal, Felix Mantilla, Elio Chacon (or Hot Rod Kanehl), Frank Thomas, Richie Ashburn and Jim Hickman (or Joe Christopher) were our guys in the starting lineup and they were a hoot! And we had 3 20 game losers on the pitching staff who led us to a 40-120 record the first year, worst in the history of baseball. Every game, fans throughout would speculate on what new and creative way they would find to lose the game. Would Hot Rod Kanehl throw the ball in the dugout on a botched double play? Would Marvelous Marv Throneberry forget to touch 2nd base?
I was smitten. It didn't matter if they won. They'd have their day. We'd have fun getting there. That is why I bet David Harinstein, whom I'd known since elementary school chader, $.10 at 100 to 1 odds that the Mets would win the World Series every year since I moved to Fairfield in '64. In 1969, after coughing up five slim dimes, I finally collected from the Yankee loving bully to the jeers of Fred Lobdell in the background.
There weren't many of us in those days. Most of the students were Yankee fans. They'd taunt us and gloat over man for man comparisons: Jerry Grote or Jake Gibbs; Ed Kranepool or Joe Pepitone, Ron Swoboda or Bobby Murcer and so on. But then they'd stop when we'd get to pitching: Tom Seaver or Mel Stottlemyre. It got serious.
That is why it was so gratifying when I saw this news item in The New York Times:
BALTIMORE, Oct. 10 (UPI) -- Tom Seaver, the New York Mets' starting pitcher for the opening World Series game here tomorrow, believes the United States should get out of Vietnam. He says he plans to buy an advertisement in The New York Times saying: "If the Mets can win the World Series, then we can get out of Vietnam."
www.nytimes.com/1969/10/11/archives/tom-seaver-says-u-s-should-leave-vietnam.html
Holy Cow! Tom Terrific was a peacenik! The association of the underdog team's star pitcher with the noble movement of the moment was astounding. Long before Colin Kapernik was born, here is a star laying his career on the line. Wow!
He was a man among men; a titan on the field and in the world of Fair Play, an antiquated notion that once governed what the ancients used to call, "Civics." He personified all that was good, all that was healthy and all that was fun about professional sports. Even Ralph Kiner knew.
Tom Seaver, the world will miss you. Thanks for the inspiration.
Your classmate,
Ken Shain
AWHS Class of '70
________________________________________
I too was at that Atlanta game and finally tossed a shoe box with just dirt (it did originally have a patch of grass from behind the pitchers mound - I know, a bad thing to do...) We had parked near that Sunoco gas station just before the exit to LaGuardia and when the game ended we hopped on the hood of cars with everyone yelling and screaming to get back to our car. Every one was sharing beers and other stuff to help us celebrate. I'll never forget that day.
And we were lucky - we got to go to the WS game 4 and watched the JC Martin bunt where the throw got away in the 10th. I was also there for opening day at Shea Stadium and I'll also always remember their first banner day where me and my brothers paraded our banner around the warning track.
Fun times...
Mitch Roth
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Legend was never tarnished but Dick Young tried to soil it pretty good.
He was a class act....in the hallowed Sandy Koufax hall of "class."
I cried like a baby last night when I heard.
Larry Solters
________________________________________
I love sport.
I played cricket, rugby and even ran half mile for my county.
I've been a Man Utd fan since watching the 1963 FA Cup final when they beat Leicester 3-1. God knows what I would have been if Leicester had won!
I came to LA and immediately became a LA Raiders fan. Marcus Allen became my hero. When he left to the Chiefs and I moved to NY I stayed with Marcus and became a Chiefs fan. Still am to this day. Flew into Miami for that incredible Super Bowl win.
I didn't get Basketball, but John Frankenhiemer took me to a Lakers game, and I've never looked back.
Anyway, the point of this ramble is, I've just never got into Baseball! I enjoyed the social aspect going to a game but never dove deep. Maybe if I had watched Tom Seaver I would have!
Richard Griffiths
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