by Roger Angell
DAYS AND NIGHTS WITH THE UNBORED
— October 1969
THE SERIES AND THE season are over—four days done at this writing—and the Mets are still Champions of the World. Below midtown office windows, scraps and streamers of torn paper still litter the surrounding rooftops, sometimes rising and rearranging themselves in an autumn breeze. I just looked out, and they’re still there. It’s still true. The Mets won the National League’s Eastern divisional title, and won it easily; they won the playoffs, beating the Atlanta Braves in three straight; they took the World Series—one of the finest Series of all time—beating the Orioles in five games. The Mets. The New York Mets? … This kind of disbelief, this surrendering to the idea of a plain miracle, is tempting but derogatory. If in the end we remember only a marvelous, game-saving outfield catch, a key hit dropped in, an enemy batter fanned in the clutch, and then the ridiculous, exalting joy of it all—the smoke bombs going off in the infield, the paper storm coming down and the turf coming up, and the clubhouse baptisms—we will have belittled the makers of this astonishment. To understand the achievement of these Mets, it is necessary to mount an expedition that will push beyond the games themselves, beyond the skill and the luck. The journey will end in failure, for no victorious team is entirely understandable, even to itself, but the attempt must always be made, for winning is the ultimate mystery that gives all sport its meaning. On the night of September 24, when the Mets clinched their divisional title, Manager Gil Hodges sat in his clubhouse office after the game and tried to explain the season. He mentioned good pitching, fine defense, self-reliance, momentum, and a sense of team confidence. The reporters around his desk nodded and made notes, but they all waited for something more. From the locker room next door came a sharp, heady whiff of sloshed champagne and the cries of exultant young athletes. Then someone said, “Gil, how did it all happen? Tell us what it all proves.”
Hodges leaned back in his chair, looked at the ceiling, and then spread his large hands wide. “Can’t be done,” he said, and he laughed.
Disbelief persists, then, and one can see now that disbelief itself was one of the Mets’ most powerful assets all through the season. Again and again this summer, fans or friends, sitting next to me in the stands at Shea Stadium would fill out their scorecards just before game time, and then turn and shake their heads and say, “There is no way—just no way—the Mets can take this team tonight.” I would compare the two lineups and agree. And then, later in the evening or at breakfast the next morning, I would think back on the game—another game won by the Mets, and perhaps another series swept—and find it hard to recall just how they had won it, for there was still no way, no way, it could have happened. Finally, it began to occur to me that if my friends and I, partisans all, felt like this, then how much more profoundly those other National League teams, deeper in talent and power and reputation than the Mets, must have felt it. For these were still the Mets—the famous and comical losers, ninth-place finishers last year, a team that had built a fortune and a following out of defeat and perversity, a team that had lost seven hundred and thirty-seven games in seven years and had finished a total of two hundred and eighty-eight and a half games away from first place. No way, and yet it happened and went on happening, and the only team, interestingly, that did not disbelieve in the Mets this summer was the Houston Astros, a club born in the same year as the Mets and the owners of a record almost as dismal; the Astros, who also came to competence and pride this summer, won ten out of twelve games from the Mets and were the only rivals to take a season series from them.
The Amazin’s amazed us so often that almost every one of the 2,175,373 fans who saw them at home this year (an attendance record that topped all clubs in both leagues) must be convinced that he was there on that one special afternoon or crucial evening when the Mets won the big game that fused them as contenders and future champions. Many claim it was that afternoon of July 8, when the Mets, five games behind the Cubs in the standings and two runs behind the Cubs in the game, came up with ninth-inning pinch doubles by Ken Boswell and Donn Clendenon that were both misplayed by a rookie Chicago center fielder; a tying double by Cleon Jones; and a bloop two-out single by Ed Kranepool that won it. Some think it was the next day, when the Mets’ shining leader, Tom Seaver, came within two outs of a perfect game, shutting out the Cubs, 4–0, and cutting their lead to three. Some hold out for the televised game at Wrigley Field the following week when Al Weis, the weak-hitting spare infielder, bashed his first homer of the year to drive in three runs in a 5–4 victory. Or the next game there, when Weis hit another homer and Tommie Agee delivered a lead-off double and a lead-off homer in the first two innings, as the Mets won again. Others remember the doubleheader against San Diego at Shea on August 16 (four-hit shutout by Seaver in the first; winning pinch single by Grote in the nightcap) that started the Mets back from their midsummer nadir, nine and a half games behind. After that day, the team won twelve of its next fourteen games, all against Western teams, and Seaver and Koosman embarked on a joint record of sixteen wins in their last seventeen decisions. My own choice of the game is a much earlier wonder—a fifteen-inning, 1–0 bleeder against the Dodgers on the night of June 4. In the top of the fifteenth, with a Dodger on third, Al Weis, playing second base, darted to his left for a hard grounder that was deflected in midflight by pitcher Ron Taylor’s glove; Weis had to leap the other way, to his right, for the carom, but came up with the ball and an instant off-balance throw that nailed the runner at the plate and saved the tie. Moments later, Tommie Agee scored the winning run all the way from first on an error. The victory sustained what came to be an eleven-game winning streak and completed successive series sweeps against the Dodgers and the Giants. Manager Hodges said later that Weis’s double reverse and peg was one of the greatest single infield plays he had ever seen.
What matters here is not the selection of one winning game (there were many others as close and perhaps as important) but the perception of a pattern in them all. Ten separate players, many of them part-timers or pinch-hitters, figure significantly in these brief accounts of seven key games. This happened all year, and in time the Mets began to recognize the pattern as their main source of strength. This is a phenomenon unique in baseball. The Mets were the first team in the history of the game to enter a World Series with only two players (Cleon Jones and Tommie Agee) who had over four hundred official at-bats in the course of the regular season. From the beginning, successful big-league clubs have won with set lineups, which has usually meant sending at least five or six hitters to the plate four or five hundred times a year. The 1967 Cardinals had eight players with more than four hundred ABs; the 1964 Yankees had six with more than five hundred. Even Casey Stengel’s famous Yankee platoons of the nineteen-fifties, even those constantly reshuffled castoffs who played for the Mets in their first season presented more stable lineups than the new champions. Hodges’ Irregulars, to be sure, were a creation of pure necessity. Cold bats, injuries, and call-ups to Army Reserve duty required improvisation all through the season, but every substitution seemed to work. Young Wayne Garrett niftily spelled old Ed Charles at third; rookie Bobby Pfeil and backup glove Al Weis filled in for Bud Harrelson and Ken Boswell; Ed Kranepool and Donn Clendenon (who was acquired from Montreal just before the trading deadline in June) together added up to a switch-hitting first baseman who delivered twenty-three home runs; Art Shamsky and Ron Swoboda became a switch-hitting right fielder who hit twenty-three more homers; Rod Gaspar, mostly played as a pair of fast wheels in late innings, led the outfielders in assists, which means enemy runners cut down in key situations. No professional ballplayer likes to sit out even one game, but in time all the Mets, sensing that no one on the bench had actually lost his job, were infected with a guerrilla spirit. Ed Charles, who has played pro ball for eighteen years, talked about it one day near the end of the season. “I’ve never seen it or heard of it before,” Charles said. “Every one of us knew when it was time to pick the othe
r guy up. The bottom of the order, a pinch-hitter, a man who’d just fanned three times—everybody figured, ‘What the hell, what am I waiting for? Do it now, baby, because there’s no big man going to do it for you.’ Give No. 14 a lot of credit.” No. 14 is Gil Hodges.
Other components of the new-Metsian physiology are more traditional. They include:
PITCHING—Tom Seaver and Jerry Koosman, who appeared and flowered in succession in the past two seasons, are now the best one-two starting pair on any team in the majors. This year’s freshman was Gary Gentry, up from Arizona State (the Notre Dame of college baseball) and only two years in the minors, who won thirteen games and invariably proved obdurate in the tough, close ones. A veteran, Don Cardwell, and two more youngsters, Nolan Ryan and Jim McAndrew, together provided the fourth and fifth starters, and Ron Taylor and Tug McGraw were the stoppers from the bullpen. Ryan throws pure smoke (in the minors he once fanned eighteen batters in seven innings), but there are those who think that McAndrew may be an even better pitcher in the end. Young hurlers’ arms are as delicate as African violets, and Hodges and the Mets’ pitching coach, Rube Walker, stuck to a five-day rotation through the most crowded weekends of the schedule, arriving at September with a pitching staff that was in splendid fettle. Rube has been known to glare at a pitcher whom he finds playing catch on the sidelines without his permission.
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 unl
ikely 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.