THE 1969 MIRACLE METS
THE IMPROBABLE STORY OF THE WORLD’S GREATEST UNDERDOG TEAM
By STEVEN TRAVERS
Foreword by BUD HARRELSON
The Globe Pequot Press
STEVEN TRAVERS
Copyright, 2009
FRONT AND BACK DUSTCOVERS
In the popular movie Oh, God! George Burns, playing the deity, is asked in a courtroom to prove His divinity by performing a miracle. Burns tells the attorney that miracles are too showy and should occur only on rare occasions.
“The last miracle I did was the 1969 Meets,” He says. “Before that, I think you have to go back to the Red Sea.”
Man has engaged in athletic competition at least since the ancient Greeks. Baseball has been played, according to legend, since Abner Doubleday invented it at Cooperstown, New York in 1839. Through the travail of ages, in the entire history of sports, the 1969 “Amazin’ Mets” remains the single most impossible, unbelievable, improbable and wonderful story of all times.
This books tells the tale of that incredible spring, summer and fall, but it does much more than simply recount how the worst sports franchise ever ascended to the very heights of greatness in a few short months. The Last Miracle: Tom Seaver and the 1969 Amazin’ Mets is the story of tumultuous times: the 1960s. Amidst the backdrop of the Vietnam War, the Mets remained the last, best hope of a city on the verge of bankruptcy. Through the lens of time we now can view them as a metaphor for a changing America, and in light of the Big Apple’s phoenix-like comeback over the years, the catapult for this battered-yet-unbowed Metropolis.
Somehow, while the Mets became the mods of baseball, the “new breed” athlete, Tom Seaver and his teammates are viewed herein as the final symbols of an innocent age; an age when the greatest icons in American culture – New York sports heroes – mounted the stage in awesome splendor; before Watergate, before free agency, before the mercenaries took over.
Here they are: Seaver and Harrelson; Hodges and Stengel; Grote and Swoboda; Jones and Agee; all the characters of the greatest comedy act ever performed, all the while upstaging a tempestuous mayoral race, President Richard Nixon’s “secret plan,” a Moonshot and Woodstock.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
STEVEN TRAVERS
(with photo)
Steven Travers is a USC graduate and ex-professional baseball player. He is the author of the best-selling Barry Bonds: Baseball’s Superman, nominated for a Casey Award (best baseball book of 2002). He is also the author of The USC Trojans: College Football’s All-Time Greatest Dynasty (a National Book Network “top 100 seller”); One Night, Two Teams: Alabama vs. USC and the Game That Changed a Nation (subject of a documentary and major motion picture); five books in the Triumph/Random House Essential series (A’s, Dodgers, Angels, D’backs, Trojans); The Good, the Bad & the Ugly Los Angeles Lakers; The Good, the Bad & the Ugly Oakland Raiders; The Good, the Bad & the Ugly San Francisco 49ers; and A Tale of Five Cities: New York, L.A., San Francisco, Washington & Moscow in October of ‘62. Steve was a columnist for StreetZebra magazine in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Examiner. He also penned the screenplay, The Lost Battalion. Travers coached baseball at USC, Cal-Berkeley and in Europe; attended law school, served in the Army, and is a guest lecturer at the University of Southern California. Steve has a daughter, Elizabeth Travers and resides in California.
Books written by Steven Travers
One Night, Two Teams: Alabama vs. USC and the Game That Changed A Nation (also a documentary, Tackling Segregation, and soon to be a major motion picture)
A’s Essential: Everything You Need to Know to Be A Real Fan!
Trojans Essential: Everything You Need to Know to Be A Real Fan!
Dodgers Essential: Everything You Need to Know to Be A Real Fan!
Angels Essential: Everything You Need to Know to Be A Real Fan!
D’Backs Essential: Everything You Need to Know to Be A Real
The USC Trojans: College Football's All-Time Greatest Dynasty
The Good, the Bad & the Ugly Los Angeles Lakers
The Good, the Bad & the Ugly Oakland Raiders
The Good, the Bad & the Ugly San Francisco 49ers
Barry Bonds: Baseball’s Superman
College Football’s Top 25 All-Time Greatest Traditions
The Last Miracle: Tom Seaver and the 1969 Amazin’ Mets
A Tale of Five Cities: New York, L.A., San Francisco, Washington & Moscow in October of ‘62
God's Country: A Conservative, Christian Worldview of How History Formed the United States Empire and America's Manifest Destiny for the 21st Century
Angry White Male
The Writer’s Life
Praise for Steven Travers
Steve Travers is the next great USC historian, in the tradition of Jim Murray, John Hall, and Mal Florence! . . . The Trojan Nation needs your work!
- USC Head Football Coach Pete Carroll
I knew you loved USC, but you really love USC!
- Fred Wallin, CRN national sporstalk host
Steve Travers combines wit, humor, social pathos and historical knowledge with the kind of sports expertise that only an ex-jock is privy to; it is reminiscent of the work of Jim Bouton, Pat Jordan and Dan Jenkins, combined with Jim Murray’s turn of phrase, Hunter Thompson’s hard-scrabble Truths, and David Halberstam’s unique take on our nation’s place in history. His writing is great storytelling, and the result is pure genius every time.
- Westwood One sports media personality Mike McDowd
Steve Travers is a great writer, an educated athlete who knows how to get inside the player’s heads, and when that happens, greatness occurs. He’s gonna be a superstar.
- Dave Burgin/Editor, San Francisco Examiner
Steve Travers is a phenomenal writer, an artist who labors over every word to get it just right, and he has an encyclopedic knowledge of sports and history.
- StreetZebra magazine
Steve Travers is a Renaissance man.
Jim Rome Show
Travers' new book finally explains the phenomenon . . . the Bonds tale is spelled out in the most thorough, interesting, revealing, concise manner ever reached.
- Maury Allen/www.TheColumnists.com, Gannett Newspapers
Travers appears to have the right credentials for the task: He is a former minor leaguer who also penned screenplays in addition to a column for the San Francisco Examiner. He calls on that background in crafting a straightforward, warts-and-all profile that remains truthful without becoming a mean-spirited hatchet job . . .
- USA Today Baseball Weekly
This is a fascinating book written by a man who knows his subject matter inside and out.
- Irv Kaze/KRLA Radio, Los Angeles
Get this book. You've brought Bonds to life.
- Fred Wallin/Syndicated sportstalk host, Los Angeles
This promises to be the biggest sports book of 2002.
- Greg Papa/KTCT Radio, San Francisco
This cat struck out Kevin Mitchell five times in one game. I'll read the book for that reason alone. Plus, he hangs out with Charlie Sheen. How do I get that gig?
- Rod Brooks/Fitz & Brooks, KNBR Radio, San Francisco
. . . gossipy, easy-to-read tale . . . explores the sports culture that influences this distinguished slugger . . . entertaining.
- Library Journal
Warts-and-all . . . Travers explores Bonds' mercurial temper and place in baseball history.
- Novato Journal
… the first comprehensive biography of Barry Bonds.
- Bud Geracie/San Jose Mercury News
Travers thought he hit the jackpot . . .
- Furman Bischer, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Travers…hit the big time . . . Travers . . . established himself as a writer of many dimensions . . . a natural . . . You were ahead of your time with the Bonds book. I still think it is the best biography of him I've seen. It does more to capture his personality than all the steroid books and articles.
- John Jackson/Ross Valley Reporter
Travers is a minor league pitcher-turned-sportswriter, and therefore qualified to evaluate [Larry] Dierker's thought process in ordering all those walks regardless of the score or the situation.
- Stan Hochman/Philadelphia Daily News
. . . looks at all of Barry's warts, yet remains in the end favorable to him. Not an easy balancing act. This is not your average sports book. It is edgy and filled with laughs . . . and inside baseball. Good, solid reading.
- www.Amazon.com
It's a great read.
- Pete Wilson/KGO Radio, San Francisco
This a good book that really covers his whole life, and informs us where Bonds is coming from. His entire life is laid out. He is very qualified to continue to write books such as this one. Good job.
- Marty Lurie/Right off the Bat Oakland A’s pre-game host
. . . a quality piece . . . (Travers) uses his experiences in baseball . . . providing a humorous glimpse into the life of a player. Would I recommend this book? Absolutely . . . laughed out loud several times at Travers' unique way of explaining his experiences. This book is definitely worth the time.
- John Kenny/www.esportnews.com
Travers’ account mentions everything from cocaine to sex to car crashes to what Bonds said he would do to Roger Clemens . . . more than a “hit” piece.
- Johnson City Press
Travers' book does do a more well-rounded job of solving the mystery of who Bonds is . . . appealing . . . is the more inside look at Bonds in Travers' book.
- San Jose Mercury News
. . . Travers' work is every baseball aficionado's dream.
- Fairfield Daily Republic
You've created quite a stir here at the station, with the Giants, and throughout baseball.
Rick Barry/Hall of Fame basketball star and sportstalk host, KNBR Radio, San Francisco
You've stirred a hornet's nest here, man.
- J.T. “The Brick”/Syndicated national sportstalk host
This is a controversial subject and a controversial player, but you've educated us.
- Ron Barr/Sportsline, Armed Forces Radio Network
A baseball player who can write . . . who knew? This one sure can!
- Arny “The Stinkin’ Genius” Spanyer/Fox Sports Radio, Los Angeles
You know baseball like few people I've ever spoken to.
- Andy Dorff/Sportstalk host, Phoenix, Philadelphia & New Jersey
Congratulations . . . a tour de force.
- Kate DeLancey/WFAN Radio, New York City
I can't stand Bonds, but you've done a good job with a difficult subject.
- Grant Napier/Sportstalk host, Sacramento
Steve's a literate ex-athlete, an ex-Trojan and a veteran of Hollywood, too.
- Lee “Hacksaw” Hamilton/XTRA Radio, San Diego
A great book about a great player.
- KTHK Radio, Sacramento
A gem.
- Roseville Press-Tribune
Here's the man to talk to regarding the subject of Barry Bonds.
- John Lobertini/KPIX TV, San Francisco
He's enlightened us on the subject of Bonds, his father, and Godfather, Willie Mays.
- Brian Sussman/KPIX TV. San Francisco
I hate Bonds, but you're okay.
- Scott Ferrall/Syndicated national and New York sportstalk host
One of the better baseball books I've read.
- KOA Radio, Denver
. . . .the "last word" on Barry Bonds . . .
- Scott Reis/ESPN TV
. . . a hot new biography on Barry Bonds . . .
- Darian Hagan/CNN
. . . one of the great sportswriters on the current American scene, Steve Travers . . .
Joe Shea/Radio talk host; Bradenton, Florida and editor, www.American-Reporter.com
To a real pro.
- Jeff Prugh, former Los Angeles Times’ Atlanta bureau chief
It was a good read.
- Lance Williams/Co-author, Game of Shadows
You’ve done some good writin’, dude.
- KFOG Radio, San Francisco
A very interesting read which is not your average . . . book . . . Steve has achieved his bona fides when it comes to having the credentials to write a book like this.
- Geoff Metcalfe/KSFO Radio, San Francisco
Steve Travers is a true USC historian and a loyal Trojan!
- Former USC football player John Papadakis
Pete Carroll calls you “the next great USC historian,” high praise indeed.
- Rob Fukuzaki/ABC7, Los Angeles
You’re a great writer and I always enjoy your musings. . . particularly on SC football - huge fan!
- Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane
A's Essential: Everything You Need To Be a Real Fan offers a breezy history (with emphasis on the Oakland years), player biographies, Top 10 lists, trivia questions and more about the Athletics' franchise that has resided in Philadelphia, Kansas City and, since 1968, Oakland.
- Bruce Dancis/Sacramento Bee
To the great Tom Seaver
A Christy Mathewson for our times
Photo captions
Contents
Photo captions
Foreword
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The glory of their times
The true New York Sports Icon
The reincarnation of Christy Mathewson
If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere
“Can’t anybody here play this game?”
The eve of destruction
High hopes
In the “big inning”
Meet the Mets
The leaping corpse
The first crucial day
The birth of a true New York Sports Icon
After the Pentecost: July 11 – July 16, 1969
The wrath of Gil
Resurrection
The march to the sea
David vs. Goliath
The perfect game
The Promised Land
Fall from grace
Plato’s retreat and subsequent comeback
The empire strikes back
Whatever happened to . . .?
Those Amazin’ Mets
A shining city on a hill
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Foreword
Acknowledgements
My thanks go to Gene Brissie at The Globe Pequot Press and my wonderful literary manager, Peter Miller of PMA Literary and Film Management, Inc. in New York City. Also to John Horne of the Baseball Hall of Fame, the great Tom Seaver, Matt Merola, the New York Mets, as always to my wonderful daughter, Elizabeth Travers, and my supportive parents.
Above all others, my greatest thanks go to my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, the source of all that is decent and true. I am proud to say that whereas I was once obsessed with Tom Seaver and the Mets, I am now obsessed with Jesus Christ. Furthermore, while this book may be titled The Last Miracle, I know that He performs a miracle every time a child is born.
INTRODUCTION
The glory of their times
“Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.”
- Jacques Barzun
There are baseball fans, and then there are baseball fans! I was a baseball fan! Growing up in California, I took to Our National Pastime like nobody else I know. I was obsessed. It was crazy, borderline insane. This . . . game! Oh, how I loved this game.
In those days, there was no ESPN, no Fox Sports, no cable TV. Teams usually televised about 25, maybe 30 road games a year. They never put home games on TV. In New York, most of the Mets and Yankees games were on the tube, but Dodgers’ owner Walter O’Malley did not want to give something away for free that fans otherwise were willing to pay for. Other West Coast teams – the Giants, Angels and A’s – followed his lead. California was a “car culture.” We drove the freeways instead of riding the subways. Our baseball appetites were wetted through great radio broadcasts, often heard in the car, courtesy of Vin Scully of the Dodgers, or Lon Simmons and Russ Hodges of the Giants
For a kid, often my only amusement was baseball on the radio. There was no Internet. We had one television in the house. I had no TV in my room. If I did not like what my parents watched, tough. I had no video games. Eventually, I got into the Strat-o-Matic baseball board game, playing an entire season in which I broadcast the games into a tape recorder, kept detailed records and typed up AP-style dispatches on an old Olivetti, but in the late 1960s that was still a few years away.
I could not wait to get home from school on Fridays, not because it was the weekend, but because that was the day The Sporting News arrived in the mail. I lapped up every word. I liked football, particularly the University of Southern California Trojans, and was also a fan of John Wooden’s UCLA basketball dynasty. I enjoyed track because my dad was into it, but all of that was just prep time for baseball.
I would listen to baseball on the radio. I do not mean it was on in the background while I did something else. I mean I would sit next to the radio and keep score. When the announcer said, “For those of you scoring at home that’s an error on the shortstop and therefore an unearned run,” he was talking to me.
In 1967, the All-Star Game was played at Anaheim Stadium. Tied at one, the game went into extra innings. Rookie right-hander Tom Seaver of the Mets came on to face the American League. The rule was that every team had to be represented, which was the only reason the Mets had a player in the game, or so I thought. Seaver was stocky, boyishly handsome, and threw heat. He sure did not look like a charity case, some kind of “affirmative action” All-Star meant to fill a “quota.” He belonged, demonstrating that by setting the junior circuit down to save the National’s victory. They said he had pitched college ball for coach Rod Dedeaux at nearby USC, which perked my ears up, that was sure. A Trojan!
In 1967, Seaver was as effective as any pitcher in the league. Sandy Koufax was retired by then. Don Drysdale had an off year. So did Juan Marichal. Bob Gibson was injured. Mike McCormick of the Giants won the Cy Young award. If Seaver had gotten more run support he would have won 20 instead of 16, and possibly the Cy Young as well as the Rookie of the Year honors that went to him.
I gravitated to Seaver. He was not on my hometown team. I had to scrape for any information I could find on the guy. The Sporting News was a big help. Sportswriter Jack Lang’s reports were great. If Sports Illustrated or Sport did anything on him, I cut out the articles and put it in a scrapbook, adding my own “editorials” in crayon. The Mets were so bad, though. The NBC Baseball Game of the Week, a staple of Saturday TV fare, usually featured champion teams of the era: the Red Sox, the Tigers, the Cardinals, but not the Mets. Seaver was like some kind of a legend; you heard about him, knew he was out there some place, like Geronimo beyond the horizon planning his next hit ‘n’ run, but I almost never saw the guy. If he was pitching against the local team on the radio, I was glued to it. Seaver.
I was not into the Mets. They were 3,000 miles away and terrible anyway. I rooted for California teams. My natural inclinations were towards things of a West Coast variety. I was not Motown or Harlem cool; I was more Beach Boys. Seaver’s USC connection was the original hook, but there was more to it than that.
In 1966 an NYU historian named Lawrence S. Ritter wrote a book called The Glory of Their Times. It may just possibly be the greatest baseball book ever written. Ritter went around the country interviewing old-time baseball players from the late 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, maybe early 1930s at the very latest. These guys now ranged in age from 65 to 90. The book was the fabulous “story of the early days of baseball told by the men who played it.” It was awesome. Just awesome. I still have my tattered, dog-eared copy with my mother’s inscription, “To our wonderful boy. Love – Mommie & Daddy. X-Mas 1967.”
I devoured that book. What this says about me, I do not really know. I was eight, nine years old, completely infatuated with a book that told the story of a game played 50 or 60 years prior to my birth. I was a freak, a hybrid. Who cares, I loved it. Then the record came out, with the actual interviews recorded. A cantankerous Rube Bressler said of pitcher Dazzy Vance, “You couldn’t him ‘im on a Mundy.” Vance (whose photos revealed a man who looked 60 when he was 30) would wear a white sweatshirt with a tattered right sleeve, causing the white baseballs to blend in with the white sheets flapping from tenements beyond the center field fence at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn on Mondays . . . laundry day!
The Glory of Their Times told the story of an East Coast game. There was no Major League ball in California in the 1900s. There were three teams in New York City – the Yankees, Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers – and the preponderance of the book’s stories revolved around the mythology of the Big Apple’s baseball heritage.
I cared about baseball and little else, but through baseball I came to understand America because the game was, as James Earl Jones said in Field of Dreams, something that stood the test of time, always something good, something resolute and unchanging even when America has “been erased like blackboard, re-built, and erased again.”
So a young boy in California learned about New York City; the hotels, the subways, the streets, the ambience of the town. The Polo Grounds, Bed/Stuy, Yankee Stadium. I was fascinated by all of it. The players all dressed in suits and ties, with starched collars and bowler derbies, when they were out of uniform. I came to love the concept of the well-dressed athlete away from the ballpark, especially since in my day by this time players were beginning to resemble anything from golf pros to ragamuffins in terms of their casual attire.
The thing I came to admire was the intelligent athlete. All the old-timers talked about Ty Cobb, who they mostly despised but nevertheless admired for his brains and competitiveness. Cobb was described as a “scientific hitter” who out-thought the opposition. The game itself was one of bunts, hit ‘n’ runs, and little ball. The players were contemptuous of baseball in the modern era – then the 1960s – because it was to their way of thinking a game of free-swinging “home run or bust” guys who eschewed the game’s more nuanced side.
Cobb came from Southern wealth. He was educated and knew Shakespeare, Greek philosophy, religion, mathematics and history. He dressed impeccably, like a Wall Street banker. Indeed he was an expert stock market manipulator who used “inside information” to buy and often sell short, just as Boston financier Joseph P. Kennedy had done. Cobb got in on Coca-Cola stock at the beginning. It made him rich beyond his dreams.
I was an O.J. Simpson fan when he was running wild at USC. I liked John Havlicek of the Celtics because he epitomized the hard-working athlete who was always in better shape than his opponents. Pete Maravich was like the circus coming to town. But football and basketball paled in comparison to baseball. Out west, I came along too late for Sandy Koufax and never got into Willie Mays. Tom Seaver was a baseball player, and more to the point, a pitcher. I was a budding Little League pitching star. Seaver seemed to resemble some of those old-time baseball players described in The Glory of Their Times. Photos of Tom more often than not showed him dressed in a three-piece suit, not the 13th hole look of his contemporaries, or worse the “Summer of Love” hair styles popularized a few years later by the Oakland A’s.
This guy was clean-cut, dressed for success, had a beautiful wife, and spoke the King’s English like a professor, not a ball player. He was a college man, of course, well read with political savvy and a social conscience. His interests included books like Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. He said self-deprecating things like, “I’m not perfect because I drink beer and I swear. There’s been only one perfect person and He lived 2,000 years ago.” He had served in the Marine Corps, so when he spoke about Vietnam he had credibility. He came from an affluent family, his brothers and sisters each having attended one of California’s great universities, California, Stanford and UCLA, with Tom’s USC pedigree making it four-for-four. His father was a Stanford man, a corporate executive. In his day he had been one of the countries’ finest golfers, the winner of the prestigious Walker Cup. Despite his well-rounded persona, Seaver was known to be the hardest-working player on the Mets, if not all of baseball. He was one of the first baseball players to benefit from weight training, which he had started doing with his USC teammate, a baseball player who also won the Heisman Trophy, Mike Garrett.
What was not to like?
But in keeping with The Glory of Their Times theme, Tom Seaver was not just an impressive baseball player and young man. He was, it seemed, a reincarnation. Seaver was Christy Mathewson! Cobb was an interesting character who fascinated the heck out of me, but in the end there were all these disturbing descriptions of his racism, his blind temper, the way his own kids abandoned him. There was an article written by Al Stump in Look magazine describing Cobb in the last year of his life, 1960-61; bitter, drunken rages, pure bile.
But Mathewson was utterly and absolutely larger than life. My grandfather, a journalist in San Francisco who also started a silent film magazine in Hollywood, gave me his fabulous collection of Lester Chadwick’s Baseball Joe series. Baseball Joe was a fictional character, but he really was not. He was Mathewson. The series included some 15 or 20 volumes following Baseball Joe from his boyhood to prep school, then on to Yale, and finally a sterling big league career with the New York Giants. Baseball Joe fit perfectly with my sense of admiration for intelligent, educated, well-rounded athlete-heroes. Chadwick wove fanciful tales of our hero resisting gamblers, winning 30 games, leading the Giants to the World Championship, and ascending to the heights of fan worship in New York City. He was handsome, had a beautiful wife, loyal friends, admiring teammates and the respect of opponents. Chadwick barely concealed the identities of the characters. Manager John McGraw was McRae. Rogers Hornsby was Mornsby. Grover Alexander was “the great Alec, stalwart right-hander of the Philadelphia nine.”
As heroic as Baseball Joe was, the real Christy Mathewson was just as admirable. In an age in which 25-year old athletes had the weather-beaten faces of Oklahoma mineshaft dwellers, Mathewson looked like a movie star. Baseball players were disreputable characters who drank, associated with gamblers, and could not be trusted with decent ladies. The good hotels and restaurants refused them service. None were college boys.
Matty was an All-American from Bucknell. Then there was his prowess on the mound. Many pictures of pitchers in his era reveal a guy seemingly shot-putting the ball off of one leg. It is difficult to conceive some of these men being able to break 80 miles an hour using such “styles.”
Photos of Matty show a pitcher with the kind of mechanics worthy of modern hurlers; the “drop-and-drive” use of his legs embodied by Seaver himself, an overhand delivery absent of any short-arming, and the full use of all his big muscles. Mathewson regularly won 30 games. He won 37 one year. He threw three shutouts in the 1905 World Series against the Philadelphia A’s. He won 373 games in his career and was the bulwark of McGraw’s Giants, one of the greatest dynasties in baseball before Babe Ruth’s Yankees.
Then there was his tragic demise. Mathewson volunteered for Army service during World War I and became an officer. He was exposed to mustard gas, which sickened and, some years later, killed him.
Tom Seaver had avoided mustard gas exposure during his Marine service, but when it came to his college education, looks, brains, integrity, and pitching ability, in 1968-69 at least, he looked to be Mathewson’s equal. The only problem was his team. He was a winner surrounded by losers. In 1968 Seaver was again brilliant, and again a sure 20-win season was reduced to 16 victories by virtue of poor run support. He pitched in the All-Star Game again, but it appeared that he would never attain the records of Koufax, Drysdale, Marichal or Gibson because he was doomed to toil in the cause of mediocrity.
In 1968, Jerry Koosman, who was at least as brilliant as Seaver, joined him in the rotation. It was around this time that an imperceptible transformation began to take place with the Mets. They had been incredibly bad for years. Under Casey Stengel and his successors, they were literally and actually a joke. Under new manager Gil Hodges, with Seaver and Koosman providing not merely credibility but genuine star potential, the Mets made the big leap from joke-bad to second division-bad. The only problem was that their “lovable loser” image seemed the only thing that drew fans. Just being another team with a losing record did not seem to fan the flames of fan passion, and in New York the Yankees set the standards impossibly high. Baseball seemed a dying sport. The chick’s dug Broadway Joe Namath and His Super Jets. Pro football was sexy. Baseball was boring.
Some time in May of 1969 I picked up the sports page and gave the standings a good perusal. Enough games had been played to begin an assessment of the season. The Cubs dominated in the new National League East, but the Mets, of all people, were genuinely competent.
“Hey Dad, do you believe the Mets are in second place?” I exclaimed to my father.
There was still plenty of season left for the Mets to descend to their natural place in the baseball hierarchy, but as the season wore on they kept winning. I was not a Mets fan, I was a Seaver fan. There was a difference. I did not care about them when Tom was not on the hill, but their story became so fascinating that I could not help rooting for them as well as my individual hero. What was really cool about it was that, since the Mets were a story, Seaver started to receive lots of publicity. Not having access to the New York Times or Mets broadcasts in California, I welcomed this attention. I was like a character in The Who’s mod anthem “5:15” who is . . . “sadly ecstatic, that their heroes are news.”
Well, what happened next is now history. The details are to be explored in minute description within the chapters of this book. Already hooked on Seaver, a kid who lived, breathed, lived and died for baseball, it was like a fairy tale for me; an extravaganza of sensory baseball pleasures.
For true fans, there is a time of life when the game means more than it ever would again. Wrapped around this is a sense of sorrow, partly explained by Jones’s Field of Dreams speech in which he talks of how fans are looking for “something good,” something they once had and will do almost anything to re-capture.
We all have some sense for what happens in life. Puberty hits, ravaging innocence. I began to notice a profound sense of shame if I did not read the box scores closely enough, did not memorize the stats, did not respect the game, revere it, and idolize it.
High school came around. Of course, I had my own career to think about. My suburban California prep team won the mythical national championship and I was good enough to eventually land a full ride college baseball scholarship. Later, I played a few years in the St. Louis and Oakland organizations. When I got a car in high school, it was like Bruce Springsteen says when he introduces audiences to “Pink Cadillac”: “This song is about . . . lust.”
I did not just have a car, I had a convertible. Driving to the beach with a bunch of guys and girls, it was like the Brian Wilson classic “I Get Around” come to life. There was this one girl who really caught my fancy. Let me just say she had a way of filling out her sweater. I remember hanging out with this chick and some other friends after school one day. I finally came home in the third or fourth inning of a 1976 World Series game between the Yankees and Cincinnati. I will never forget it. I was mortified with guilt that I had paid so little respect to the Fall Classic as to miss four innings of a Series game; like a wayward Christian having offended the Savior.
My parents were aghast that such an unheard-of thing could happen. It was surely the beginning of an unsavory future. I had found the world outside of baseball, taken a bite of Original Sin, and it would never be the same again.
Well, despite everything, baseball never got that far away from me. As a young player I enjoyed the way I could combine the pleasures of youth – bars, groupies, ribald teammate camaraderie – with the game itself. Partying and chasing girls was, just as Jim Bouton’s Ball Four informed my young mind, as much a part of minor league life as hits, hero worship and strikeouts.
Speaking of strikeouts, I enjoyed my best strikeout game at the expense of . . . the Mets. On July 30, 1981 at J. Fred Johnson Stadium in Kingsport, Tennessee I pitched a complete game victory for the Johnson City Cardinals, a minor league affiliate in the St. Louis organization, over the Kingsport Mets. I struck out 14 batters. I was told that it was a league record, but I could not verify it. What I can verify is that three of those Mets’ strikeout victims were no less an imposing opponent than Kevin Mitchell, a member of the 1986 World Champion Mets and the 1989 National League Most Valuable Player at San Francisco. Two of my Cardinal teammates went on to play in the Major Leagues. Curtis Ford had a brief run as a middle infielder. Danny Cox was a key pitcher on the St. Louis staff during the 1985 and 1987 St. Louis division championship runs; years in which the title was desperately fought over between the Cards and New York Mets. Chip Cisco, an infielder on that team out of Ohio State, was the son of 1962 Mets pitcher Galen Cisco.
Several members of that 1981 Kingsport team would be members of the famed Mets’ powerhouse of the 1980s. Mitchell hit .335 in 1981. Mark Carreon hit .289 for Kingsport. Lou Thornton was on that team and played in New York from 1989-90. Herman Winningham was a speed demon who came up for a 14-game “cup o’ coffee” in New York (1984). Me, I played two brief years of professional ball. In 1982 I was a teammate of Jose Canseco’s at Idaho Falls in the Oakland A’s organization. Perhaps it is a little self-indulgent to recall with such accuracy my inauspicious minor league career, but then again when that is all you have you tend to guard the memories with a certain amount of jealousy (particularly my three-inning scoreless stint in a 1982 big league exhibition game for Oakland against San Francisco at Phoenix Municipal Stadium, broadcast back to the Bay Area by Bill King and Lon Simmons).
When I wrote Barry Bonds: Baseball’s Superman (2002), one reviewer who heard about my striking Mitchell out three times went to Rohnert Park, California where Mitchell was then managing a minor league outfit called the Sonoma Crushers, trying to verify my story. Mitchell said he had never heard of me and certainly did not remember my dominance of him, but hey, as the wonderful Casey Stengel so famously put it: “You can look it up.” More specifically, in the Johnson City (Tennessee) Press and the Kingsport newspaper, July 31, 1981; in my handy Sporting News Official Baseball Guide – 1982 (Appalachian League, page 429; featuring Tom Seaver on the cover), also the 1983 edition (Pioneer League, page 469); and in the always-reliable Baseball Encyclopedia.
I have spent my life looking for those “reserved seats” of the Field of Dreams soliloquy. I think this is what makes baseball such a marvelous father-son affair. Some of New York’s greatest baseball scribes, the likes of Roger Kahn and Roger Angell, did their best writing describing the wonders of father, son and ballpark. It is when dad takes junior to the stadium and sees his youth again in those young eyes that he feels that magic. I know my own father experienced this with me.
My daughter never took to baseball. I found something close to it through USC football, since she is a big Trojan fan. The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and the Rose Bowl became those special family shrines, but it is not quite the same as baseball. As I say, the other sports were often just passing time in the off-season until baseball rolled around.
When I look back, when I really try to find those “reserved seats,” the year 1969 stands out above and beyond all others. I went to countless games with my dad in later years, loving every minute, but creeping adulthood by that time brought on incremental cynicism. 1969 was, for me, the final season of unfettered purity and innocence. Not being a New Yorker, I saw not one single Mets game in person that year, but it does not matter. I was there. I lived it, breathed it. I was as much of a New Yorker as Jimmy Breslin or Norman Mailer.
Color television was a relatively new phenomenon at that time. I saw an ESPN Classic replay of the 1965 Twins-Dodgers World Series. It was black-and-white, grainy, with bad camera angles. I watched a similar replay of the 1969 Mets-Orioles World Series, and it was quite clear and bright, a vast production improvement from four years prior.
TV sports were entering a golden age. The mystique of USC football, for instance, owes itself in large measure to the color image of the cardinal and gold-clad Trojans clashing with the blue and gold-colored UCLA Bruins; the Coliseum stands awash in exciting new styles so removed from the dreary image of Wall Street stock brokers staring out at 1950s Yankee games as if observing a Dow Jones ticker. In L.A.: pretty girls, sexy cheerleaders; a warm and inviting blue-sky November Saturday while the rest of the nation shivered.
The indelible images of the 1969 play-offs and World Series are just as startling. First there were the announcers, key among them such golden throats as Curt Gowdy, Dick Simpson, and Mike Walden, among others. These were the national broadcasters, and the sound of their voices meant only this: October baseball, the Fall Classic, the almost-taboo nature of a ball game being shown in the classroom. I felt like shouting to my classmates, all of whom lacked any of my baseball intelligence, “hey, I know about this stuff . . . I have inside info . . . that’s Tom Seaver and he won 25 games this year.” Here was a subject in which I possessed vastly more knowledge and credibility than the teacher. That does not happen every day, brother.
But the most indelible minds-eye image is of the green grass of Shea Stadium, the pretty-blue pinstriped uniforms of the Mets, that awesome “NY” insignia on the cap which, despite being a rip-off of both the Yankees and the Giants, nevertheless had a uniqueness all its own. Then there were those wonderful gray Baltimore road flannels, the black-and-orange ensembles and their own great symbol, the bird image on black cap.
But it was Shea Stadium that seemed to be a character in and of itself. A new stadium is finally going up in Flushing Meadows, but for years, decades really, Shea was thought of as a dump. In 1969, however, it was a baseball palace. Outside of Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, Busch Stadium in St. Louis, perhaps the wondrous Houston Astrodome – plus a few others - in 1969 most baseball stadiums were decrepit and old.
A series of “cookie-cutter” monstrosities in Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh and elsewhere would be built. All would need to be torn down to make way for real baseball parks. Over time, stadiums in Baltimore, Cleveland, Seattle and other cities would be done right, and in comparison Shea Stadium would not hold it own.
But Yankee Stadium was seven years from its renovation. With the Bronx becoming a gangland killing field, the Yankees a shell of their old selves, and the Stadium itself more than half empty, the “House That Ruth Built” did not have the 1969 imprimatur of Shea Stadium. Just four years old, Shea provided modern amenities in what was, by New York standards, a suburban atmosphere. It was easily accessible by freeway from the white enclaves of Long Island, Connecticut and Westchester County. Its Queens location was thought then to be a safe alternative for a generation of “Archie Bunkers” who had escaped the meaner streets of Brooklyn and the Bronx. It was the anti-dote to crowded, crime-riddled Brooklyn, which the Dodgers fled because their fans had mostly departed.
But what struck my young mind as most unusual were the Shea fans. Go to a library, or check your old baseball book collections, and look at one of those coffee table histories of the World Series. Look at photos of fans in the stands at: Yankee Stadium, 1962; Dodger Stadium, 1966; and Busch Stadium, 1968. It is startling and says much about why the 1960s were considered the time of greatest social upheaval in American history.
Yankee Stadium, 1962: men, all dressed in black suits, many wearing hats, smoking pipes, some in dark sunglasses that made them look like Sam Giancana. Very few women, but the ones seen are in mink stoles, sunglasses, bouffon hair-dos. Bored expressions all, little enthusiasm. These are not the regular season patrons, but rather the “fat cats” with money and connections to Series tickets unavailable to the average Joe.
Dodger Stadium, 1966: men in white, short-sleeved dress shirts and ties, sunglasses giving them the look of vice cops, many wearing visors on a hot day. More women than at Yankee Stadium, print dresses, sunglasses.
Busch Stadium, 1968: a black-and-white ensemble (most photos are not in color), the fans looking robotic in their sameness.
Shea Stadium, 1969: for the first time, the fans have character. A true ensemble. Far more women and a fair rendering of black people, almost non-existent in previous years. Enthusiasm, colorful, lots of placards exhorting their heroes. The fans do not all look like stockbrokers. This scene portends the extraordinary changes in fan behavior seen in the next decade, when the fans became wild, unruly, charging the field in post-game celebrations.
Then there was my uncanny predictive ability. Youth is a time of unbounded enthusiasm and surety. The odds do not matter nearly as much as what your heart tells you is true. Less than a year earlier, I had watched my favorite pro football team, the Oakland Raiders, take the lead with mere minutes left on the clock on a blustery December afternoon at Shea Stadium. Then Joe Willie Namath led the New York Jets on a clutch drive, resulting in the winning touchdown, giving the Jets the American Football League title. From there it was on to Miami and a Super Bowl III match with the 13-1 Baltimore Colts, who went through the NFL Play-Offs liked Patton’s Army in the early spring of 1945.
Baltimore was an 18-point favorite. Every prediction from all possible sources agreed with the assessment that it would not be a game, but rather a coronation for the Colts. Every prediction, that is, except from Namath himself, who claimed that his pre-game ritual was to go to bed with “a blonde and a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red” and “guaranteed” a New York win. In my young mind, the Jets could not lose. I was utterly positive they would win. When they did I was the least-surprised person in the country, except for Namath I guess.
The Mets faced the exact same kind of odds against another Baltimore opponent, the 109-win Orioles. This was the juggernaut of juggernauts. They were an even better baseball powerhouse than the Colts had been a football powerhouse.
I knew the Mets would win. There was no doubt in my mind. The exactness of youth replaced reason or bet hedging, equivocations. When they did, I was again completely unsurprised.
Then came the aftermath, and this was where it got really crazy for me. If I was obsessed before, I was now possessed by an overwhelming desire to read, to know, anything I could get my hands on concerning the New York Mets, Tom Seaver, and the 1969 baseball season.
First there was the record, The Amazin’ Mets 1969. This was a jazzy vinyl re-enactment of the season, with the recordings of Bob Murphy and Lindsey Nelson re-creating all those incredible moments that I had not heard because I did not have access to Mets’ broadcasts via radio or TV in those pre-cable, pre-Internet, pre-Syrius radio, pre-podcast days. I listened to that thing over and over again.
Then there were those back issues of Sports Illustrated and The Sporting News. I read and re-read them, committing it all to memory. In the spring of 1970 I found something that changed my life forever. The Sporting News Official Baseball Guide - 1970 was a complete re-cap of the 1969 season. Every single detail of the year – scores, chronology, post-season, stats, trades, attendance, everything – was found within its pages. I memorized it. Not just the stories, the team summaries and World Series highlights; I mean the minutiae, the statistical leaders, all of it. That dog-eared little paperback became the Holy Grail. It was an altar I worshipped at. It was a “baseball Bible.” I became the world’s leading baseball expert on the Year of Our Lord 1969.
Then Tom Seaver wrote a book called The Perfect Game, which got into his mind inning-by-inning as he beat Baltimore in game four at Shea Stadium. Later, Jim Bouton’s Ball Four was released. That was not a book about the Mets, but I must have read it, in whole or in part, 40 times over the years. I memorized it, too. Bouton went into great detail about his years playing in New York, so the result of reading Ball Four increased my acute knowledge of all things having to do with the Big Apple, even though it would be a decade before I ever visited the place.
I read these books, magazines and publications for years after the 1969 season. I would just pick one of them up, flip to a page, and read on. Frankly, it was unhealthy to be so into any one thing like that, but in looking back I can be thankful I was addicted to this, not drugs or alcohol. My parents, my mother in particular, were concerned at my single-mindedness of interest. She took me to the opera and plays to widen my horizons, but always my mind wandered back to Tom Seaver and the Mets.
Strangely somehow, my baseball obsession had an osmosis effect in that love of baseball and baseball history became love of history, period. In reading The Glory of Their Times, Baseball Joe and everything else associated with the game, I came to learn about America and the world. If Christy Mathewson and a lot of big leaguers were serving in the Army during World War I, I came to know about World War I. If Ted Williams missed several years flying for the Marines during World War II and Korea, I came to learn about World War II and Korea. If there was a controversy over Tom Seaver’s proposed public endorsement of a so-called “Vietnam Moratorium” in 1969, I came to learn about Vietnam. From there, it all expanded until I came to be a true historian and culturalist.
So, this book is not just about Tom Seaver and the Mets. It is about 1969. It was an amazin’ year not just because of the Mets, but rather it is a touchstone of American culture, a tipping point in world history; the end of much, the beginning of much more.
STEVEN R. TRAVERS
(415) 455-5971
The true New York Sports Icon
“Joe, Joe, you never heard such cheering.”
“Yes, I have.”
- Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio’s cold reply after she returned from Korea.
The rarest of the breed is the true New York Sports Icon. One of the greatest of this breed was “born” at 9:55 P.M. Eastern Standard Time at Shea Stadium in Flushing Meadows, Queens, New York City on Wednesday, July 9, the Year of Our Lord 1969. This was not the moment of his Christian birth, but rather the moment of his ascension into that most esteemed place in American society. His new “birth” in fact placed him in tricky territory not necessarily Christian in nature in that he now became a source of pagan idolatry, the kind that tests man’s ability to withstand the sins of pride of vanity.
****
Outside of a very few historical figures, the short list of which includes such names as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Charles Lindbergh, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Douglas MacArthur, George Patton, John F. Kennedy, John Glenn, Martin Luther King Jr., Neil Armstrong and Ronald Reagan; the true New York Sports Icon is the next-most exclusive in this great nation, and therefore probably the world.
Marilyn Monroe, an iconic figure of the first order, learned about the exclusive nature of this club when she returned from a USO tour of Korea in the early 1950s. Love-starved GIs baptized her in lust and adoration. Upon returning home she announced to then-husband Joe DiMaggio, “Joe, Joe, you never heard such cheering.”
DiMaggio was a cold fish, utterly self-absorbed, amoral in the manner of the Italian Mafiosi he hung out with despite press coverage that he did not. Writers said he was the clean Italian-American hero who changed the gumba image of a generation of first and second-generation immigrants from the Old Country.
DiMaggio was more like Don Vito Corleone, Marlon Brando’s character in The Godfather, who had a strict moral code about sex and drugs that did not extend to the mortal sin of murder. Okay, DiMaggio was not known to condone killing even if some of his social companions did. However, he viewed the sexpot Marilyn with a jaundiced eye, particularly when a blast of wind from a New City fire grate blew her dress to her head, revealing to the preying eyes of public spectators, paparazzi, cast, crew, and eventually the world via the magic of movie, her panties in what was at that time considered de facto pornography.
Marilyn’s breathless exhortation of Army lust aimed her way in Korea no doubt elicited in Joe D. disturbing images of his wife in various stages of carnal betrayal of their wedding vows. Several thousand horny young men in close proximity to his sex symbol bride, no doubt blowing kisses implicit with the “promise” of forbidden pleasures, brought out his nasty side. DiMaggio’s nasty side was both biting and regularly evident.
Now she was telling him had had “never heard such cheering.”
“Yes, I have,” DiMaggio replied.
Aside from probably being the beginning of the end for the famed DiMaggio-Monroe marriage, it was a lesson in true hero worship for Marilyn. Movie stars, rock stars, maybe a few models or even people who are “famous for being famous” often get the wrong idea about their own celebrityhood. They mistake the fawning love and fan obsession for them with heroism. Perhaps they have moments in which the cheers are louder, the spotlight brighter, than the attention paid to a General George Patton after running roughshod over the Nazi Wehrmacht, a Presidential motorcade when the polls are in his favor, or an astronaut after defying death and touching the Heavens.
But the actor, the rock god, the sex symbol is a tabloid spectacle, a public relations creation, a performer on cue. At any given time they may believe the hype, but true iconic status is reserved for the very rarest among them, and often death – like masters of art throughout history - must precede the full impact of their fame. Some who may have achieved this level of idolatry include Rudolph Valentino, John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor, Jimmy Stewart, Peter O’Toole, Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, Clint Eastwood, Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Jack Nicholson, Harrison Ford, Al Pacino, Tom Cruise, Bruce Willis, Tom Hanks, Arnold Schwarzenegger, John Huston, John Ford, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Jimmy Page, Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Cash, Steven Tyler, and David Lee Roth.
The greatest adoration is reserved for those “in the arena,” as Theodore Roosevelt exclaimed, but much of their fame comes from historians, often after their death, as was the case for Abraham Lincoln. The political hero is often a man who absorbs the “slings and arrows of outrageous” Shakespearean fortune, like the artist admired and revered only in the soft reflection of elapsed time.
There are others whose public persona stands the test of time: Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Howard Hughes, Stephen King, Tom Clancy, Rush Limbaugh. Some are unique to New York: Fiorello La Guardia, Rudolph Giuliani.
Then there are the sports heroes. To be sure, many of our greatest forged their names not on the Elysian fields of New York but elsewhere, as was the case for Michael Jordan in Chicago, Bart Starr in Green Bay, Sandy Koufax in Hollywood’s shadow, Joe Montana in South Bend and San Francisco.
A handful of non-Americans have achieved true worldwide notoriety that is not merely European hype or Latin madness. These would include Pele of Brazil, Daley Thompson of Great Britain, and Wayne Gretzky of Canada. David Beckham is a media creation more than a true on-field superstar.
Others, for reasons of fate, prickly personality, racial bigotry, character flaw or timing achieved the very heights of on-field greatness but sadly or even justifiably never quite saw the top of Mt. Icon. Jim Thorpe, Ted Williams, Jim Brown, Hank Aaron, O.J. Simpson, Pete Sampras and Barry Bonds are just a few whose abilities were unmatched but whose place in history is exceeded sometimes by those whose records do not compare.
Other sports legends include but are not limited to: Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, Tris Speaker, Lefty Grove, Jimmie Foxx, Roberto Clemente, Red Grange, Sammy Baugh, Emmitt Smith, Jerry Rice, Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, Vince Lombardi, Bill Russell, Jerry West, Elgin Baylor, Oscar Robertson, Magic Johnson, Shaq O’Neal, Bruce Jenner, and Carl Lewis.
New York City is the capital of the world, the epicenter of modern society, the New Rome. In recent decades Los Angeles has bid to match it, and in many ways even passed it, but for overall impact and gravitas, the Big Apple remains the king of the American Century, with a unique ability to elevate as well as destroy its heroes and villains. It is difficult to truly define the true New York Sports Icon. The sports god does not read from a script. He must face the stiffest possible competition and cannot hide his mistakes like a flubbed line. He is all-too human, and therefore all the more heroic when he performs at a superstar level. Many are called, few are chosen. In many ways, he is a thing of the past.
The criteria for membership is not a difficult description: long membership on a New York team or on the New York stage; in non-team sports some New York pedigree; greatness on the field resulting in Most Valuable Player award(s); ultimate title(s) won in the form of World Championship(s) with the Icon in question providing leadership, his best performance(s) when the heat of pressure is greatest; the kind of fan lovefest exuded upon him that exceeds the ordinary; and for good measure a Toots Shor personality embodied by the image of a guy who just might tell tall tales in a Manhattan sports tavern.
His true iconic stature must proudly be made and acknowledged while he is on the field during his prime years, unlike a Ted Williams, oft-vilified yet admired mostly in retrospect. He must be held in high esteem long after his career ends, unlike an O.J. Simpson, who had a free lunch complete with harem from one end of America to the other only to fall from grace in the most despicable manner possible.
Ultimately, the contenders are these:
Christy Mathewson
“Iron Joe” McGinnity
John McGraw
Babe Ruth
Lou Gehrig
Carl Hubbell
Bill Terry
Mel Ott
Joe Louis
Joe DiMaggio
Bill Dickey
Yogi Berra
Joe McCarthy
Jackie Robinson
Branch Rickey
Duke Snider
Roy Campanella
Willie Mays
Leo Durocher
Frank Gifford
Rocky Marciano
Casey Stengel
Mickey Mantle
Roger Maris
Whitey Ford
Billy Martin
Joe Namath
Tom Seaver
Walt Frazier
Red Holzman
Muhammad Ali
Thurman Munson
Reggie Jackson
Dave Winfield
John McEnroe
Don Mattingly
Darryl Strawberry
Dwight Gooden
Gary Carter
Bill Parcells
Lawrence Taylor
Phil Simms
Patrick Ewing
Derek Jeter
Mariano Rivera
Roger Clemens
Alex Rodriguez
Joe Torre
The list of those left off tells the story of the greatness of those who are on it. Weaning the truest of the New York Sports icons from this list is a difficult chore. Managers and coaches such as Joe McCarthy, Leo Durocher, Red Holzman and Joe Torre presided over moments of supreme joy, but somehow they do not quite make the cut of this ultra-competitive “team.”
Bill Dickey was at one time considered the greatest catcher in baseball history, or certainly on the short list with Mickey Cochrane; at least until the next generation of backstops came along to eclipse his star. Keeping a Hall of Famer like “Iron Joe” McGinnity (who starred for both the early Giants and Dodgers, then known as the Superbas) off a list like this is subjective, but then again so is omitting such mound stalwarts as Rube Marquard, Herb Pennock, Waite Hoyt, Dazzy Vance, Lefty Gomez, Red Ruffing, Don Newcombe, Sal Maglie, Allie Reynolds, Catfish Hunter, Sparky Lyle and Goose Gossage.
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