ONE BOY THAT SUMMER

Dear God,

This is a thank you note.

Long delayed in one case but pretty current in another.

As You know, Tom Seaver died last week.

For twenty years, from 1967 to 1986, Seaver  mesmerized baseball fans, winning 311 games, striking out 3,640 batters, compiling a career earned run average of 2.86 and pitching a now unheard of 231 complete games.  He won the Cy Young award three times (1969, 1973 and 1975), struck out 200 or more batters in a single season nine times, threw more than 200 innings (also unheard of today) in sixteen seasons, and was a near-unanimous choice to the Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility, winning a then-record 98.84% of the votes.

In 1970, in a game tying the major league record for 19 strikeouts, he fanned the last ten batters in a row.

No starting pitcher could do that today either, mostly because they never last beyond the seventh inning.

You probably don't need me to tell You all this, You being God and all.  But on the off chance that  baseball is not Your most important concern -- it is, after all, a game -- I'll continue.

In 1969, Seaver led the New York Mets to their first world championship.  There has been one since, in 1986,  and three other losing appearances (in 1973, 2000 and 2015).  Two of those five trips to the World Series were improbable.  In 1973, the team was in last place on August 30 with a losing record but snuck into the playoffs a month later two games over .500, four teams barely behind them, none of them having particularly acted like they wanted to win.   And in 2000, they made it to the playoffs as a wild card team, which is our way of turning second place into total victory (but, in truth, was probably created to generate more advertising revenue for the teams).

In any case, then there was 1969  . . .

Which was impossible.

Some even called it a miracle.  (Please advise.)

The team, true to form, lost on opening day that year.

To an expansion team, the Montreal Expos.

God, just think about that for a minute.  The baseball gods -- these are the folks who don't have as much power as You but sometimes think they do and act that way -- had decided to spread pixie dust on the hapless Mets, literal bottom dwellers in the first seven seasons of their brief existence, by scheduling them on opening day against a team that was even worse, a team that would go 52-110 that season and finish 48 games out of first place.

But the Mets lost anyway.

The bullpen gave up four runs in the eighth inning.

And things did not get much better thereafter.

They were 3-7 ten days into the season . On June 1 they were in third place in their six team division but still had a losing record.  On July 1 they were in second six games above .500, an extraordinary improvement given their sorry history but still eight games behind the first place Cubs.  And by August 14 they had slipped to ten games behind.

Then they did nothing but win.

Which is more or less when people think You may have gotten involved.

They went 38-9 the rest of the season to finish first in their division, swept Hank Aaron's Atlanta Braves in a best of five playoff for the NL pennant, and then beat the Baltimore Orioles four games to one to take the World Series. Hank Aaron is baseball's all-time home run king. (Or was until Barry Bonds beat his record.  But Bonds was cheating so lots of us think Hammerin' Hank is still the guy on home runs.) And the Baltimore Orioles, who went 109-53 that year, were so good that, at the start of the World Series, no one down here gave the Mets any chance at all.

Seaver was stellar. 

25-9 during the regular season, he won the first playoff game and pitched a masterful 10 innings to win the fourth and pivotal game of the World Series. The next day, with Jerry Koosman pitching, the Mets won the whole shebang.

When the last out came, Seaver was the first player from the dugout to jump on Koosman. Tons of other folks ran onto the field to celebrate.  In a sort of non-Biblical rapture, children ran happily screaming through schools.  Sadly, some people in Baltimore were heard taking Your name in vain. You, however, might want to forgive them. This was the second time in a year that a supposedly superior team from Baltimore had been beaten by a weaker one from New York, given that the Colts had lost to Joe Namath's football  Jets in the Super Bowl that January, and people from Maryland probably thought You were just being unfair to let that happen again.

(Sorry for the sidebar. I don’t need to tell You who to forgive.)

Anyway, and as You also know, I was born in 1956 and grew up in Brooklyn, NY.  I was named after my maternal grandfather, who I called "Poppa" and loved beyond words (he's with You now so please say "Hello" for me).  Poppa, also born and raised in Brooklyn, had been a lifelong Brooklyn Dodger fan.  But when the Dodgers left Brooklyn for Los Angeles in 1958, he -- like most Dodger fans in Brooklyn -- became a baseball widow.  He hated the Yankees and Walter O'Malley, the owner who took the Dodgers west.  It was thus not remotely possible for him to root for the Los Angeles Dodgers or switch his allegiance to the baseball team that remained in New York.

So, truly, Poppa was in mourning.

To say that a part of Brooklyn died when the Dodgers left is not an overstatement. The team was the borough's identity.  The summer sound track in Brooklyn in the 1950s was of kids playing and Dodger games on the radio. You could literally walk down the streets following the play by play from open windows, or so I was told.  For the most part, the players themselves lived in its neighborhoods, certainly during the season. And with Jackie Robinson, the team had literally changed America.

All men may not have been created equal in the segregated south (or even the red-lined north).

But they sure as hell were at Ebbets Field.

(Apologies for the "hell" in that last sentence, but there really is no other way to make the point.)

And then,  in 1958,  they left.  

And  a giant hole was left to fill.

Until 1962, when the Mets filled it.

Poppa's love of baseball was resurrected that year.  I think it was, as we say down here, an Act of Yours.  At the very least it was mystical and somewhat  inexplicable.  New York had a new team.  And the new team even had two old Dodgers, first baseman Gil Hodges (who would retire in 1963 and begin managing the Washington Senators) and third baseman Don Zimmer.  The new team was in the National League and it wasn't the Yankees.

So Poppa rooted for them. 

Even though they stunk.

And I loved him.

So I rooted for them too.

Even though they stunk.

It wasn't easy.  In 1964 or so, years before Seaver arrived and  Gil Hodges returned, and long before the "miracle" of  '69, my parents decided to give me a baseball uniform as a birthday present.  What did I want, they asked, Yankees or Mets?  Mets, of course, I said, never wanting to be caught dead in a Yankees outfit in front of my grandfather.  Then I went outside in it . . .

And was laughed at by the best baseball player on the block.

A Yankee lover as it turned out.

In Brooklyn, no less.

Who woulda thunk that?

By September of 1969, however, no one was laughing at the Mets.  Armed with a pitching staff -- Seaver and Koosman chief among them --  that stifled opponents, their manager, Hodges (who had returned in 1968),  adroitly platooned lefties against righties (and vice versa)  at first base , second, third and in right field, suffered neither fools nor the lazy gladly, and made them winners.  They were in truth a schizophrenic team.  The same guys were rarely in the line-up three days in a row.  I don't know if You see this sort of teamwork among humans in general (probably not these days, at least here in the US), but on the '69 Mets it was magical.  Ron Swoboda and Art Shamsky, for example, who were platooned in right field, each had about 300 at bats that year and each drove in about fifty runs.  Roughly the  same was true of Donn Clendenon and Ed Kranepool, who were platooned at first base. And Ed Charles and Wayne Garret, platooned at third.

Gil Hodges was what a famous author down here, Roger Kahn, called one of the "Boys of Summer". They were all those beloved Dodger players in the late 1940s and 1950s -- Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, Carl Erskine, Roy Campanella, Clem Labine, Don Newcombe, Billy Cox.  Hodges, however, was especially beloved.  He was known as the "one who stayed".  That was because, as You know, he married a girl from Brooklyn, bought a home and raised his famiy there.  He was also a regular at Our Lady Help of Christians, the Catholic parish in which his family lived. 

All of his kids went to the parish school.

Me too.

One of them, Cynthia, was in my class and once gave me a signed picture of her Dad. 

So I always thought she was pretty cool.

As Tom Seaver will be the first to tell You, Gil Hodges made the Mets.  He was a total professional.  And a no-nonsense guy.  When the team's star left fielder, Cleon Jones, didn't hustle on  a ball hit to him during a game, Hodges walked all the way out to left field and pulled him from the game.  In baseball, just so You know, not hustling is a cardinal sin; it can cause all sorts of problems if it becomes a habit. Needless to say, Cleon never lacked for hustle again.  Hodges was also a great teacher.  He knew what he wanted players to do but had a way of getting them to do it on their own.  

(Part of that may have been owing to the fact that players were a little scared of him; at least that's what one of my friends was told years later by Art Shamsky.  You should ask. Also, and as a relevant aside, really a plea, Hodges should be in the Hall of Fame and the people down here who decide those things obviously need some help on that score. Twenty-five guys are in there who over time received fewer votes than he. In the 1950s, he led all major league first basemen in hits, home runs, RBIs, total bases and extra-base hits. He was an All-Star eight times (also more than any other first baseman).  And then, following seven seasons in which they finished either last or second to last,  he turned the Mets into World Champs, the only pre-free agency expansion team ever to do so.  Could You help here, please?)

Returning to 1969 . . .

It’s hard to put into words how special that summer was for kids like me.    But here's a little vignette that may help.

The World Series in those days was played during the day.  And the deciding  fifth game started in the afternoon of  a school day.  At Our Lady Help of Christians that morning, Sister Louise Claudia told our class that "Cynthia was out sick" and then chuckled.  Everyone knew Cynthia was at Shea Stadium with the rest of her family watching her Dad help make history.  Meanwhile, the nuns decided to make a little history of their own.  As the game started, they stopped class, rolled the educational TVs into the classrooms, and turned it on.  

As You know better than anyone, Catholic nuns in the mid-20th century were serious about school. They ran the places with iron fists, some of which my classmates experienced from time to time.  In my eight years in Our Lady Help of Christians, the only other time I recall classes stopping was on June 5,1968, when we all were marched over to church to pray for Bobby Kennedy.  This was different.  This time, the nuns were stopping school for . . .

A baseball game.

But maybe they knew something we didn't . . .  

Or You do.

One of my friends is John Sexton.  He is a former president of New York University, a former dean of that university's law school, and a former high school teacher who I met in 1973 at a high school summer debate institute at Georgetown University.  For years, he has taught a seminar at NYU called Baseball as a Road to God,  and in 2013 he turned that into a book with the same title.  In it, he makes the point that baseball, like You, is often "ineffable".  The ineffable, he writes,  is a window on the "sacred", on You, a "mystery, both fearful and fascinating", and is "experienced, not defined, revealing itself in moments of intense feeling."  The setting can be "a house of worship or a mountaintop or a ballpark."

For him, the ineffable was "eff-ed" on October 5, 1955, when Gil Hodges caught the last out and the Brooklyn Dodgers won their only World Series (against the Yankees), overcoming a decade of ultimate loss with their one and only ultimate win.

For me, it was "eff-ed" on October 16, 1969, when the Mets overcame seven years of loss and I, along with my classmates, slid down the bannisters at Cynthia's school, yelling ecstatically alongside our teachers, the equally ecstatic nuns.

From the school, I ran to Poppa's house.  

In the years that followed, the Mets muddled along, occasionally great, often frustrating. They won again but I don't think they were ever as miraculous or ineffable again. In 1989, another former university president and baseball lover, Yale's Bart Giamatti, wrote a book called Take Time For Paradise.  In it, he said "I believe we have played games, and watched games, to imitate the gods, to become godlike in our worship of each other and, through those moments of transmutation, to know for an instant what the gods know."

So thank you.

For Tom Seaver.

For Gil Hodges.

And for the '69 Miracle Mets.

Sincerely,

One Boy That Summer.