On Monday both Mets’ fans and baseball devotees everywhere lost a master. George Thomas Seaver was magical. He was the epitome of what it meant to be a Met, without any doubt the greatest Met in the team’s history. A pitcher’s pitcher, Seaver transformed the lowliest of Major League Baseball’s franchise into the Miracle Mets. That is the 1969 World Champion New York Mets to we mere mortals.
The following is a story prepared as part a book I am finishing that looks at the lives and careers of each player who was the best to wear a particular uniform number. It describes a record strikeout performance in a 1970 game against the San Diego Padres. And it attempts to do so while putting into context who Tom Seaver was in his own time. While he was creating his legend.
Among Tom Terrific’s other awards, kudos,and honors is the simple truth that nobody who ever wore uniform number 41 was better at baseball than Tom Seaver. Enjoy.
Earlier in the day thousands of New Yorkers congregated on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan for the celebration of the first Earth Day. Mayor John Lindsay had closed the famed boulevard from Union Square to Central Park allowing the assembled masses to gather. 14th Street between 3rd and 7th Avenues had been closed as well as an ‘ecological carnival’ was taking place. As similar observances were taking place across the nation, the specter of America’s involvement in Vietnam and the discord that had spread across the nation as a result had never been greater. Civil rights battles were still being fought nightly in the nation’s cities every day and on the television every evening. The shooting of four students who were protesting the War in Vietnam at Kent State University by Ohio National Guardsmen was still twelve days into the future. The country was restless and the evening news had become a nightly window into that unrest in millions of living rooms across America.
But not everything was as strained as the fabric of American society had become. It was April, springtime in New York City and flowers were coming into bloom, temperatures were warming, and baseball had returned from its annual wintertime hibernation. In New York baseball had changed markedly in the past few seasons as the Yankees had fallen off the face of the Earth during the last half of the 1960s and the Mets had been the sport’s laughingstock, well, since they were born. But in Queens during the summer of 1969, a divination of sorts occurred.
Baseball magic. A season when a baseball team, who had never finished higher than ninth place had somehow managed to overcome an 8½ game deficit in the standings over the last six weeks of the schedule to win a division title. A season when MLB played its first ever League Championship Series and the team that had just pulled off a miracle comeback in the race for the National League East crown swept the Atlanta Braves to win the pennant and advance to the World Series. A season that would see the once and future world champion Baltimore Orioles, winners of 109 games and the American League pennant (and generally thought of as the best team in the sport), take the first game of that Fall Classic only to lose the next four and the World’s Championship to the Amazin’ New York Mets.
The elation caused by the frenzy of eight months earlier was prevalent in Shea Stadium. The energy of it all was still evident as baseball’s lovable losers and their fans weren’t quite used to the notion of being champions. The excitement of the 1970 season was two weeks old and the collective teams of the major leagues were settling in for the long hall by April 22, 1970.
That evening the Mets were scheduled to go up against the San Diego Padres, one of the new teams forged in the second wave of baseball’s expansion just a season before. That first Padres team, much like the original New York Mets of 1962, were dreadful; winning just 52 games to go with 110 losses in their debut season.
But this season was new, and it was still April. A time that still allows the baseball fan, every baseball fan, to harbor fanciful dreams of October success, before the reality of not having enough pitching or getting too many injuries in the outfield brings that same fan back to the familiar, but oh so cold reality of dashed baseball dreams. The Padres entered the game with a 6-8 mark on the young season and had Mike Corkins taking the ball that day. New York was 7-5 as they sought to validate their surprising 1969 season. Manager Gil Hodges countered with his ace and current holder of the National League’s Cy Young Award, Tom Seaver, to pitch for the Mets.
Seaver retired José Arcia on a fly ball caught by Tommie Agee in center field to start the game. He then got Van Kelly to look at a called third strike before getting Cito Gaston to swing at strike three as Seaver quickly set down San Diego in order in the top of the first. The Mets scored the game’s opening run in their half of the first inning as Ken Boswell doubled home Bud Harrelson tomake the score 1-0. But the Padres tied it up with a home run by Al Ferrara that landed well beyond the left field fence in the top of the second. With the game still tied, Bud Harrelson’s triple in the bottom of the third scored Tommie Agee to give the Mets a 2-1 lead that they would never relinquish.
But none of that is why this game of particular note. No, this game was about strikeouts, specifically strikeouts of Padres batters by Tom Terrific. He got one more in the second, then two in the third, and then two more in the fourth inning to give him seven K’s going into the fifth inning. Two more whiffs in the fifth brought Seaver’s total to nine.
It was with two outs in the bottom of the sixth that Tom Seaver really bore down. The remainder of the Padres batters, beginning with slugger Al Ferrara as the last out of the sixth and continuing until he was the last out in the top of the ninth, all went down on strikes. Five batters looked at strike three, five more swung at the third strike, it didn’t matter - Tom Seaver struck out ten consecutive Padres to close out the game.
Seaver’s nineteen strikeouts in a nine-inning game tied the record set by Cardinals’ pitcher Steve Carlton the previous September. And with the exception of Carlton’s masterpiece, no pitcher had ever struck out nineteen batters in a single nine-inning game in the century that big league baseball had been played. Ever.
RIP Tom Terrific.
