Seaver home on East Rancho Drive. Tom was fiercely
proud of his military training on the half-million acres of
Marine Corps Base, Twentynine Palms, Calif. The disci-
pline he learned there, he said, would help him become a
better pitcher. He embraced the all-American image.
A reporter asked Seaver if he ever had trouble with any-
one. Yes, he replied: Ralph Houk, the Yankees’ manager.
Seaver explained that in 1967, he had stopped at Toots
Shor’s, the famous sports hangout, after the banquet in
which he received his Rookie of the Year award. It was 1:30
in the morning when Houk saw him there.
“You’ll never be a big league pitcher keeping hours like
this,” Houk snarled.
“If you had 25 players like me,” Seaver snapped back,
“you wouldn’t finish 10th.”The events of life are not so important. The moments are es-
sential. It is all about relationships.
—CAROL HOWELL, Let’s Talk Dementia: A Caregiver’s GuideI
T WAS A GO. The teammates folded themselves into
a car and pointed it toward Diamond Mountain. Har-
relson, the plucky whippet of a shortstop, had been Seaver’s
roommate and dear friend. In his condition, he had been
accompanied to California by Shamsky, the witty first base-
man–outfielder who hit a pinch-hit, three-run homer off
Seaver in 1967 as a Red, then dared not mention it to him
over the next four seasons as his teammate. Koosman, thebroad-backed Midwesterner, was the southpaw complement
to Seaver in the rotation. Swoboda was the brash, ne’er-do-
well rightfielder who became a productive role player in
Hodges’s platoon system.
Koosman and Swoboda, as if picking up where they left
off 50 years earlier, when Vietnam divided dinner tables
and clubhouses, immediately fell into heated political de-
bates in the car, knowing they would have to table the ar-
guments once they reached Seaver’s house.
“Koosman is just a joy,” Swoboda says, “when he isn’t
burying you in über-right-wing crap.
“I didn’t run or hang out with Tom [in 1969]. I wish I
would have. I was a guy who could find various ways to
piss off Gil Hodges. All Gil wanted you to do was act like an
adult and make you the best player you could be and help
the Mets win ball games. I could do some of it some of the
time, not all of it all the time like Seaver. Seaver was so fo-
cused and so organized in the way he approached things.”
On that Saturday in May 2017, Tom and Nancy greeted
the 1969 Mets at the door of their house. Seaver looked
good. Robust. Healthy. They hugged. He gave them a tour
of the home. Later they would drive to a restaurant for a
long lunch.
They shared some wine and they swapped stories about
1969 in the unique intimacy of teammates. These tales,
forged in the battles of youth, are the mortar of friend-
ships. They linger not as stored memories, like dusty pho-
tographs in a shoe box, but as elements of our very being,
like wrinkles and scars. They are not just part of what we
did. They are who we are.
The five teammates spent almost nine hours together.
Seaver repeated himself with a few stories about Hodges
or Rube Walker, the team’s wizard of a pitching coach, but
that was the only sliver of a sign that something might be
amiss in that famously studious, analytical head.
The highlight of the day was when the teammates
walked the vineyards with Tom and his dogs, as Seaver
does every day. It was a brilliantly bright and warm day,
the Cabernet grapes tilted toward the nurturing sun.
“It was a pretty spectacular place,” Swoboda said. “He
looked good and sounded good. It was so much fun be-
cause Tom was all there.”Yesterday I got a card in the mail to sign. I still get them all
the time.
— JIMMY QUALLS in 2016, to the Herald-Whig, Quincy, Ill.J
IMMY QUALLS had 31 hits in his major league
career. He is famous because of only one of them.
At 7:30 a.m. on July 9, fans began lining up at Shea for
tickets for the 8 p.m. game against first-place Chicago,
which led New York by 4^1 / 2 games in the NL East. By the
time Seaver threw the first pitch, thousands still were lined1969 METSHERB SCHARFMAN