“Don’t cry. We won the game,” he told her, “and I still
had a shutout.”
Nancy looked at him and laughed through the tears. She
made Tom laugh.
“It was the first time I laughed since he got the hit,”
Seaver said.
Headline in the Daily News the next day: NANCY SEAVER
CRIED SOFTLY IN 9 TH.
A baseball career can be like a beautiful sailboat. You
can attend meticulously to it, and yet ultimately where
it goes can turn on the whims of tide and wind. The or-
ganization, teammates and especially the manager and
coaches a player draws will all affect his course. Seaver
may have been so good as to be impervious to such influ-
ences. That he fell in with Hodges, Rube Walker and the
Mets put the wind surely at his back.
New York traded for Hodges in 1967, a move Murphy, the
GM, called “the first big turning point.”“It’s time, I think, we did something about that clown
image of the Mets,” Hodges said when he was hired.
He banned poker playing, instituted a curfew, put con-
trols on drinking and fined players $25 a pop for mental
mistakes on the field.
“I think Tom looked at him as a father figure,” Shamsky
says. “They shared a lot of common things—the way they
approached the game, they were ex-Marines.... We all to
a person respected the man as much as you could respect
a man. Tom had a personally close relationship with him.”up in vain past the elevated train station next to the sta-
dium. Hundreds more nearly stormed the press gate to see
the phenomenon that was Seaver and the Mets. A crowd of
59,083 people did squeeze into the joint, including 7,056
Midget Mets, part of the team’s youth fan club. In Wallkill,
N.Y., town administrators were fighting the idea of this fes-
tival called Woodstock, and at Cape Kennedy in Florida,
Apollo 11 sat one week from its launch. But on this night
Shea Stadium shook with enough noise and meaning as
to be the center of the universe. As each inning went by
without a Cub reaching base, Seaver and the crowd grew
stronger, a symbiosis of belief and will that was visceral.
“My heart was beating so much and the feeling was al-
most out of my arm,” Seaver said after the game.
Harrelson was watching at a bar in upstate New York,
where he was serving a short stint in the Army Reserve
at Fort Drum. As Seaver walked to the mound for the
ninth, Harrelson, bursting with pride, turned to some-
one standing next to him
and couldn’t help but say,
“Hey, I know him. I know
Tom Seaver. Tom Seaver is a
friend of mine.”
Tw e nt y-fi v e up, 2 5 do w n.
Two outs from a perfect game,
Seaver looked in at Qualls, a
22-year-old centerfielder the
veteran-loving Durocher put
in the lineup for one of only 28
starts that year. Seaver’s father
and Nancy (“wine-colored
dress”) watched nervously
from the stands.
Seaver threw a fastball,
aiming low and away. It was
one of his rare misbehaving
children, staying over the
middle of the plate. Qualls
hit it firmly and cleanly into
centerfield for a single.
“With a guy like Seav-
er,” said Grote, his catcher,
“you don’t second-guess. He
throws the type of game he wants to throw.”
Seaver had poured so much into this 4–0 victory that
the hit “felt like somebody opened a spout in my foot and it
all ran out of me, the pressure all ran out.” (In fact, Seaver
would come away from that game with a tender shoulder;
he went 1–4 in his next five starts.)
“He’ll probably never be that fast again as long as he
lives,” Durocher scoffed, “and if he pitches like that every
night, he’ll never lose a game.”
After the game, Nancy ran into Tom’s arms, crying.34
SPORT S ILLUS TR ATED OC T OBER 21–28, 2019
HERB SCHARFMAN1969 METSSURPRISE PART Y
After his complete
game in New
York’s Game 5 win
over the Orioles
at Shea, Koosman
(36) celebrated the
Mets’ first title with
Seaver ( jacket).“We were a lot of different people,” says Swob
California guys, East Coast guys who didn’t k