Now available: Tom Seaver, America’s top athlete and sports
personality, plus Nancy Seaver, Tom’s lovely wife, for those
situations that call for young Mrs. America or husband-and-
wife sales appeal.”
—Newspaper ad, placed one week after the World Series by
Seaver’s agent, Frank ScottT
OM AND NANCY, like Jack and Jackie, aglow in
beauty and youthfulness, and now with success confirmed
upon them, captured the hearts and hopes of America. Tom
signed a book deal. He showed up on the stage for the Kraft
Music Hall, a popular TV show, singing “Nancy (With the
Laughing Face)” to his wife, accompanied by The Lettermen.
Tom and six of his teammates were booked for 17 days at
Caesa rs Pa lace for $10,000 each to appea r in singer Jimmie
Rodgers’s show. The boys sang “The Impossible Dream.”
Seaver left the gig early. He and Nancy decamped to the
Virgin Islands.
A winter stock theater in Florida offered him $10,000 a
week for a seven-week run. He turned it down.
One day, in November, while planning to winter in the
New York area, he went shopping for a coat. Reporters were
there. He decided on a size 43 long double-breasted moun-
tain lion coat, but only after asking if there were any conser-
vation laws against it. The proprietor produced a certificate
that the lion was shot legally in the mountains of Mexico.
Nancy picked out a coat for herself ($3,000 amber fox).
Fa me is like w ine: bot h sweet a nd da ngerous, depending
on how you consume it. Seaver sipped appropriately. On
Dec. 15 he showed up at Toots Shor’s for t he premiere of t he
official World Series film. He revealed that he and Nancy
had just bought an old farmhouse in Connecticut.goofy ways. Bullpen coach Joe Pignatano used to tell him,
“Don’t think, Swoboda. You’ll only hurt the team.”
But with these drills, “I figured out how to be a better
outfielder,” Swoboda says.
He dived for the ball, a choice Orioles slugger Frank
Robinson later called dumb because it risked having both
runners score. But Swoboda snagged it for
the second out. One run, not two, scored.
Seaver went back out for the 10th. Again,
two runners reached with one out. This time
Walker ambled to the mound. “I’m getting
tired, but I can continue,” Seaver vowed. He
induced a fly ball and then, with his 150th
pitch on short rest, and working his 296th
inning of the year, he struck out Paul Blair.
Mets magic finally showed up in the bot-
tom of the 10th with another one of those
Scotch-tape-and-bailing-wire rallies: a pop
fly lost in the sun for a double, followed by a
bunt, which the pitcher threw off the wrist
of the runner at first for a game-ending er-
ror. Of course.
Seaver covered 10 innings without al-
lowing an extra-base hit. Only two pitchers
ever had won a World Series game that way:
Christy Mathewson in 1913 and Carl Hub-
bell in ’33. Nobody has done it since Seaver.
Seaver and Koosman started six of the
Mets’ eight postseason games, including complete-game
victories over Baltimore in Games 4 and 5. A couple of hours
after the clincher, a 5–3 win at Shea, Seaver and Gentry left
the champagne-soaked clubhouse and headed out toward
the field. They felt a pull to go back to the pitching mound,
an almost sacred physical place for them, the epicenter of
everything that happened in 1969, and give thanks.
“We just wanted to see it or walk on it once more,” Seav-
er said then. “You know, like when nobody was around or
making a big fuss.”
Seaver climbed the dugout steps to the field. His shirt
was open and wet, and he was wearing no shoes—only his
baseball socks. W hen he and Gentr y made it to the mound,
they were not prepared for what they saw.
“By the time we got there, it was too late,” Seaver said.
Thousands of fans had stormed the field after the last
out, and as if to require physical evidence that the Mets
really did win the World Series, they grabbed fistfuls of
grass and dirt. Most of the mound where Tom Seaver did
some of the best work in the annals of pitching was gone.
A few hundred fans still milled about, not wanting the
moment to end. When they saw Seaver they let up one last,
loud cheer. Seaver smiled.
“You deserve some congratulations too,” he told them.
“You people are amazing too.”36
SPORT S ILLUS TR ATED OC T OBER 21–28, 2019
ERIK SHERMAN COLLECTION1969 METS