“You begin to value privacy
much more,” he said. “You
don’t have a moment to your-
self or a moment to share with
your teammates.”
Two days later Seaver re-
ceived the SI Sportsman of the
Year award.
Officially handed the Grecian
urn that goes with the award,
Seaver spoke eloquently for 10
minutes. In conclusion, he turned
to Nancy and said, “I couldn’t
have done it without her.”
Nancy (“gray cashmere pants
suit”) broke down in tears.
“I told you not to cry,” Tom
said.I was the immature one then. I was content just to be the lady of
the moment, to get a taste of all those things that two kids from
Fresno never get. I never stopped to ask him about goals. But
Tom always has known what he wanted and where he was going.
—NANCY SEAVER in 1981B
EAUTY IS AS ephemeral as the dried seeds of dan-
delions floating on a summer breeze like wispy, white
parachutes. The sun over Napa Valley can only last for so
long. It fell lower in the sky, lengthening the shadows of the
grape arbors on Diamond Mountain. It was time to go. Time
to say goodbye. Nobody wanted to say it, but they knew it
was probably the last goodbye.
“It was eight to nine hours of unbelievable memories,”
Shamsky says. “When we left, it was bittersweet. Saying
goodbye to guys in their 70s, you don’t know what’s going
to happen.”
Heeding a call within the soul, man must create. Only the
most fortunate create as fully as did Tom Seaver. He created
art—yes, art, because he made art on the mound—a loving
marriage now in its 54th year, two daughters, a Hall of Fame
career, a model of comportment, the winery, countless friends,
goodwill and an aesthetic of time and place from 1969 that
never will be duplicated or forgotten. But amid earth, air,
sun and sky and the very fruits of their yield, even the mostaccomplished man is humbled by what is created from above.
Surrounded by his teammates in the vineyard, Seaver
surveyed the greatness of this creation spread before him
and told them, “You know, if I couldn’t do anything else but
walk out here every day with the dogs, I’d be happy.”
Seaver is one of between five and six million Americans
suffering from dementia. A 2017 study published in the
Journal of the American Medical Association found that 8.8%
of the population 65 and older has dementia, a rate that
works out to an average of about two or three players from
a world championship team of 50 years ago. Working on
his own book, Swoboda telephoned Seaver one day. It was
around the time the teammates visited Tom on Diamond
Mountain. Swoboda wasn’t sure if it was just before or just
after the get-together.
“Remember when Hodges came out to visit you on the
mound in the ninth inning in the World Series?” Swoboda
said to Seaver. “What did he say to you?”
Seaver could not remember the meeting.
“Remember that almost perfect game you had against the
Cubs?” Swoboda asked.
Again, Seaver had no memory of it.
“Tom just didn’t remember,” Swoboda said. “He couldn’t
put any of those little pieces together. He couldn’t find them.
They were gone.
“It rattled me, if only because those memories are such
treasures to me. The thought that something could sneak in
and steal them from him and that now they are gone, just
gone, is tragic beyond words.”
Dementia is our most expensive disease. The cost of care
is greater for dementia than for heart disease or cancer.
The toll on loved ones when the mind fails before the body
is incalculable.
Once in the flower of his youth, on the cusp of making it
big, Seaver experienced a pitching epiphany. He was 22 years
old and pitching a spring training game against the Braves,
part of his first major league camp after a 12–12 season at
Jacksonville the previous season.
“I gave up a couple of hits and fanned three or four men,”
he once remembered. “I suddenly saw if I pitched up to my
capacity and used my head as well as my arm, I could get
major league hitters out.”
The head and the arm, in equal brilliance, served Seaver
as well as any pitcher who climbed that dirt hill to answer
the challenge, which makes his declining cognition all the
more heartbreaking. Shakespeare’s aging, dementia-stricken
King Lear, in as anguished a tragedy as has ever been writ-
ten, asks poignantly, “W ho is it that can tell me who I am?”
He is Tom Seaver, the archetype of the thinking man’s
pitcher. Fifty years ago, Seaver and the 1969 Mets defined
what was possible. Not just for a year, but for an eternity,
even as the memories of such wonder are being stolen from
BRACE HEMMELGARN/MINNESOTA TWINS/GETTY IMAGES his own beautiful mind.^ ±
CLOSING TIME
Tom threw the first pitch at the
2013 All-Star Game; the 1969
Mets reunited in ’17 ( far left to
right; Harrelson, Koosman, Erik
Sherman, Shamsky, Swoboda;
Seaver in foreground).