RobKirkpatrick.com

Bobby Thomson, the man who struck “The Shot Heard ‘Round the World,” passed away on Monday.  Here’s his New York Times obituary:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/18/sports/baseball/18thomson.html?_r=1

And here’s my short story “Epiphany at Coogan’s Bluff,” which Slow Trains published in 2007:

http://www.slowtrains.com/vol6issue4/kirkpatrickvol6issue4.html

Forty-one years ago today, the New York Mets acquired first baseman Donn Clendenon from the Montreal Expos in exchange for Kevin Collins, Steve Renko, Bill Carden, and Dave Colon.  Clendenon would hit .252 with 12 home runs and 37 RBI in 72 games for the Mets in the 1969 regular season, injecting some much-needed right-handed power into the lineup. He starred in the World Series that October, going 5 for 14 with 3 home runs and 4 RBI against the vaunted Baltimore Orioles staff to earn MVP honors in the fall classic for the Miracle Mets. Clendenon’s best full season with New York was in 1970, when he hit .288 with 22 home runs and 97 RBI.

On this same date in 1983, the then-woeful Mets again acquired a first baseman who would prove to be a key figure in a World Championship. The St. Louis Cardinals sent Keith Hernandez to the Mets in exchange for Neil Allen and Rick Ownbey. Hernandez hit .306 for the remainder of 1983 and hit .311 in 1984, when he finished second in the National League MVP voting and showed invaluable on-the-field leadership as the Mets became pennant contenders for the first time in a decade. Consistent Keith hit .309 in 1985 and .310 in 1986, when he helped led the team to its second World Championship. In 1987, he was named the franchise’s first team captain and hit .290. Injuries dogged him throughout 1988 as his average fell dramatically, though he still helped New York win the Eastern Division and knocked in 5 runs in a seven-game postseason series against the Los Angeles Dodgers. That season, he also claimed his eleventh consecutive Gold Glove.

“And at seven minutes to midnight, the goose-egg sweep is complete.”

So said Mets broadcaster Gary Cohen on Thursday night, perhaps as a nod to Lindsey Nelson and the ‘69 Mets, as New York finished off a sweep of the Philadelphia Phillies with the third of three consecutive shutouts.  The Mets topped the Phillies 8-0 on Tuesday, 5-0 on Wednesday, and 3-0 in the series finale at CitiField to pull from last place in the National League East to within 2 games of first place.  It was the first time in 41 years that the Mets staff shut out an opponent over a three-game series.

The Phillies were also the victims in 1969, getting blanked in three contests at Connie Mack Stadium by Jerry Koosman, Tom Seaver, and a combined effort from Gary Gentry, Nolan Ryan, and Ron Taylor.  Two days before the series in Philly, Gentry had gone the distance against Steve Carlton and the St. Louis Cardinals at Shea Stadium in a 6-0 victory that clinched the division for the suddenly Amazin’ Mets, part of a 42-inning scoreless streak.  As Al Weis turned a 6-4-3 double play to end the game, broadcaster Nelson famously marked the moment for posterity: “At 9:07 on September 24th, the Mets have won the championship of the Eastern Division of the National League!”

A comparison of the two “goose-egg” streaks illustrates how much the game has changed since 1969. Gentry pitched the full nine against the Cards, as did Koosman and Seaver in their gems against the Phils. Gentry went just five innings in the series finale in Philadelphia – giving way to Ryan (who tossed three scoreless in relief) and Taylor, who recorded a one-inning save – but he was going on just three days’ rest, which is interesting considering the game was meaningless at that point with the Mets having already clinched the division for manager Gil Hodges.

In today’s era of pitch counts and “protecting” pitchers, it’s become increasingly rare for pitchers to go the distance, even when they’re still working on shutouts.  (And can you imagine a manager today letting his #1 or #2 hurlers go nine innings in mere postseason tuneups?)  The 2010 Mets who entered the three-game set in last place in the East, returned to relevance in the division on the strength of three groups efforts.  Mets pitchers recorded the following stats in 27 innings against Philadelphia:

Tuesday, May 25

R. A. Dickey (W, 1-0) 6 IP, 0 R, 7 H, 0 R, 3 BB, 7 K

R. Valdes (SV, 1) 3 IP, 0 R, 2 H, 2 BB, 4 K

Wednesday, May 26

H. Takahashi (W, 4-1) 6 IP, 0 R, 5 H, 0 BB, 6 K

J. Mejia 1 IP, 0 R, 1 H, 0 BB, 0 K

Igarashi 1 IP, 0 R, 0 H, 0 BB, 1 K

Nieve 1 IP, 0 R, 0 H, 0 BB, 1 K

Thursday, May 27

Pelfrey (W, 7-1)  7 IP, 0 R, 3 H, 5 BB, 5 K

Feliciano 1 IP, 0 R,  0 H, 0 BB, 2 K

Rodriguez 1 IP, 0 R, 0 H, 0 BB, 1 K

TOTALS VS. PHILLIES

27 IP, 0 R, 18 H, 10 BB, 27 K

Those of you who followed my recreation of the 1969 baseball season would enjoy the Facebook page for Big Hair and Plastic Grass: A Funky Ride Through Baseball and America in the Swinging ’70s, the forthcoming book by pop culture historian Dan Epstein. I can personally attest that it’s a hugely fun book, and the author’s put together a FB profile that is in the process of goin’ viral with more than 600 fans in little over a week’s time.  The page has regular updates with links to great YouTube footage from the 70s, wonderfully tacky images from the era shared by fans, and frequent commentary from the author featuring his characteristic wit. 

Check it out. 

http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Big-Hair-Plastic-Grass-A-Funky-Ride-Through-Baseball-In-The-1970s/321769914865?ref=ts

Here are the rules:

1. Assign a team/franchise to the position where it’s placed stars (HOFers, MVPs, All-Stars & Cy Youngs) throughout its history.

2. Use each team/franchise just once.

3. Arrange the franchise positions into a batting order based on each’s composite offensive skills.

1. SS Pittsburgh Pirates (Vaughn, Wagner, Groat)

2. 2B St. Louis Cardinals (Hornsby, Schoendienst, Herr)

3. LF Boston Red Sox (Williams, Yaz, Rice, Ramirez)

4. CF New York Yankees (Combs, DiMaggio, Mantle)

5. 1B NY/San Francisco Giants (Terry, Mize, McCovey, Clark)

6. 3B Boston/Milw./Atl. Braves (Matthews, Pendleton, Jones)

7. RF Detroit Tigers (Heilmann, Kaline, Gibson)

8. C Cincinnati Reds (Lombardi, Bench)

9. SP Brooklyn/LA Dodgers (Roe, Drysdale, Koufax, Sutton, Valenzuela, Hershiser)

RP Phila./Oakland A’s (Fingers, Eckersley, Street)

Have a better lineup?  Send it to me!

On this date forty years ago, Ed Charles (seen in the above photo, to the left of Jerry Koosman and Jerry Grote, celebrating the last out of the 1969 World Series) became the first player released by the newly crowned world champion New York Mets.

Charles, then 36, had played in 61 games for the Mets in 1969, hitting .207 with 3 home runs and 18 RBI. One of the home runs came in the division clinching game on September 24 off Steve Carlton, who’d started the All-Star Game for the National League in July.

Charles did not play in the NLCS against the Braves, but he played in four of five World Series games against the Orioles, hitting just .133.  His biggest contributions in the Series came in Game Two. He singled and scored the go-ahead run in the top of the ninth inning. Then, with two on and two out in the bottom of the ninth, he gloved a hard grounder and threw to Donn Clendenon to preserve a 2-1 win.

“The Glider” played in eight Major League seasons after signing as an amateur with the Boston Braves in 1952. His best offensive season was his rookie year in 1962, when he hit .288 with 17 home runs and 74 RBI for the Kansas City Athletics.

Known as a smooth fielder, Charles came to the Mets in 1967 in a trade for Larry Elliott and cash. Charles had a perfect 1.000 fielding percentage in the ‘69 series.

After his release, Charles retired from baseball with a career average of .263 and 86 home runs. He scored 438 runs and knocked in 421 in 1005 games played.

Charles was on hand at CitiField when the Mets honored the 40th anniversary of the ‘69 team this summer.

Now that we’ve completed our day-by-day recreation of the 1969 World Championship season, we can take some time to analyze how the Mets pulled off their miraculous upset of the Orioles in five games.

First, if someone had said that New York’s top two hitters from their everyday lineup, leadoff man Tommie Agee and third-spot slugger Cleon Jones, would hit a combined .162 (6 for 37) in the series – and that Art Shamsky, the only other Met (aside from Jones) to post a .300 average in the regular season, would be hitless in 6 at-bats in the World Series after hitting .538 against the Braves in the NLCS - one might have thought Baltimore had swept the series. 

So how did the Mets win?  Simple: pitching.  True, New York had a less than amazin’ .220 team average in the series, but their pitching staff held the O’s to an anemic .146 team mark in the five games. After scoring 4 runs off Tom Seaver in Game One, the AL champs scored just 5 runs over the final 4 games.  Jerry Koosman, the team’s second best hurler in the regular season, was its best in the series with a 2-0 record and a 2.04 ERA in 17 2/3 innings. With Koosman’s two wins bookending Gary Gentry’s 6 2/3 scoreless innings in Game Three and Seaver’s 10-inning masterpiece in Game Four, New York subdued the Birds by holding them to just 4 extra-base hits across the 5 games. Out of the bullpen, Ron Taylor, Nolan Ryan, and Don Cardwell threw 5 2/3 innings without allowing a run.

The top two men in the Baltimore lineup, Paul Blair and Don Buford, had just 4 hits in 40 at-bats. Boog Powell led the Orioles with a .263 average but had no home runs or RBI.

Meanwhile, the Mets got enough offense from two members of their right-handed platoon lineup - one expected and one unexpected. Seeing the majority of the action at their positions with southpaws Mike Cuellar and Dave McNally starting 2 games aipiece for the O’s, cleanup hitter Donn Clendenon hit .357 with 3 home runs, and eighth-place hitter Al Weis opened eyes with 5 hits in 11 at-bats (.455) including the game-winning RBI in Game Two and a game-tying home run in Game Five. As they had throughout their 100-win campaign, the 1969 Amazin; Mets used timely hitting and dominant pitching to bring a happy end to a miracle season.

Thursday, October 16, 1969

The New York Mets are World Series champions.

The Amazin’s overcame an early three-run deficit to beat the Baltimore Orioles 5-3 in Game Five and close out the series at home. Jerry Koosman pitched a complete game to earn his second series win, series MVP Donn Clendenon homered in his third straight appearance, and Al Weis hit a key game-tying home run, his first ever homer at Shea Stadium.

After hitting .215 in the regular season, Weis finished with a .455 series average.

The Mets fell behind in the third when Orioles pitcher Dave McNally smacked a two-run shot over the leftfield wall. Three batters later, Frank Robinson drove a towering home run over the centerfield fence for a 3-0 Orioles lead.

But it was the last time Baltimore would score in ‘69.

Koosman settled into a groove, and the Mets got on the board in the sixth when Cleon Jones was hit by a pitch and Clendenon followed with a drive that ricocheted off the upper deck in leftfield. At first, umpire Lou DiMuro ruled that McNally’s pitch had missed Jones’s feet before it hit the ground and bounced into the Mets dugout. But manager Gil Hodges emerged with a ball that bore the mark of shoe polish, and after inspecting it, DiMuro awarded Jones first. This enraged Baltimore manager Earl Weaver, as in the top of the inning, Frank Robinson had struck out after claiming to have been hit by a Koosman pitch.

With the Mets trailing by one, Al Weis sent the fans to their feet with his game-tying home run off McNally in the seventh. In the eighth against reliever Eddie Watt, Jones led off with a double high off the centerfield fence, and he scored the go-ahead run one batter latter on Ron Swoboda’s bloop single to left, which landed just in front of a lunging Don Buford to the delight of the enraptured Shea faithful. After Ed Charles flew out, Jerry Grote lined a hard grounder to Boog Powell at first, and when Watt mishandled Powell’s toss to first, Swoboda came around to score a key insurance run.

Protecting a two-run lead, Koosman made a mistake in walking Frank Robinson to begin the ninth. But Koosman got Powell to ground into a force play and retired Brooks Robinson on a fly to right.

Davey Johnson stepped to the plate next. I recount what happened next in 1969: The Year Everything Changed:

Second baseman Davey Johnson hit a deep fly ball to left that might have made many a fan hold their breath, but when Jones stopped moving backward and calmly settled under the ball just shy of the warning track, it was all over.

He collected the ball and brought his hands down as he practically knelt to the Shea grass in a solemn gesture. Veteran baseball writer George Vecsey wrote, “Shea Stadium was caught quivering as Jones sighted the ball, and the whole city erupted as he caught it, and the fans poured onto the field, and the New York Mets were the champions of baseball. There were a million exciting things happening and it was hard to focus on any one incident. But out in left field, if you had been looking there, you would have seen Cleon Jones, with fans racing over to pummel him, stop for a moment, drop quickly to one knee. Later, he explained his brief genuflection. ‘Someone was good to us.’ ”

The Mets, the laughingstock of baseball in their first seven years of existence, were now the best team in all of the land. All jubilant hell broke loose. Fans ran onto the field in celebration. Some collected dirt from the infield; others dug out home plate as a souvenir. It was just before 3:30 on that Thursday afternoon, October 16, and throughout the city, New Yorkers began their celebration. White-collar confetti danced downward upon spontaneous revelers. Strangers danced in the streets, young with old, black with white—one of the few moments of harmony during a year that had seen the nation divided by age and race.

Tuesday, October 14, 1969

Superman came to Shea Stadium for the World Series, and his name is Tommie Agee.

The Mets centerfielder led off the bottom of the first in Game 3 with a home run off Baltimore’s Jim Palmer. More importantly, Agee made not one but two sparkling plays in the field to prevent at least five potential runs in New York’s 5-0 victory over the Baltimore Orioles. 

The underdog Mets now lead the Orioles 2-1 in the series.

Mets no. 3 starter Gary Gentry cruised through the first three innings and New York led 3-0 after Gentry struck a two-run double in the second to score Jerry Grote and Bud Harrelson.

But with two outs in the fourth inning, Baltimore’s Frank Robinson singled for his team’s first hit of the game, and Boog Powell followed with a single of his own. After Gentry got Brooks Robinson on strikes for the second out, Elrod Hendricks drove a ball deep into the left-centerfield gap in Shea. (After the game, he would describe it as the hardest ball he’d ever hit.)  But Agee raced into the gap and nabbed the sinking drive with an amazing backhanded “ice cream cone” catch just in front of the wall. 

Jerry Grote’s sixth-inning double scored Ken Boswell to make it 4-0. Then, Agee came to the rescue once again. Gentry again fell into two-out trouble in the seventh when he walked the bases loaded. Gil Hodges called to the bullpen for Nolan Ryan, and the Orioles’s Paul Blair greeted him with a line drive into right-center. Agee got on his horse, pounded his glove just before diving, and gathered it in for the third out. The home crowd erupted as he jogged in from centerfield, realizing that Agee, the former A.L. Rookie of the Year, was responsible for stranding a total of five Baltimore runners on base.

From there, Ryan closed things out and Ed Kranepool’s solo shot in the eighth ended the day’s scoring.

WORLD SERIES GAME THREE: Mets 5, Orioles 0.  W: Gentry (1-0)  L: Palmer (0-1)  SV: Ryan (1)

Sunday, October 12, 1969

A Mets starting pitcher finally threw a good game in the playoffs, and the bottom of the order delivered when it counted most for New York in Game Two of the World Series.

After three rocky outings in the NLCS by its the team’s top three hurlers - Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman, and Gary Gentry – and a loss by Seaver in Game One of the World Series, Koosman took the mound in Memorial Stadium and carried a no-hitter into the seventh inning against the potent Baltimore Orioles lineup.

Don Clendenon had given the team its first lead in a Series game with his home run off Dave McNally to begin the fourth inning. Koosman, owenr of a 17-9 record in the regular season, made that single stand up until Paul Blair lead off the seventh with a single to left, stole second, and scored on Brooks Robinson’s two-out single into center.

The score was knotted in the top of the ninth when Ed Charles singled with two outs and moved to third on a perfectly executed hit-and-run by Jerry Grote. Manager Gil Hodges left eighth-place hitter Al Weis, who hit just .215 in the regular season and had just one at-bat in the NLCS, in to face McNally. Weis had singled off the Orioles southpaw back in the third, and he rewarded Hodges’s confidence by rapping a single into left to score Charles with the go-ahead run.

Koosman took that lead into the bottom of the ninth and retired the first two men in the Orioles order, Paul Blair and Don Buford. But there the lefty faltered, issuing walks to both Frank Robinson and Boog Powell to put the tying and winning runs on base. Hodges called for closer Ron Taylor to put out the fire.

Up stepped the dangerous Brooks Robinson, who drove in 84 runs in the 1969 season and starred with a .500 average in the ALCS. Robinson swung at a Taylor offering and bounced a hard smash to Charles at third base. The man they call The Glider gloved it and took a step toward third for the force out. But realizing he might not beat Frank Robinson to the base, Charles stopped and fired across the diamond to first. Clendenon stretched and dug Charles’s throw out of the dirt to get the final out and preserve a 2-1 win in the Mets’ first World Series victory.

Both Charles and Weis were 2 for 4 in the game. McNally suffered his first postseason loss despite giving up just six hits while striking out seven batters.

The series now moves to New York, where the Mets and Orioles will square off in Game Three at Shea Stadium on Tuesday, October 14.

WORLD SERIES GAME TWO: Mets 2, Orioles 1.  W: Koosman (1-0)  L: McNally (0-1)