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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.

Wednesday, October 15, 1969

Tom Seaver pitched his best game of the postseason, Ron Swoboda made the catch of his life, and now the Mets find themselves one game away from a world championship.

After allowing 9 runs over 12 innings in two starts, Cy Young candidate Tom Seaver crafted a masterpiece in Game 4 of the World Series. The Franchise threw 10 strong frames, allowing just one run on six hits and two walks, as the Orioles and Mets went into extra innings at Shea Stadium.

Donn Clendenon’s solo home run in the second inning off Baltimore’s Mike Cuellar gave New York an early lead. The score remained 1-0 until the top of the ninth, when Seaver appeared to tire. He surrendered back-to-back hits to Frank Robinson and Boog Powell to put men on first and third with one out. Brooks Robinson sent a sinking liner into rightfielder. Swoboda, who was dubbed “Rocky” because of his defensive struggles earlier in his career, made a split-second decision and dove to his right with his body parallel to the ground and his arm reaching out as far as he could. Quoting from 1969: The Year Everything Changed:

If not for perfect timing, the ball would have skipped past Swoboda’s glove and likely gone all the way to the wall. Perhaps in some parallel universe, it did just that: Both runners scored as Robinson pulled into third with a triple, and Baltimore scored a come-from-behind win in Game Four to regain momentum in the Series. Perhaps in this alternate reality, the Orioles went on to win the Series, while the ’69 Mets had to settle for being an intriguing footnote in baseball’s long, storied history.

But Swoboda’s timing was perfect, and he caught the ball just inches above the outfield grass. Frank Robinson tagged up and scored from third to tie the game, but the Shea crowd didn’t seem to care. The fans of this miracle team had witnessed yet another miraculous catch, and one batter later, Swoboda made another fine (though not nearly as difficult) catch on a line drive to halt the Orioles rally.

After the game, commentators would compare the play to the greatest catches in World Series history. 

Swoboda made a jogging catch on Elrod Hendricks’s liner to end the inning. Swoboda’s single in the bottom of the ninth, his third of the game, pushed Cleon Jones to third with two outs, but reliever Eddie Watt got pinch-hitter Art Shamsky to ground out to second, and the game proceeded into extra innings.

Still on the mound, Seaver worked around a jam in the tenth. Davey Johnson reached on an error by Wayne Garrett, and Clay Dalrymple’s pinch hit put two on with one out. But Don Buford flew out to right, and then Seaver struck out Paul Blair.

In the bottom of the tenth, Jerry Grote led off with a flyball double that fell just out of reach of shortstop Mark Belanger in shallow leftfield. After an intentional walk to Al Weis, Pete Richert came on to face pinch-hitter J. C. Martin. Martin laid down a perfect sacrifice bunt, and when Richert fielded it and wheeled to first, his throw hit Martin and bounced away. Rod Gaspar, running for Grote, came around to score the winning run.

The Orioles would argue that Martin should have been called out and the play called dead because he had been running outside the basepath when the ball struck him. But the play stood, and now this miraculous Mets team will look to close out the series on Thursday at Shea.

WORLD SERIES GAME FOUR: Mets 2, Orioles 1 (10 inn.).  W: Seaver (1-1)  L: Hall (0-1)

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)