The Mets Police

This is called a Huntington Beach cap. It's for ladies I guess.  Click the pic if you want one but if you're a dude you could do better.

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Johan Santana feels their pain. 25 years ago Ron Darling felt it...(is 1985 really 25 years now? Wow.)

While the Mets' team ERA is lower than Steve Carlton's or John Candelaria's, the team batting average is only .244. On 28 occasions this season. Met starters have allowed three runs or less, and lost or got no decision.


Tom Seaver (2.41), Jon Matlack (2.86), Jerry Koosman (2.91) and Mickey Lolich (2.95) rank first, seventh, eighth and 10th among National League starters in ERA, but their stomachs churn with the same pitch-by-pitch anxiety as that of the humblest reliever. When you pitch for the Mets, one mistake can be disastrous.


"It's like a damned broken record," says Seaver, who leads the league in strikeouts and heartbreaks and who suffered through a nightmarish seven-week period this summer in which he did not win a game despite some typically Seaverian statistics: seven starts, 55 innings pitched, 13 earned runs, 2.13 ERA and three home runs allowed. For his efforts he was rewarded with four defeats and three no-decisions. Harking back to the days of Marv Throneberry, the Mets managed to score only nine runs in his behalf. Last Friday night they were just as niggardly, scoring only one run. But Seaver pitched up his 11th win (he has lost 10) by shutting out the Phillies. By whiffing eight batters he extended his own record for consecutive 200-strike-out seasons to nine.

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MET STARTING PITCHERS KOOSMAN, LOLICH, MATLACK AND SEAVER - 09.13.76 - SI Vault

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Tom Seaver:  Sportsman of the Year 1969.

In his three years with the Mets, Seaver has won 59 games, but it must be remembered that in his first two seasons he played on teams that were a symphony of incompetence. He went to New York's spring training camp in St. Petersburg, Fla. in February of 1967 with only one year of professional work behind him. "I had no time limit set for making it to the major leagues," he says, "but I believed that eventually I would get there because I felt I was good enough. There were no self-declarations that if I did not make it in two or three years I would quit and try something else. None of that. At training camp I was ready to be sent back to the minors if the Mets felt I needed the extra work. I was perfectly willing to accept that, because I believed in the absolute integrity of major league baseball. To be honest about it, I had not been overly impressed by myself during my first year in pro ball at Jacksonville. A record which shows you win only as many games as you lose [12-12] is not one you can accept or be happy with."

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TOM SEAVER
- 12.22.69 - SI Vault

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I love this stuff. Great to read it all from the perspective of the time.

Gil Hodges, the Met manager, has often been regarded as one of the nicest men in baseball, but his players know how tough he can be. If he does not like something he sees a player doing he will "sit him down" until the player has learned his lesson. The thing which Hodges himself learned the quickest as a manager was how to handle pitchers the most difficult job a manager has. Working effectively with Pitching Coach Al (Rube) Walker and delegating a lot of responsibility to him, Hodges still takes on himself the blame for any mistakes and often awards the praise to his coach. Hodges manages a lot on instinct and lets neither press nor ownership call his shots for him. He pulls his pitchers when he thinks the time is right and he is seldom proved wrong.


Eggheads and barbers, newspaper columnists and television commentators, have all offered theories as to what the Mets have meant for New York City this year. Basically, what the team did was play good National League baseball in a town that has always seemed fonder of the National League than the American. Old men put transistors to their ears on city streets to listen to the Mets, and women suddenly discovered that the game was not dying. It is impossible to tell how many listened to the Mets on radio or watched them on television, but at one point a Met game on WOR-TV pulled 40% of the viewing audience in prime time while the next-highest-rated show, the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, got only 20%. In that stretch of summer between the schools' recess in June and New York's clinching of the divisional title two weeks ago, an average of 36,221 paying customers went to Shea Stadium each day, and nearly half of New York's final 43 home dates were against the Astros, Expos, Padres or Philliesclubs certainly not known as gate attractions.

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Pitching and An Omen favors The Mets - 10.06.69 - SI Vault

September 1969. The Mets are for real.

At 8:43 the next evening the Mets, by virtue of having won a 12-inning game from the Montreal Expos in the first half of a twi-night doubleheader, moved into first place on percentage points. Joan Payson, the Mets' owner, stepped down from her box next to the team's dugout and walked toward home plate wiping tears from her eyes. When New York won the second game while Chicago was losing in Philadelphia, the Mets were on top and not going to be very easy to catch.


Professional baseball had endured for 92 years before the New York Mets first got their hands on it back in the spring of 1962. While they couldn't quite kill the game, they certainly brought it to one knee. Doing things that had never even been imagined before, they drove their fans into one of the oddest diversions ever developed: writing on bed-sheets. While it was long believed that the simple act of putting on a Yankee uniform caused players to perform better, a Met uniform suddenly turned some previously gifted players into clowns. In their first seven years of existence the Mets finished a total of 288� games out of first place and built their all-important loss column to 737.


But in the spring of 1967 Tom Seaver joined the team and the franchise had a young player of outstanding quality. The Mets had thought enough of Seaver in his first year of baseball to have him pitch for their Triple A farm team at Jacksonville, and he led the league in games started while splitting 24 decisions. Then Seaver was advanced to the majors, and he was amazed at what he found out about the Mets. "There was an aura of defeatism," he said last week, "and I refused to accept it. Maybe some of the others started to feel how I felt because I noticed that the team seemed to play better behind me than it did for any other pitcher."


More here.

'Met Brutality' a placard read in Pittsburgh, and the - 09.22.69 - SI Vault

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I don't think I've done this one before but hey St. Patrick's Day is coming...maybe you'd like a green Mr. Met hat.

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Take some advice from the Mets Police.  Click the cap and buy one.  Then go find yourself a nice Irish girl who will wear it.  St. Patrick's Day is coming.  

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This one is officially called an "Omir Santos" cap.   I'm not sure why.  I am sure I don't want one even though I like Omir Santos.   Click the pic if you are insane and want one.

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So close...get rid of the lines and the crap on the sides and this would make a good Sunday alternate.  Overall, not the worst.  Click it if you'd like to buy one.

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A ladies cap...and I think this one would look cute on your girlfriend.  I've really been warming up to the alternate caps as of late.  Since you never know what Charlie Samuels might pull out of the luggage, this should never be worn by actual Mets.  You know what, I take that back - screw it, when they do the pink bats for Mother's Day they should go all-in and wear these.   Seriously.  What's going to happen, people are going to make fun of the Mets?  That ship has sailed.  Click the pic if you'd like to buy one.

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send ideas/guest columns to shannon at metspolice.com