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.

More here:

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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Good morning.  Seems quiet in Flushing, and today is supposed to be redesign day (redesign night actually) so once the coffee kicks in and I clear my daddy duties for the day, away we go.

My DVR tells me "Mets Yearbook 1976" is coming soon.  That should be fun.  In the meanintime, here's some material from the films SNY is using to fuel Mets Yearbook.  Let's call this one "Mets Yearbook 1969."


1969 Mets Highlight Reel from Brad S on Vimeo.

Osh41 did send me a ton of pictures from the Mets fans gathering, I will post those and Peter's as soon as we move to the new place.  As a reader, expect that at some point you come to the site this weekend and it looks different.  Other than that, should be smooth sailing.  I'm using a web design company called Minaya-Wilpon and supposedly they are the best.

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Is Ted Williams right? Are the '69 Mets the start of a dynasty?

Now the Mets feel that they will be back, too, but search and you will not find a man in the entire organization who thought that 1969 would be a year in which the team would win its division championship, let alone a World Series. This was to be a season in which the club became respectable and might even finish as high as third in the East. Just the year before they had wound up 16 games below .500 and in ninth place, 24 games behind pennant-winning St. Louis.


It was absurd to think that New York could win 100 games. But the Mets did. It is equally absurd to believe that those 100 games were won with luck. If one holds to the baseball clich� that the breaks tend to equal out, then maybe the Mets were repaid all in one season for seven long years of bad breaks.


But, more important, the Mets were a hungry club and gave of themselves as teams do only in novels. Only four of them had been regulars for as long as three years. It was a smart team. Of the 27 men who contributed to New York's rise, 22 had been to college—a remarkable percentage for a baseball club. And it was a team that was being prodded from underneath. This year the Met farm system produced four pennants in the minor leagues, twice as many as any other organization, which means that more good new Mets are on their way up.


Looking them over last week, Ted Williams said that he saw the possibility of the Mets becoming a dynasty, and it is pretty hard to doubt anything Teddy Ballgame says these days. Although dynasties have a way of lasting for about a year in the National League, the Mets, bless 'em, always seem to defy established principles. With their victory justly acclaimed as a triumph for baseball, it may be hoped that any residual tarnish from the hyperbole of Madison Avenue and New York politicians will soon wear off, leaving only the warm success that is likely to endure and honor the sport.


A seven-year joke and a fraying one at that: the Mets - 10.27.69 - SI Vault

Another fine '69 Mets article:

In all of New York baseball, starting with the day in 1846 when Alexander Cartwright's Knickerbockers and the New York Nine crossed the Hudson to Hoboken to play the first recorded baseball game anywhere, there has never been anything like it ... not the Bobby Thomson home run, a spear aimed at the heart of all that was Brooklyn ... not the perfect World Series game by the Yankees' Don Larsen ... not the World Series catches by Willie Mays and Sandy Amoros and Al Gionfriddo.

Continues here.

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Who knows why September 10th 1969 was awesome?  I do!

Mets in First Place; Lead by One Game

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Thanks to KJS for sending these over.  Some shots from the stands of the 1969 celebration.








As I mentioned yesterday, I like fanpics.  There's something relatable about a shot from the crowd with a regular ol' camera.







Got pics to share?  email to shannon@metspolice.com









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A big tip of the blue Mets hat to the boys in Flushing for the ceremony last night!

That ceremony was everything that I preach about on this blog.  What a wonderful dose of tradition that really hit the spot and stirred the emotions.

It's nice to see that the organization knows how to throw a ceremony, it was right in tone with the annual old-timer's day ceremonies at a nearby stadium.   Howie Rose did a great job and is clearly the right man to have out there.

Random thoughts:
it's nice to see Seaver embrace his role as the guardian of history.   He looked happy to be there, and although he rushed it a bit, the words of his speech were excellent.

Great to see Buddy Harrelson get a big ovation.  I enjoyed booing him as a manager (especially when he stopped coming out to the mound) but it has been 20 years, so it's good to see him appreciated.

It's also nice to see Ed Kranepool increasingly being appreciated.   His name had been the kind of name you'd throw out to make fun of the Mets, but he had a nice long career so it was good to see him placed near the end of the line.

After putting up with Gooden and Strawberry in pinstripes, it's nice to see Yogi in blue and orange.

I don't have to tell everyone that the '69 replicas looked better than anything the Mets presently wear.  You all have eyes.  Hopefully they have eyes upstairs too.   There have been lots of pinstripes this week - hopefully that's an organizational shift that goes beyond the '69 celebration.

How about Seaver mentioning how nice the players looked in their home whites!   Was he speaking casually or is Tom on board with the rest of us (except Charlie Samuels and people named Wilpon) in hating the black.

Ed Charles had a black Mets hat.  Why?

It was nice to see Nolan Ryan, and i think it was Gary Cohen who pointed out that it was nice to see Ryan in the context of what he accomplished as a Met instead of as the guy from the Fregosi trade.

The ceremonial first pitch(es) - again perfect with G. Thomas Seaver, Nolan Ryan and Jerry Koosman throwing to Berra, Grote and Duffy Dyer.

Koosman too is starting to be more appreciated than he has oh since 1979.

Koosman is saying he rubbed shoe polish on the ball on Gil's instructions.

A few housecleaning posts this morning.  Compilation posts make it easier for the site to focus traffic.

Here are the links from yesterday related to the 1969 New York Mets

Some cool 1969 Mets jerseys!

Cool from 1969 Sports Illustrated Article #1

Cool from 1969 Sports Illustrated Article #2

Cool from 1969 Sports Illustrated Article #3

Cool from 1969 Sports Illustrated Article #4

Some local newspaper articles about the 1969 Mets

Swoboda's Catch

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It sure is nice here out at Mets Police HQ.   I thought we were heading for a washout.  Weather.com says that there might be rain around 5, then a break at 6 - so hopefully the ceremony goes off without a hitch.

Some cool jerseys. I don't think I have seen a Swoboda, Cleon Jones, Kranepool or Bud Harreslon jersey in the wild...



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

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.

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Excerpt from:  Pitching and An Omen favors The Mets - 10.06.69 - SI Vault

In the bars of Queens and Long Island the cry now is, "Seav and Kooz and bring on the booze." During the two years that Koosman and Seaver have been pitching together for New York they have won 77 games and completed 65 of them. By the end of last week they had won 18 of their last 19 decisions, dispelling rumors that they were suffering with arm troubles.

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Excerpt from: 
With each winning game, the legends grew. Their followers - 10.20.69 - SI Vault

THE VACUUM MEETS NEW YORK'S TEAM OF DESTINY

Shortly before the start of the World Series last Saturday afternoon Donn Clendenon of the New York Mets introduced one of his teammates, rookie Outfielder Rod Gaspar, to an old friend, Frank Robinson of the Baltimore Orioles. It was a historic meeting. Five days earlier Robinson had stepped onto a folding chair, squirted a spray of champagne to attract attention and announced to the Orioles, "Ron Gaspar just said on television that the Mets will sweep the Birds in four games. Bring on Ron Gaspar, whoever the hell he is. Quiet! I'm told that his name is Rod Gaspar. Bring on Rod Gaspar, whoever the hell he is." Now, thanks to Clendenon, Frank Robinson knows who Rod Gaspar is.

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Excerpt From:  A seven-year joke and a fraying one at that - 10.27.69 - SI Vault

But the 66th World Series will be remembered for many things. Those were not really angels in the Met outfield: they were the Flying Wallendas. Donn Clendenon set a record for a five-game World Series by hitting three home runs and he only got into four of the games. For the first time in 35 years a manager, Baltimore's Weaver, got bounced from a Series game. When the Mets finally clinched the championship, a blizzard of ticker tape settled over Manhattan; and at Shea Stadium fans pulled up chunks of turf, festooning themselves with the magic sod as if its new-established healing qualities could cure all their fears and ills as merely walking upon it had cured those of their heroes.

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Some stuff from around the web:

The forgotten sweep on the Braves in the first NLCS.  You  rarely see any tape of it, and as the article points out you never hear about it.

Koosman sold the clinching ball. Come on Jerry.  Really?

Kranepool is with the rest of us:  Citi Field needs more Mets stuff.

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A guest post from Jerry at Baseball Digest.  Thanks!

Photo credit to New York Daily News.













Swoboda's Memorable 1969 World Series Catch Recalled in Historic Photo

New York, August 21 — The date was October 14, 1969, when Mets right fielder Ron Swoboda made one of the greatest catches in World Series history, robbing Brooks Robinson of the Orioles in Game 4 at Shea Stadium, a defining moment in the Amazins’ improbable world championship.  Now, 40 years later, Mets fans and collectors alike can preserve that historic moment as the New York Daily News and Cirillo World present “The Catch of a Lifetime: Swoboda Saves the Day,” a limited edition memorabilia piece available for purchase, with part of the proceeds benefitting the Mets Foundation.

“After 40 years, I’m still thanking Brooksie for not hitting the ball right at me,” jokes Swoboda about the play.

Signed by both Swoboda, who has forever become a part of New York sports folklore, and Hall of Famer Robinson, this classic Frank Hurley photo from the Daily News archives is now available for purchase as a framed, limited edition memorabilia piece for $209.99 (plus tax, postage and handling).

Only 1,000 of this signed collector’s item are being made available to the public, by calling 212.972.5337, emailing NiceCatchRon@gmail.com, or logging onto the Daily News website at www.nydailynews.com/catchto get your collectible while supplies last. 

A portion of the proceeds of each sale of "The Catch" will benefit the New York Mets Foundation, which funds and promotes a variety of educational, social and athletic programs and other charitable causes. Founded in 1963, it continues its mission to invest in the future of the community, and to provide assistance to myriad organizations that benefit children and others in need.

Veteran New York sports public relations executive John Cirillo was 13-years-old when his boyhood idol made the eye-popping grab, and is now teaming with Swoboda on the project.

“I remember racing down the stairs at St. Mark’s School in Brooklyn, and sprinting the three blocks home to watch the end of the game,” says Cirillo, the former Knicks and Madison Square Garden exec who now runs Manhattan-based Cirillo World. “Like millions of Mets fans from that generation, the Catch has been indelibly etched in my mind’s eye for four decades.,” says Cirillo.

Adds Swoboda, “People are always asking me about it. I still have the glove. Did the play change my life? You bet it did.”


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Wow, I took 16 hours off from obsessing over the Mets and I wake up to Livan Hernandez being released (I am shocked actually), this News: Gary Sheffield is not Happy from Metsblog which explains why Sheff asked out last night....

While I was mobile I saw Vaccaro took a good swing at the Mets.  He correctly points out that what attendance there is is all because of pre-sold tickets for the new stadium and our crushed dreams.  2010 is going to be ugly in Flushing I fear.  I would fear it more if I owned the team.

Adam Rubin (he comes out of Minaya-gate looking more good than bad, right?, I'm more into him now) had a Seaver piece.   I'm sure we'll see plenty of '69ing over the next 48.

Back to Metsblog...Cerrone wrote about the lack of excitement over the '69 celebration.  Matt you nailed it on the head...it's not that we don't care, but the '69 Mets are from before our time.   We only know of them from stories.   As you said, the '86 team are our Mets.   I also share your worry that the franchise will misinterpret the lack of enthusiasm....so we should all go out of our way to make a BFD about this.  

I also pick up the vibe that in the blogoverse I am one of the old guys.   There's a few of us in the range of 40 years old who remember Keith Hernandez as a player, but there's an awful lot of Mets fans who grew up on Mike Piazza and black uniforms.

The '69 thing is challenging.   I love that they are doing it, they should do more of it - but for good or bad I wouldn't recognize Ed Charles if he were sitting next to me on the bus right now.

Maybe part of that is the organization's fault - even for us who are passionate enough to spend hours a day blogging about the Mets, they haven't taken the time to foster their own history.



I should know what Ed Charles looks like...maybe if there were a picture of him somewhere in Citi Field.

The Mets should do banners inside Citi Field like these in Wrigley.









The game is likely to not sell out on Saturday.   It's going to pour.  A good sign is that the cheapest Stubhub tickets are nearly $30 so there must be some demand.  However, when the game doesn't sell out, will that encourage David Howard to whip out the "bad investment" line again?  Is there no value in building your team's brand?  Right now this brand is Amazin', a really lucky run you had to believe, some underachievers in the late 80s, a wild card run to the World Series that saw the Yankees win a World Series at Shea (which means they won one fewer at Shea than the Mets did), and 40 or so disasters.  I think I just inspired myself...for the next post.

Let's see how many Phillies blogs link to this to make fun of us.

Anyway, the first 25,000 fans to enter the park on Saturday get this Mets 69 t-shirt.



The ceremony is at 6:45 so don't spend too much time over at the chop-shops and make sure you are inside.

The News has a nice piece about the 69ers today.



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Let's get ready for tonight's airing of Game 1 of the 1969 World Series.

Sports Illustrated wrote about a 1969 Mets team mid-season:


The most amazing thing about these new Mets is that they started the season like the old Mets, winning only 18 games and losing 23 through May 27. "That was accomplished in a rash of mediocrity," says Outfielder Ron Swoboda. But since then, the Mets have been the best team in the National League. They tore off an 11-game winning streak, including a historic New York sweep of six games against the Dodgers and the Giants, and during the eight weeks between May 27 and the All-Star break, the Mets won 35 games and lost only 16, a pace that was 4� games better than Chicago's record for the same period.


Four main reasons for the Mets' exalted station are Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman, Cleon Jones and Tommie Agee. Seaver, the ultra-cool righthander, generally wins every four or five days, and so does Koosman, now that the lefthander has recovered from an early-season sore shoulder.

...

To go back to those early days, there was a time when it seemed that the Cubs might clinch the pennant by the Fourth of July. Then the Mets corrected their course and the Cubs started to play with consistent inconsistency, which is not hard to explain, since the Cubs are in one way much like a football team. They have 11 men who do most of the work, and 11, as that old crapshooter Leo Durocher well knows, is a good round number. The manager's 11 Cubs are the four in fielders, Ron Santo, Don Kessinger, Glenn Beckert and Ernie Banks; the catcher, Randy Hundley (all of whom made the All-Star team); the rightfielder, Billy Williams; and the five pitchers, Starters Ferguson Jenkins, Bill Hands and Ken Holtzman and Relievers Phil Regan and Ted Abernathy. Still, since the middle of June, the Cubs have played barely .500 baseball.

More below:

They began the season just like the old Mets. But last - 07.28.69 - SI Vault

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