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                                       1969

          The 1969 season will never go away.  It gives a particular flavor to life, and
it will be taken as a treasure to the end.  No one could have foreseen what we
saw.  It stands apart from all other sports miracles.  Baseball historians can point
to a few examples of teams leaping from terrible to great in a single year.  But
none of these are comparable to the 1969 Mets because no other suddenly great
team had spent so long in the cellar, and no other team had ever become such a
symbol of futility.

         1969 began like all of our other seasons, with a loss on opening day.  We
lost to an expansion team.  Nothing was surprising in April or May.  Our pitching
was good and our hitting was weak, just as they had been in 1968, when we poked
our heads into ninth place.   The Mets seemed to be headed for the fifth place
finish everyone had predicted, in the first year of divisional play, the first year of
the Expos.  But around Memorial Day, something happened that at the time
seemed as weird as the discovery of crop circles or a story of an alien abduction.  
The New York Mets won eleven games in a row.  

         I remember how this felt.  Something had cracked.  The Mets had never
done anything like this.  When a team wins eleven games in a row, it alters your
sense of what is possible.  At the end of that eleven game streak, the Mets were
five games above .500.  It was June, and my eye didn’t need to look for my team
at the bottom of the list.  They were in second place.  And for the very first time
in my eight years of looking at the standings, the two-digit number on the left was
larger than the two-digit number on the right.  

         Suddenly the Mets could imagine that they were in a pennant race, with the
Chicago Cubs of all people, another Cinderella team emerging from years of
mediocrity to dominate a division that everyone thought should have been
dominated by the Cardinals.  The Mets held steady.  The Cardinals slept.  And
then in July, the Mets played the Cubs in the first series they ever played that
actually mattered.  They played it for all it was worth.  In the first game, they
came from behind in the bottom of the ninth.  Seaver almost pitched a perfect
game in the second.  Then the Mets flubbed the third game with fielding errors,
prompting Cubs manager Leo Durocher to call the clumsy team of the third game
“the real Mets.”   

         This crack, from Durocher’s notorious lip, opened the floodgates.  The
worried Cubs despised us, and we would hate them back.  Here were America’s
two biggest and oldest baseball cities.  Here were two teams of great character,
and no history of success.  Only one could win.  It was a shame.  But boy it was
fun.  It was tense and it was wild, and as the season progressed it turned into a
full scale carnival, with brushback pitches, black cats, and taunting cheers.  It
was hand-to-hand combat between two desperate and deserving dreams.  In the
second Cubs series in July, at Wrigley, the Mets once again won two out of
three.  They were only three and a half games out of first place.   In mid-July.

         Then it all collapsed.  It had to.  How could it possibly have happened?  
How could we have dared to hope for this?  By mid-August, after a rough month,
the Mets were nine and a half games behind the Cubs.  They were in third place,
as the Cardinals had finally woken up.  And the Pirates were gaining.  We would
probably finish fourth.  It was okay.  It had been more fun than any Mets season
had ever been.  I wasn’t crushed.  I was only 14, but I knew something about how
the world worked.

        I don’t know how to describe what happened next.  It is the best baseball
memory I have.  Imagine lightning.  Imagine the silence after the flash.  Imagine
a swell of sustained thunder.  Imagine the heavens opening and the rain loud and
sweeping and drenching the earth.  Imagine a baseball team winning thirty-eight
of its last forty-nine games.  Imagining all of the other teams crumbling with fear,
dissolving into irrelevance.  Imagine two young aces winning eighteen of their
last nineteen starts.  Imagine a team that has always been bad suddenly playing
as no team ever has.  Imagine the largest city in the world fully in its thrall.  
There are no words adequate to this.  There are not even numbers.

         There is only the bursting of all boundaries.  There is only the image of
thousands of fans spilling over the line that had kept them off the field on which
the miracle has happened.  There are flying corks and foam on the camera lens.  
There is the emotion of millions watching the Mets in their wet dugout singing all
of the baseball songs they can think of.  There is the memory of the hung-over
Mets recording the songs in a studio the  next day and all of us rushing out to buy
the quickly-pressed record.  There was a pure and powerful happiness that waved
a wand over the last seven years.  The bad years would no longer be laughed at,
or cried about.  They were lifted up out of the gutter and given a place of honor at
the table.  They gave the moment of triumph its luster.  They were the
preparation for the launch. They had been worth it.  But you only knew it now.  
Everything had happened as it was supposed to happen.  This was the real
meaning of the Mets.

         After the Mets won the NL East and celebrated, you needed to remind
yourself that, for the first time in history, the team that had won more games than
any other in the league still had to win a few more to claim the pennant.  After the
way they had played, the Mets were still not favored to win the National League
Championship Series.  It was as if nothing they could do could render what they
had done believable.  But they beat the Braves quickly and easily, in three
games.  Even that didn’t make them the favorites to win the World Series.  The
1969 Orioles were one of the best teams of all time.  I wasn’t in a mood to be
greedy.  I was happy with the pennant.  

         In those days, the World Series was played in the daytime.  This made it a
public event.  You could see what it really meant to people.  There were radios in
every classroom and every office.  You could hear the game in every street and
every shopping center.  It seemed to me that the Mets were all that anyone
anywhere was talking or thinking about.   

         Seaver lost the first game.  Seaver lost.  Our team did not look frightening.  
None of them could hit like Frank Robinson and none of them could field like
Brooks Robinson.  Some of them could pitch as well as Mike Cuellar, but not this
time.  How had the Mets managed to win so many games?  I felt, at the end of
the glum and sobering first game, as if I was beginning to forget.

         But the second game reminded me.  The Mets won by scoring more runs
than the other team.  But just barely.  To do this with their lineup, they had to
have spectacular pitching.  They got it this time.  Koosman almost pitched a no-
hitter.  Clendenon hit a home run.  The Orioles tied the game.  But the Mets, with
three little singles, went ahead in the ninth, and held it.  

         In the third game, the Mets win was decisive, the only decisive win of the
Series.  Gentry and Ryan combined for a shutout.  Tommy Agee made two
catches that have changed my understanding of how the human body can move.  
The Mets won, 5-0.  They had the momentum again, and the rumbling sound you
had heard all season long was back and it seemed as if it had never gone away.  
It swelled as Seaver returned to form in the fourth game, as Clendenon hit
another home run, and as Swoboda, stinky fielding Swoboda, made a tumbling
catch as great as either of Agee’s the day before.  In the tenth inning, a fated and
probably wrong base running call gave the game to the Mets.

         The Orioles struggled mightily in the fifth game.  They knew they did not
deserve to lose.  They could not understand what was happening.  Surely, the
Orioles must have thought, this thing could be prevented.   They had eyes and
minds and arms.  They had will.  And so they scored three runs before the Mets
could do anything.  Then in the bottom of the sixth, Cleon Jones reached first
because Gil Hodges convinced an umpire that the shoe polish on a ball belonged
to him.  Clendenon hit another home run.  Al Weis, who could not hit home runs,
hit one to tie the game in the seventh.  A wave came out of the crowd and pushed
the Mets in front in the eighth.  Human beings could not stop this, or anything
else that had to happen.  Davey Johnson would some day become the most
successful manager in Mets history.  But now, with two outs in the ninth, the
Orioles second baseman hit a line drive to left.

         In what seemed like slow motion, Cleon brought the dying ball into his
glove.  He squeezed it tightly.  He dropped to his knees.   


©Dana Brand 2006