The reincarnation of Christy Mathewson

 

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“Seriously. There isn’t a person in the world who hasn’t heard of Tom Seaver. He’s so good blind people come out to hear him pitch.”

 

- Reggie Jackson

 

He was the “24-year old reincarnation of Christy Mathewson, Hobey Baker and Jack Armstrong,” according to sportswriter Ray Robinson. He was “so good blind people come out to hear him pitch,” said Reggie Jackson.

            He was born George Thomas Seaver on November 17, 1944 in Fresno, California. He went by the name Tom, except for his wife Nancy, who called him George. He remains the only Met player to be selected a true New York Sports Icon. He is the greatest player in Mets history and the key figure in the most amazing event in the annals of sports. In his prime he was the best pitcher in baseball, and arguably the best either of all time or in the post-World War II era, depending upon how one analyzes the records and eras. He enjoyed several of the most spectacular single seasons in history and sustained a career built on consistent success over a long period. He transcends sports and New York City. In a rough ‘n’ tumble town, a town of Irish Catholics, of rough hewn neighborhood Italians, of Brooklyn Jews and Harlem blacks, Seaver was a Park Avenue, or to be precise, a Connecticut WASP.

            “Even at USC, I was a six-pack-and-a-pick-up-truck guy, but Tom was a champagne-and-cigar-in-the-back-of-a-limousine guy,” recalled ex-Trojan and Boston Red Sox favorite Bill “Spaceman” Lee.

            New York City likes it athletes to be regular guys. With Seaver it was as if they found somebody from the fanciest prep school, a best-selling author, a U.S. Senator or college professor; put a uniform on him, and discovered to their amazement that he could bring high, hard heat with the best of ‘em. Over time, Seaver’s singular impressiveness as a pitcher and a person wore thin with teammates and the press. He never suffered fools well, but over time it was demonstrated to be who he was. It was not an act. He was one of the rarest of the breed.

            Other athletes have been smart. Moe Berg was an OSS spy. Bill Bradley was a Rhodes Scholar. Wilt Chamberlain was an intellect. But few if any were the complete package as was Seaver; a combination of looks, education, uprightness and unmatched athletic greatness.

 

Charles Seaver, Tom’s father, played football and basketball at Stanford University. He was also one of the finest golfers in the world at one time. In 1932 he competed for the United States in the prestigious Walker Cup, an amateur trophy named for the family of two Presidents: George W. Bush and his father, George Herbert Walker Bush. Famed radio broadcaster Ted Husing announced that Seaver defeated his British opponent, Eric Fiddian, thus securing for the U.S. their seventh Walker Cup title.

            After winning the Walker Cup, Charles returned to Stanford and defeated a golf teammate named Lawson Little. When courting his wife, their dates more often than not were putting contests for nickels and dimes. After graduation came marriage, membership in the aptly named Sunnyside Country Club in Fresno, California and a rising executive career with the Bonner Packing Company.

            This was the central California of John Steinbeck’s novels, but Charles Seaver was a successful businessman who protected his young family from the Great Depression. Fresno and environs were “America’s fruit basket” or “salad bowl,” providing grapes, figs, peaches, oranges, and vegetables to fruit stands and grocery stores.

            Fresno is a town that gets very hot in the summer and is subject to strange “tule fogs” in the winter. Despite being in California, it a place with a passion for sports that more resembles Texas or Oklahoma. Charles raised a family in idyllic California suburbia. The family backyard included cherry, orange and fig trees. The streets were safe for the kids to ride bikes and get into mischief. The little league fields were well kept, supported by an enthusiastic community. He kept up his golf game, winning the Fresno city tournament six times. Weekends were spent at the country club. Charles and his wife watched their four children splash in the pool, play golf and whack tennis balls.

            The kids included Charles Jr., who took to golf like his old man. Next was Katie, a swimmer in the manner of her aunt, who had surfed Hawaii’s wild rides. Carol was also a swimmer.

            “There was good clean competition in our home, and you earned what you got,” said Charles. “The only thing provided for you was emotional security.”

            George Thomas was the youngest. The Battle of the Bulge was about to get underway when he was born in the late fall of 1944. Victory in Europe came less than six month later; the conquering of Japan a few months after that. He would grow up in a post-war Baby Boomer environment that has been mythologized by such books as David Halberstam’s The Fifties: California barbecuing, drinks on the patio, socializing with neighbors, the kids’ fast friends. Capitalism had not just survived, it had thrived. The Great Depression, the New Deal; done, dead. These were the Eisenhower years and this was the middle class, the American Dream. But in this West Coast version of the Kennedys, being youngest meant fighting for everything you got.

            “When you are the fourth child in a family, you probably have to be a little tougher to survive,” his mother told friends.

            “His dad was Tom’s idol,” Charles Jr. said. “Our father was a perfectionist and he taught his boys to be the same way.”

            For reasons that have never really been explained, he went by his middle name from an early age. Tom played in the back yard with imaginary friends, one of whom was his alter ego, “George.” He took to baseball over and above all other activities. The game was coming into its own as a televised sport. Tom imitated the players, sliding into “home,” declaring himself “safe,” arguing with the “umpire.”

            Eventually he was allowed to leave the house on his own, to venture into a street past sprinklers watering lawns. The music of the era was Pat Boone, not Nirvana. It was the age of innocence, the last vestiges of a by-gone era before drugs, the anti-war protests of the 1960s, pornography, and the bone-chilling fear of child molestation.

            Tom made fast friends with a neighbor boy named Russ Scheidt. They played baseball together. In 1953, with the Korean War coming to an end, eight-year old Tom Seaver showed up for little league try-outs. The coach, a high school teacher named Hal Bicknell, noticed that he was the smallest boy and told him he needed to be at least nine. He ran home bawling into the arms of his mother, but resolved to come back the next year. When the time finally came, he made the North Rotary team of the Fresno Spartan League.

            Tom was immediately installed as a pitcher, the most important position on the field. One day an adult rooting for the opposing team shouted a stream of insults at young Tom, who cried but kept on pitching.

            “He had this tremendous desire to succeed, to win,” recalled Bicknell. He “didn’t complain, didn’t quit, just poured it right in there.”

            Charles Sr. went to the games but was never a “little league parent,” pushing his kids to be something they did not want to be. He encouraged his son as he did all his children, but always stressed education above everything else. Charles was a perfectionist and instilled that in young Tom, but the desire extended beyond baseball to all things he endeavored in.

            Tom achieved the pinnacle of his little league world, batting .543 and throwing a perfect game. Getting back to that level of perfection would drive his pitching career well into the big leagues. Tom’s mother read him a children’s book called The Little Engine That Could.

            “The lesson got through to me,” he said. “I grew to share my mother’s optimism, her feeling that everything would work out, that any goal could be achieved.”

            For some reason he could not master golf as he did baseball. Angry and frustrated, his mother told him she would not play with him as long as he threw his clubs after bad shots, but he did follow Charles Sr. on the course, learning the art of quiet concentration.

            “I’ve got the ability of self-control and discipline on the mound, and I certainly got that from my dad,” he said.

            Fresno in the 1950s and 1960s may well have been the sports capital of America. It was a competitive environment, producing young kids who went on to great success on the diamond. Jim Maloney came out of Fresno to become one of the hardest-throwing strikeout pitchers in baseball, the ace of the Cincinnati Reds. Dick Ellsworth was another hard-throwing chucker who went to the Mets. The 1959 Fresno State Bulldogs made it to the College World Series.

            The town did not merely produce baseball stars. Tom Flores was a quarterback hero who would star for the Oakland Raiders, later leading them to two Super Bowl titles as their coach. Daryle Lamonica followed Flores. After Notre Dame he became a two-time American Football League Most Valuable Player, quarterbacking the Raiders into the 1968 Super Bowl.

            Little league ends at age 12. When the boys turn 13, they move on to Babe Ruth League play, which means making the enormous leap from small-field dimensions to a regular diamond; pitcher’s mound 60 feet, six inches from home plate, the bases 90 feet apart. It is the end of many a “career.” It almost was the end for Tom Seaver.

            He had a friend named Dick Selma. He and Selma were rivals throughout little league, competing for star status, their teams for supremacy. It was an even rivalry until junior high school. Selma continued to grow. As he entered Fresno High School he was reaching six feet in height with a muscular build. Tom was still 5-6 and 140 pounds as a high school sophomore. On top of all else, Tom was by virtue of being born in November younger than most of his classmates, some of whom were born in January and therefore were almost a year older at a time when that year means everything in a kid’s development.

            “He was the runt of our crowd,” Selma recalled.

            Selma made the Fresno High varsity as a sophomore, a singular honor that separates a young man from the pack. Tom barely made the junior varsity. While Selma impressed the local prep media and professional scouts, Seaver remained a JV. To still be a JV in one’s junior year, as he was, invariably means that one lacks the skills to go beyond high school if indeed he makes the varsity in his last try as a senior. Tom did not throw hard, but he was smart. He learned how to set up hitters, to change speeds, developing a curve and even a knuckler.

            “Tom was a hell of a pitcher, as contrasted to a thrower, even when he was on the JVs,” Selma recalled when he got to the big leagues. “He knew how to set up hitters, and him just in high school, I’m still learning now.”

            High school sports success often dictates one’s place in the social hierarchy. Being a career JV was a comedown after little league stardom, but Tom had much more going for him. Despite his lack of size, he was a good-looking kid with an outgoing personality. Tom had easygoing charm and the gift of repartee. He was popular with teachers, with teammates, but most importantly with pretty girls. Above all other things, this is the prized attribute that determines a high school boys’ place in the pecking order. He was a good student who decided he wanted to become a dentist.

            “He was a real happy-go-lucky guy,” Selma said. “He had a lot of friends and he always dated all the good-looking girls.”

            In his senior year, Tom went out for basketball, mainly to stay in shape for baseball. He was determined that he would make the most of what looked to be his last year of athletic competition. He was a 5-10, 165-pound guard whose natural athleticism shone through. Surprisingly, he made the all-city team.

            The scouts were out in force, but not to see him. Selma was on everybody’s radar and would eventually sign with the expansion New York Mets for $20,000. Tom did manage to make it into the starting rotation. Still lacking any heat, he was effective enough throwing off-speed pitches with control to win six games against five losses and a place on the all-city baseball team, “mostly because there wasn’t anyone else to choose,” he recalled. “When the professional scouts came around, looking over the local talent, some of the other kids got good offers. I didn’t even get a conversation; not one scout approached me.”

            It was the beginning of the magical “summer of ’62,” the year depicted by filmmaker George Lucas, who grew up in nearby Modesto and would attend the University of Southern California with Seaver. The world Lucas showed in American Graffiti was the only one Tom Seaver knew. It was a unique central California culture of cars and girls. Tom Seaver’s Fresno was not quite The Beach Boys’ Southland surf magic, nor the brewing, dangerous mix of angry protest, harmful drugs and unprotected sex that would have such ultimately devastating consequences in the Bay Area.

            Songwriter Stephen Stills wrote a famous line: “There’s something happening here; what it is ain’t exactly clear.” Indeed, in California something was happening there. It had been going on there for decades. Tom Seaver would come to symbolize what it was.

            California’s political ethos can be traced back to the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln promoted the building of the Trans-continental railroad. He received his greatest financial backing from the railroad companies. A look at the map leaves one pondering why the line was built over the difficult terrain of the Rocky and Sierra Mountain ranges, to San Francisco, instead of the relatively flat lands of Texas, Arizona, Nevada, the Southern California desert, and on into Los Angeles. The reason is that had it been built over the “Southern route,” slaves would have built it. Lincoln could not condone that.

            When the Civil War ended a large migration to California occurred. Northerners from Boston and New York who supported the Union tended to favor San Francisco. Former Confederates favored Los Angeles. Later, when the Rose Bowl became popular, Midwesterners flocked to the warm lands of Southern California. As a result, the north took on a more liberal, secular nature. The south became more conservative and Christian.

            However, inter-mixing within California created a general mindset popular statewide. It became a progressive place, a trendsetter, a place of new ideas. In the north, a strong civil rights movement developed. Orange County and environs remained Right-wing, but on matters of race its white, Christian citizenry developed a sense of moderation unlike their Southern brethren, who thought like them on most other matters such as anti-Communism and small government.

            Two Southern California political figures embodied this way of thinking. Both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan ascended to the White House in large measure on the strength of Southern support. Together, they husbanded the South “into the Union,” so to speak, by making palatable to the South the conservative-yet-racially-moderate views of Orange County and California in general.

            So it was that in the 1950s and 1960s, a young white boy growing up in an affluent California suburb would feel free to choose as his sports hero a black man without thinking twice about it; with no repercussions from disapproving friends and family. When Tom Seaver was a young boy in Fresno, California, the Dodgers and Giants were still in New York. There were no Pacific Coast League teams near him. As a fan, he was a “free agent.” He was not pre-disposed to root for white stars like Mickey Mantle of the Yankees or Ted Williams of the Red Sox. Willie Mays of the Giants and Sandy Koufax of the Dodgers, teams whose fan bases he lived in, were not yet in the Golden State. He chose Henry Aaron, the smooth-swinging outfielder of the Milwaukee Braves who at that time was an emerging superstar.

            In later years, Seaver said he was “prejudiced” growing up in Fresno; that to look down upon black people was accepted. Perhaps Seaver was correct, but what he considered prejudice in the 1950s and early 1960s was moderate by American standards. It did not stop him from admiring Hank Aaron; at least as an athlete. Inter-racial dating and full-scale integration may not have been subjects on his radar screen, but whatever pre-disposed social constructs he was raised with did not effect his view of black baseball stars. 

            “It mush have been his form that made me pick him,” he said. “I sat through entire ball games, just looking at Henry Aaron, nothing else, fascinated by him, studying him at the plate and on the bases and in the field.”

            Seaver once expressed some question as to why he, a pitcher, chose as his “idol” an outfielder. Later, when he went to USC, he attended many Dodgers games on season tickets owned by his uncle.

            “Sandy Koufax became my hero,” he said. “But he never really replaced Aaron.”

            The choice of the Jewish Koufax is also emblematic. Tom Seaver became a race-neutral white man. As he matured and broadened his horizons, he chose his heroes, idols, associations, roommates and friends strictly on merit and personal commonalties. At USC his roommate would be Mike Garrett, a black running back on the football team (also a baseball outfielder who later played professionally for the Dodgers organization) from the inner city Los Angeles neighborhood of Boyle Heights. Seaver would bring his California attitude with him to New York. He would be part of the “new breed” of modern athletes in the late 1960s.

            But that was all a long ways away in 1962. The dream of big league glory was gone. Tom had no reason to believe he had a chance, but his love of the game would never go away. There was also the matter of college. Coming from a solidly middle class family his father undoubtedly could have paid his tuition, but he had already put Tom’s three older siblings through school, interestingly enough each attending three of the four great California universities: UCLA, California and Stanford.

            Tom had his heart set on the fourth college, USC, a private school with steep tuition costs and one of the best dental schools in the nation. He wanted to spare his father from fronting the money. A plan was hatched: instead of college after high school he would serve in the U.S. Marines. He would save and earn some money, getting some help from the GI Bill. That would only assuage a little bit of the cost. A tiny voice in the back of Tom Seaver’s mind would not go away.

            What about a baseball scholarship?

            This seemed to be a ludicrous proposition. USC had the best baseball program in the nation, led by legendary coach Rod Dedeaux. They had their choice of the best players. If a hot prospect did not wish to go directly into professional baseball, his college choices were basically USC, SC, Southern California or Southern Cal; at least it seemed that way. Dedeaux had no more interest in a junk-baller from Fresno than the pro scouts who ignored him did.

            First things first. While waiting to report for Marine Corp basic training, Tom worked for the Bonner Packing Company. It was not an internship in his father’s plush office suites. Rather, he got up each day before dawn and spent the day wrestling enormous boxes of raisins along a loading platform. Two or three men were needed to lift the “sweat boxes.” The temperature in the un-air-conditioned warehouse was 100 degrees in the summer time. Sometimes snakes, rats and spiders slithered out of the boxes.

            “After six months it was almost a relief to go into the Marines,” he stated. At night, Tom pitched for an American legion team. Something was already happening to Tom Seaver. As he approached his 18th birthday, he was getting taller, putting on weight, and was stronger after lifting “sweat boxes.” Tom could feel his clothes tightening on his body, his pants becoming too short. He could not help but think that he was throwing harder in July than he had in April. His baseball dreams would not die. 

He joined the Marines with his boyhood friend, Russ Scheidt. First came three months at Camp Pendleton, the famed home of the so-called “Hollywood Marines” (as opposed to those who train in Parris Island, South Carolina) near San Diego.

“I hated the Marine Corps boot camp,” Seaver wrote in The Perfect Game, an autobiographical review of his 1969 World Series victory over Baltimore, written in collaboration with Dick Schaap. Caught with a dirty rifle, for three-and-a-half hours he had to do an exercise called “up-and-on shoulders, first holding out my rifle, which weighed 11 pounds, then lifting it over my head, then holding it out again.”

“No, no, no, you don’t stop ‘til I get tired!”” the drill instructor yelled in typical Southern-Marine voice cadence, when Seaver seemed too exhausted to go on.

The DI in fact did get tired and several had to take turns “supervising” Seaver, who “thought I was going to die.” After getting caught whispering to Scheidt, verboten during chow time, one DI jumped on the table, running towards him, food and plates flying everywhere. He took Seaver outside, kicking him over and over again. By this time Seaver had been in boot camp for 10 weeks. He was a “trained-to-kill Marine, and nothing could hurt me short of an M-14 rifle in the chest.” He had tears in his eyes . . . to keep from laughing!

Seaver graduated from boot camp, joined a Reserve unit, and by the fall of 1963 enrolled at Fresno City College. For more than a year since high school, he had eaten three squares a day, done countless push-ups, pull-ups and “up-and-on shoulders.” As he got older he had grown. In this period of time he had gone from 5-10, 165 pounds to 6-1, 195 pounds. He was a grown man, physically and mentally. He had not picked up a baseball since the summer of 1962, but he had a sneaking suspicion that when he did he would be able to throw it harder than ever, and if so . . .

Strolling down the street in Fresno, Tom passed a man he had known all his life. The man did not recognize him.

“Hey, remember me?” he called out to him.

“My God,” he said. “Is that little Tom Seaver?”

There still seemed no hope of that scholarship from USC, and none of Major League glory, but Seaver had the indomitable optimism of his mother.

The Little Engine That Could.

 

The Fresno City College Rams have one of the greatest J.C. baseball traditions in the country. Maloney, Ellsworth and Selma all pitched there before going to the big leagues. Scouts and college coaches paid attention to them. In September of 1963, a couple months shy of his 19th birthday, Seaver came out for what the coaches and players call “fall ball.” He was known for having made all-city pitcher at Fresno High, even if it had been “because there wasn’t anyone else to choose.”

But his new height, the 30 pounds of muscle, the newfound strength, gave Tom confidence that he could not help but be noticed by coaches and players alike. After the initial period of conditioning came the moment of truth: try-outs on the mound. After warming up, Seaver got set, went into his motion, and delivered a 90-mile per hour fast ball.

The ball sailed up and in, smacking into the catcher’s mitt with a loud thud. Suddenly, USC did not look like such a pipe dream. In the spring of 1964, freshman right-hander Tom Seaver was the ace of the Fresno City College team, compiling an 11-2 record against stiff competition, earning team MVP honors.

What was happening to Seaver was less a phenomenon and more common than many realize. The high school blue chipper is accorded great attention, but many times he has physically matured sooner than his peers have. Sometimes he peaks at the age of 17 or 18. Others, like Seaver, grow, gain strength, and mature in more ways than one. Few make the kind of transition that Tom Seaver would ultimately make, but many high school “suspects” in various sports go on to become “prospects” in college, in the minor leagues, and in their 20s. Some attain stardom. Scouting is a very tricky, unpredictable business. 

The impossible seemed to have occurred. Seaver’s 11-2 record at Fresno City College earned the recruiting attention of Rod Dedeaux. He was a legitimate fastball artist. Dedeaux called him the “phee-nom from San Joaquin.”

But Dedeaux needed to know for sure that he could compete for the Trojans. “I only have five scholarships to give out,” the coach told him. Before the ride would be offered, Seaver would have to prove himself with the Fairbanks, Alaska Goldpanners.

Today, collegiate summer baseball is a well-known commodity. Many scouts place more credence on a player’s performance in one of these leagues than they do on their college seasons. The Cape Cod League uses only wooden bats, which proves to be a great equalizer for pitchers and a shock for aluminum-bat sluggers who find themselves batting .250 on the Cape. Summer ball has a long tradition in Canada, where American collegians test themselves in such exotic locales as Red Deer, Alberta, Calgary and Edmonton. The Kamloops International Tournament in British Columbia has attracted some of the fastest baseball for decades. The Jayhawk League, consisting of teams from Boulder, Pueblo, Colorado Springs, plus Kansas and Iowa, was once a leading destination for college players. The California Collegiate Summer League, consisting of teams from the Humboldt Crabs in the north to the San Diego Aztecs in the south, has produced many stars in its various forms over the years.

But the Alaskan Summer Collegiate League is the most legendary. Over time, the league became the Alaska-Hawaii League, with teams flying in for extended road trips on the islands and the “land of the midnight sun.”

“The team was put together by a man named Red Boucher,” said former Met pitcher Danny Frisella, who was a teammate of Seaver’s in Fairbanks. Boucher was the Mayor of Fairbanks. “He got all the best young ball players up there.” Andy Messersmith of the University of California became a 20-game winner with the California Angels. Mike Paul pitched for Cleveland. Graig Nettles played for Minnesota. USC quarterback Steve Sogge, a baseball catcher, played on that team. Rick Monday was an All-American at Arizona State, where he was a teammate of Reggie Jackson and Sal Bando in a program that captured the 1965 National Championship (also producing Mets’ pitcher Gary Gentry). In the very first amateur draft ever held in 1965, Monday became the first player chosen, by the Kansas City A’s.

“Monday was there the year I was and he couldn’t even make our team,” said Frisella. “I think 13 guys were signed off that team. It was semi-pro ball, and we played eight games a week. We didn’t get paid. Not for playing ball. But I earned $650 a month for pulling a lever on a dump truck. And I didn’t have to pull the lever too often.”

The man most responsible for the growth of summer collegiate baseball was Dedeaux. In 1963, when his Trojans won their fourth national championship, the press dubbed his team the “New York Yankees of college baseball.” He eventually retired with 11, having produced such stalwarts as Ron Fairly, Don Buford, Bill “Spaceman” Lee, Jim Barr, Dave Kingman, Rich Dauer, Steve Kemp, Fred Lynn, Steve Busby, Roy Smalley, Mark McGwire and Randy Johnson. His successor, Mike Gillespie, won the school’s 12th College World Series in 1998 (Texas is second with five) while producing such talented stars as Bret Boone, Aaron Boone, Jeff Cirillo, Geoff Jenkins, Jacque Jones, Morgan Ensberg, Barry Zito and Mark Prior.

If a young player wanted to test himself amongst the best of the best, he could find no more competitive environment than the USC baseball program. For Tom Seaver, having tasted real success for the first time in his life at Fresno City College, it represented the ultimate challenge. He needed that scholarship; not just to save his father from paying the steep tuition, but also to give himself imprimatur as opposed to “walk on” status.

Dedeaux had come out of Hollywood High School to become the captain of the Trojan baseball team. He had the briefest of Major League “careers” with the Brooklyn Dodgers, but befriended his manager, Casey Stengel. Later, Stengel brought his Yankees to Los Angeles for exhibition games against USC, giving college players the chance to play against Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford. After retirement from managing the Mets, he became a banking executive in Glendale, the L.A. suburb where Dedeaux lived. For years Casey was a regular at Trojan baseball games.

Dedeaux was a key figure in organizing and growing the popularity of the College World Series. The first CWS was held in Kalamazoo, Michigan and featured the University of California Golden Bears beating Yale for the national title. Yale’s first baseman was a war veteran named George H.W. Bush. Bush and Yale came back the next year, only to be beaten this time by Dedeaux’s Trojans. Eventually, the CWS found a permanent home in Omaha, Nebraska.

“He never looked like a ball player, but he had eyes in the back of his head,” said Bill Lee, who played four years under him from 1965 to 1968, earning All-American pitcher honors and a National title in his senior year. “He knew in the first inning what would happen in the fifth; in the fifth what to expect in the eighth.” The greatest teams Lee ever saw were “the 1975 Cincinnati Reds, any Taiwanese little league team, and the 1968 USC Trojans!”

“Dedeaux was the sharpest tack in the box,” recalled Mike Gillespie, who played on his 1961 College World Series champions.

An extraordinary amount of athletic talent flowed to the professional sports leagues from USC and California in general. Huge crowds watching Trojan football games at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum played a large role in luring the Dodgers and Lakers out west. Dedeaux modernized the collegiate game from a “club sport” to a pipeline for the pros. Utilizing the perfect California weather, he turned his into a year-round program. There was “fall ball” from September to Thanksgiving; followed by a full slate of 50-60 games in the spring instead of a paltry 20 or 25. But it was summer ball that Dedeaux turned into breeding grounds for diamond success.

A college player generally returned to his hometown after school let out and played on a pick-up team, or a ragamuffin semi-pro outfit. The competition was not good and players benefited little, returning to school without having progressed. Dedeaux wanted his players to experience something akin to minor league life; playing nightly games, traveling, and handling a fast brand of ball that prepared them for the college season, then a pro career.

In the 1950s he sent his players to Canada, where in addition to good baseball experience they enjoyed the educational aspects of life in an “exotic” locale far from home. When Alaska became a state, Red Boucher raised money to build a first class facility and began recruiting the best collegians to Fairbanks. Dedeaux and USC were his number one source. A league was developed with teams in Fairbanks, Anchorage (the Glacier Pilots and later the North Pole Knicks), the Palmer Valley Green Giants, and the Kenai Peninsula Oilers. Teams from Canada and the contiguous lower 48 states traveled to Alaska. The sun almost never set in the summer. Lights were not needed. On June 21 a “midnight sun” game starting at 11 P.M. was played without any lighting. The Alaskan teams also traveled, playing in an end-of summer tournament called the National Baseball Congress in Wichita, Kansas. The NBC featured all the best teams from across America. The Canadian teams generally played in the Kamloops International Tournament.

Years later, when Tom Seaver became a broadcaster even before his playing career ended, he told partner Joe Garagiola of his Alaskan experience during a World Series telecast.

“They play baseball in Alaska?” asked Garagiola.

“Really good baseball, Joe,” replied Seaver.

“Tell me about it,” inquired Garagiola, and Seaver did just that.

In June, 1964 Seaver boarded a plane for Fairbanks to join a team consisting of future big leaguers Monday, Nettles, Curt Motton, Ken Holtzman and Gary Sutherland of USC. They were All-Americans with national reputations. Seaver was immediately intimidated, wondering whether he, a junior college pitcher still battling the insecurities of a nothing prep career, could compete at this level. He had little time for contemplation once he arrived, however. Boucher’s wife met him at the airport.

“We’re playing a game right now,” she told him. “I brought a uniform with me. You can put it on at the field. We may need you.”

The beautiful stadium and the large crowd struck Seaver. In a town of 20,000, some 50,000 people attended Goldpanners games.

“I dressed in a shack near the field,” Seaver recalled.

There was no time for introductions when he arrived in the dugout, beyond Boucher’s handshake and orders to get to the bullpen to warm up right now. The score was tied 2-2 with the Bellingham, Washington Bells in the fifth inning as Seaver hurriedly got loose, was waved into the game and “met my catcher on the way to the mound.”

He proceeded to retire the side, then met his teammates in the dugout. That night, Seaver pitched effectively in relief, earning a hard-fought victory and the respect of his all-star mates. He was used mainly in relief, later rating himself the “third- or fourth-line pitcher” on the ‘Panners. He lived with the Bouchers. Aside from being a community leader, Red was a sharp baseball man who taught young Seaver important lessons on the psychology of pitching. He was very much like Tom’s optimist mother. Seaver came to understand that half the battle was believing in himself. Through psychology and the experience of successfully testing himself against the best, he was gaining invaluable confidence. Boucher told him that each morning he needed to wake up and say to himself, “I am a Major Leaguer.”

Dedeaux coached a summer team of USC players in Los Angeles that traveled to Fairbanks. Seaver pitched and mowed them down with high heat. When Boucher yelled at Dedeaux from across the field how it was going, the USC coached cracked, “How the hell would I know? I haven’t seen the ball since the second inning.” Seaver’s scholarship offer was seemingly secured that night, but there were still bumps in the road.

In August the Goldpanners made their way to Wichita for the NBC, stopping in Grand Junction, Colorado for a tune-up against a fast semi-pro outfit. Seaver started but was hammered off the mound. NBC rules required the roster be reduced to 18 players. Boucher had to decide between Seaver and Holtzman, an All-American at the University of Illinois. He visited Seaver in his hotel room to inquire of his confidence, but the young Californian just told him to “try me.” Boucher kept Seaver.

Against the Wichita Glassmen, Seaver was called on in relief with the Goldpanners winning 2-0. The bases were loaded in the fifth inning with one out. Boucher tried to steady his reliever, but Seaver just growled that he had “listened to you all summer long. Now it’s up to me. Give me the ball and get out of here.” 

Confident or not, it took some doing for Seaver to steady himself. Two walks and an infield hit pushed across three runs and now the Goldpanners trailed, 3-2. A double-play kept the damage down. Over the next innings Seaver gained command. It was before the days of the designated hitter. In the eighth inning with the bases loaded Seaver came to the plate. Boucher saw something in the young man who had once batted .543 with 10 home runs in little league. He decided to let him hit. Seaver responded with a grand slam to win the game. He pitched and won a second game in the tournament, earning summer All-American honors from the National Baseball Congress. For the first time, professional scouts were evaluating him.

“We had a lot of players who could throw the ball harder than Tom,” Boucher recalled. “His fastball moved well, but he was no Sandy Koufax. His curve and slider were not much better than average by college standards. His greatest asset was his tremendous will to win. And he had this super concentration. He believed he could put the ball right through the bat if he wanted to.”

Dedeaux called Boucher and inquired of several USC players on the Fairbanks roster. Boucher interrupted him to say that Seaver would be “your best pitcher.” Boucher assured him that he would “bet on it,” to which Dedeaux replied that the Alaska manager was so high on the kid “I really don’t have any choice.”

Seaver had finally assured himself of the scholarship. He arrived at USC during a golden age on campus and in Los Angeles. That fall of 1964, quarterback Craig Fertig led the Trojans to a breathtaking comeback victory over Notre Dame, 20-17. USC’s running back, Mike Garrett, would go on to become the first of the school’s seven Heisman Trophy winners.

The actor Tom Selleck, a basketball, baseball and volleyball star out of Van Nuys High School, was on campus. A few years separated them, but Seaver and Bill Lee were in the program at the same time. It was a dominant age, under athletic director Jess Hill the greatest sustained sports run in college history. Aside from Dedeaux’s perennial champions, John McKay’s football team won two national titles and two Heismans in the decade. The track, swimming and tennis teams won NCAA titles with regularity.

Cross-town, John Wooden’s UCLA basketball dynasty was just heating up that year. Big league baseball was in full swing on the West Coast. The Los Angeles Angels were an expansion team. The Giants and Dodgers had continued their rivalry in California. Sandy Koufax and the Dodgers sold out the beautiful new Dodger Stadium and won the World Series twice in three years.

The famed USC film school also became world class at that time. Two of their most famous students were in school when Seaver was there. George Lucas would create the blockbuster Star Wars series. John Milius wrote the screenplays Dirty Harry and Magnum Force; then directed The Wind and the Lion and Red Dawn, among many others. He would become known as the most conservative filmmaker in notoriously liberal Hollywood. Another aspiring film student was turned down by USC. Steven Spielberg had to settle for Long Beach State, but as friends with Lucas and Milius, Spielberg was hanging around the campus so much he seemed to have matriculated there.

Those three became friends with Francis Ford Coppola, who was attending film school at UCLA along with future Doors’ rock legends Jim Morrison, Ray Manzarek and John Densmore. Together, Lucas, Milius, Spielberg and Coppola hatched a hare-brained scheme to go to Vietnam with actors to film a “docu-drama” in the style of Medium Cool, which was half-movie, half-footage from the 1968 Democrat National Convention in Chicago. The Vietnam idea was nixed (for some odd reason) by the Pentagon, but eventually became Apocalypse Now, featuring the haunting music of Morrison singing “The End.” All of it was detailed in a fabulous 1998 Hollywood book by Peter Biskind called Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and in the documentary Hearts of Darkness.

The USC campus has always been conservative, fraternity-oriented and traditional, but even more so when Seaver arrived. That fall, Republican Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater energized a conservative movement based in nearby Orange County, embodied by Republican student politics at USC. Numerous USC (and UCLA) graduates made up the campaign and later administration staffs of Richard Nixon. Among them were Watergate figures H.R. Haldemann, John Erlichman, Dwight Chapin, and Donald Segretti. In the 1976 film All the President’s Men, the Segretti character tells Dustin Hoffman, playing Carl Bernstein, about the so-called “USC Mafia” of that era.

Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy was received like a conquering hero when he toured for his autobiography Will, on campus in 1983. When Democrat Presidential nominee Walter Mondale campaigned at USC in 1984, he was met by the resounding chant, “Reagan country” in favor of the incumbent President. According to student accounts, controversial filmmaker Michael Moore was booed off stage when he screen Fahrenheit 9/11 on campus, leading him to start wearing a UCLA cap.

Bill Lee got a taste of the stuck-up nature of social life on campus, which he described in his riotous 1984 autobiography, The Wrong Stuff. Lee was dating a beautiful sorority sister until movie star “Alan Ladd’s kid snaked her away from me,” presumably with a show of wealth.

Seaver enrolled as a pre-dental student, joined a fraternity, and quickly made friends with Dedeaux’s son, Justin. His Marine experience immediately separated him from the silly frat boys. He also befriended Garrett. This arrangement came to symbolize all that is righteous about college sports. Here was Seaver, the white middle class son of an affluent business executive, “prejudiced” while in high school, paired with Garrett, the black inner city son of a single mother. Had they not been teammates at USC, these two never would have found each other. Instead they became the best of friends.

Garrett was an introspective young man bound and determined to make the most of his opportunity. He had been an All-American at Roosevelt High School in Los Angeles and of course made his name on the football field, winning the Heisman Trophy in 1965 and helping the Kansas City Chiefs win the 1970 Super Bowl. Eventually, he graduated from law school and became USC’s athletic director, where he hired the great Pete Carroll in 2000. Garrett was serious about baseball, too. He even took some time off from his NFL career to pursue the game in the Dodgers’ organization before returning to the San Diego Chargers in 1971.

“Mike was serious about things,” said assistant USC football coach Dave Levy. “One time he and I got into a big discussion and he expressed frustration that he could not rent an apartment in Pasadena because he was black. I just told him he needed to understand there were white folks of good conscience and that you had to let people change. I had discussions with black kids at USC and I said they needed to take advantage of the educational opportunities that sports provided them. Mike came to agree with me."

“If you’d told me that a black kid from Boyle Heights would win the Heisman Trophy,” Garrett said on the History of USC Football DVD (2005), “I’d have just said, ‘You’re crazy.’ ”

Seaver and Garrett were both intensely dedicated. They worked out together. Justin Dedeaux was amazed that Seaver could keep up with Garrett stride-for-stride running wind sprints. The Garrett-Seaver relationship also directly marks the beginning of a revolution in sports training, with profound consequences. Baseball players were told not to lift weights; that to do so would “tie up” their muscles, making them unable to throw and swing the bat. But Seaver had seen how much better he had gotten when he got stronger lifting boxes and later doing push-ups, pull-ups and rifle exercises in the Marines.

Jerry Merz, a friend of Seaver’s who studied physical education, recommended that Seaver lift weights to increase his strength. Garrett lifted weights for football and Seaver asked him to help start a regimen, which he did. Seaver’s stocky body responded to weight training, with immediate good results on the field. He would take his weight training routine with him into professional baseball, influencing a change in the perception of weights in the 1970s. Over time, all baseball players would bulk up on weights, and eventually this led to the rampant use of steroids.

Seaver’s casual, open relationship with Garrett was an eye-opener for him. Despite idolizing Henry Aaron from a young age, he had met few blacks. He had adopted the country club racism accepted by whites of that era, probably without fully realizing it. Charles “Tree” Young was a black track, basketball and football star at Edison High School in Fresno a few years after Seaver came out of Fresno High. He became an All-American tight end on the 1972 USC football team generally considered the greatest in history; later a star with the 1981 World Champion San Francisco 49ers before entering the Christian ministry.

“I most certainly knew all about Tom Seaver,” Young said. “He was from Fresno, had starred at USC, and made good with the New York Mets. But the Fresno of the 1960s was a place where you needed to know your place.”

Young lived in the “black section” of Fresno. It was not a segregated society, certainly not like the South. Edison High was integrated and Young a popular student-athlete.

“If you are good in athletics, you can go places and do things unavailable to others,” Young said. “When I arrived at USC, my first question was, Where’s the blacks? I quickly discerned that there was double meaning in the term Southern California. But through sports, black brethren and white brethren became one. It took some doing, and on our football it did not happen overnight.”

Young was a member of the 1970 USC football team that traveled to Birmingham and, behind running back Sam “Bam” Cunningham defeated Alabama, thus effectuating great racial change in the South. The Trojan team he played on, ironically, was racially divided as a result of the playing of black quarterback Jimmy Jones over white hotshot Mike Rae.

Young, a strong Christian, helped organize fellowship meetings in order to bring the team together, against some resistance. After a “revival” meeting in 1971, the 2-4 Trojans traveled to South Bend and beat 6-0 Notre Dame. That team never lost again, going on to an unbeaten National Championship the next year.

The nature of USC - its conservatism and traditions – has been credited by those who were there at the time with allowing such a thing to freely occur. By contrast, social angst and war protests dominated life at rival campuses Cal-Berkeley and Stanford. According to John McKay, the supposedly “enlightened” Stanford student body directed “the most vile, foul racial epithets I ever heard” at his team, one in which McKay had “provided more and greater opportunities for black athletes than any in the nation,” when they made their way onto the Stanford Stadium field.

A few years prior to that, Tom Seaver brought a certain amount of white conservatism with him. After all, his father ran a large company and he had never been exposed to radical politics. But USC was a place where ideas could flow more easily than at a segregated Southern campus, yet be tempered by the kind respect for tradition that seemed to have been lost at Berkeley. The Cal campus was allowing itself to become the de facto staging grounds of American Communism in the 1960s.

In the hierarchy of Trojan sports, Mike Garrett towered above a junior college baseball transfer like Seaver. But as teammates they gravitated to each other, finding their similarities more compelling than their differences. Garrett was considered undersized, and Seaver – at least until his recent growth spurt – had always identified himself as “the runt of our crowd,” as Dick Selma put it. He felt only admiration for Mike, who forged success for himself without the kinds of physical gifts of a later Trojan superstar, O.J. Simpson.

In 1965, Seaver worked hard to make it onto USC’s starting rotation. Oddly, it was a down year for the Trojans, who finished 9-11, in fourth place behind conference co-champions Stanford and California, and one game back of cross-town rival UCLA. But Seaver was excellent, winning 10 games against only two defeats with a 2.47 earned run average, establishing himself as the undisputed staff ace. He was named to the all-conference team along with Garrett and Justin Dedeaux. A major boost in his confidence came in an alumni game when Seaver got Dodgers first baseman Ron Fairly, a former Trojan, to pop up on a slider. As Fairly ran past Seaver on the mound he said, “Pretty good pitch, kid.” Seaver had retired a big league hitter, and allowed himself to dream big league dreams (three years later in the Major Leagues, Fairly connected on a Seaver slider for a home run).

In June 1965, the very first Major League draft was held. Rick Monday, an All-American outfielder for National Champion Arizona State, was the number one pick. Because he had not gone into the Marines his first year after high school, the sophomore Seaver’s college class was in its third year, making him eligible for the draft. Already, the strategy behind obtaining maximum signing bonuses meant that college juniors would get more, since they had the bargaining leverage of returning for their senior year. A graduated senior had to take whatever was offered him or go home, his eligibility gone.

His favorite team, the Los Angeles Dodgers, drafted Seaver. He and his USC pals regularly went to nearby Dodger Stadium on his uncle’s tickets to watch the great Sandy Koufax pitch. Scout Tom Lasorda came around to negotiate. If Seaver had lacked any confidence before, making All-American at the National Baseball Congress, retiring Fairly, and compiling a 10-2 mark for Troy took care of that. Lasorda offered $2,000. Seaver came back with $50,000, arguing that Selma had received $20,000 from the Mets out of junior college and he was a seasoned Trojan star. Lasorda came up to $3,000, but that was that. The tantalizing possibility of Tom Seaver forging a career on the great Dodgers teams of the 1970s would be only that, tantalizing.

“Good luck in your dental career,” Lasorda told him.

It was a real-world business lesson Seaver was not going to learn in any economics class. It also meant a return to Fairbanks in the summer of 1965. This time Seaver did not arrive in Alaska as an unknown, dressing in a shack and introducing himself to his catcher on the mound. There was sense of hierarchy on the Goldpanners, and the ace pitcher at the University of Southern California was tops on that hierarchy. It was as talented a team as any in the country, the “all-star” concept of picking the best collegians from around the nation making the Goldpanners better than most college teams and probably better than a lot of minor league clubs.

The “pitching staff was so deep and talented – Andy Messersmith, Al Schmelz, Danny Frisella and I were the starters . . .” recalled Seaver. As can happen when a young athlete achieves success, a sense of overconfidence – some call it “senioritis” – can effect his performance and often requires some “negative feedback” in order to right the tilting ship. The Goldpanners again made it to the NBC in Wichita, but the plethora of talented pitchers, all vying for mound time to gain experience, strengthen their college resumes, and of course get visibility for the scouts, meant that Seaver’s toughest competition came on his own team. In Wichita, “I had a chance to win only one game before we reached the semi-finals” against the Wichita Dreamliners.

A big crowd and lots of scouts came out for a ballyhooed match-up between the hotshot Trojan hurler and a semi-pro outfit consisting of four recent big league performers; Bobby Boyd, Jim Pendleton, Charlie Neal and Rod Kanehl. Neal and Kanehl had played for the New York Mets. Neal led off the game with a triple, Boyd added three hits, and Kanehl stole home as the Dreamliners defeated Seaver, 6-3. Seaver probably could have pitched around some of the ex-big leaguers but challenged them instead, paying the price. He hated walking hitters even if it meant giving them a pitch they could hit. After getting knocked from the mound, Boyd approached him.

“Kid, you got a great future ahead of you,” he told him. “You’re going to be a big league pitcher.”

Seaver felt the veteran was mocking him. That night, Tom and some teammates went out for beers. Kanehl joined them, repeating what Boyd had said. Fairly had expressed admiration for his ability, too.

Maybe they’re right.

Schmelz and Frisella both signed with the Mets instead of returning to school. Seaver came back to Southern Cal and immediately noticed a bevy of scouts at the “fall ball” games. He attended a number of Dodger games that September, focusing on Koufax as he pitched his team to the World Championship. The consensus among the scouts was that Seaver was one of the top young prospects in amateur baseball, and that the Dodgers had blown it by not signing him in the summer.

While Seaver’s baseball future was developing, so too was his personal future. In 1964 he sat in a class at Fresno City College a few seats away from a pretty blond named Nancy Lynn McIntyre. His smooth repartee and way with the girls deserted him, and he never said “two words to her the entire semester.”

At the end of the spring semester before heading north to Alaska, Seaver and some pals blew off steam drinking beers and playing softball when he spotted her. Impulsively he ran towards her and, in what had to be one of the most awkward “first dates” in history, was unable to stop himself, ran into her, knocking her flat. He then picked her up and asked if she wanted to go to a softball game.

“No,” she replied.

Seaver then, for all practical purposes, kidnapped her. She endured the softball game and agreed to a second “date” if it would be less violent. Over the next year and a half, the relationship faced challenges with Nancy in Fresno, Tom in Alaska for two summers and in Los Angeles going to school. She occasionally came to visit. He saw her on vacations back to Fresno. Their casual agreement was that they would see other people. In Los Angeles, Tom knew that a pretty girl like Nancy would have no trouble finding a guy. He had always been popular with girls. Dick Selma expressed amazement at how, despite being a JV pitcher, he dated all the best-looking girls in high school.

Now he was a “big man on campus,” best friends of the Heisman Trophy winner, star of the baseball team, rumored to be a bonus baby when the draft came around. Girls at USC were plentiful and he dated his share of them. Perhaps his Marine experience, or the up-and-down nature of baseball, had matured him beyond his years, but for whatever reason he did not want to “play the field” anymore. He and Nancy agreed to be exclusive, and after some initial difficulties both realized that they wanted marriage, a family and stability.

“Nancy and I,” he wrote in The Perfect Game, “seemed . . . to realize at the same time that life wasn’t about all parties, that we could be serious about ourselves and about other things without being pretentious or somber.” They both wanted to “live in a real world.”

They decided to marry, and more importantly, never to hurt each other; easier said than done. Tom’s prospects were certainly excellent. If baseball did not pan out, he would have a USC degree, followed by dental school and a nice practice back in Fresno. The only friendly glitch in the relationship was the fact that Nancy’s father argued the merits of Notre Dame football while Tom supported his Trojans. The Tom-Nancy partnership would prove to be a remarkable love story.

In January, 1966 a winter draft was held. Because of what eventually happened to Tom Seaver, the rules of the winter draft were later changed, but despite being in school he was selected number one by the Milwaukee Braves, who were that year in the process of moving to Atlanta. Braves’ scout Johnny Moore, who had seen ‘em all in Fresno, arrived at the Seaver household in a Cadillac. When he left Tom was $51,500 richer. He was a hot young prospect ticketed for the big leagues, where his teammate would be the great Henry Aaron!

No sooner did he sign with the Braves than he discovered the contract was invalid. USC had played a few early season games. A player could only sign prior to the playing of games on the spring schedule, and the Trojans always got off to an early start. Seaver would have to wait until the June draft, but he was not disappointed. He would pitch for Southern Cal. Then the NCAA declared he was ineligible since he had signed a pro contract. He was like Ko-Ko in The Mikado, caught in the middle of a “pretty state of things,” wrote his biographer, John Devaney.

Finally, the commissioner’s office got involved. It was decided that a “lottery” would be held. Any team willing to match the Braves’ offer could enter it. Three teams – Philadelphia, Cleveland and the New York Mets – did just that. The Dodgers wanted in, too, but general manager Buzzie Bavasi was so consumed in contract talks with Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale, both holdouts that spring, that he forgot to get the team’s name in. For the second time, the Dodgers passed up a chance to get Tom Seaver.

The Mets were selected and Seaver reported to Homestead, Florida, where their minor leaguers were well underway for Spring Training. The experience was extraordinary for him. Four years earlier, he had been less than a “suspect”; a warehouse “sweat box” lifter and a lowly Marine recruit with drill instructors screaming in his face. Year by year things had gotten better for him: junior college ace, proving himself with the Alaska Goldpanners, “big man on campus” at USC; now a bonus baby; and a few months later, married to the beautiful Nancy Lynn McIntrye.

The guy who could not make the Fresno High varsity until his senior year found himself trailed by curious glances and murmurs at Homestead. “That’s the guy from USC.” “That’s Seaver, they paid him over 50 grand.” Bud Harrelson, Jerry Koosman and Nolan Ryan were all in camp, but Seaver was singled out for the special treatment accorded to the most important prospects. It was dizzying, but Seaver had “class” according to Harrelson, who said that despite his place at the top of the totem pole, the bonus baby did not put on airs or try to show anybody up.

Most players start out at class A ball and have to fight for years to move up the ladder. The combination of Seaver’s college record, bonus money and the team’s lack of success meant that he started at triple-A Jacksonville, Florida. Manager Solly Hemus, who had seen a few in his long baseball career, declared him, “the best pitching prospect the Mets have ever signed,” and then paid him the ultimate compliment: “Seaver has a 35-year-old head on top of a 21-year-old body. Usually, we get a 35-year-old arm attached to a 21-year-old head.”

Seaver was teammates with Dick Selma at Jacksonville. Immediately he had success and was ticketed as a “can’t miss” prospect who would be in the Major Leagues soon, maybe even in September. He led the team in victories and strikeouts. He was given the nickname “Super Rookie,” or “Supe” for short. His future was secure when Hemus said he reminded him of Bob Gibson. When most minor league pitching prospects get hit, they are removed so as to protect their gentle psyches. Hemus realized Seaver had the mental toughness of . . . a 35-year old. When his rough patches came, as they always do, he kept him in to gain from the experience.

The roughest patch came off the field, when the “wizened” wives and girlfriends of the Jacksonville players set the naïve California girl Nancy “straight” on the notorious sexual habits of ballplayers. Tom assured her of his commitment to her, but her mind was filled with dreadful thoughts. 

After a heavy workload at Jacksonville, the Mets decided not to call him up in September. Seaver and his new bride returned to Los Angeles, where he was now just another student at USC. Suddenly Seaver saw a new future in baseball, and began to think about broadcasting on the side. He transferred his major from pre-dentistry to public relations. Instead of living near campus, notorious for being near a high crime zone and at that time only a year removed from the nearby Watts riots, they lived in upscale Manhattan Beach.

In 1967, Seaver entered Spring Training amid speculation that he would be a starting pitcher. Had Seaver not been with the lowly Mets, he probably would not have made it to “The Show,” as the Majors are referred to, as quickly. He would have started out at singe-A or double-A, then worked his way up. Instead, he did start as a rookie in 1967. In truth, he was as ready as can be. Manager Wes Westrum not only put him in the starting rotation at the beginning of the season, he was talked out of starting him on Opening Day only out of caution.

The Mets were as bad as ever in 1967, only now they were just terrible, not funny. The old Casey Stengel stories, the wacky “Marvelous Marv” Throneberry antics, were gone. Now they just lost. Seaver was appalled.

“I was not raised on the Met legend,” he said. He had no affinity for any of that stuff. Despite being a rookie, he quickly ascended to a position of leadership on the club. When teammates laughed at their ineptitude, he refused to let them get away with it. Once, when Mets players were fooling around in the dugout during a game, Seaver found some spiders nesting in a corner. He scooped them all up and threw them at the offenders, telling them to wake up and pay attention. His attitude would have been taken exception to, except that he was so shockingly good. It earned him immediate respect.

Seaver’s work ethic was legendary, his concentration and seriousness unprecedented in Met history. He was immediately successful. When his brother, Charles Jr., a New York City social worker, visited a client he saw a poster of his brother hanging in his tenement apartment. It was an era before ESPN and the lowly Mets were not on national TV very much. Cincinnati’s Pete Rose openly wondered who “the kid” was at Gallagher’s, a New York steak house, when he saw an out-of-place Seaver sitting at a table by himself. Told whom he was, Rose then made the connection. This was the guy who beat his Reds, 7-3, on June 13.

He sure looks young but the kid’s got a helluva fast ball.

Against his hero Henry Aaron, Seaver induced the slugger into a double-play, but was almost in admiration of his opponent when Aaron adjusted later and hit the same pitch over the fence. Henry told him he was “throwing hard, kid.” He “stalked” Sandy Koufax at the batting cage when the now-retired legend was in town as a broadcaster. When Koufax recognized who he was, Seaver was taken aback but pleased.

Seaver earned a spot on the National League roster for the All-Star Game, played near his college stomping grounds, at Anaheim Stadium. This meant more embarrassed mistaken identity. Cardinal superstar Lou Brock thought he was the clubhouse boy and asked him to fetch a Coke. Seaver dutifully did that, but Brock had to apologize when he was informed who he was.

In the game, Seaver came on in extra innings to retire the American League, saving the National’s 2-1 victory. On the season he was 16-13 with a 2.76 earned run average, easily garnering Rookie of the Year honors. His 16 victories came with little offensive or defensive support from the 10th place Mets. He easily could have won 20 games in a year in which the great pitching aces of the era – Koufax, Don Drysdale, Bob Gibson, Juan Marichal – were retired, hurt or slumped. Mike McCormick, a journeyman southpaw with the Giants, won the Cy Young award, but in truth did not pitch better than Seaver.

The Tom Seaver of 1967-68 was still developing. In the beginning, he was considered a sinker-slider pitcher whose fast ball was excellent but not nearly at the level of such heaterballers of the time as “Sudden Sam” McDowell or Bob Gibson. But the late maturation process that began when he entered the Marine Corps had not reached fruition. His hard work and weight lifting paid off, and by late 1968 Billy Williams of the Cubs told teammates “he brings it” after being set down by him.

Seaver was honest with his manager when asked how he felt. Whereas most pitchers lied, Seaver put so much into pitching that by the eighth inning he was worn out. He and Nancy took to the New York scene feet flying. If ever a “sports couple” was seemingly born for the Big Apple, it was the Seavers.

“Nancy and I love this town,” Seaver told sportswriter Maury Allen. “We walk around Manhattan, up Fifth Avenue, past Carnegie Hall, down Broadway. We want to get to the Museum of Art and the Museum of Natural History on our next day off.”

Seaver felt a natural intellectual curiosity, fueled by his surroundings. The literary nature of New York society did not escape him. He read books by John Steinbeck, who had written of the central California that they both grew up in. Steinbeck’s vision of California was much different from Seaver’s easy affluence, but Tom had an inquiring mind and absorbed all of it. He read books about politics, satire and the classic baseball history book The Glory of Their Times, which allowed him to realize that he was part of something bigger than himself; that being a New York baseball star was special over and above playing in other cities. He had respect for the game and its traditions, and to Mets fans number 41 began to represent the sort of idol Whitey Ford and Mickey Mantle meant to Yankee supporters. They chanted “Seav-uh” as he mowed hitters down at Shea Stadium.

Seaver studied opponents and maintained detailed scouting reports. His dedication was total, but he also smiled and joked around. He was the quintessential “fan” living the fantasy of playing in the Major Leagues. Almost all big leaguers were high schools superstars who took their ability for granted, strutting around like they owned the place. Seaver was still pinching himself. Not only was he privileged to wear the uniform, he was the ace of the staff! On a bad team he was a “stopper” whose victories ended losing streaks.

“There was an aura of defeatism about the team, a feeling of let’s get it over with,” Seaver recalled. “I noticed that the team seemed to play better when I pitched but . . . that wasn’t right and I said so. I probably got a few people mad, but I went around and told the guys that if they did that for me and not for somebody else, it was wrong.”

“When Seaver’s pitching, these guys plain work a little harder,” noted catcher Jerry Grote.

“You notice his concentration out there on the mound when he’s pitching,” said Bud Harrelson. “And playing behind him, you try to match it.”

His performance in the All-Star Game filled him with not just pride and confidence, but inspired him to try and instill that same attitude in his teammates. He became the undisputed leader of the young Mets. After one dismal game he stood on a stool and announced: “Gentlemen, after watching that performance, I would like to take this opportunity to announce my retirement from the game of baseball.” If he pitched well but lost for lack of support he took the weight of defeat on his own shoulders.

“I just don’t feel I’m pitching as well as I can,” he lamented. “A mistake here . . . a mistake there . . . they add up. You wonder when you’re going to come on and start eliminating the mistakes.”

   He was a perfectionist, a trait he inherited from his father. It applied to every aspect of his life; the way he dressed, the way he conducted his marriage, his life. He expressed admiration at brother Charles’s sculptures, since he could attain a sense of perfection in the work that seemed impossible in the messy, up-and-down competition of baseball. Still, each game he came out hoping for a perfect game, something Sandy Koufax had done. Koufax once said that he wanted a perfect game until the first man reached base; a no-hitter until the first hit; a shutout until the first run . . .

He made no excuses just because he was a rookie. He handled every aspect of his business, not just pitching well but fielding his position, showing some pop with the bat, and cheerleading on days he did not pitch. The older Mets were replaced more and more by youngsters who emulated Seaver’s professionalism.

“For the first time maybe,” Seaver told a Sport magazine reporter years later, “we realized that we had guys who cared deeply whether we achieved, that we had pitchers who could hit occasionally and who wanted to win so desperately. Looking back I think it was the first time in my experience with the Mets that we believed in each other, the first time I felt that that I wasn’t here to lose.”

Pitching coach Harvey Haddix marveled that Seaver absorbed his lessons, did not need to be told something twice, and analyzed his performances thoroughly. On road trips, he sat with Mets broadcasters Lindsey Nelson and Ralph Kiner, figuring he someday would be doing that, too. He never tailed off, as so many young hotshots do when the league figures them out, or they lose the psychological edge. In fact, Seaver in 1967 established a trait he maintained throughout his career: a strong finish.  After winning the Rookie of the Year award, he said it was “nice,” but added the unthinkable: “I want to pitch on a Mets’ pennant winner and I want to pitch the first game in the World Series. I want to change things . . . the Mets have been a joke long enough. It’s time to start winning, to change the attitude, to move ahead to better things. I don’t want the Mets to be laughed at anymore.”

In the off-season Seaver continued his studies at Southern Cal. Years after achieving superstardom, wealth and worldwide fame, he continued going to school in the fall, finally earning a degree from USC in the mid-1970s.  He was accorded celebrity status first by his hometown of Fresno, who gave him the “key to the city,” then by the USC baseball program. Working out to stay in shape in the off-season with a team led by Bill Lee (which would win the College World Series), he was one of their own who had made it. The up-and-coming Trojans were eager to hear tall tales of big league life. Seaver was good at weaving a yarn. Buoyed by a double in salary, happily married, he was sitting on top of the world.

In 1968, Gil Hodges took over as manager and the complexion of the Mets began to change. Some of those youngsters who Seaver first met during Spring Training in 1966 were breaking into the big leagues. Jerry Koosman, Tug McGraw, Bud Harrelson and Nolan Ryan were the face of the “new Mets.” An incredible amount of optimism surrounded the club throughout the winter and then Spring Training. Considering how bad they had been it seems to have been misplaced. Considering what they did just a year later, maybe not so much. The ultimate optimist was Seaver, but Hodges was a winner as a Brooklyn Dodger star; a fan favorite and one of those guys who were not so far from earning status in the true New York Sports Icon fraternity. He expected to win, too.

On Opening Day against Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Juan Marichal and the San Francisco Giants at Candlestick Park, Seaver took a hard-earned 4-2 lead into the bottom of the ninth inning. Exhausted, he was removed and watched in despair as his bullpen blew the lead in a 5-4 loss.

Same old Mets.

In his next start he shut out Houston for 10 innings but came away with a no-decision in a game lost by New York, 1-0 in 24 innings, when second baseman Al Weis let a groundball scoot under his glove.

Same old Mets.

After some early bumps in the road, however, the Mets rebounded and by mid-June were near the .500 mark, a remarkable record for this franchise. Hodges and Seaver developed a professional reputation based on mutual respect. Seaver’s on-mound demeanor was very intense, but one game he was laughing and grinning with catcher Jerry Grote during a game he won. Hodges advised that he should maintain a more disciplined presence, but was surprised to hear – and accept – Seaver’s explanation that in a game he lost he was “too tight,” and decided to loosen up in order to pitch better. Everything Seaver did had a method behind it. Hodges had seen many players over the years, and in Seaver he recognized a “new breed” of highly intelligent, motivated professionalism. The game was changing and Seaver was changing it.

But Seaver was in many ways an old-time baseball man. Despite his three-piece-suit, briefcase-carrying, Wall Street Journal-reading reputation, he was fun-loving, chewed tobacco and loved a few laughs over beers with the boys after the game. His teammates loved him. He was one of the guys, only more so.

1968 was a strange season. Known as the “Year of the Pitcher,” it was a season in which the Most Valuable Player in both leagues was a moundsman. In the American League, Detroit’s Denny McLain was the last 30-game winner. In the National League, Bob Gibson of St. Louis was even better, if that can be believed, hurling 13 shutouts, posting 48 straight scoreless innings, and a record earned run average of 1.12, a mark that may never be broken. Gibson struck out 17 Tigers in the World Series, but Detroit’s Mickey Lolich was the hero with three wins to earn the MVP. The National League won the All-Star Game, 1-0. Only one American Leaguer, Carl Yastrzemski of Boston (.301), batted over .300. Only five did it in the senior circuit. The combined ERA of both leagues was 2.99. Don Drysdale of Los Angeles set the all-time consecutive scoreless innings streak with 58. Oakland’s Catfish Hunter hurled a perfect game. Gaylord Perry of the Giants and Ray Washburn of the Cardinals threw no-hitters against each other’s teams on consecutive nights at Candlestick Park; a feat never equaled before. With scoring and by extension, attendance down, Major League Baseball decided to lower the height of the mound beginning in 1969. Baseball was dead, a casualty to pro football’s sexy image. Or so it seemed.

For Tom Seaver, 1968 was another year of great success matched by frustration. Outside of the superhuman Gibson, he pitched as well as anybody else in the league, but if the 1967 Mets had failed to support him, they looked like the “Murderer’s Row” Yankees compared to the 1968 version. Seaver said they owed the rest of the staff as much as they had given him but did not mean that they metaphorically skip town on his day to pitch.

            He again appeared in the All-Star Game. In August his desire for perfection almost came to fruition when the Cardinals’ Orlando Cepeda broke up his bid in the seventh inning. It served to whet his appetite for one. He won 16 against 12 losses, with a sterling 2.20 ERA and 205 strikeouts. There was a distinct improvement in his velocity as his body grew in strength. Seaver dominated the opposition and could have won 20 or even 24 games in 1968, but the Mets were abysmal behind him.

            They hit .228 as a team, but gave Seaver even less. Over one 11-game stretch, his ERA was 1.91 but opposing pitcher’s were 1.72 against New York bats, when they scored a mere 19 runs overall. Seaver’s record during that period was 2-5. 

            Off the field, Seaver visited Vietnam vets in the hospitable. Nancy was a self-confessed “liberal,” opposed to the war. Seaver still had the Marine experience drummed into his being, but he questioned America’s involvement. On the one hand, he read enough and understood history, so he realized that appeasement fails. In 1968 the world did not quite realize the horrors of Communism, although they certainly knew enough. But Mao Tse-Tung’s “Cultural Revolution,” then in its third year, and the 55 million murdered in Red China, were not fully revealed yet. But for now, Seaver was aghast at the loss of American life, the suffering of the wounded. 

He gave his time to crippled kids, leaving the hospitable with tears streaming down his face. Seaver was a Christian, but kept his religious views private. He had a deep social conscience, understood that he was a role model, and knew from having admired hero-ballplayers himself what an impact he had on their young lives. Unlike Joe DiMaggio, a man of amoral self-interest, Seaver was happy to give of himself. Over the years, as he saw how those he thought were his friends really just wanted to get something from him, he would shut down somewhat, become wary, but in 1968 he was still a wide-eyed idealist who thought he could change the world. 

            Despite the Mets’ batting woes, there were hopeful signs. Rookie of the Year Jerry Koosman got the support Seaver did not. He also made the All-Star Game, winning 19 against 12 losses with a 2.08 ERA. The southpaw from Minnesota threw almost as hard as Seaver. Jerry Grote also made the All-Star team. With good young pitching, New York finally lifted themselves from 10th to ninth with a 73-89 record, which despite a second half slump was reason for celebration amongst their supporters. But Seaver, Hodges and the young team found no reason to jump for joy over a below-.500 season. They had their hopes set on bigger and much better things. However, Hodges suffered a late-season heart attack in 1968. His availability was in doubt when the season ended. Somebody wished Seaver luck the next year; hopefully more run support.

            “So much depends on number 14,” Seaver said of 1969. 14 was Hodges’s number.