Sportsman Of The Year

It is, more than anything else, the striving for excellence that Seaver transmitted to his teammates. He became their leader by setting them a rare example. Two small incidents display this aspect of Seaver. He had planned, on winning his 20th game, to celebrate by taking his wife Nancy out for an expensive dinner. But he won No. 20 as the first game of a doubleheader against Philadelphia. The Mets then lost the second game, and Seaver saw no reason to celebrate. He and his wife dined at a hamburger stand.

About a month later, when almost all of the impossible had happened and the Mets had just beaten Atlanta to win the National League championship, there was the usual wild celebration in the dressing room. Seaver stayed a few minutes, but then slipped out to find a television set where he could watch Baltimore beating Minnesota. He thought he might spot a point or two about the Oriole hitters.

This, and the Seaver who says he'll accept almost anything the Mets want to pay him next year because he can't think about pitching if he has to worry about money arguments, and the Seaver who avoids the banquet circuit because he feels too many outside interests hurt ballplayers, and the Seaver who would have gone to spring training on a certain date this year even if there had been a baseball players' strike, and the Seaver who says, "The happiness of baseball is its competitiveness; that is what I love about the game," are all one young pitcher. But so is the Seaver who throws spiders and gets in water fights with the Shea Stadium ground crew—which is why he is the man-child of the Mets.

If perfection is Seaver's goal—and already some consider him a little too perfect to be true—he came close to baseball's version of it on the one night last season that may well have made the Mets. The city of New York had gone without a significant National League baseball game for a dozen years when on July 9 Seaver took the mound to work against the league-leading Chicago Cubs. New York was only four games behind Chicago, and the biggest crowd in the history of Shea Stadium was out to see if the Mets were real. For eight innings that night Seaver did not allow a Cub on base while striking out 11 of them. Three times he received standing ovations at the end of innings, and as he went out to begin the ninth the crowd stood for him once more. "When I got on the mound," he says, "I suddenly felt my arms somehow being lifted upward, just as if I had pressed them against the sides of a doorway for a long period of time."

Seaver got the first out by fielding a bunt by the leadoff hitter, but then gave up a single to rookie Jimmy Quails. Gone was the perfect game, but Seaver's performance in New York's 4-0 win had shown Met fans that the time had finally come to root for their team instead of laughing at it.

That night—Seaver now calls it the night of "my imperfect game"—Bud Harrelson, the Mets' young shortstop and Seaver's roommate, was with his Army Reserve unit at Camp Drum in upstate New York. Harrelson went to a bar in the nearby city of Watertown and, while watching the game and Seaver's performance on television, began to have an unprofessional reaction to what was happening.

"It was like I was being pulled into the set," he says. "I had so much pride in the team and in Tom that I guess I kind of lost my head a little. When he went out to pitch the ninth inning I did something only a kid is supposed to do. I turned around to a guy standing next to me and said, 'Hey, I know him. I know Tom Seaver. Tom Seaver is a friend of mine.' "

By the time the 1969 baseball season was over, a large number of Americans were having the same kind of reaction to both Seaver and his Mets. The Mets excited them. The Mets cheered them. The Mets were friends. The Mets, in fact, were the only possible ending to a decade of wondrous performances, surprises, shocks. Sport—as the following pages show—had never seen anything like the "60s. But what better way to go into the '70s than to be borne there by the Mets?