July 25, 1969: Maine gets a glimpse of Mets’ ‘miracle’

It was an unusual news story in a summer full of them. In the first week of July 1969, newspapers in Maine reported that Portland TV station WMTW, southern Maine’s home for Boston Red Sox telecasts, would also carry five New York Mets games “by special arrangement” that month.1

A station official said the Mets were interested in building a New England fan base and had “decided to do some testing.” A more likely reason for the broadcasts – also acknowledged by the station – was that Joan Payson, the Mets’ enthusiastic owner, was visiting the Pine Tree State and was willing to pay costs estimated at more than $10,000 to be able to watch her team.2

Some of the games beamed to Maine that month entered Mets lore after the team’s upset win in that fall’s World Series. They included a 4-3 walk-off win against the first-place Chicago Cubs on July 8, and Tom Seaver’s almost-perfect game against the Cubs the following night.

Other games shown on WMTW, while less iconic, were still interesting, like the Mets’ come-from-behind win against the Cincinnati Reds on July 25. Just as they had on July 8, the Mets scored three runs in their last turn at bat to turn a 3-1 deficit into a 4-3 victory. It was another bright piece in the mosaic that was the 1969 Mets’ miraculous season.

While Payson relaxed in the seaside community of Falmouth Foreside, her second-place team was keeping the heat on the Cubs.3 The Mets, managed by Gil Hodges, entered the game with a 53-40 record, 5½ games behind Chicago in the newly created National League East Division.4 The July 25 game was the second of a four-game set with Cincinnati, the Mets’ first series after the All-Star break. They’d stumbled in the first game, losing 4-3 on a 12th-inning home run by Tony Pérez.5

Manager Dave Bristol’s Reds sat in fourth place in the NL West Division with a 49-41 record,6 but were only 3½ games behind the division-leading Atlanta Braves.7 Many of the players who carried Cincinnati to the following year’s World Series were already present, including Pérez, Johnny Bench, Lee May, Tommy Helms, Jim Merritt, and Pete Rose. The famous nickname The Big Red Machine, applied to the great Reds teams of the 1970s, had been coined a few weeks earlier to refer to Cincinnati’s potent offense.8 Some of the Reds’ starters were missing on July 25: Bench and outfielder Alex Johnson were on military duty, while Helms was recovering from an appendectomy.9

In front of 38,538 fans10 on a Friday night at Shea Stadium, the Mets sent lefty Jerry Koosman to the mound. Koosman, in his second full season in the majors, entered with an 8-5 record and a sparkling 1.88 ERA.11 He’d pitched complete-game wins in his previous three starts and also contributed 1⅔ shutout innings in the All-Star Game on July 23. He hadn’t previously started against Cincinnati in 1969. His parents were on hand, in town from Appleton, Minnesota.12

Bristol countered with righty Jim Maloney, who had been the Reds’ ace for much of the mid-1960s but was playing his final full season in 1969 while dealing with arm, groin, and other injuries.13 He had a 4-2 record and a 2.80 ERA. Maloney had thrown a no-hitter against the Houston Astros on April 30 but struggled for much of the following month. He’d started two games against the Mets in 1969. On May 17, during his post-no-hitter difficulties, he gave up hits to the first two Mets batters in the first inning and was pulled from a game in which he eventually took the loss. Newspapers reported that he’d had trouble loosening up his pitching shoulder.14

Koosman breezed through the first three innings, allowing only a second-inning single to Pérez, who was erased in an around-the-horn double play. Maloney, in contrast, labored early on. With two outs in the first, the Mets’ Cleon Jones singled and moved to second when first baseman May couldn’t hold a pickoff throw from Maloney.15 Walks to Art Shamsky and Wayne Garrett loaded the bases for Ed Kranepool. Maloney escaped the jam by getting Kranepool to ground to second baseman Chico Ruiz.

The Mets mustered more offense in the third inning. Tommie Agee led off with a walk and Ken Boswell’s single sent him to third. One out later, Shamsky’s sacrifice fly to right field scored Agee for a 1-0 New York lead.

Maloney and Koosman posted zeroes in the fourth and fifth innings. Entering the sixth, Koosman had retired 11 straight Reds. Then Cincinnati’s bats awoke, starting with a leadoff single up the middle16 by Woody Woodward, who moved to second base on a sacrifice. Rose’s two-out single to center scored Woodward to tie the game, 1-1. Rose, playing right field in 1969, entered the game hitting .329 after a 2-for-5 performance against the Mets the night before; he ended the season as the NL batting champion at .348. The Reds weren’t done – Ruiz singled Rose to third, then stole second base without a throw – but Tolan struck out to end the rally.

The 1969 Reds led the NL in several offensive categories, including hits, home runs, RBIs, batting average,17 and slugging average, and their batters resumed the assault on Koosman in the seventh inning. Pérez led off with his 24th round-tripper of the season, to left field just over the glove of a leaping Jones,18 to give Cincinnati its first lead. With Ron Taylor starting to warm up for the Mets, May drew a walk. One out later, Woodward’s just-fair double down the right-field line19 scored May to give the Reds a 3-1 lead. It was Woodward’s first extra-base hit and second RBI of 1969. Danny Breeden, playing his second major-league game at catcher, popped to second. Maloney, allowed to hit for himself, struck out.

Rookie Rod Gaspar pinch-hit unsuccessfully for Koosman in the seventh, and Taylor retired the Reds in order in the eighth. Bristol also made a pitching change in the bottom half, summoning righty Clay Carroll, who entered the game with a 12-4 record and a 3.30 ERA.

Bristol and Maloney acknowledged after the game that Maloney didn’t have his best stuff, and Bristol said he had been judging batter by batter since the fifth inning whether to pull his starter. (Maloney “looked good to me,” Hodges said, diplomatically.)20

Carroll hit Jones with a pitch to start the eighth. Shamsky, a former Red, doubled off Tolan’s glove in right-center field to put runners at second and third.21 Garrett’s grounder to first scored Jones and sent Shamsky to third, where Al Weis ran for him.22 Weis held while Kranepool grounded out.

With Wayne Granger warming in the Reds bullpen,23 J.C. Martin, starting in place of Jerry Grote, batted next.24 Martin belted a first-pitch fastball to right field; it skimmed off the top of the fence and into the Mets’ bullpen to put the Mets back in front, 4-3.25 It was Martin’s fourth, and final, homer of the season.

Taylor came back out for the ninth, and the pesky Pérez led off with a double. May popped foul to Kranepool at first. Pinch-hitter Fred Whitfield sliced an opposite-field fly to left, where Jones caught up with it on the run. Though Woodward was 2-for-3, Bristol sent Jimmy Stewart to hit for him. Stewart smoked a line drive to shortstop Bud Harrelson, and the Mets had secured a nail-biting 4-3 win in 2 hours and 6 minutes.26 Taylor earned the win, Carroll took the loss, and no doubt Payson asked everyone she met in Falmouth Foreside the next day whether they’d watched her team.

Maine newspapers indicate that two more Mets games were aired on WMTW after July – games against the San Francisco Giants and Los Angeles Dodgers on August 30 and September 1.27 Presumably, Payson was in Maine at the time, though available sources do not specify. On September 24, while visiting London, she listened to the Mets’ division-clinching win over the St. Louis Cardinals via the Armed Forces Radio Network.28

Payson’s friends in Maine had eight more chances to watch the Mets on TV in October – at no cost to her – as the team won the NL Championship Series and World Series. Due to network affiliations, those games were not carried on WMTW, but on another Portland station, WCSH.29

Acknowledgments

This story was fact-checked by Tom Brown and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Photo credit: Joan Payson, National Baseball Hall of Fame Library.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author used the Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org websites for general player, team and season data and the box scores for this game. The author also listened to a recording of the game broadcast on the New York Mets’ radio network, recorded off WKAJ-FM in Saratoga Springs, New York, and made available on the Internet Archive.

This story was inspired by a mention of the July 1969 Maine TV broadcasts in George Vecsey’s Joy in Mudville (New York: McCall Publishing Company, 1970), 186.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/NYN/NYN196907250.shtml

https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1969/B07250NYN1969.htm

https://archive.org/details/cbotrarchive/1969+07-25+Reds+at+Mets.mp3

Notes

1 “Five Met Games Will Be on TV Channel 8,” Waterville (Maine) Morning Sentinel, July 5, 1969: 14; “WMTW to Televise Five Mets’ Games,” Bath-Brunswick (Maine) Times-Record, July 7, 1969: 9. Newspaper TV listings, as well as the story cited in Note 2, suggest that additional Mets games may have been aired that month beyond the five included in the initial announcement.

2 “Mets, Mrs. Payson Come to Maine – Coincidence?” Maine Sunday Telegram (Portland, Maine), July 13, 1969: 1. The costs were related to the hookup that carried Mets broadcasts to WMTW, as well as the preemption of ABC network programs. No Red Sox broadcasts were preempted. According to an online inflation calculator provided by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, $10,000 in July 1969 had the same purchasing power as $83,682 in the fall of 2023. “CPI Inflation Calculator,” US Bureau of Labor Statistics, accessed November 2, 2023, https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=10000&year1=196907&year2=202309.

3 The 1969 Mets held second place in the NL East from June 3 through August 12. A loss to Houston on August 13 dropped the Mets into third, but they reclaimed second place the next day. The Mets surged into first place with a doubleheader sweep of the Montreal Expos on September 10 and stayed there the rest of the season, finishing with an 8-game advantage.

4 The Mets, then in their eighth season as a franchise, were in thoroughly uncharted territory for them. They did not spend a day over .500 until April 17, 1966, when a win over Atlanta gave them a 2-1 record. The team lost the next day and remained at or below .500 – often well below it – for the remainder of the 1966, 1967, and 1968 seasons. The team had never led the NL at any point in its first seven seasons.

5 Of the five games included in the initial WMTW announcement, the July 24 game was the only one the Mets lost. In order, the games were the Mets’ 4-3 walk-off defeat of the Cubs on July 8; the Mets’ 4-0 win in Seaver’s near-no-hitter the following night; the Reds’ 12-inning, 4-3 win on July 24; the Mets’ 4-3 win on July 25, the subject of this story; and the Mets’ 3-2 defeat of the Reds on July 26.

6 And one tie.

7 The Braves won the NL West Division that season but were swept by the Mets in the first NL Championship Series.

8 When the author searched Newspapers.com in October 2023, the earliest use he found of the “Big Red Machine” nickname was Bob Hertzel, “Reds Glad to Be Home,” Cincinnati Enquirer, July 15, 1969: 33. The Enquirer, the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News, and other Ohio newspapers continued to use the nickname for the remainder of the 1969 season.

9 Gabe Buonaro, “Redlegs Outlast Mets in 12,” Paterson (New Jersey) Morning Call, July 25, 1969: 20; Mets broadcaster Lindsey Nelson also mentioned the appendectomy and the military service on the game’s radio broadcast. Backup catcher Pat Corrales was also absent following a personal tragedy: His wife, Sharon, had died three days earlier, shortly after giving birth to the couple’s fourth child.

10 Paid attendance was 37,470; the Mets’ game broadcast gave the total attendance as 38,538 but did not mention any specific promotion that accounted for the additional fans.

11 Koosman pitched in nine games for the 1967 Mets and 35 games in 1968.

12 Dana Mozley, “2-Run Homer by J.C. Saves the Night, 4-3,” New York Daily News, July 26, 1969: 30.

13 Maloney pitched seven games with the 1970 Reds and 13 games with the 1971 California Angels. Information on injuries from Gregory H. Wolf, “Jim Maloney,” SABR Biography Project, accessed October 2023.

14 “Pitching-Poor Reds Bombed 11-3,” Dayton Daily News, May 18, 1969: 1D.

15 May was charged with the error.

16 The hit is described as a “single to center” in Retrosheet. The Mets’ radio broadcast described it as a grounder up the middle that second baseman Ken Boswell fielded but could not make a play on.

17 The Reds and Pittsburgh Pirates tied for the NL’s top team batting average, .277.

18 Mets’ radio broadcast.

19 The Mets’ radio broadcast initially called the ball foul, then corrected to fair as May was waved home.

20 Earl Lawson, “Maloney Back in Rotation,” Cincinnati Post & Times-Star, July 26, 1969: 10. The Mets’ radio broadcast mentioned action in the Reds bullpen as early as the top of the sixth, with Carroll beginning to get loose just before Rose’s game-tying single.

21 Mozley, “2-Run Homer by J.C. Saves the Night, 4-3.”

22 Retrosheet has Weis running for Shamsky while Shamsky was at second base, but this appears to be incorrect. Both the Mets’ radio broadcast and Mozley say that Shamsky moved to third on Garrett’s grounder and was then replaced by Weis.

23 Mets’ radio broadcast.

24 Grote, usually the Mets’ starting catcher, had played the previous night. He got the July 26 game off as well, then returned to action on July 27. News stories from the period make no specific mention of an injury to Grote.

25 Lawson, “Maloney Back in Rotation;” Bob Hertzel, “Mets Rally in 8th, Beat Reds, 4-3,” Cincinnati Enquirer, July 26, 1969: 17. The Mets’ radio broadcast compared Martin’s drive to a stone skipping across water.

26 Mozley.

27 “Maine TV Diary,” Portland Press Herald, August 30, 1969: 3; “Maine TV Diary,” Portland Press Herald, September 1, 1969: 27.

28 Associated Press, “Mrs. Payson, Owner of Mets, in London,” Waterville Morning Sentinel, September 25, 1969: 12.

29 WMTW was an ABC affiliate; WCSH was affiliated with NBC, which broadcast the 1969 baseball postseason. Sample TV listings that show postseason games appearing on WCSH include “Sports Today,” Maine Sunday Telegram, October 5, 1969: 10B, and “TV Programs,” Portland Press-Herald, October 16, 1969: 38.