1969 Mets: Spring Ahead

Spring training in 1969 was one of the most disjointed preseasons in major league history. There was much being seen for the first time. New franchises were added, new divisions created new rivalries, the pitcher’s working environment was irretrievably altered, and for the first time a work stoppage threatened training camps. The Mets had to deal with these issues like any other team, but heading into spring training 1969 their chief concern was about the health of their manager.

Gil Hodges was a quiet leader. Beloved as a player in Brooklyn, his slump was the cause of prayers throughout the borough during the early 1950s, and he had returned home to join the fledgling Mets when they took the place of the departed Dodgers and Giants in 1962. Even when Hodges was traded to Washington the following year, fans were happy because he was getting the chance to manage. The Mets traded to get him back after the 1967 season, and the love affair between fans and Gil Hodges, which had never extinguished, burned hot again. He immediately worked with the Mets front office to acquire players he was familiar with from the American League, yet he let his young players learn on the field. He showed patience and stressed hard work. There was no miracle in 1968, but there was marked improvement at Shea Stadium. Besides battling the Astros to stay out of the basement, the Mets had exceeded their manager’s preseason goal of 70 wins when they arrived in Atlanta for the last road stop of the year on September 24.

Hodges had thrown batting practice despite suffering from a cold for a few days. Early in that night’s game, Hodges left the dugout and told pitching coach Rube Walker that he was going to lie down. Walker, his pitching coach in Washington before coming with him to New York, had never known Hodges to do any such thing during a game. Trainer Gus Mauch called for a doctor and Hodges was soon on his way to Henry Grady Hospital, not a mile from Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium. The hospital confirmed that Hodges had suffered a heart attack and he was placed in the intensive care unit. He missed the rest of the season and was still in the Atlanta hospital a month later. The question whether he would manage the team in 1969, according to Mets beat writer Jack Lang, “went unanswered for months.”

Time eventually provided the answer. A three-pack a day smoker, Hodges gave up cigarettes, went on a strict diet, and spent the offseason relaxing and recuperating with his wife, Joan. From the time Hodges went to the hospital until spring training in February, the manager was virtually unseen and unheard as the team kept the press and public in a veil of secrecy that, in Lang’s words, “would have made the Kremlin proud.” So spring training in St. Petersburg was the first time many reporters got to see the Mets manager since his heart attack. By then, there were a lot of other developments to follow.

The astonishing dominance of pitching in 1968 had been a few years in coming. The 1960s had been a decade of remarkable achievements, but many of them had come from the mound. The major leagues, under pressure for the first time due to the burgeoning popularity of professional football, adopted changes that the powers that be in baseball would have once resisted with every fiber of their being.

The strike zone was changed. Umpires were required to call strikes as they had before the broadening of the zone in 1962. After six seasons with umpires calling strikes all the way to the shoulders, the strike zone returned to the earlier definition as “that space over home plate between the batter’s armpits and the top of his knees when he assumes a natural stance.” The pitching mound was lowered from 15 to 10 inches to try to bring pitchers down to size and not have a repeat of a 31-game winner in Detroit (Denny McLain of the world champion Tigers) or a .301 batting champion in Boston (Carl Yastrzemski of the Red Sox). It was hoped these changes would also bring Bob Gibson back to the earthly strata after his 1.12 ERA for the National League champion Cardinals, the lowest ERA for a qualifying pitcher since Mordecai “Three Finger” Browns 1.04 in 1906. In case those changes didn’t work, an idea first flouted by Connie Mack in that 1906 season was given a spring trial 63 years later. Both leagues agreed to test out a rule where a “designated pinch hitter” would bat for the pitcher every time up in a game. The NL didn’t take as much of a shine to it as the AL, but both leagues shelved the idea at the end of spring training.

Divisional play, approved by owners in July 1968, became a reality for the first time in major league history in 1969. Two teams the Mets considered close rivals and major draws because of history—the Giants and Dodgers—would now be in the Western Division and oppose them only 12 times a year (six home and six away). The Braves, Astros, Reds, and the brand-new San Diego Padres would make up the rest of the division. The geographically-challenged realignment would put the Midwestern Cubs and Cardinals in the East with the Mets. They would be joined by the two Pennsylvania clubs—the Pirates and Phillies—plus Canada’s first entry into the major leagues: the Montreal Expos. Division opponents played one another 18 times per season. The American League also split into two divisions, with the expansion Kansas City Royals and Seattle Pilots in the Western Division along with the Angels, Twins, White Sox, and recently relocated Oakland A’s—making Chicago the only team in that division not relocated or created since 1961. The AL East had the majority of the old-line junior circuit clubs as well as eight of the last nine pennant winners: the Tigers, Red Sox, Orioles, and Yankees, plus the long-languishing Indians and the Senators, the latter a ’61 expansion creation (the 765 Senators games managed by Hodges would remain the franchise record in Washington; Bobby Valentine would surpass it after the club relocated to Texas).

The two division winners in each league would now play a best-of-five postseason series to determine the pennant winner. Season-ending ties for the National League pennant had previously been decided by best-of-three series; any ties for a division title would now be settled by a one-game playoff, as had always been the case in the American League.

Presiding over the two leagues was a new commissioner, Bowie Kuhn. Formerly the attorney for the National League, he had been hired as commissioner to replace the ineffective William Eckert, who did nothing to try to stem the coming labor unrest in the game. Kuhn beat out challenges from Yankees president Mike Burke and Giants head of baseball operations Chub Feeney, the latter was soon named NL president. Kuhn was hired in February for one year at a rate of $100,000, at a time when the average salary was $10,000 and the highest-paid Met, Tom Seaver, made $35,000. Kuhn was thrown right into the fire. The Major League Players Association called for players to not sign their 1969 contracts until a dispute regarding the pension fund and benefits was resolved. Kuhn and MLBPA head Marvin Miller settled the situation with a three-year deal on February 25, exactly three weeks after Kuhn had been elected to office.

Mets players had kept busy during the brief stoppage, working out and joking with the press at “Camp Seaver.” Though informal in nature, the player-run camp gave Mets pitchers a leg up on teams that passively waited out the stoppage. With a little over a week between the delayed start of spring training and first exhibition games, Mets pitchers were young and limber. It was the hitting that was the bigger problem.

The Mets still lacked a big bat. Despite the presence of Ed Kranepool—the union rep and last original Met still in the team colors—first base was the obvious spot for an upgrade. With third-year pro Rod Gaspar hitting .333 in his first 36 at-bats in Florida, the temptation was to start the kid in right, move Ron Swoboda to left field and put career outfielder Cleon Jones at first base. Hodges, a three-time Gold Glove winner at the position, opined, “Anybody can play first base.”

Joe Torre, a catcher by trade, was poised for a move to first base and Atlanta was looking to deal him. Atlanta general manager Paul Richards talked with the Mets and wanted its top two young players: Nolan Ryan and Amos Otis. Though Torre was just 28 and already a five-time All-Star, the price was too steep for GM Johnny Murphy or the Mets. The Mets had gone to West Palm Beach to face the Braves on St. Patrick’s Day hoping to return to St. Petersburg with Torre. Otis was considered a better prospect than Ryan by the Mets, who had drafted “Famous Amos” from the Red Sox and converted him from shortstop to center fielder. (A Hodges spring experiment to convert him to a third baseman did not work.) Ryan would have given the Braves the league’s fastest pitcher to go along with the slowest (knuckleballer Phil Niekro). Both Otis and Ryan remained Mets while Torre was indeed sent to the St. Pete training facility on March 17, only it was to the Cardinals’ side of the complex. Orlando Cepeda went from the Cardinals to the Braves as compensation.

As spring training started to wind down, the annual prognostications started rolling in. Las Vegas had the Mets at 100-to-l odds to win the World Series. The sportswriters were going with conventional wisdom as well. After feeding statistics into a computer and coming up with a “Strength Ratio” to determine where a team would finish, Bud Goode of the New York Daily News reported the results. “Detroit and St. Louis figure to repeat as [league] champs,” he wrote. “The Mets have some great young hurlers. However, the Mets need to score 100 more runs to challenge. The computer pinpoints their inability to win close games as a major factor in their ninth-place finish last year.” (The computer turned out to be wrong, the Mets would score 159 more runs in 1969 than the previous year, raising their per game offensive total from 2.90 to 3.90—even in a year of enhanced offense, that was the fourth-highest increase in the NL, and the best in the Eastern division.)

The Mets finished the spring with an exhibition doubleheader against the Twins in New Orleans, a chance for that city to display its major league readiness should any club decide to make the Big Easy the 15th city to land a team since the Braves first shifted locations in 1953. The Mets and Minnesota—two of those aforementioned 14—played an Easter Day doubleheader after the Saturday game was rained out. Each game was to be seven innings, but the Mets won the first and took off with the lead in the fifth inning of the nightcap to catch a plane. The Mets finished the spring at 14-10, tying them with the 1966 Mets for the best percentage in spring training.

The ’66 club, under Wes Westrum, had been the first Mets team not to lose 100 games. As the Mets left for New York on April 7, 1969, no one would have imagined that the team could actually match their .583 spring mark in the regular season… much less better it by 34 points and win 100 games. It was beyond the unthinkable, it was impossible, it was destiny.

MATTHEW SILVERMAN has written several books on the Mets, including 100 Things Mets Fans Should Know and Do Before They Die, Mets Essential, Shea Goodbye (with Keith Hernandez), and Mets by the Numbers (with Jon Springer). He works as editor with Greg Spira on the Maple Street Press Mets Annual. He served as managing editor for Total Baseball, Total Football, The ESPN Football Encyclopedia, and as associate editor for The ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia. A former associate publisher at Total Sports Publishing, he was lead editor for Baseball: The Biographical Encyclopedia. He lives in High Falls, New York.

 

SOURCES

Daily News Legend Series, Amazin’ Mets: The Miracle of ’69 (Sports Publishing, 1999).

Koppett, Leonard. The New York Mets (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1974).

Lang Jack and Simon, Peter. The New York Mets: Twenty-Five Years of Baseball Magic (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1986).

“The Strike Zone: A Historical Timeline” http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/official_info/umpires/strike_zone.jsp