Terrific only began to say it.
Tom Seaver [1] was everything to the New York Mets. Everything. He was everything to me. Everything. And I know I’m not alone in that assessment.
Seaver’s death [2] Monday at the age of 75 was announced tonight shortly after the current Mets’ win at Baltimore [3]. I watched that game, as I watch practically every game, probably because I watched the Mets play their way to Baltimore and the World Series 51 years ago next month. The Mets played their way to Baltimore in October of 1969, taking on and taking down the mighty Orioles, in large part because they had the good sense to ask the commissioner of baseball to write their name on a slip of paper and stick it in a hat in the spring of 1966. The Mets’ name emerged. The perennially bottom-scraping Mets didn’t know it, but they were soon to follow.
Seaver made the Mets a year later. Then he made the Mets over.
[4]Tom Terrific, 1944-2020.
There are and have been many avenues into loving this team, a team hobbled by expansion when they were born and perversely celebrated as lovable losers as they barely learned to crawl let alone walk. We understand imperfection. We revel in humanity. We root for the underdog because we fancy ourselves the underdog.
But then we got somebody who shattered every paradigm about what it meant to be the New York Mets and to love the New York Mets. Somebody who was as far from losing as first place was from tenth. Somebody who not so much flirted with perfection but set up shop just down the block from it. Somebody who was human, yes, but performed in a superhuman manner, leaving behind an indelible image of a pitcher and a person who could not be beat.
That ethos and ability took Tom Seaver to the major leagues, then to its top, where he stayed for the balance of two decades as an active player and then forever after as an immortal. Find me a better pitcher than Tom Seaver. I’ve been a fan of this sport for 52 seasons. I haven’t found one, though to be fair, I stopped looking after I found No. 41.
Seaver played baseball for as long as he could, then checked in and out of the game as he chose. After his retirement, we saw him both reasonably often and not nearly enough. He held a few titles as an emeritus Met, but living legend amply covered his portfolio.
Half of that all-purpose descriptor is gone now, with Tom a victim of complications from Lyme disease, dementia and COVID-19. We knew about how the first one brought on the second. I hadn’t heard anything about the third, but this is 2020, and when more than 180,000 of our countrymen have died from a virus, one or more is bound to be somebody you can’t believe could be ended. We couldn’t believe Tom Seaver had to retire from public life in the first place, in 2019. He was too strong, too much the champion. Nobody filled out the spot atop a pitching rubber like Tom Seaver. I don’t know jack about wine, but I’m sure nobody filled out a vineyard like Tom Seaver, either.
I came to loving the Mets in 1969. Tom Seaver was instantly my favorite Met of all time. All time has yet to expire where my affection is concerned. He was the best when the Mets were the best, and perhaps as a six-year-old that was all I needed to know. Soon the Mets wouldn’t be so much the best, but Tom never ceased, not as far as I could reckon. He won twenty games for us four times and five times overall. He won the Cy Young three times. He pitched in two World Series. He lifted us to our first world championship, the world’s least probable, earned to an Amazin’ extent on the right arm of the man observed by anybody with any sense of the game as the most likely to succeed. When the time came for his ticket to be stamped for Cooperstown, the process couldn’t have been more of a formality: 311 wins; a 2.86 ERA over twenty seasons; and 3,640 strikeouts translated to a 98.8% Hall of Fame approval rating, the highest any starting pitcher has ever drawn.
I’m always citing numbers with Seaver. I can’t help myself. They were so astounding to me, so far beyond what anybody else was posting. You can wake me up on Christmas morning, as the saying goes, and I can rattle them off: 16-13; 16-12; 25-7; 18-12; 20-10; 21-12; 19-10; 11-11; 22-9; 14-11; 7-3. Then 6/15/77. Then 4/5/83. Some numbers in between and thereafter for three other teams. Then 41 on the wall, 425 out of 430 votes from the BBWAA and, honestly, I can swim in those numbers for hours.
But you can look those up on Baseball-Reference or anywhere. Tom Seaver transcended his statistics. The professionalism. The striving. The striding. The knee in the dirt as he drove the ball toward home plate, to whichever spot he judged optimal for the achievement of an out. The fastball that blew as many as ten batters in a row away. The reimagining of his arsenal as he grasped that his inherent physical talents were diminishing. The Franchise, obviously. A man who showed up at Shea in 1967, refusing to suffer losing gladly. A man who put away his gear in 1987, declining to compete at a level that wouldn’t permit him every chance to win and win again. For a generation, he was the personification of winning. I knew it. His teammates knew it. The opposing batters knew it. Magnificence cross-bred with consistency leavened with the intensely cerebral and the indefatigably competitive. Oh, brother, Tom was more than terrific.
Terrific only began to say it. Yet it says so much.