The September of My Youth

Topps created 787 different baseball cards for 1972. I don’t remember how many of them I collected, but at least until the final series I’d say “many,” if not most. With the questionably titled In Action subset; the Awards — what kid doesn’t want to stare at a plaque?; the Boyhood Photos of the Stars; and the updated, stenciled TRADEDs that captured Jim Fregosi at Spring Training (where they could have left him), the ’72s sprawled like nothing I’d experienced. It never occurred to me I could have collected them all.

Topps created a more concise 660 baseball cards for 1974 and released each of them into the world at once. Plus airbrushed TRADED cards, which were however many, and the individual team checklists, which were 24. Give or take some WASHINGTON “NAT’L LEA.” variations, I collected every 1974 Topps card eventually, the vast majority of them in the moment by ripping open pack after pack. This is what a kid who was a baseball fan did when he was 9 and 11, respectively.

So I have scads of 1972s and stacks of 1974s. But, I wondered a while back, why didn’t I accumulate more 1973s? An exact count has never been calculated, but I know I have some 1973s. Not a slight amount, but no quantity competing with the year before or the year after or, for that matter, most of the years when I was a kid. I was 10. I loved baseball. I loved baseball cards. I very much liked the 1973 Topps design. I found it space-agey in a good way. Yet my primary goal as a 10-year-old wasn’t to collect the cards that came out that year.

In my sixties, the answer came to me: 45s and Wacky Packs. Those seven-inch records in the spring, those stickers that spoofed name-brand consumer goods in the summer. Those were what my allowance went toward in 1973. I was up to four bucks a week by then. It could have been subconscious budgeting that directed my funds toward one obsession rather than another, or it could have been my first experience with the concept of bandwidth. If I was interested a lot in something, it would figure I was less interested in something else. Even when you’re 10 and your life outside school or camp and whatever you’re being told to do at home to amass your weekly four bucks is whatever you decide it is, your brain and your instincts are going to take you to only so many places.

First, at the age of 10, to the record store, because in the spring of 1973, I was all about Top 40 radio. When I put together that the songs I heard and grooved to could be mine for less than a dollar (such bargains that they even came with flip sides!), I was all in. “The Night The Lights Went Out In Georgia” by Vicki Lawrence. “Stir It Up” by Johnny Nash. “Out Of The Question” by Gilbert O’Sullivan. “I’m Doing Fine Now” by New York City. “Shambala” by Three Dog Night. “One Of A Kind (Love Affair)” by my beloved Rock & Roll Hall of Fame-inducted The Spinners. I could go on and often do.

Locked into WGBB, then WXLO, then WPIX, my radio kept playing in 1973. One August weekend, I discovered American Top 40 with Casey Kasem, and I was hooked on the countdown concept for life, in case you hadn’t noticed. Though come summer, I had eased up on record store visits and turned back toward the familiar surroundings of our neighborhood candy stores, where I bought my baseball cards. Except the items in wrappers I sought were Wacky Packs. Wacky Packages seems to be the correct term, but everybody called them Wacky Packs.

These were essentially retro items for me. I was 10 and getting nostalgic for something from when I was younger. Wacky Packs had first come out a few years earlier, when my sister was in elementary school. They were issued on cardboard stock, like differently shaped baseball cards. She and I bonded over their hilarity. Tide was Tied. Cracker Jack was Cracked Jerk. Chock Full o’ Nuts was Chock Full o’ Bolts. Gravy Train was Grave Train. I’m pretty sure you get how it worked. Like her ’67 and ’68 baseball cards, I inherited these from Susan as she matriculated through junior high. Like football cards, Partridge Family cards and other oddball flotsam that entered my collecting sphere, they weren’t baseball cards, but they filled gaps.

Out of nowhere, Wacky Packs were back in the general preadolescent consciousness in the summer of ’73, in sticker form. I didn’t see the point of them as stickers, because how were you supposed to collect them like cards, but that’s how they came. Everybody was into Wacky Packs — Jail-O; Gadzooka; Skimpy — and I was no different. “You know, these used to be cards,” I’d start to mention to my fellow 10-year-olds before allowing them the pleasure of discovering the charms of Hostage Cupcakes in whatever form was accessible to them. Each generation is entitled to thinking it is onto something for the first time ever.

This was me and my interests in the summer of 1973. Wacky Packs I stuck carefully to sheets of paper. Music in my ears and on lists. Maybe a glance at the Watergate hearings. Not so many new baseball cards, but all the ones I’d already gathered not going anywhere as long as my mother didn’t make good on her threat to throw them out if I didn’t clean up my room.

And somewhere in the background, a little obscured due to bandwidth limits, my favorite baseball team.

9. 1973
In the primordial ooze from which was conceived MY FAVORITE SEASONS, FROM LEAST FAVORITE TO MOST FAVORITE, 1969-‘PRESENT’ (with 2024’s slotting TBD), I had what amounted to a Top Seven list. As a Casey Kasem Connoisseur, I knew there was no cachet to a Top Seven, so I needed to stretch it out a bit. Eventually it became a Top Ten in my mind, and then all of the Met seasons I’d experienced on this blog. I will present No. 7 through No. 1 in due order in due time. The Top Seven within MY FAVORITE SEASONS makes total sense to me.

What wasn’t making sense to me as the Top Seven grew into a Top Ten was articulating to my satisfaction how 1973 missed the initial septet cut. It’s my touchstone of a season. It’s the season I’m almost certain I’ve referenced either directly or indirectly more than any season in Mets history across the one day shy of twenty full years we’ve been blogging. It’s the season that defines so much of what it means to be a Mets fan, especially if you were growing up back then. I was definitely growing up back then. I was definitely a Mets fan back then. My veins course with the blood of the 1973 Mets. My blood type is YGB+. My DNA reveals torrents of You and Gotta and Believe. I counter every rational discouraging thought about the trajectory of every rationally discouraging Met season with “1973,” and whatever I’m trying to decide about the immediate fate of the contemporary Mets becomes no worse than a coin flip. “Sure we suck, but so did the 1973 Mets, and they…”

All of that, and it’s No. 9? Huh? American Top 40 was based on record sales and radio airplay. MY FAVORITE SEASONS, especially amid its upper echelons, is based on touch and feel and personal perception of what made this Mets fan this Mets fan. Hence, I can offer two explanations for why my reverence for the 1973 Mets can’t elevate their year any higher than No. 9 on my all-time list.

1) The stuff about limited bandwidth, which explains why for the first five months of the season, maybe I just wasn’t as engrossed in the Mets at the age of 10 as I usually was.

2) Nineteen Seventy-Three wasn’t an endpoint in my Mets fandom. It was a booster rocket. Once it took off, there was no telling where it was going to take me. As Gary Cohen might say, 1973 was one of my seminal seasons. I Believed then so I could Believe more later — or maybe 1973 walked so other seasons could run, even if they wound up running into a wall.

Rankings can be incidental when most everything on your list is something you label FAVORITE; they are things you really love. We’re in the Top Ten. I love what’s at No. 10. I love what’s at No. 8. Love is all around, no need to fake it (I watched my share of sitcoms then, too). No. 9 is plenty lofty, appropriate enough, as by September of 1973, my Met head was in the clouds.

Ah, September, the month that catapults 1973 into a league of its own. The Wacky Packs fad had faded. The radio volume was lowered, unless WHN was needed for non-country music purposes. September was when 1973 became 1973, and my bandwidth was tuned to one frequency.

The Mets re-emerged as the overwhelming priority of my 10-year-old life. So what if I didn’t have that many 1973 Mets cards? I kept the 1973 Mets here (points to head) and here (points to heart) and here (points all over). The same Mets who were kind of a drag in the middle of summer…the same Mets who couldn’t get out of their own way or last place in July and August…the same Mets who were without significant segments of their frontline attack due to injuries…they weren’t the same Mets anymore. They were “the 1973 Mets” now and “the 1973 Mets” forever more. We still know exactly what that means.

Every day of September, I was flush with the realization that this team could do and was doing the possible. I knew there was a kind of precedent for it, having come along late to the 1969 rise from utterly unlikely, but I also knew this was singular and sensational. It was getting done. The last-place team became a fifth-place team. The fifth-place team became a fourth-place team. The margin from the middle of the pack to the top of this chart was dwindling to infinitesimal. Fourth became third. Third became second. Games Above .500 wasn’t the barrier to entry it was in other divisions. We did things differently in the National League East in September 1973. If I understood the word “mediocre” at 10 years old, I didn’t bother to investigate its nuances. Besides, my team wasn’t mediocre. It was winning practically every day with a phalanx of players who were living up to their best selves.

Second became first and stayed there. The first-place New York Mets of September 1973 nosed out in front and fended off what was left of all comers. It took until October 1 — honorary September 31 — to make it official. We Gotta Believed all the way to the NL East title that was on nobody’s radar less than five weeks earlier, unless you studied the standings intently and had an aptitude for math. I loved math as a kid until it got hard. It wasn’t hard to Believe the 1973 Mets, 6½ out on August 30, could hop, skip and jump over the combined shortcomings of the Phillies, Cubs, Expos, Pirates and Cardinals. The math checked out. The Mets finished with three more wins than losses, and a game-and-a-half better than anybody else.

Our team earned us the right to watch three to five more games of baseball with a genuine rooting interest. The Cincinnati Reds awaited us in the playoffs. I was too hyped up to notice they had 99 wins to our 82. I had Seaver and Matlack and Koosman on my side. I had Tug as my spiritual guide and the immortal Willie saying Goodbye to America but not to his bat just yet. I had Cleon and Rusty and Garrett hot as hell, as Grote having come back and Hodges having performed a mini-miracle in Grote’s stead and the likes of Bud Harrelson and Felix Millan up the middle all at once reminding us that they had been All-Stars not so long before.

Rose? Bench? Perez? Morgan? We had us. It didn’t occur to me that these Mets beating those Reds would be an upset. I just watched the Mets overturn five teams’ playoff hopes in a month. What was one more inside a week? The Reds squeaked out two wins by a run apiece. The Mets took the other three games by five, seven and five runs, respectively, Haiku-style. Our victories weren’t generated without some fuss, but we were in the middle of making a fuss over the 1973 Mets, so what was a little more?

You had to Believe
Great pitching beat great hitting
The New York Mets ruled

We won the pennant. We were in the World Series. We were about to face the defending world champions, the A’s. I didn’t think Oakland was unconquerable, and they weren’t. We just didn’t conquer them. A ground ball here, a passed ball there, maybe a managerial decision or two…ah, I don’t sweat it that much a half-century or so after the fact. A little, but not to excess. Not winning everything at the very end in October 1973 couldn’t blemish what September 1973 gave us and gave me. September 1973 gave us and gave me our and my template — Septemplate? — to deal with daunting seasons and daunting months in the decades ahead. Even daunting innings. You Gotta Believe has never sounded off-key. That it rarely worked as well as it did in September of ’73 didn’t detract from the power of the original month from heaven.

Somewhere inside me, I’m living every month I’ve ever been a Mets fan. But my default setting is one month in particular.

If you’d like to take a deeper dive into the glorious 1973 Met weeds, check out what Len Ferman has created here and see what Jacob Kanarek has recently revised here.

PREVIOUS ‘MY FAVORITE SEASONS’ INSTALLMENTS
Nos. 55-44: Lousy Seasons, Redeeming Features
Nos. 43-34: Lookin’ for the Lights (That Silver Lining)
Nos. 33-23: In the Middling Years
Nos. 22-21: Affection in Anonymity
No. 20: No Shirt, Sherlock
No. 19: Not So Heavy Next Time
No. 18: Honorably Discharged
No. 17: Taken Down in Paradise City
No. 16: Thin Degree of Separation
No. 15: We Good?
No. 14: This Thing Is On
No. 13: One of Those Teams
No. 12: (Weird) Dream Season
No. 11: Hold On for One More Year
No. 10: Retrospectively Happy Days