50 years later, one fan remembers an Amazin’ moment
Don’t let this get around, but I’ve got the dirt on the New York Mets’ stunning 1969 World Series win, the 50th anniversary of which is being celebrated this week. Perhaps I’d better explain. I was never much of a sports fan, and in grade school I was inevitably the last chosen for any team. But I loved reading books about baseball. Biographies of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig omitted the game’s duller parts and recounted only the highlights.
But Dad soon set me straight; those books were about Yankees.
“We’re Mets fans,“he patiently explained. My parents grew up in Brooklyn in the 1940s, when rooting for the Dodgers was as compulsory as eating a knish. When the Dodgers left for Los Angeles in 1957, my parents were bereft.
Happily, 1962 brought the arrival of a new expansion team, the
New York Metropolitans. By 1964 my family was living in a neighborhood in Queens, just a few miles from the new stadium in Flushing Meadow Park. It wasn’t long before
I was being dragged to the games.
As a reader and not a watcher of baseball, I was apprehensive. But I delighted in Shea, with its brightly colored rectangles hanging in vertical lines from the stadium’s facade, not unlike the backgrounds of musical numbers on “The Dean Martin Show.” It was the Swinging Sixties, and the Mets were a part of it.
Alas, when the Mets swung, they usually struck out. They couldn’t hit or pitch, and their ill-fated initial crop of players — “Marvelous Marv” Throneberry comes to mind — tended to run into one another trying to catch a high-fly to the outfield. Consistently in the catacombs of the National League, the inaugural 1962-63 Mets posted 120 losses.
“Can’t anybody here play this game?” their first manager, the crusty Casey Stengel, famously wailed. The Mets’ radio commercials hopefully concluded with the words, “We’ve got no place else to go…but UP.”
But watching the Mets lose game after game was, in the parlance of the time, a real downer. The German pessimist philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer would have been a perfect Mets fan.
Yet by some act of God or miracle of nature, the Mets went on to win the 1969 pennant and face off against the Baltimore Orioles in the World Series. And my father had scored two tickets for the crucial fifth game.
When we entered Shea Stadium with 57,395 other fans on the afternoon of Oct. 16, the Mets had a comfortable 3-to-1 lead. That did little to dispel our home-field angst; they’d blown it so many times before.
Our fears were confirmed when Baltimore scored three runs in the third. Then the Mets bounced back, and at the top of the ninth they were leading the Orioles 5-3. Could they really pull it out?
With two outs, Jerry Koosman pitched to Davey Johnson, who hit a high fly-ball to left field, and Cleon Jones was swiftly under it. He gracefully caught the ball and — in a gesture for the ages — crouched down and leapt up, arms extended in victory.
The Mets had managed to top the moon landing three months prior by winning the World Series. I’ve never seen a crowd, before or since, so over the moon.
Fans spilled onto the field. Caught up in the exhilaration, I scooped up a handful of infield dirt and slipped it into my pocket. Then I felt something whack me on the back of the neck, a piece of sod someone had ripped up from the grassy part of the field. I decided to take the turf, too.
When I got home, I put the Shea dirt into an old Excedrin bottle and planted the sod on the lawn in front of our house. I imagine it’s still there, just as the pill bottle is still up in my attic. Both souvenirs recall the day the miserable Mets became the Miracle Mets. And a bookish kid discovered that the last can, one day, be first.
Nason is a writer living in Whitestone.