A TERRIFIC LIFE
News’ Bill Madden offers sneak peak at his new book on Mets great Tom Seaver
Excerpt from TOM SEAVER by Bill Madden. Copyright © 2020 by Bill Madden. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc, NY. To purchase a copy, visit Simon & Schuster’s website. Even after Tom Seaver gutted out a 7–5 complete game victory in which he gave up a couple of home runs and struck out only three against the Red Sox in Fenway Park, on July 30, 1985, for number 299, it didn’t initially dawn on him that his next start would be against the Yankees — in New York! “I never looked ahead,” Seaver said in a 2016 interview. “Someone pointed it out to me in the clubhouse afterward; I don’t remember who. I just remember thinking, ‘Well, isn’t that gonna be nice. At least it’ll be an easy commute for Nancy and the girls.’” A few days before arriving in New York, Seaver was asked if he would feel any special revenge toward the Mets by winning his three hundredth game in their backyard. The passage of time had mellowed him. “I’m not going back with any idea of that,” he said. “I have some very, very good memories of New York and its fans. When I left New York this last time, it was an honest mistake. There was no animosity leading up to the point where I was left unprotected. [Mets co-owner] Nelson Doubleday called me and apologized and told me he hoped I’d get my three hundredth real soon. So, it’s not anything where I’m trying to show anybody up.” When the White Sox arrived in New York late Thursday night, August 1, for the four-game series against the Yankees, Seaver went home to Greenwich. Only when he was reading the newspaper at breakfast Friday morning did he learn that Sunday, when he would be making his hopefully historic start, had long before been designated “Phil Rizzuto Day” by the Yankees to honor their beloved former shortstop and longtime broadcaster by retiring his uniform number 10. So be it, Seaver thought; while the Rizzuto festivities were going on prior to the game, he would be otherwise indisposed. Sunday, August 4, dawned to an unsettling commotion in the Seaver household. Somehow a bat — the flying kind — had made an unwelcome intrusion through a window in the old converted barn, arousing Tom and Nancy and sending them scurrying about to find a broom. Once one was located, Tom began flailing away at the bat until the creature finally winged off out the window whence it had come. Their rude awakening having subsided,
Tom and Nancy went back to bed and were able to catch a couple more hours’ sleep before the fortyyear-old pitcher was to start preparing for the biggest day of his career.
It was a fitful morning, Seaver would later reveal, that had nothing to do with the bat invasion. His stomach was uneasy, and he could hardly get down an English muffin for breakfast. He had a headache, too. When he arrived in the visitors’ clubhouse at Yankee Stadium later that morning, Jerry Reinsdorf and Eddie Einhorn, the White Sox owners, were waiting for him, along with a small group of reporters and a clubhouse man holding a case of baseballs for him to sign.
“How do you feel, Tom?” Einhorn asked.
“I’ve got a headache, and my stomach is queasy as hell,” Seaver said, laughing. “Otherwise, I feel just great.”
LaRussa knew otherwise. Between the ceremony to honor Rizzuto and Seaver’s “homecoming” going for his three hundredth win, the White Sox manager could envision all the theater that was about to unfold in the House that Ruth Built. Privately, he was anxious and worried about his pitcher.
“I remember the atmosphere in the stadium like it was yesterday,” LaRussa said in a 2017 interview. “At least half the fans were Mets fans, while the Yankees had all these formidable hitters, future Hall of Famers like Dave Winfield and Rickey Henderson, and there’d been so much buildup. I’m saying to myself, ‘I know he’s Tom Seaver, but this is so unfair to Tom to have all this attention and, likely, you know they’re going to get him, and we’re not going to play well, and it’s just not going to be a storybook ending. How wrong was I?”
Shortly before two o’clock, Seaver began making his way down to the bullpen for his pregame warm-up session. By now, the Rizzuto Day ceremonies had taken on the air of the TV game show The
Price Is Right, as one corporate CEO after another presented the sixty-eight-year-old Yankees legend with a slew of expensive gifts ranging from cars and boats to golf clubs, lifetime supplies of soft drinks, and a trip to Italy. It was John Campi, the longtime vice president of promotions for the New York Daily News, who supplied a welcome bit of levity to the interminable proceedings by coming up with the idea of presenting Rizzuto with a cow, adorned with a golden halo, in recognition of the signature “Holy cow!” phrase
the Scooter was so fond of invoking throughout his broadcasts. Taking the reins of the cow from legendary
Daily News cartoonist Bill Gallo, Rizzuto was suddenly jolted when the frisky bovine, who’d apparently had enough of all this shlock, stepped on his foot and knocked him to the ground. Fortunately, Rizzuto, who came up laughing, was not hurt, although years later he would frequently complain in jest about being upstaged on his own day by a cow and, of all people, an ex-Met, Tom Seaver.
“It’s funny,” said Reinsdorf in a 2017 interview, “I have absolutely no memory of the Rizzuto ceremony that day. That’s how so consumed I was with Seaver.”
Because the Rizzuto Day ceremonies dragged on as long as they did, Seaver twice had to stop throwing in the bullpen. It was not until 3:06 p.m., after the White Sox had come up empty despite two singles and two walks off the Yankees’ Joe
Cowley in the top of the first, that Seaver finally got to throw his first pitch. Among the near-sellout Yankee Stadium crowd of 54,032 were former president Richard Nixon, Baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberroth, and, sitting in a box right next to the visiting team’s dugout, Nancy and their two daughters, twelve-year-old Sarah and nineyear-old Annie. Along with them was Seaver’s seventy-four-year-old father, Charles, who, a half century earlier, had achieved his own bit of sporting fame by going unbeaten for the United States in its victorious 1932 Walker Cup golf match against Great Britain. On his way out to the bullpen before the game, Seaver stopped at the box and handed his dad a baseball.
He was not quite sure what kind of reception he would get, Yankee Stadium being longtime hostile territory for anyone with a Mets pedigree, and the day already devoted to Rizzuto. So, it was immediately a great comfort to see so many people standing and applauding him as he took the mound in the first inning. It was hard to differentiate Yankees fans from Mets fans, as they were all chanting “Sea-vuh! Sea-vuh!” in the same New York accent.
“I was beat as hell,” Seaver conceded later. “It was like I was levitating on the mound. I hadn’t felt like that since 1969 when I was going for a perfect game against the Cubs. But there wasn’t a chance in hell I was coming out. If you can’t get up for one more out for your three hundredth win, then you never will!”
It was 6:11 p.m., four hours and one minute after he’d first gone out to warm up, when Seaver threw his 142nd and final pitch of the game: a fastball close in on [Don] Baylor’s hands. Baylor swung and lofted a high fly to medium left field. White Sox left fielder Reid Nichols moved in a couple of steps, then drifted back the same distance to camp under the ball and make the catch. It was over. Tom Seaver had just become the seventeenth pitcher in baseball history to win three hundred games. Final score 4–1, Seaver’s uniform number throughout his major-league career. “Hel-lo?” Nancy would say later.
As soon as the ball settled into Nichols’s glove, Ozzie Guillen leaped high into the air, screaming and waving his arms in exhilaration. After watching the catch, crouched down between the pitcher’s mound and first base, Seaver turned and looked at Fisk, letting out a shout before jumping into his catcher’s arms. “Seaves,” Fisk said, joyously, “you’d have been nothing without me!” (Before he left the field, Fisk made sure to grab all the used balls from the game out of the home plate umpire’s bag.)
After being mobbed in a brief scrum by his teammates, Seaver’s attention quickly turned to Nancy, sitting in the dugout box and wiping away tears with a handkerchief. He broke away and rushed over to hug her and the girls, but he was a moment behind Guillen, who had decided to collect his reward for the game-winning hit by being the first to plant a smooch on Nancy and the Seaver daughters. “I said ‘Congratulations’ to all of them,” Guillen explained to the media afterward, “because family is a part of your life. They felt real ‘wow.’ I was just real excited for a teammate and a good guy.”