For my 12th birthday, in May 1976, my father took me to the National Baseball Hall of Fame, in Cooperstown, NY. Toward the end of our visit, he told me I could pick out one item from the gift shop.
The Hall of Fame was a more modest museum back then, nowhere near its current size and scope; a half-century ago, it was more a collection of old shoes, clothing, and equipment.
I could have picked anything to take home to Setauket, Long Island: a T-shirt, jersey, or cap. Maybe a bat, a ball, or a glove. Anything. The place was stocked with memorabilia that would have been the envy of all my friends. But there was one item that called out to me with a sentimental and nostalgic tone.
In the formative years of my baseball fandom, I spent a lot of time listening to Mets games on a transistor radio tucked under my pillow. Extending my bedtimes were the voices of the Mets’ mighty broadcasting triumvirate of Bob Murphy, Ralph Kiner, and Lindsey Nelson. It was music to my ears. And now, in the gift shop, I could barely believe my eyes. There in front of me was an album cover bearing big yellow letters reading “Ya Gotta Believe.” Underneath, smaller type promised “all the exciting play-by-play action highlights and interviews of the amazin’ Mets 1973 end of season play-offs and World Series Championship Games.”
I had struck gold. “Ya Gotta Believe” was the battle cry of the 1973 Mets. The memories of that season were still fresh in my head — what an opportunity to relive the favorite year of my so-far brief life. If I could have traveled back to any year back then, or even now, it would have to be 1973, the defining season of my life as a Mets fan.
Mets fans prefer their baseball accompanied by a certain amount of heartbreak and despair, and the 1973 version was all of that and a bag of Wise potato chips.
I was 8 years old when my uncle Tony (my mom’s younger brother) took me to my first game, at Shea Stadium, in 1972. Baseball was a big hit for me, and actually being at the ballpark in person sparked an interest that propelled me into the 1973 regular season. And then beyond — when Uncle Tony took me to Game 3 of the 1973 National League Championship Series, also known as the Pete Rose/Bud Harrelson brawl game. Pitcher Jerry Koosman went the distance. Rusty Staub hit two home runs. But the game is best remembered for the brawl, and how Mets fans reacted to it. With one out in the top of the fifth, Rose slid hard into 145-pound shortstop Harrelson at second base while attempting to break up a double play. Little Buddy flew into the air. Epithets and punches were exchanged, and mayhem ensued. Both benches and bullpens cleared. I couldn’t understand why everyone was out on the field. I thought the game might have ended, for some unfathomable reason.
Meanwhile, right after order was restored on the field, there was tremendous disorder in the stands. Fans hurled garbage, including a whiskey bottle that nearly struck Rose in the head when he returned to his left-field position. Reds manager Sparky Anderson ordered his team off the field. A contingent of Mets manager Yogi Berra, Willie Mays, Tom Seaver, Rusty Staub, and Cleon Jones pleaded with the fans to stop the pelting or the Mets would forfeit the game. The fans finally calmed down enough to let play continue, and the Mets won 9-2. It had been an amazing scene that left an indelible memory.
I’m still eternally grateful that Uncle Tony chose me of all people to take to that game. That was back in the days when you could still smoke pretty much anything right in your seat. I remember the smell of Uncle Tony’s True menthol cigarettes, cigars, and marijuana, along with beer, urine, and even jet fuel trailing flights to and from nearby LaGuardia Airport, where Uncle Tony worked as a fleet service clerk for American Airlines. He was 26 at the time, and between marriages to exotic women from distant locales: Liddy, from Paris, who he met while he was still a teenager stationed in the military, and then Isabel, from Cali, Columbia. Later there would be a third wife, from the Dominican Republic. He seemed to get married every 20 years to a woman 20 years younger than the last one. I thought he was the coolest guy in the world. He wore a loosely tight Afro-perm, like someone you would see grooving down the Soul Train line. He was good-looking enough that he was later chosen to appear in an advertisement for American Airlines in The New York Times.
Soul Train and the soul music of the early 1970s served as a soundtrack to the baseball season and life in New York. Riding in Uncle Tony’s car, we’d listen to Al Green, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Isaac Hayes, Gladys Knight and the Pips, the Spinners, Sly and the Family Stone. I still have the Soul Train Hall of Fame album — “DON CORNELIUS picks 22 of the greatest SOUL HITS of all time” blares a cover blurb — that was released in that momentous year of ’73.
Just four years removed from the 1969 “Miracle Mets” World Series championship, and a mere 11 years since Casey Stengel’s “Amazing Mets” made the team’s debut, in 1962, losing 120 games, the 1973 “Ya Gotta Believe” Mets proved to be the most quintessentially “Metsian” team of all time, providing the franchise with an identity-defining performance.
Tug McGraw, the colorful left-handed reliever, inscribed himself in Mets lore by shouting “Ya Gotta Believe!”
I was too young to follow the 1969 Mets, who, in retrospect, were more aberration than miracle. It requires no suspension of disbelief to see why the team did so well. Led by the National League Cy Young Award winner Tom Seaver and rising star left-hander Koosman, the Mets won 100 games, outdistancing the second-place Chicago Cubs by eight games in Major League Baseball’s newly aligned National League East.
But Mets fans prefer their baseball accompanied by a certain amount of heartbreak and despair, and the 1973 version was all of that and a bag of Wise potato chips. Being a Mets fan means “Ya Gotta Believe,” against belief. “Ya Gotta Believe,” against all hope. “Ya Gotta Believe,” when you know you’re eventually going to lose. Mets fans aren’t accustomed to happy endings. In the words of the Bard of Baseball, Roger Angell, writing in that inaugural Mets year of 1962:
“Suddenly the Mets fans made sense to me. What we were witnessing was precisely the opposite of the kind of rooting that goes on across the river. This was the losing cheer, the gallant yell for a good try — antimatter to the sounds of Yankee Stadium. This was a new recognition that perfection is admirable but a trifle inhuman, and that a stumbling kind of semi-success can be much more warming. Most of all, perhaps, these exultant yells for the Mets were also yells for ourselves, and came from a wry, half-understood recognition that there is more Met than Yankee in every one of us. I knew for whom that foghorn blew; it blew for me. —Roger Angell, The Summer Game
In 1973, after winning 83 games during each of the three previous seasons, the Mets suffered a litany of injuries, and on July 9 found themselves at 34-46 and in last place, 12.5 games back in the NL East. But it was a mediocre division, and the Mets battled, cutting their deficit to six games, on August 20.
Around this time, Mets chairman of the board M. Donald Grant made a surprise visit to the team’s clubhouse to deliver an inspirational speech, expressing that he and club owner Joan Payson “believed” in the team. As he was leaving, Tug McGraw, the colorful left-handed reliever, inscribed himself in Mets lore by shouting “Ya Gotta Believe!” Some thought McGraw was mocking Grant, but McGraw later insisted he was sincere. Either way, the words quickly became the team’s battle cry for the rest of the season.
Manager Yogi Berra also believed. In fact, he aced McGraw in the slogan department, uttering the immortal line, “It ain’t over till it’s over.”
Yogi was right. The 1973 Mets proved greater than the sum of the team’s parts: First baseman John Milner led the team with 23 home runs; right fielder Staub drove in a team-high 74 runs; second sacker Felix Millan, choking up halfway on the bat, connected for 185 hits, 155 of them singles. Staff ace Seaver recorded a 19-10 record with 251 strikeouts and a 2.08 ERA and was named the National League’s Cy Young Award winner. Reflective of the team’s barely over .500 record, southpaws Koosman and Jon Matlack were 14-15 and 14-16, respectively. Another left-hander, George Stone, turned in the best performance of his nine-year career, going 12-3 with a 2.80 ERA in 148 important innings. (Present-day Mets fans can take solace in knowing that at the same 60-game juncture, the 1973 Mets record was 28-32, while the current Mets were 30-30.)
On October 1, 1973, a rainy day at Wrigley Field, in Chicago, the Mets beat the Cubs 6-4 in the last game of the regular season, capturing the NL East with an 82-79 record. They were the only team to finish above .500 in the division, with the worst win-loss record for a division pennant-winning team in MLB history (until the San Diego Padres’ 82-80 finish in the NL West, in 2005).
The Mets mowed down Cincinnati’s heavily favored “Big Red Machine” three games to two in the National League playoffs, to advance to the World Series. After that deciding game, at Shea Stadium, a riot ensued on the field the likes of which seemed unique to New York during the 1970s (similar situations took place at Yankee Stadium during post-season celebrations from 1976 to 1978) and would not be tolerated today. Fans stormed the field, removing everything and anything within grasp — tearing up patches of grass, removing all three bases and home plate, and tearing away sections of the outfield. Mets players were physically accosted when fans wrapped their arms around them and grabbed for pieces of their uniforms. Even the rambunctious McGraw was amazed by what he saw: “They just kept coming down,” he said. “It was so eerie.” Reds manager Sparky Anderson was also in disbelief, saying, “I’m not angry, I’m ashamed that I live in this country. I’m not too sure New York is in this country. Mayor Lindsay was sitting right there. Why didn’t he do something about it? What are the cops out there for? If they aren’t going to stop it they are stealing money.”
Side one of the Ya Gotta Believe album concludes with a post-game interview with Tom Seaver after the bedlam. The raw emotion is evident in his cackling voice: “We’ve been fighting all year long with injuries and everybody says we’re out of it, and we got our cotton-pickin’ players in the lineup for six weeks and we won the cotton-pickin’ thing, and we deserve it. We played like hell, and we fought like hell.”
Then, once again, the Mets were underdogs to Oakland’s “Swingin’ A’s,” the previous season’s Series champs. For some reason, left-hander Stone was curiously absent from manager Berra’s World Series rotation. Some Mets fans are still traumatized by Berra’s decision not to go with Stone’s hot hand in Game 6 of the Series, with the Mets holding a three-games-to-two lead. Instead, he went with Seaver on three days’ rest, perhaps feeling like the Mets, up 3-2, were playing with house money as the series returned to Oakland for Games 6 and 7.
But just like the Bad News Bears, the Mets would eventually lose the last game of the season, dropping Game 7 of the 1973 World Series to the Oakland Athletics and future crosstown rival Reggie Jackson, in the first installment of his “Mr. October” saga. Reggie struck the decisive blow with a two-run blast in the third inning, the first of his 10 World Series home runs. Jackson’s bomb gave the A’s a 4-0 lead in the game, which they eventually won by a score of 5-2; he was named the Series MVP. The Mets mounted a rally in the top of the ninth that saw the tying run come to the plate, but third baseman Wayne Garrett popped out to shortstop Bert Campaneris and it was all over but the crying. Later, Berra defended his decision to start Seaver in Game 6 rather than the well-rested Stone with yet another Yogism: “If you’re gonna lose, lose with your best.”
This was my first experience with a broken heart, my first lesson in the sweet pain and inherent masochism involved in being a Mets fan. The 1973 Mets prepared me for all the broken hearts to come (baseball and non-baseball related) and taught me about loving something that doesn’t necessarily love you back. ❖
• The Mets are acknowledging the 50th anniversary of the 1973 NL pennant-winning club with an exhibit in the New York Mets Hall of Fame Museum, adjacent to the Jackie Robinson Rotunda entrance at Citi Field.
Baltimore-based Charlie Vascellaro is a frequent speaker on the academic baseball conference circuit and the author of a biography of Hall of Fame slugger Hank Aaron. His writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and other publications.
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