The first time I met Tom Seaver, I was more nervous than I ever had been introducing myself to an athlete. It was 1981. I had worked at The Washington Post for four years. I had covered the Final Four and written about corrupt cops.
My boyhood hero.
I already had learned that meeting athletes you looked up to as a kid could be dangerous because they could disappoint you. When someone falls off a pedestal you have created for them, they tend to fall hard.
I have no doubt my voice was shaking a little when I walked up to Seaver in the Cincinnati Reds’ clubhouse inside the Astrodome in Houston. When I managed to get out my name and who I worked for, he gave me that big Seaver smile, put out his hand and said, “Washington Post? Do you know Woodward and Bernstein?”
I said that I had, in fact, worked for Bob Woodward when I was on the Metro staff and that Carl Bernstein, the other hero of “All the President’s Men,” had left The Post and was now working in TV.
“Tell you what,” Seaver said. “I’ll make you a deal. You tell me what Woodward’s like, and I’ll give you all the time you want.”
Wow. A boyhood hero who could both charm and impress this boy-grownup in less than a minute. Seaver died after a lengthy battle with dementia Monday at the age of 75, and I’m sitting here right now, a little boy again, crying my eyes out.
I started going to Mets games when I was 6 years old — yes, at the Polo Grounds. The Mets were awful, and there was no sign they were ever going to get better. They reached a high-water mark in 1966 — their fifth season — when they went 66-95. A year later, they were worse, going 61-101. But, for the first time there was hope: George Thomas Seaver.
He was 22, and whenever he pitched, the team had a chance. With a decent team, he would easily have won 20 games that season. Instead, he was 16-13, with an ERA of 2.76. The next year he was better, winning 16 games again (the Mets won 73) with an ERA of 2.20.
And then came 1969. The Miracle Mets. The Mets won 100 games and stunned the Baltimore Orioles in five games in the World Series. I saw 66 games at Shea Stadium that year (including the four postseason games) and to this day I can name the 26 Mets who received full World Series shares. Bobby Pfeil, for the record, was the 26th, not active for the Series but voted a full share by his teammates.
The heart and soul of that team was Seaver, who went 25-7 with a 2.21 ERA and won the first of his three Cy Young Awards. He became a national figure after that, but he still belonged to the Mets, to New York and to me. He continued to pitch brilliantly for the next seven seasons — in 1971, he was 20-10 with an ERA of 1.76. Even when they were good, the Mets didn’t score a lot of runs. With reasonable run support that year, Seaver might have won 25 games — or more.
And then, on June 15, 1977, he was gone. He got into a salary battle with M. Donald Grant, the team’s imperious chairman of the board, and Grant ordered him traded — to the Cincinnati Reds. That remains the worst day in Mets history — and there have been plenty of bad ones. He went 14-3 for the Reds and won 21 games in all while the Mets sank to last place. They spent the next six seasons in deserved baseball purgatory. Their best record was 68-94. Grant was fired in 1978, but it was too late.
After I answered all of Seaver’s questions about Woodward and editor Ben Bradlee that day in Houston, he was engaging and anecdotal. At one point, I mentioned how he always said he knew his delivery was perfect when he had dirt on his knee because it meant he was getting low and driving all the way through his release.
He laughed the high-pitched laugh I had heard since I was a kid. “I’ve always told people that, and there’s some truth to it,” he said. “But I always rub dirt on the knee, regardless, so the hitters will see it and think, ‘Oh, Tom’s in a groove today.’ Sometimes I was, sometimes I wasn’t, but I wanted them to think I was no matter what.”
His career numbers are, as Casey Stengel would have said, amazin.’ He won 311 games and pitched 61 shutouts among his 231 (!) complete games. He came within two outs of a perfect game against the Chicago Cubs in 1969 — he called it his “imperfect” game — and pitched a no-hitter for the Reds in 1978. All his numbers were extraordinary, including the 98.84 percent of the Hall of Fame votes he received in 1992.
Seaver showed signs of dementia as far back as 2013. When his family announced in 2019 that he would be unable to return for the 50th anniversary celebration of the Miracle Mets, it was apparent the situation had grown dire.
What was truly sad was that Seaver loved coming back to New York to celebrate great occasions. He threw the last ceremonial pitch at Shea Stadium in 2008 and the first one at Citi Field in 2009. When Tom Glavine became the second Mets pitcher to win 300 games in 2007 (244 of his 305 wins came with the Braves and 61 with the Mets), the team honored Glavine for the accomplishment and brought Seaver back to help.
Seaver and Glavine held a pre-ceremony news conference. Seaver introduced Glavine, who spoke for about two minutes and then sat back while virtually every question was directed at Seaver. “I’m not sure they really needed me in there,” Glavine joked, walking out. “There’s no such thing as sharing a stage with Tom Seaver. He is the stage.”
Seaver was also responsible for the most unprofessional moment of my 43 years in journalism. In August 1985, pitching for the White Sox, he won his 300th game against the Yankees at Yankee Stadium. I got to cover that game. Seaver was 40, but his ERA for the season at that point was 2.90. He held the Yankees to six singles and pitched a complete game in a 4-1 win.
Afterward, he stood at his locker, glowing. The Yankees had threatened in the eighth inning, and Seaver had wondered whether he could finish the game. “I was on fumes,” he said. “I didn’t think I could get to the finish line. But then Pudge [37-year-old Carlton Fisk] came out and kicked me in the butt. He said, ‘You are not coming out of this game. You are not winning your 300th game sitting in the dugout. Don’t even think about it.' I looked at him and realized I didn’t have a choice.”
I was on deadline for the first edition. But I waited until the crowd around Seaver cleared. Then, in a voice no doubt as shaky as the first time I met him, I said, “Tom, this is totally unprofessional, I know. But I’ve watched you pitch since I was 10. Would you mind signing my scorecard?”
I was almost hoping he would say no because it was so out of line to even ask. Seaver grinned. “What would Woodward say about this?” he asked. Then he grabbed the scorecard and wrote, “John — Glad you could be here for this … Best, Tom Seaver, August 4, 1985 — win #300.”
Until now, I had never told anybody about that — especially Woodward. But you better believe I still have the scorecard. After all, it was signed by a hero who never let me down.
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