Is it redundant to note 2020 was good year for obituary writers? In my era of aging second-class-hipster-punk-hardcore-alt.country-post-Reagan pre-URL coffee generation groovers and former ex-pats who lie about remembering Jimmy Carter in a sweater on tv and still subtract 10 years from their real age when asked, it felt like 2020 was the year so many more of our heroes, contemporaries and friends started to drop. Hall of Fame baseball players, iconic actors, the mighty Van Halen. Facebook is starting to be a place I visit just for mourning and posting remembrances of people gone away. Or at least that is what I found myself doing a lot last year. I’ve been lucky not to lose anyone very close to me, but for us baseball acolytes and music junkies it was a rather rough year. So while I’m not auditioning to be an RIP scribe, here’s the second of a few tales to tell about a departed notables.
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When I was little I spent a lot of time in the care of my grandparents on my mother’s side. They lived in the Glendale neighborhood of Queens, near the last stop of the M train subway line. The house they lived in was fronted by a classic, tall cement and brick stoop that led up to the front door, perfect for playing stoop ball. I spent hours thwacking rubber balls into this stoop and catching the rebound in my glove, enacting elaborate major league baseball pitching fantasies in my head. In every pitching fantasy I was Tom Seaver.
My grandfather had been a Brooklyn Dodger fan his entire life until the darn jerks moved the team across the country in 1958. “Darn jerks” was about as colorful as my grandfather’s language would get. A devout Presbyterian, about the only thing that could get him close to swearing was asking him why he never switched to rooting for the Yankees. To ask this questions was borderline traitorous, as well as raw evidence of an unlearned outsider. No blue-bleeding, south-of-Flushing Dodger fan would ever consider the idea of shifting allegiances to the uptown Yankees. The Yankees broke the hearts of the Dodger fans in one World Series after another. When the Dodgers finally won, they left town and ripped all the old wounds wide open. Millions of the world’s most miserable baseball fans were devoid of a team until the Mets appeared in 1962.
The Mets played the sad sack role nicely, a team of comedically bad players, they set records for losing while their manager Casey Stengel performed daily as charming old coot and kept the crowds laughing. But old time Dodgers fans could care less, they got to go to the ballpark again, puff a stogie in the stands with an ice cold Rheingold and talk about the glorious days of Ebbets Field. Few cared that the Mets were hapless until 1969, when they pulled off a professional sports miracle that couldn’t be ignored.
I was too young to have been aware of the 1969 Miracle Mets, but I heard about them all the time. They were the team that went from worst to first and upset the best team in world to win the World Series. Tom Seaver was the leader of that infamous group, a once-in-a-generation rock star performer who elevated everyone else around him to perform beyond their abilities. Every time he walked onto the field, magic was possible.
Seaver was my hero. I collected his baseball cards with passion, always holding onto them outside of all the others, memorizing his statistics from the backs of the cards. I studied his pitching form through pictures in magazines, newspapers and Mets scorecards, noticing how he bit down over his bottom lip with supreme effort when he delivered his pitches, how he always had dirt on the right knee of his uniform because he dropped down remarkably low to the ground when pushing off the pitching rubber. In Mets yearbooks I found out he grew up in some place in California called Fresno, was married to a beautiful blonde woman named Nancy and resided in Greenwich, Connecticut, a place my grandparents deemed “hoity toity.” Seaver was good looking, athletic, successful, everything a young boy was supposed to become.
I’m not even sure if I actually saw him actually pitch. Seemed like every time I went to a game in person there was another guy on the mound, although I’m sure I expected him to just be pitching every game. Why not? He was the best pitcher. When I would go down the to the field with the gaggles of other kids trying to get autographs during batting practice, I never succeeded in seeing my hero, snagging the most valuable signature in the world. I must have seen him pitch on tv though, because I replicated his delivery too closely and my own Little League coaches were trying to teach me not to pitch like what I thought I saw Seaver doing and my pitching career didn’t get much further than that stoop in Glendale.
Many years later, I had a job in tv production and somehow snagged press box access passes for Mets Opening Day. Elevator doors opened to take me up to press level and right there was Tom Seaver. Wearing a light blue dress shirt, sharp blue suit, and orange tie speckled with tiny blue Mets logos, talking to another older guy. Right there! Tom Seaver! What should I say? How could I say something to him now, so many years later, my hero? Now I was a grown man, moreover, I was a professional in the entertainment industry, who routinely encountered all sorts of celebrities and didn’t care. Remaining cool and unfazed was part of my existence. The elevator was only going up two floors. I didn’t have much time.
He was shorter than I’d imagined, but still thick like an athlete, bigger and broader than you’d think in real life. My heart thumped as I prepared to completely interrupt his conversation and say, what, exactly? I loved his work? He would always be my favorite player? That those darn jerk Mets never should have traded him?
The elevator doors opened. I remained speechless. Seaver and the random executive guy exited, completely unaware of all the drama happening right next to them. Dazed and breathing harder than normal, I stepped out of the elevator. Tom Seaver. Just another guy in a suit? No, he’s the guy in the pictures on the wall of my boyhood bedroom, all blazing blue and orange letters, teeth biting hard on his lower lip and throwing the greatest pitch of all time.
