Artist Thomas Sarrantonio was an avid Mets fan as a teen in the late 1960s. He went off to school and lost the bug somewhat, but he does still play softball on Sundays in the Hudson Valley (sometimes with me!). His once beloved Mets books, bought and devoured in 1969 and 1970, remained for years in his beautiful artist’s studio. So he did what others have done when it is time to get rid of stuff like this: “Let’s get Matt to take them.” I gladly accepted the donation of a dozen Mets books from that era. I’ve written a few books on the team I grew up with—coming of Mets age after the glow of ’69 had dulled to something like a communicable disease in the late 1970s. One caveat: Tom expects book reports! This was one area I excelled in at school. So now I pull these books off the pile in my office in the order I originally placed them on the shelf. Keep in mind there are 100+ other unread books piled in my office. This could take some time.
Last to First by Larry Fox (New York: Harper and Row, 1970)
Here we stand on the cusp of another baseball season. To me it is both great and horrible. Great because there is nothing that I know better or appreciate more than baseball; horrible because there is nothing that can bring me more torment on a daily basis… save perhaps for a prolonged illness with no known cure. In the spring of 1969, there was nothing but horrible in terms of Metdom. Seven seasons in the books and only once did the Mets break the 90-loss barrier. They lost 100 games five times in that span—and somehow have done so only once since.
Like other books in this series of reviews, this hardcover has a lot of schtick and some good stories about the lousy years from expansion team to world champion in the 1960s. Last to First adds a small wrinkle in italicized vignettes Fox writes whenever a ’69 Mets enters the baseball orbit, like Ed Kranepool, who was a senior in high school when the Mets debuted in 1962, and was still just 17 when he took the field as a major leaguer late in 1962 during the club’s still-standing, infamous, 120-loss unveiling. (It is still the National League record; 2024 White Sox be damned.) Fox noted that in May of ’62 the Mets pried the soon-to-be-dubbed Marvelous Marv Throneberry from Baltimore. The author then inserted:
While the Mets were getting Throneberry, another left-handed-hitting first baseman at James Monroe High in the Bronx was breaking home run records set 30 years before by Hall of Famer Hank Greenberg. Greenberg never hit more than seven home runs in one year for Monroe; Ed Kranepool would hit nine.
Fox wrote something similar for every player on the ’69 team, plus manager Gil Hodges, who was acquired in the autumn of 1967 in a trade with the Washington Senators. It was probably the most important deal by the Mets to that time—the biggest was sheer luck, a special lottery that gave the Mets Tom Seaver after the Braves fouled up his draft paperwork. Other names soon to be familiar to fans in 1969 were signed as amateurs (Jerry Koosman, Ron Swoboda, Tug McGraw); selected in the early years of the baseball draft, inaugurated in 1965 (Nolan Ryan, Gary Gentry, Ken Boswell); and a handful of trades landed the soon-to-be New York household names in ’69 (Tommie Agee, Al Weis, Art Shamsky).
Larry Fox was working for the New York Daily News at the time and had already written a book about Joe Namath. For his book on the Mets he added some nice touches beyond the usual 1969 Mets stories that have made the rounds a bit in the past 57 years. I liked this reportage far from the glow of the celebrations of clinching the first National League East title. on the other side of the country, in a humdrum game between the Giants and the expansion Padres, Roger Craig, who’d suffered mightily amid bad offense and worse defense in the first two years of Mets existence, was now the pitching coach with a San Diego team destined to lose only 110 games in its first season. The Padres catcher was another Mets alum of the glum days, Chris Cannizzaro. Both knew the Mets had clinched their division and exchanged a single word and a smile on the subject: “Amazin’.” Wes Westrum, the Mets manager prior to Hodges, who quit before he could be fired, was now a coach with the Giants. Ron Hunt was San Francisco’s second baseman. Both beamed about how the Mets and the fans deserved this suddenly unstoppable team. “But as for M. Donald Grant,” Hunt said of the Mets board chairman, chief blowhard, and future villain, “he can kiss my foot.” Hunt, who held the Mets career record for being hit by a pitch from the 1960s to the 2010s—and who established the post-19th century major league mark with 50 HBP in 1971—always knew how to take one for the team.
The Miracle Mets were quite business-like in winning all but one of their postseason games in ’69 and celebrated like the champions they so unexpectedly were. May we all be so blessed again.