Howard Cosell. Growing up in the 1970s you could not get away from the man. Yet unlike, say, Joe Buck who today has a similar gig to Cosell, you felt like it was worth putting up with the annoyance factor of “The Mouth That Bored.” Howard was annoying, but he was good.
In another “I Watched This Moldy Old Game So You Don’t Have to” presentation, we go back to 1978 with the Mets in Philadelphia making a rare Monday Night Baseball appearance on ABC. Maybe I watched it. Maybe I was at baseball camp. It was a long time ago. But Howard was there, as well as Keith Jackson, and Don Drysdale, and don’t forget Billy Martin. How big was that broadcast booth at Veteran’s Stadium?
However many people they could cram into the booth at the Vet, the real star of the broadcast was Pete Rose, who was playing several hundred miles away in Atlanta. Jim Lampley was there giving at bat by at bat updates as Rose tried to match Wee Willie Keeler’s National League 44-game hitting streak. And in the crowded booth in Philly, they were making news, too. Billy Martin, who a week earlier tearfully resigned as Yankees manager, only to be named the new manager starting in 1980 at Old-Timer’s Day, was on the ABC telecast. (Billy would take over for reigning world champion manager Bob Lemon in 1979 and be fired again after the season, only to spend 1980 in Oakland instead of Yankee Stadium.) As for managing Reggie Jackson—one of the main reasons he left in 1978—Martin tells the ABC audience, “I’ll manage anybody if he can get us to win.” (I wish Howard had broken in with a nasally, “A ringing endorsement if I have ever heard one!”)
Enter into all this excitement the ultimate party pooper: the 1978 Mets. At 45-61 they are in fifth place, having been swept in Houston following a series victory against the Reds in New York in which Shea disturbingly broke character and fawned all over Rose. Ovation after ovation rang from the second- and third-largest crowds of the year at Shea as Rose pursued his hitting streak. Pat Zachry summed it up for most hardcore fans stuck in Mets prison when he kicked a step in disgust and broke his toe. He was out for the season. Mets fans were stuck watching a slow fade to last place. Cue Howard’s yellow jacket—the same one he wore several years earlier in the Monday Night Football booth with famed New York sportswriter Oscar Madison.
July 31, 1978: Mets at Phillies
Before the Mets-Phillies game even starts, Pete Rose is up, so we zip down to Atlanta. He walks amid hometown boos to future Hall of Famer Phil Niekro at Fulton County Stadium, where, like Shea, the fifth-place club has a Rose-inflated crowd figure (Fulton County’s 45,000 is bigger than Shea managed a week earlier). With far less fanfare in Philly, Mets third baseman Elliot Maddox grounds out against Dick Ruthven. The Phillies also have a Maddox leading off—Garry; he flies out to open things against Nino Espinosa.
The Mets are so unworthy of prime time. Keith Jackson, fresh off a 17-day vacation, has to wonder why they summoned him from Hawaii for this. Jackson, whom I always felt was a very underrated baseball broadcaster, ponders New York’s future as Joe Torre gazes across acres of Philly AstroTurf and concrete. “Grim visage most of the time,” Jackson says of Torre, “because he’s deeply involved.” Jackson, already the voice of ABC college football, is much more upbeat about Mets catcher John Stearns because he was a star defensive back in college at Colorado—“busting helmets in Boulder.” Stearns is only a few weeks removed from the game-ending collision in Pittsburgh when Dave Parker tried to bowl over the smaller catcher. Stearns got the out, the Mets won the game, and Parker spent the rest of the year with a football facemask on his batting helmet as he recovered from a fractured jaw and cheekbone. (A major league first according Paul Lukas, with his usually exhaustive info on that uniform breakthrough.) Parker was still named MVP. Stearns got his own baseball card the following year for his 1978 shattering of the then-major league record for steals by a catcher.
Speaking of records, Cosell crowed that “one record that will never be broken is Lou Gehrig’s consecutive game streak.” In a way he was right—he never saw it. Cosell died in April 1995, a few months before Cal Ripken finally toppled the mark.
Cut to: Pete Rose in Atlanta. He tries to bunt his way on in his second appearance. Would Joe D. have done that to keep his hit streak alive? Anyway, Rose then swings away and lines to Jerry Royster at short.
Shifting back to Philly, Jackson relayed a story from the previous day in Cincinnati, where the Reds tried the novel idea of playing three infielders on the right side of the infield and shifted the third baseman Rose (who had two hits to continue the streak) playing in the shortstop spot to negate Philadelphia pull hitter and future Mets prisoner Richie Hebner. Hebner foiled the defense by bunting three times for base hits before the Reds relented the shift; he added two more hits for a 5-for-5 day. That is the elusive proof I’ve been looking for about how the shift wouldn’t have lasted a day if they tried that crap in the 1970s. A bunt would still work now.
Hebner was a better thinker than base runner. Against Espinosa on Monday in Philly, Hebner had his sixth straight hit (pulled to right field, by the way) and then was deked by Mets shortstop on a hit-and-run. Lee Mazzilli caught the ball in center and fired his patented 12-hopper to first that hot dog Willie Montanez somehow never touched. Nino backed up the play and stepped on first for the only 8-1 double play I’ve ever seen. And Hebner made it happen against the man he’d be traded for the following spring. And Pete Rose, of all people, joined Nino and replaced Hebner at first in Philly in 1979.
This just in: Chevy Monza is one ugly car. The ad should be—“Hey, we have a stick shift! And it beats walking!!”
A better case for speed was made by Dick Ruthven. The Phillies starter threw 89 miles per hour and the crowded booth went ga-ga over his zip on the ball. He tied the Mets in knots—not that that was hard during this period—but he was a key piece for the Phillies, acquired from the Braves during the trade deadline for reliever Gene Garber—who would end Pete Rose’s streak, but not tonight. Because in Atlanta, Rose tied Wee Willie Keeler’s 1897 mark of 44 straight games with a groundball single to right—a routine out today in the shift that only Richie Hebner could out-think.
Back in Philly, Cosell lamented about Torre’s torture when Bob Boone snapped a scoreless tie in the fifth with a home run. “This is what’s driving Joe Torre crazy,” Howard pontificated. “Torre has to put together architecture of a ballclub with the personnel given to him… They reveal their vulnerability at given points.” In a less hopeful review of the Mets, shortstop Larry Bowa of the first-place Phillies said in a pregame interview that the Mets were the kind of “noncompetitive club we need to beat up on.” The Phillies would win their third straight division title and take 12 of 18 games against the 1978 Mets. (Though somehow Kevin Kobel would beat Steve Carlton the following night at the Vet.) On this night the Phils knocked out Nino with four runs in the sixth. The Bull, Greg Luzinski, had the big hit, a two-run double after architect Torre walked Mike Schmidt in front of him.
The network started getting a little antsy at that point and switched to the White Sox-Red Sox game at Fenway Park. The once impenetrable Boston AL East lead was down from 14 games to four. Jim Rice, who would join Dave Parker as an MVP in 1978, was in the midst of a 1-for-23 slump. He’d recover but Boston’s error was fatal. It would end on an October afternoon with one of best and most heartbreaking games I’ve ever seen.
To my surprise, ABC switched back to the Vet, where Ed Kranepool came off the bench to hit a long fly to plate Doug Flynn with the only Mets run. Philadelphia immediately got the run back en route to the 6-1 win, but Mazzilli’s popgun arm actually nailed Hebner at the plate, with the Hacker spiking the Bad Dude. And then the tape ends. The crystal ball back to 1978 goes fuzzy. The entire crowded booth now dead. Nino is gone, too. The Vet is kaput. Who the hell ever thought we’d miss 1978?