Artist Tom 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.
Joy in Mudville by George Vecsey (New York: The McCall Publishing Co., 1970)
Reading baseball books 55 years after they were written, it’s easy to see a pattern: Mets bad, bad, bad, bad, less bad, bad, not so bad, and ends with Mets Amazin’! George Vecsey, still around at 86, and the first in a family of writers and artists, including New York Post pundit and younger bro Pete Vecsey, George grew up in Queens and was Hofstra Class of 1960. With the New York Times he covered everything from religion to soccer (in some parts of the world, these two topics are the same), but he made his bones with baseball.
Vecsey got the plum assignment to cover the brand-new Mets in 1962. They were lousy but they were cool in a way that your old man’s Yankees—though championship caliber—were not. The 1969 Mets ruined maybe the Cubs’ best chance at a world championship until they finally won in 2016. Another Chicago team swiped the Mets’ claim as the worst team since 1899 when the 2024 White Sox took that mantle from the Mets—though the White Sox won one more game than the ’62 Mets, who had two games not made up.
The book takes us from the dawn of the franchise to the 1969 victory parade and the weeks afterward. It ends with Johnny Murphy, the team’s GM, who died a few weeks after the champagne dried: “We realize it took hard work and spirit and luck—and that’s what it will take again.” Here we are, 56 years later, and that’s still the hard-to-find recipe. In 1969 the League Championship Series was brand new and it represented a new mountain for a team to climb on its way to a world championship. The ’69 Mets made it look easy, overtaking the stumbling Cubs, and then winning seven of the eight postseason games they played that fall. Even the one loss—the first game of the World Series in Baltimore—felt like it was tossed in for added drama. A moment where the naysayers could shake their head and say, “We told you. This team shouldn’t even be here.”
The Mets won four straight—as predicted by Rod Gaspar, mockingly called “Rod Stupid” by Frank Robinson in the Orioles’ champagne-soaked locker room after they swept Minnesota in the first ALCS the same day the Mets burned Atlanta in the NLCS. Gaspar just didn’t say which four they’d win in a row.
There are lots of good insights by a reporter who followed the team’s every move, and who’d just turned 30. Vecsey had his eyes on a life of writing about things other than locker rooms. He helped craft insightful autobiographies with country legend Loretta Lyn (Coal Miner’s Daughter), Stan “The Man” Musial, and a revelatory book on Bob Welch, a star World Series hero living a second life as a young All-Star alcoholic. And Vecsey certainly knew a good quote when he heard it. I love the quote from Tom Seaver about his time spent packing raisin crates in his native Fresno before college, earning plenty of wisdom on top of the $2.05 per hour in his pay envelope: “I realized how fortunate I was. It opened my eyes to see how so many people were messed up. People go through life thinking the world owes them a living. The world owes them nothing. They owe the world something.”
Not to put words in Vecsey or Seaver’s mouth, but there is plenty to learn from this today. Mets fans are spoiled. Not in championships, but in the idea that the world owes them pennants and every overpaid player on or off the market. The Mets have had some ownership lows—the end of the Payson regime after Joan passed and various points of embarrassment during the Wilpon ownership. The Mets built championship teams by going with their gut. The ’69 team was built from within as was the ’86 team, for the most part. There have been other NL pennant winners, but in each case the team soon fell on hard times. This is the team we’ve chosen, whether we got on board in the ‘60s, the ‘70s, the 2000s, or the day they signed Juan Soto.
I trust the people that own the Mets because… I have no other choice. I like to look back on the old days and see what I might glean from spending so much time following a team chasing a ball. One day they’ll get it right again. I hope George Vecsey is around to see it. And I hope that I’m here, too. In the meantime, we wait. And dream of parades while we hump raisin crates day after day.