Obituaries

[David Horn]

Tom Seaver, Pitcher Who Led ‘Miracle Mets’ to Glory, Dies at 75

A Hall of Famer, Seaver won 311 games for four different teams. But Mets fans called him Tom Terrific for turning around the club’s fortunes.

Tom Seaver, who had 3,640 strikeouts in his 20 big-league seasons, is sixth on the career list.
Tom Seaver, who had 3,640 strikeouts in his 20 big-league seasons, is sixth on the career list.Credit...Associated Press

Tom Seaver, one of baseball’s greatest right-handed power pitchers, a Hall of Famer who won 311 games for four major league teams, most notably the Mets, whom he led from last place to a surprise world championship in his first three seasons, died on Monday. He was 75.

The cause was complications of Lewy body dementia and Covid-19, according to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

At 6-foot-1 and 200 pounds, give or take a few, with a thick waist and tree-trunk legs that helped generate the velocity on his fastball and hard slider and the spin on his curveball, Seaver at work was a picture of kinetic grace. He had a smooth windup, a leg kick with his left knee raised high, and a stride so long after pushing off the mound that his right knee often grazed the dirt.

With precise control, he had swing-and-miss stuff. He struck out more than 200 batters in 10 different seasons, a National League record, and on April 22, 1970, facing the San Diego Padres, he struck out a record 10 batters in a row to end the game. His total of 3,640 strikeouts in his 20 big-league seasons is sixth on the career list.

He was also a cerebral sort, a thinker who studied opposing hitters and pored over the details of each pitch — its break, its speed, its location. As he aged and his arm strength diminished, it was his strategic thinking and experience that extended his career.

Seaver pitched for the Cincinnati Reds, the Chicago White Sox and the Boston Red Sox during the second half of his career, winning more than 100 games, including his only no-hitter with the Reds against the St. Louis Cardinals in 1978.

Even so, the seasons he spent away from New York seem like little more than a footnote, because few players in baseball history have had the impact on a team that Seaver had on the Mets.

He was the team’s first bona fide star, known to New York fans as Tom Terrific and, more tellingly, The Franchise. The team was established five years before he arrived, and had not finished higher than ninth in the 10-team National League. Even then, the Mets had quickly earned a reputation for chuckleheaded ineptitude.

The Mets were hardly more inspiring in Seaver’s first two seasons, finishing 10th in 1967 and ninth in 1968, but Seaver himself served as the signal that the team’s fortunes were turning.

Until his arrival, no Mets pitcher had ever won more than 13 games in a season; Seaver won 16 his first year and 16 more the next.

He was the league’s rookie of the year in 1967, and was an All-Star nine times in 10 full seasons with the Mets. He had five seasons with more than 20 wins for the team, led the league in strikeouts five times and in earned run average three times. He won three Cy Young Awards as the league’s best pitcher.

All those achievements notwithstanding, there is no heroic Tom Seaver narrative without 1969, a year the so-called Miracle Mets won the World Series. That team charged from a losing record at the beginning of June and from 10 games behind in mid-August to capture the National League’s East Division crown, then swept the Atlanta Braves in the National League Championship Series and finally defeated the heavily favored Baltimore Orioles, winners of 109 regular-season games, four games to one for the World Series title.

Many Mets were unlikely contributors to the team’s unlikely success. None were more important than Seaver.

That July, he threw a nearly perfect game against the first-place Chicago Cubs, yielding only a single with one out in the ninth inning.

Beginning in August, the Mets went 39-14 the rest of the season, and Seaver won his last 10 decisions on his way to a 25-7 record and his first Cy Young. Then he won Game 1 of the N.L.C.S. against Atlanta (although he did not perform especially well), and he lost Game 1 of the World Series.

But he came back to pitch all 10 innings of Game 4, winning 2-1 and tilting the series in the Mets’ favor.

Beyond pure statistics, he was often given credit for being the workhorse whose expectations and example dragged the Mets from worst to first.

“He was a heck of a lot responsible for tightening things up around here,” the Mets catcher Jerry Grote told Sport magazine in 1970. “From the first year, he was going out to win, not pitch his turn. When Seaver’s pitching, those guys plain work a little harder.”

From 1969 on, Seaver was a celebrity — part of a new generation of sports heroes in New York. He starred along with Joe Namath of the Jets, who won the Super Bowl nine months before the Mets earned their championship, and Walt Frazier of the Knicks, who won the National Basketball Association crown in 1970.

During the championship season, when he expressed his view that the United States should get out of Vietnam, it was newsy, especially after protesters on Moratorium Day, Oct. 15, 1969, the same day as the fourth game of the World Series, distributed literature with his picture on it at Shea Stadium.

Further, both he and his wife, Nancy Lynn McIntyre, became popular objects of curiosity, recognized on the street and deluged with fan mail.

With their fresh-faced California good looks, they were invited to host a television talk show and to co-star in a regional theater production. A 1970 article about the two of them in McCall’s magazine was headlined “Tom & Nancy Seaver: America’s Very Own Beautiful Couple.”

The Mets never came close to their 1969 season again during Seaver’s tenure.