Why The Mets? Tom Seaver

Some people I know have wondered why I started rooting for a baseball team located across the country. When I started getting into sports as a young kid, the Seattle Pilots were finishing their first (and only) season in the northwest, before a man named Bud Selig somehow "miraculously" found a home for them in Milwaukee for the next season, which is another story altogether. There were soon to be no more regional teams in which to have an interest, at least for awhile.


Like many kids, we collected baseball cards, and started figuring out from the stats on the back who were the better players (we had some idea from checking out the daily box scores back then, in addition to the year-to-date stats of the everyday players that were published in the Sunday paper).


Tom Seaver was the best player on the team that wound up winning the World Series that year, so, like I suppose any kid does still, I became a bandwagon fan, the distance between us be damned. However, a principle of never changing allegiances no matter what had been somehow formed in my mind, so when Seattle wound up getting another baseball franchise, there was no thought whatsoever of changing by then. As for following the Brewers, who had been the Pilots, rather than the Mets, I thought to myself, "Well, they are in Milwaukee now....it's not New York!"


So it's been all of these years, with some highs and a lot of low points, one of those being the trade, in June of 1977, of the cornerstone of the franchise, Seaver, to the hated Cincinnati Reds. By that time, I'd found some other sources for information on baseball, most notably Baseball Digest and The Sporting News. I'd read articles about concepts like the free agency, and the rapid increase of salaries for players, but I'd never really though much about them, knowing that while trades were a part of professional life, the antics of Charlie Finley aside, the stars of a team were pretty much going to be with a team for the majority of their playing days, except in the twilight of their career, as with what happened with Willie Mays and the Mets.


The fact that one of my fave ballplayers had been dealt just days after another high point in my sports life, the Blazers winning the 77 Championship, was quite a shock, even if the Mets were in the tank by then (and God knows they were), I still never really thought that Tom Terrific would ever be anything but a Met, but as most everybody has found out in the post-Curt Flood era, loyalty on both sides in the business of sports isn't exactly what it used to be.


At any rate, some of the machinations behind Tom Seaver's sudden departure from New York, 30 years ago this past Friday, some of which I never could comprehend at the time, especially from miles away, are detailed in a great story in today's New York Daily News story HERE.