Saturday Seasons: 1972 -- The Sorrow and the Pity

          The New York Mets began the 1972 season with great anticipation and expectations, including a pronouncement by their manager that this was the most talented ball club he had ever managed and well capable of challenging and perhaps overtaking the 1971 World Champion Pittsburgh Pirates.

          “They still don’t have the big guy to knock in the runs,” Daily News columnist Dick Young would write, even as reports noted that the Mets were heavily into talks to acquire one by trade. But even Young allowed that the club, as is, was stocked well enough to be a serious contender.

          The year ended, however, being perhaps the most star-crossed season in team history.

          Lurking just beneath the surface as spring training got underway was the possibility that the season would never get off the ground. Negotiations between the owners and the Players Association were at a standstill and a strike loomed. The tangible sticking point in the talks seemed relatively small – a $500,000 increase in the owners’ contribution to the players’ pension fund -- but the deeper issue was the union flexing its perceived muscle against the intransigent, anti-labor owners. Finally, on April 1, with only days before the start of the regular season and with no agreement in sight, the players walked out and the owners shut their spring training camps.

          “They probably figured we’d never go this far,” Mets ace and player representative Tom Seaver said after a players’ meeting that endorsed the strike. “I guess they wanted to test the strength of our association to see if we would carry out our threat.”

          With players scattered and nothing else to do, Mets manager Gil Hodges went out the next day and played 27 holes of golf – 18 with just his coaches and an additional nine with a Daily News beat writer, Red Foley, tagging along. “I sometimes think I’m too strong for this game,” Hodges joked to Foley as he outdrove his golfing partners and overshot greens. Returning to the Ramada Inn on the Palm Beach Lakes golf course, Hodges collapsed while walking to his room to prepare for dinner, hitting his head on the floor as he fell. Joe Pignatano and Rube Walker tried to help Hodges while Yogi Berra called for an ambulance. But it was all for nought. Upon arriving at the hospital, Hodges was pronounced dead of a heart attack. He was 48.

          Hodges’ death was front-page news not only in the tabloids, but in the New York Times. Tributes poured in from around the city and around baseball, and more than 30,000 fans passed by the Torregrossa Funeral Home in Brooklyn to pay their respects. Officiating at Hodges’ April 6 funeral was Francis Mugavero, the archbishop of the Brooklyn Diocese, and current Mets, former Dodgers teammates and local political figures attended.

          After what they considered a respectful interval – four hours – the Mets named Yogi Berra to succeed Hodges. Other candidates considered but rejected were former Giants shortstop Alvin Dark, fired the year before as Cleveland Indians manager; former Orioles manager and current Mets AAA Tidewater manager Hank Bauer, considered too strict to make it with this squad; and Mets farm director Whitey Herzog, deemed too radical in thought to please the Mets hierarchy.

          Simultaneously, the Mets announced they had acquired the big bat – Expos outfielder Rusty Staub, sending shortstop Tim Foli and outfield prospect Ken Singleton to Montreal.

          A week later, the owners and the Players Association reached an agreement in which the players got the additional pension money and salary arbitration was added to the collective bargaining agreement. The players received no pay for games missed. The agreement was that the season would begin where the teams would have been on April 14. Missed games would not be made up. And unlike succeeding strikes, when camps were opened for an abbreviated training, the next day, the season began.

          And begin it did for the Mets. Whether it was because their talent was that good or because they played with the fervor that in the next century would be called the dead coach bounce, the Mets played better than .700 ball through early June. In early May, in the midst  of what would become an 11-game winning streak, the Mets were doing so well that team president M. Donald Grant got owner Joan Payson a $50,000 Mothers Day gift: her favorite player from her beloved New York Giants, Willie Mays. The Mets sent the aforementioned sum and pitcher Charley Williams to San Francisco for the outfielder-first baseman, who at age 41 was more “Say what?” than “Say hey!”

          As Dick Young wrote, “While Willie Mays is no dog, he is no longer young and his beauty is fading.”

          Or as Mays noted, “If used the right way, I know I can do a good job for the Mets.”

          Mays got off to an auspicious debut for the Metropolitans. Facing his former team, Mays walked in the first and scored on a Staub grand slam. Then, in the fifth, he homered to give the Mets the deciding run in a 5-4 win. “It seemed like the stage was set at that particular time, that I had to do something,” Mays said after the game. “I was just lucky.”

          Mays’ second home run would come a few days later, May 21, against Phillies ace Steve Carlton at Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia. The blast came in the eighth, three innings after Mays broke up Carlton’s no-hitter, and provided runs in a 4-3 win. As Phils manager Frank Lucchesi said, “Never sell a superstar short, even if he is 41.”

          The win was the Mets’ 11th in a row, a streak they would not again equal for 14 years, in the championship 1986 season. The next day, the streak ended with a 2-1 loss to the Cubs. At the time, the Mets were 25-8, five games atop the NL East.

          Even without injuries, it was an unsustainable pace. But then the injuries started taking their toll. Jim Fregosi, he of the Nolan Ryan trade, recovered from a finger fractured in spring training only to have his chronically achy back kick up. He would miss 55 games. Cleon Jones would miss 50, Bud Harrelson more than 40. Rusty Staub, in what was described as the “epitome of Mets frustrations,” would break his hand swinging at a pitch on July 17 and miss 90 games. It was a string of injuries that the Mets’ 1972 highlight film would say “defied belief.”

          Fregosi, who was moved to third base from shortstop to make it easier on his back, was forced to play games at shortstop. On occasions, catchers Jerry Grote and Duffy Dyer were tried out in right field.

          By September 1, the team, which spent 49 days in first place, had fallen into third place, 14 games behind the division-leading Pirates. Papers were giving more coverage to the Bobby Fischer-Boris Spassky chess match in Helsinki than the Tom Seaver-Roberto Clemente matches in Pittsburgh and Flushing. With four straight wins over the fifth-place Expos, the Mets closed out the season with an 83-73 record, but 13 ½ games behind the Pirates, but it wasn’t even that close.

          Jones led the team with a meager 52 RBI. Right fielder John Milner hit 17 home runs but only batted in 38. Tommie Agee made 11 errors. After that exciting start, Mays hit only six more home runs and batted in only 19.

          Recapping the season, Newsday’s Joe Donnelly brutally alleged that many players on the team had quit. “They stopped being a team and fell into cliques that just happened to use the same room and wear the same uniform,” he wrote. He described Fregosi and Jones “a pair of potbellied bookends” and pitcher Gary Gentry as “a clique unto himself.” Donnelly called Mays, Jones and Tommie Agee “the Infirmary Boys” for the amount of time they spent in the trainer’s room, and particularly singled Mays out for seeking, and receiving, special treatment. He quoted an unnamed player as saying, “This wouldn’t have happened if Gil was still alive, prompting general manager Bob Scheffing to defend manager Berra’s performance.

          To be sure, there were positives to the season. Lefty John Matlack led the staff with four shutouts and was elected Rookie of the Year. Seaver won 21 games, Jim McAndrew 11 (with a 2.80 ERA), and Tug McGraw saved 27 with a 1.70 ERA.

          On July 4, Seaver took a no-hitter into the ninth inning, only to have it spoiled by a Leron Lee broken-bat single. Seaver ended up with a one-hit, 2-0 victory over the San Diego Padres. “I didn’t lose it on a hanging curve or a bad slider,” Seaver said. “It was a good fastball down and in.”

          McGraw took center stage in the all-star game, pitching a scoreless ninth and 10th innings to earn the win in a 4-3 extra-inning win for the National League, whiffing four and striking a blow on behalf of relief pitchers, responding to American League manager Earl Weaver’s stocking his pitching staff only with starters. Citing his and Reds closer Clay Carroll’s selections by National League manager Danny Murtagh, McGraw said afterward, “We’re really happy the National League has recognized relief pitchers belong.”

          That was McGraw’s 1972 belief. In 1973, he would believe in something else. But that’s next week’s story.