Saturday Seasons: 1977-- The Descent into the Dark

July 13, 1977. Mets versus the Cubs at Shea Stadium. Lenny Randle at bat, facing Ray Burris with one out in the sixth and the Mets trailing, 2-1, when….the lights went out. Not just at Shea, but all across New York City. Two separate lightning strikes tripped circuit breakers that knocked out the power lines feeding the city, plunging the five boroughs into a 35-hour blackout that would see looting across the city, result in 3,700 arrests and produce an estimated $300 million in damages.

As Time magazine reported in its blackout story, “It was a gut punch to a city that was already on edge in numerous ways. The city was teetering on the edge of several different kinds of insolvency, and serial killer David Berkowitz, aka the Son of Sam, was still on the loose murdering young New Yorkers for sport.”

For the 1977 Mets, the gut punch came a month earlier, on what still remains one of the darkest days in Mets history: the Midnight Massacre that saw a looting of the roster, lowlighted by the trade of “The Franchise.” Tom Seaver, to the Cincinnati Reds.

Make no mistake, the 1977 Mets were an awful team, even with Seaver. They got off to a terrible start, and on May 31, with the team mired in last place, having lost nine of their last ten and with a 15-30 record, the Mets fired manager Joe Frazier and replaced him with their backup first baseman, who would become, briefly, a player-manager: Joe Torre. Torre’s playing career would end a month later, when as past of the Midnight Massacre trades, the Mets would acquire Joel Youngblood to take Torre’s place on the active roster.

Newspaper stories at the time would suggest that Frazier, who had been promoted a year before from the team’s AA A Tidewater farm team, had lost control of the clubhouse, including the respect of two of its stars, Seaver and slugger Dave Kingman. Other journalists seized on that excuse as just so much more Mets brass spin. As Newsday columnist Joe Gergen wrote, “Now that the Mets have cured the symptom, perhaps they will take the time to diagnose the illness. So bad had been odor around Shea Stadium in the first two months of the season that yesterday, the Mets were moved to action. As expected, they cut off their nose.”

And the undercurrent of the firing was that it was yet another example of the team’s board chairman, M. Donald Grant, exerting his authority to prove that if anybody should be considered the franchise, it was him. Frazier was the pick of general manager Joe McDonald, not Grant, and it was Grant who ordered McDonald to fire Frazier, who only the year before had led the team to a decent third-place finish.

So, too, was Grant’s order that McDonald trade Seaver, who had battled with the chairman for more than a year, going back to his role as the team’s player representative during the bitter negotiations that led to the 1976 lockout. What resulted was a new Collective Bargaining Agreement fueled by an arbitrator’s decision that struck down’s baseball’s reserve clause and ushered in the free agency era. It was a change that the old-school Grant bemoaned, especially the sea change that shifted control to the players, rather than the owners. And his public enemy number one was Seaver, whom Grant had signed to a three-year contract in 1976 that made him, at the time, the highest pitcher in baseball, at a base salary of $225,000 a year, after bitter negotiations and considerable acrimony.

As free agency took hold in the 1976-1977 offseason, that distinction was short-lived, as other, lesser pitchers signed more lucrative contracts, led by former teammate Nolan Ryan, who was earning $300,000 a season from the California Angels, even though he was not eligible for free agency until after the 1979 season.

Seaver, by many accounts, was upset that Grant’s parsimony was the main barrier to improving the Mets and spoke out about what he said was the Mets’ failure to pursue free agents, most notably center fielder Gary Matthews, who would have fit nicely into the Mets’ offense. Matthews signed instead with the Braves. “How can you not even try?” Seaver had asked in an impromptu session with the writers at the Mets’ spring training complex in St. Petersburg on Feb. 26, 1977.

Grant took the comments personally, as an attack on his authority, and over the succeeding months started spreading the spin that Seaver was a malcontent who should have been thrilled by his contract and not bellyaching about how much others make. Grant also painted Seaver as a cancer in the clubhouse. Grant’s primary vehicle for those attacks was Daily New columnist Dick Young, who was merciless in his continued character attacks on Seaver – even on days when news events seemingly would suggest that Young write on a different topic.

You’d think, for example, that Young would feel compelled to opine on Frazier’s firing and Torre’s elevation to manager. Au contraire….his column, on the back page of the Daily News, underneath the story about the managerial change, instead contended that the Mets were having difficulty trading Seaver because they couldn’t find any takers at what would be considered a respectable price for perhaps the best pitcher in the game.

“Why is there no sense of true value when the Mets talk trade about Tom Seaver?” Young wrote. “I can think of two reasons. One, the Mets are dealing from weakness. They are trying to unload a problem to a confined market, the restricted market is created by the player’s dictates [a reference to the 10-and-5 provision of the collective bargaining agreement]. Second, Seaver is a troublemaker….As great a talent as is Tom Seaver, he has become an irreparably destructive force on the Mets. In his undisciplined rage at the team front office, he put down his teammates. They were not worthy of playing behind him, he said.”

That, of course, was a management spin on Seaver’s understandable request that the team look to make itself better; after all, it only finished third the year before, not first. And, demonstrating his desire to stay a Met, Seaver bypassed Grant and spoke directly with team owner Lorinda DeRoulet (Joan Payson's daughter) and negotiated a contract extension that preserved his current salary (and the sanctity of that contract) while giving him substantial raises in the extended years.

As the trade deadline approached, with the team in Atlanta, Seaver had a lengthy telephone conversation with general manager McDonald, apprising him of what had transpired. Seaver made some additional suggestions and said that if management acquiesced, he would put aside his differences with Grant and rescind his request for a trade. The next afternoon, Grant summoned the board of directors to consider Seaver’s requests. But just as the board was to take up the matter, Seaver called again and said to forget what he had offered the night before. “I want out,” is what he told the board.

What happened to change Seaver’s mind? Another Dick Young column, which began, “In a way, Tom Seaver is like Walter O’Malley. Both are very good at what they do. Both are deceptive in what they say. Both are very greedy.” To support his case, Young contended that Seaver bristled about Ryan earning more than he was. “Nolan Ryan is getting more than Seaver, and that galls Tom because Nancy Seaver and Ruth Ryan are very friendly and Tom Seaver has long treated Nolan Ryan like a little brother,” Young wrote.

That reference sent Seaver over the edge. “When he dragged my wife into this and my family, I called the Mets back and pulled my offer back and said, ‘That’s it.’  “Seaver said afterward.

That Seaver felt Young was, to a large extent, carrying Grant’s water is understandable, since Young had a family tie to the Mets: his son-in-law, Thornton Geary, hired by the team as a media coordinator – at Young’s request. Young and Grant denied any conflict or quid-pro-quo” “I'm not obliged to Grant because of that," Young said. “That’s a smokescreen." Grant said the only alliance he had with Young was “simply an alliance through respect. Is Seaver the only one allowed to have a friend in the media?” Newsday’s Thomas Collins quoted Grant as saying.

Hours after rescinding his offer, Seaver was gone, sent to the Reds in exchange for four players: pitcher Pat Zachry, the previous season’s rookie of the year who had been struggling; second baseman Doug Flynn; and outfielders Steve Henderson and Dan Norman. Also gone was Kingman, sent to the Padres for pitcher Paul Siebert and Bobby Valentine. In yet another trade, the team sent Mike Phillips to the Cardinals for jack-of-all-trades Joel Youngblood, who would take Torre’s roster spot.

The next day, Seaver held a news conference, wife Nancy by his side. Seaver told his side of the story, and everything went smoothly until he was asked if he had something to say to the fans. That’s when Seaver became emotional, choking up and breaking into tears. “C’mon, George,” he said, referring to himself by his first name, finally asking, “What if I write it out?” He borrowed a pen and paper from an Associated Press reporter, and wrote about the ovation he got a few weeks before after passing Sandy Koufax on the career strikeout list.” He described the ovation as “one of the most memorable and warm moments of my life.”

Grant did not hold a news conference or make himself available for comment. But as Young fielded inquiries about his independence and objectivity and the team started to regroup, Newsday columnist Bill Nack best summed up the situation about who was most at fault. “We look, of course, to M. Donald Grant, the only man responsible for what has happened in the last few days, and ironically the only one of the cast of embattled characters who was completely and truly expendable …That he survived, of all people, reveals the state of hopeless decay and drift the New York Mets are in.”

The rest of the season? Well, let’s just say that the Mets fared only slightly better under Torre than they had under Frazier, going 49-68 under their new skipper and finishing, at 64-98, 37 games behind the NL East champions, the Philadelphia Phillies. The last place finish was their first since escaping the cellar a decade earlier and their first since divisional play began in 1969.

Zachry went 7-6 with a 3.76 ERA and 63 strikeouts in 119.2 innings, credible but not the type of numbers that would make fans forget Seaver. Henderson, promoted to the major leagues, batted .297 with 12 home runs and 65 RBI in 99 games, good enough to finish second in the Rookie of the Year balloting behind future Hall of Famer Andre Dawson. Flynn, as expected, played a flashy second base but hit only .191. Norman was recalled for a cup of coffee, seven games. Bright spots were Randle, who hit .304, and Ed Kranepool, who hit .281. Jerry Koosman, who inherited staff ace status after Seaver departed, pitched to a 3.49 ERA and whiffed 192 batters – but still lost 20 games while winning only eight.

Perhaps the team’s brightest moment came when the lights went out.

Randle, in numerous interviews years later, recalled swinging at Burris’ pitch when the blackout hit.  “It was pitch black, so I swing, make contact, and take off. What would you do? The Cubs Manny Trillo and Ivan de Jesus tackled me as I was coming into second,” Randle was quoted in one of the published interviews.  “I’m from Compton so I’m used to playing with no lights, having games lit with candles and car high-beams."

Which is exactly what happened. To keep the relatively sparse crowd of 14,626 calm while everyone tried to figure out what was going on, some Mets players drove their cars through the bullpen and onto the field – much to the consternation of bullpen coach Joe Pignatano, who worried the vehicles would trample the tomato plants in his vegetable garden. Randle, Valentine, Flynn, Kranepool and catcher John Stearns took to the field and essentially did an infield practice ballet, pantomiming double plays. “We took a phantom infield,” Flynn said in one newspaper article recalling the game, “It was all Valentine’s idea and we put on a show. We started making diving stops. Then we decided to turn double plays. We made flips behind the back and through the legs. The crowd really seemed to enjoy it.”

The crowd also enjoyed the free food – hot dogs and ice cream given away because, without refrigeration, they would spoil, anyway. And to put the fans in the right frame of mind as they ventured out of Shea attempt getting home subway-less, organist Jane Jarvis led them in a singalong of White Christmas.

               The lights went back on the next day, but for the Mets, the Dark Ages had already begun. They would lose the continuation of the game, on September 16, and continue losing – 95 or more games in each of the next three seasons. They avoided 95 losses in 1981 only because a strike shortened the season by one-third.

And Seaver? He went 14-3 with a 2.34 ERA in 20 starts for the Reds in 1977. The next year, he pitched his only no-hitter for the Reds. The year after that, he led the Reds to the postseason.

Which is more than you can say about M. Donald Grant, who was gone by the end of 1978.