Saturday Seasons: It's 1971. Gentlemen, Start Your Grousing

In 1969, the New York Mets stunned the baseball world by rising from the depths of the second division to win the World Series. In 1970, the team regressed slightly toward the mean but nevertheless continued to bask in the afterglow of the unlikely championship. But in 1971, the tie that bound the team together and propelled them to greatness began to fray.

               They finished the season 83-79, 14 games behind a Roberto Clemente, Willie Stargell and pre-yips Steve Blass-led Pittsburgh Pirates squad that would defeat the San Francisco Giants in the NLCS and the Baltimore Orioles in the World Series. They also finished seven games behind a St. Louis Cardinal team led by Bob Gibson and Joe Torre – the third baseman the Mets could have had if they were willing to part with Nolan Ryan. (Instead, they waited a year and got Jim Fregosi; more about that later).

               To be sure, injuries took their toll on the roster and contributed to the disappointing finish. Cleon Jones and Tommie Agee, who would share the team’s home run lead with 14 each (okay, not that impressive), missed a combined 75 games. Art Shamsky, another power hitter, also spent time on the disabled list. Jerry Koosman suffered from a mysterious shoulder soreness that sidelined him for a month and Gary Gentry also had lingering arm soreness. Wayne Garrett, who might have been the left-handed third base platoon with righty Bob Aspromonte, was off for almost half the season fulfilling his military obligation (remember the Vietnam War?). When he returned, Garrett hit only .213 – only slightly worse than Aspromonte, who batted .225.

               Looking back, the starting lineup’s individual statistics mask that while they got hits, overall, they could not get timely hits. Jones led the team with a .319 batting average; Ed Kranepool, having his best season in years as he marked his 1,000th game in a Mets uniform, hit .280, also with 14 home runs. Jerry Grote hit .270 and regular second baseman Ken Boswell, .273. But Jones led the team with only 69 RBI, followed by Kranepool’s 58.

               Tom Seaver won his 20th game on the season’s final day. He was tagged with 10 losses; combined, the Mets scored a total of 17 runs in those defeats. Seaver would end the year with a league-leading 1.76 ERA and 289 strikeouts, a National League record for a right-hander. Koosman -- when he was healthy – pitched to a 3.04 ERA; Ray Sadecki was at 2.92 and Gentry at 3.23. Tug McGraw won 11 games out of the bullpen. Danny Frisella, the right-handed half of the saves brigade, recorded 12, along with eight wins and a 1.99 ERA.

               All in all, the team should have done better, and for a while, they did. Over the first two and a half months of the season, from Opening Day to June 30, the Mets’ record was 45-29, and, after a 4-0 Ryan victory over the Pirates, the Mets entered July trailing Pittsburgh by only two games.

But then the bats went cold. The Mets started July by dropping five in a row, stopping the skid in the nightcap  of a doubleheader against the woeful Montreal Expos in which Ray Sadecki and Ryan each pitched three-hitters, but the Mets could only win one.

They dropped six more after that win, hitting the All-Star break having lost 11 out of 12 and fallen 10 games behind the Bucs. On July 21, they got 19 hits at Wrigley Field against the Cubs – and lost, 11-7, hitting into as many double plays (four) as the Cubs had home runs. It was their 16th defeat in 19 games.

From then on, it was all over but the grumbling, and it was open-season for finger-pointing. “The main reason is there’s not that unity,”  Agee told Newday’s Steve Jacobson. “We don’t pull for each other the way we did. One guy is not picking up the other guy.”

“In ’69, guys were fighting to stay in the big leagues. Now they’re content to be in the big leagues. “ Agee was quoted as saying in the same article.

McGraw added, “We’re not playing as aggressive as in 69. We show spurts of it, not consistently. We’re more lackadaisical.”

It wasn’t just a lack of timely hitting. The Mets were plagued by missed signs, bad baserunning, multiple runners picked off in a game. And other players began grumbling about manager Gil Hodges’ aloofness, noting that they mostly communicated to him through his coaches.

Two games that could be considered microcosms of the season came in early August, after things fell off the rails and it appeared that the team would be unable to set things right. The first came on August 1, in which some of the tension between the players and their manager bubbled to the surface. Somewhat appropriately, it involved Hodges and the team’s best hitter, Jones.

You might remember the 1969 incident in which Hodges marched out to left field and pulled Jones from a game; initially it was reported that Hodges felt Jones hadn’t hustled after a fly ball and wanted to make an example of Jones (there was some smoothed-over revisionist history afterward). This time, the manger’s action was to sit Jones in the first game of a scheduled Sunday doubleheader in which the Cubs started a lefty Jones should have feasted on. “He’s the kind of guy you’ve got to beat if you want to stay in contention,” Jones noted afterward. It also was a game the Mets needed to win; the Cubs' scheduled pitcher for the second game was their ace, Ferguson Jenkins.

Without Jones, the Mets lost, 3-2; the nightcap was rained out. When asked afterward why Jones remained on the bench, Hodges said it was out of concern for Jones’ health. But the clear implication was that Hodges was still miffed that Jones removed himself from the lineup the previous Friday, citing a sore throat. So Hodges kept Jones on the bench Saturday, when the weather was good, and again Sunday. “I thought with this type of weather, it was best to keep him out,” Hodges said after the game. When asked for comment afterward, Jones looked at his locker-mate, Agee, and shrugged.

The second was a 17-inning , 2-1 loss to the Braves in which the Mets hit into six double plays; Agee, in going 0-for-8, hit into three of them, including one that started as a line drive into the outfield. “I can’t remember a longer night,” he whispered in the clubhouse afterward, according to Joe Donnelly’s Newsday account. Good pitching, little hitting and, fittingly, a game-ending play in which the Mets failed to execute fundamentals properly. Braves pinch hitter Darrell Evans singled to right, hard enough that a good throw from right fielder Ken Singleton could have nailed Sonny Jackson trying to score. But the throw went up the line and Jackson scored, game over.

What had started out as a promising spring had become a lost summer. The team went 9-20 in July and was only slightly better in August, 12-17, a month in which they failed to pick up ground on a Pirates team that also slumped. The month ended with a three-game sweep of the Dodgers (who would lose the NL West to the Giants by a single game), prompting Hodges to proclaim, “I still feel we are in a pennant race. I feel it more and more each day….Sure, we’ll need help, but these last few days have been helpful.”

Alas, the help never came. The Pirates got hot and won the division going away, even though the Mets finished the month 17-13.

On the bright side, the team did get to evaluate some of their prospects, most notably outfielder Ken Singleton, who tied with Jones for the most game-winning hits, nine; first baseman Mike Jorgensen; and infielder Teodoro Martinez, who never seemed to live up to his potential.

But the thorniest evaluation was that of Ryan, who broke in with team as a teenage fireballer in 1968 but who never seemed to live up to his potential. His performances were inconsistent and he displayed a wildness that continually put men of base via walks. Hodges banished Ryan to the bullpen in August, only to return him to the rotation in September.

“What becomes of Nolan Ryan may be one of their biggest problems,” Red Foley wrote in the Daily News.

Newspaper stories compared him to Rex Barney, who broke in with the Dodgers in 1943 with similar credentials, and whose career was summed up in a 1971 newspaper story as “all promise – little production.”

Mets brass apparently came to the same conclusion about Ryan, and on December 10, traded him to the California Angels for Fregosi, a good-hitting all-star shortstop they planned to play at third base. In the team’s highlight film recapping the 1971 season, the Mets spoke glowingly of Fregosi’s coming. Ryan was never mentioned.

But that wasn’t the worst thing that happened before the 1972 season started. More about that next week.