Saturday Sounds: Cleon Jones — Down on One Knee

Last week we opened the vault with Ron Swoboda. This week we don't even have to change the tape — because on that same January night in 2019, less than an hour after Swoboda was on the show, Cleon Jones was on the line. Back to back, the two outfielders who bookend the 1969 World Series: Swoboda made the catch that saved Game 4, and Jones caught the fly ball that ended Game 5 and made the Mets champions of the world.

A quick word on what you're hearing: we've given the interview a new Saturday Sounds introduction and retired the old show open, but the conversation itself is exactly as it aired in January 2019.

Start with the introduction I gave him that night, because I meant every word: he was one of my first favorite players ever. Number 21. The kid from Mobile, Alabama, who played football and baseball at Mobile County Training School — 26 touchdowns in nine games, thank you very much — signed with the Mets in 1963 and got a September call-up that year without playing a single game of Double-A or Triple-A ball. By 1966 he was the starting center fielder. By 1969 he was simply the best hitter on the Miracle Mets: a .340 average, a .422 on-base percentage, and team highs just about everywhere you looked — hits, doubles, stolen bases, walks, even hit-by-pitches. Leading the team in getting hit. That's commitment.

Jones's 1969 Topps card — the season of the final out.

And yet when you ask Cleon Jones about Casey Stengel — he broke in under Casey in '63, when the Old Professor was old enough to be his grandfather — he just laughs. Favorite Casey story? "There was a million of them." Pick one, Cleon. Any one. We're still waiting.

The two weeks that changed everything come up, as they must: November 27, 1967, Gil Hodges arrives to manage the Mets. December 15, Tommie Agee — Cleon's high school teammate back in Mobile — is traded to New York. Cleon talks about what Hodges demanded and how he made young players better, and when A.J. puts the Hall of Fame question to him point-blank — his teammates had been telling Newsday that very week that Gil belongs in Cooperstown — Cleon takes his time and makes the case his way. (Gil finally got in in 2022. The '69 Mets were right about their manager, and they were early.) And on Agee, he says the thing that tells you everything about Cleon Jones: "It meant everything to me, but it meant more to the team, in my opinion."

The villains get their inning, too — Leo Durocher's Cubs, in first place until September, and the night a black cat showed up at Shea. Cleon remembers a confident Chicago club that thought the race was theirs, and a Mets team that just kept making all the plays.

Then the World Series, and the most famous shoe in Mets history. Game 5: Dave McNally's pitch clips Cleon's foot — the shoe-polish ball. Umpire Lou DiMuro isn't buying it until Gil Hodges produces the ball with the polish on it. Cleon remembers Donn Clendenon insisting, "the ball hit him, the ball hit him" — and then Clendenon went up and hit the home run that pulled the Mets back into the game. "He put us back in the ball game," Cleon says. "He was the difference in the ball game."

And because Swoboda opened this series, Cleon gets the last word on him — noting that he'd watched Ronnie dive for balls like the famous one for five years without ever coming up with it. But with the biggest audience in baseball watching, "he made that play." From one '69 outfielder to another, that's as good as it gets.

But the part of this conversation that has stayed with me ever since is the last few minutes, when Cleon talks about Africatown — the community in Mobile County where he and Agee grew up, a close-knit place of about 10,000 people with no park and no recreation facilities, where a 13-year-old Cleon Jones played with whatever glove he could borrow. "I was using my classmate's gloves, my next-door neighbor's gloves, the guys down the street's gloves. And that's how I became a pretty good athlete." Men like Clyde Gray — the Mobile man who pushed the Athletics and the Mets to take a look at him — made sure the kids had baseballs and bats so they could play and develop. Cleon has spent his retirement paying that forward: painting homes for the elderly, restoring rotten wood, putting people back into their houses. "I get up in the morning, six o'clock, and meet my fellows, and we go to work. That is my way of giving back, because it was so much given to me as a youngster."

The man who went down on one knee to end the 1969 World Series spends his mornings on his feet, rebuilding the hometown that made him. Press play — and when you're done, come tell us your Cleon Jones memories over in Talkin' Mets on the Korner. More from the vault next Saturday.

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