Saturday Sounds: Ron Swoboda — Casey, Gil, and the Catch

For 17 years, I did a little radio show called Sports Talk New York. It bounced around the dial — WGLI, WGBB, WLIE, WBWD — and over those years I got to sit across from an awful lot of the people I grew up worshipping. Some of those conversations I've carried around in my head ever since. Most of them have just been sitting on SoundCloud, gathering digital dust.

So we're opening the vault. Every Saturday here on Kiner's Korner, we'll pull one of those interviews back out — I'll tell you what I remember about it, and you can hear the whole thing for yourself, right in the article. First up is a perfect place to start: Ron Swoboda, in January 2019, on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the Miracle Mets.

You already know the catch. Game 4 of the 1969 World Series, Brooks Robinson drives one to right-center, and Swoboda comes out of nowhere, horizontal, and picks it off the top of the grass at Shea. It's the single most famous defensive play in Mets history, and Swoboda has been telling the story for fifty years — his memoir, Here's the Catch, had just come out when we talked.

Swoboda's 1969 Topps card — the season of the Catch.

But here's the thing about Ron Swoboda: the catch is about the eighth most interesting story he tells in this half hour.

There's the afternoon in St. Louis where he lost a fly ball in the sun, came back toward the dugout raging at himself, and stomped his own helmet — a fiberglass helmet, mind you — until it cracked and stuck on his foot. And waiting for him was Casey Stengel: 74 years old, a plaster cast on his wrist from a fall, who came up those dugout steps "like he was 22 years old," grabbed his rookie by the shirt, and delivered the most Casey line ever recorded: "When you missed that fly ball, I didn't run in the clubhouse and throw your watch on the floor." Swoboda tells it the way only a man who survived Casey can. (Around the 10:26 mark, if you're the impatient type.)

There's Casey falling asleep in the dugout during games — and Swoboda's defense of it is better than any eulogy: if you were managing those Mets and you fell asleep, what exactly were you missing? There's the "new Babe Ruth" tag they hung on a 21-year-old kid in 1965, and what that does to a person. There's the Joe Torre trade the Mets turned down, and the Donn Clendenon deal they didn't — the inside story of how the Miracle actually got built.

And then it turns, the way the best conversations do. Swoboda on Gil Hodges is as honest as a ballplayer gets about a manager he clashed with: fighting Hodges, he says flat out, was "the stupidest thing I ever did" — and then he lays out the Hall of Fame case for the man, no prompting needed. (Gil finally made it to Cooperstown in 2022. Ron was right, and he was right early.)

And because it was 1969, the world kept leaking into the season. Vietnam. The USO tours. And my favorite moment in the whole interview: the night of the moon landing, the Mets were stuck on a broken airplane in Montreal, watching a man walk on the moon. "We can't get from Montreal to New York," Swoboda says, "and here's a guy taking a footprint on the moon."

"Time flies when you're having fun," he says near the top of the show. Thirty-one minutes with Ron Swoboda flies, too. Press play — and when you're done, come tell us your favorite story over in Talkin' Mets on the Korner. More from the vault soon.

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