Tom Seaver: A Terrific Life - Softcover

Madden, Bill

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1982136227 ISBN 13: 9781982136222

Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

An authoritative, “must-read” (Keith Hernandez) biography of Hall of Fame pitching legend Tom Seaver, still the greatest player ever to wear a Mets jersey, by a journalist who knew him well.

He was called Tom Terrific for a reason. Tom Seaver is “among the greatest pitchers of all time” (Bob Costas). He is one of only two pitchers with 300 wins, 3,000 strikeouts, and an ERA under 3.00. He was a three-time Cy Young award winner, twelve-time All Star, and was elected to baseball’s Hall of Fame with the highest percentage ever at the time. Popular among players and fans, Seaver was fiercely competitive but always put team success ahead of personal glory.

Born in Fresno, California, Seaver signed with the New York Mets in 1967, leading them to their stunning 1969 World Series victory. After a legendarily lopsided trade, he joined the Cincinnati Reds, then later played for the White Sox and the Red Sox before ending his career following the 1986 season. After his playing days, Seaver retired back to California to establish a successful vineyard. The in 2013, a recurrence of Lyme disease severely affected his memory, which Madden was the first to report. In 2019, Seaver’s family announced that he had been diagnosed with dementia and was withdrawing from public life. Tom Seaver died on August 31, 2021.

Madden began following Seaver’s career in the 1980s. Seaver came to trust Madden so completely that, eager to return to New York from Chicago, he asked Madden to explore a possible trade to the Yankees which never materialized. Drawing in part on their long relationship, Madden “has crafted a biography as terrific as the subject” (Jane Leavy, New York Times bestselling author of Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy).

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

For more than forty years Bill Madden has covered the Yankees and Major League Baseball as the national baseball columnist for the New York Daily News. He is the author of several books, including the New York Times bestseller Steinbrenner, and has collaborated on memoirs by Lou Piniella and Don Zimmer. Madden was the 2010 recipient of the Baseball Hall of Fame’s J.G. Taylor Spink Award and is a member of the Writers Wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame. He lives in Florida.

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Chapter 1: 300! CHAPTER 1 300!
HE HAD ALREADY WON 273 GAMES in the big leagues, along with a record-tying three Cy Young Awards, a no-hitter, and Sports Ilustrated’s Sportsman of the Year Award—not to mention having led the New York Mets to the most improbable World Series championship in baseball history—when Tom Seaver received the news that fateful morning of January 20 in 1984.

He was going to have to leave New York for the second time in his career.

Unlike the first time, 1977, when he was still in his prime, Seaver was thirty-nine now and coming off two successive losing seasons, which had already caused him to question privately whether it was time to start seriously considering life without baseball.

Other than miraculously regaining the lost two miles per hour on his fastball or winning the Sporting News’ Comeback Player of the Year Award, Seaver had nothing more to prove when the Chicago White Sox shocked the baseball world that day by selecting him as the number one pick in something called the free-agent compensation draft, passing over hundreds of far younger established players and prospects.

“I just don’t know if I want to do this,” Seaver said to his wife, Nancy, that morning in the kitchen of their home, a converted barn snuggled within a parcel of seven heavily wooded acres in Greenwich, Connecticut. Leave home again? With his two daughters growing up? Why?

In recounting that conversation years later, Nancy Seaver said her husband’s anger at the Mets for leaving him unprotected in the draft was tempered by his own self-doubt as to whether he had anything left in that durable right arm that had already logged more than four thousand innings across seventeen major-league seasons—and whether it was worth it to find out, in another city, in a different league with the designated hitter, halfway across the country from his home and family.

“I think he was questioning himself whether or not he needed to put himself out there again,” Nancy said during an interview at Seaver’s vineyard in Calistoga, California, north of San Francisco, in 2017. “Maybe it was time for him to come home and start to think about his future.” But Nancy said she suggested that he give it a try. Go to the new team. “I started thinking, ‘Well, we could live in the city. How fun that would be for the girls. We could actually live in a high-rise—we’d never done that before.’?”

Seaver pondered what she had said, still uncertain about how much he had left.

“Well,” he said, “maybe if I just get two hundred ninety wins. What’s so wrong with that? Maybe I could be content with that.”

Again, Nancy felt he was short-changing himself. What was twenty-seven more wins? He’d won twenty games in a season five times previously in his career and led the league with fourteen victories just three years earlier in the strike-shortened 1981 campaign.

“You have to go for the three hundred wins,” she said, firmly. “If you don’t at least try, it will always be in the back of your mind.”

Looking back thirty-three years later, Nancy laughed. “I literally shoved the guy out the door. I said: ‘You will never be happy if you have to wonder if you could ever get to three hundred wins.’ I knew he wasn’t finished.”

Three years earlier, Seaver had told scribe Frank Deford of Sports Illustrated: “My one statistical goal is three hundred wins, but I’m not going to keep after it if I have to struggle. It’s no fun to go out there and not pitch well. That would be too frustrating.” He was thinking of two of the more recent three-hundred-game winners, Early Wynn and Gaylord Perry, both of whom had been in their forties and needed multiple starts to achieve three hundred. He wanted no part of that.

And much of the 1982 season, when he’d gone 5-13 with an ungodly 5.50 ERA in his last year with the Cincinnati Reds, and ’83 when he’d pitched considerably better but still had another losing record (9-14) with the hapless (68-94) last-place Mets, had left him with nothing but frustration.

But perhaps more than anything, Seaver worried if he could fit in with a new team and new teammates, most of them ten to fifteen years younger than him. He had always been regarded as a true baseball Renaissance man, the out-of-the-ordinary clubhouse intellectual who was fond of citing Bernoulli’s law to explain why a fastball rises; who eschewed reading the sports pages or the hunting and fishing magazines at his locker in favor of the New York Times crossword puzzle; and who organized bridge games in the clubhouse, as he explained to his teammates, “to stimulate your minds.” He had learned bridge from his parents and brought the game to the clubhouse in his early years with the Mets. “It’s a mental exercise,” he would say, “just like the crossword puzzles I do every day. Both bridge and crosswords have you withdraw bits of information and recall things—just like you do with pitching.”

There was another thing: he was no longer young. The game was changing, and so were the players He’d be moving on to another new team where he had to figure out if he could fit in. All around him, the kids were getting younger, their interests far different from his. Their music was louder, and they wore earphones. There was no conversation. No stimulation. It’s important, he thought, how the new generations make you feel, in the same job you’ve been doing for twenty years.

But Nancy was right. He may have lost a tick or so off his fastball but nothing of his competitiveness. The White Sox were a far better team than the Mets, having led the major leagues with ninety-nine wins in ’83, and it would be not unlike joining Cincinnati’s All-Star-laden Big Red Machine in 1977, with Johnny Bench, Pete Rose, George Foster, and company. He and Bench had developed a very special pitcher-catcher rapport, much like what he’d enjoyed with Jerry Grote, who’d been his catcher with the Mets the whole ten and a half years he’d been with them. And Sox receiver Carlton Fisk was considered the American League “complete catcher” counterpart to Bench.

So, Seaver would go to Chicago—although not before an acrimonious contract extension negotiation with the White Sox owners—and begin that final quest for the one milestone that mattered to him. When he reported to the White Sox spring training camp in Sarasota, Florida, on February 20, he felt renewed. His bitter feelings toward the Mets had still not subsided—“what the New York Mets did was disrupt my family life,” he told the Chicago press corps—but he’d had a full month to reflect on the benefits of going from a last-place team to a first-place team, and he’d gotten acquainted by phone with Fisk and White Sox manager Tony LaRussa; he’d seen firsthand how they went about their business, and concluded that the move might actually be a blessing.

“I knew in my heart I’d be pitching somewhere in 1984,” Seaver told the Chicago media. “I can win sixteen to twenty games here.” He went on to say how much he, a student of baseball history, was looking forward to pitching in the American League, especially at the White Sox’s seventy-four-year-old Comiskey Park, venue of the infamous 1919 “Black...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Simon & Schuster
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2021
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1982136227
• ISBN 13: 9781982136222
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV, GPSR Europäische Union; info@simonandschuster.nl; ; Herculesplein 96; AA Utrecht; 3584; Niederlande