When it is argued (and it always is) that the Mets’ miraculous 100-win season in 1969 is tainted, somehow, by the team’s extraordinary luck, it may be comforting to remember how the previous Mets’ teams of 1962-8 were not only unsuccessful but spectacularly unlucky as well.
Statistics show how the 1969 team picked up a few more wins than that team deserved, but similar stats record the 1968 squad’s lack of luck. The Mets played 15 extra-inning games in 1968: if they had done as well in these as in nine-inning games, they would have won at least 7 out of the 15. (The Mets’ record in 9 inning contests was close to .500: 71 wins and 76 losses.) Instead, they took only 2 out of the 15 extra-inning contests. While such games depend on having a strong and deep bullpen and a talented bench, such extreme results must be attributed (at least in part) to some very bad luck. By another measure of a team’s luckiness (or lack thereof), the Pythagorean method (which uses runs scored and runs surrendered to derive what a luck-neutral team’s record “should” have been), the 1968 Mets “should” have won 77 games, but won only 73. While either figure was sufficient to break the old team record for victories (which was 66), the higher figure would have vaulted the Mets to the never-before-seen heights of seventh place, and perhaps given a little advance notice for the coming season’s success. As it was, they finished ninth for only the second time in the team’s history, keeping their ambitions and their talents well-hidden from scrutiny.
The 1968 season seemed tantalizing all around, not least because the young Mets’ squad got off to their fastest start yet. By the first day of summer, they still were on the verge of breaking into the NL’s first division. The high point of the season, and of their existence to that point, came on that first warm evening of summer, when their record stood at 32 wins and 33 losses. Earlier that month, they had also stood a game away from breaking the .500 mark, standing at 28-29 with their second-year ace Tom Seaver going for them. But on that occasion, Seaver faced the San Francisco Giant’s ace Juan Marichal (who would lead the NL with 26 victories in 1968), and the Giants repelled the Mets’ progress. A week later, the Mets had struggled back to one game away from .500, but facing another ace, Don Drysdale, again they fell short. In the 98 games remaining after June 21st, they went 41-56 (and one tie), falling to ninth place, but throughout that spring the team showed great promise.
The winning pitcher of their 32nd victory that June afternoon was Dick Selma, a 24-year old righthander enjoying his best major league season. After beating the Dodgers 5-1 that day, Selma’s winning percentage was the best in the league, at 7-1, just ahead of Marichal (at 13-2) and the Mets’ rookie sensation Jerry Koosman, who had earned his 11th victory two days earlier against only 2 losses. The Mets’ best pitcher, though his record in the spring didn’t reflect his talent, was Seaver, so they had a formidable trio of starters. Another young starter, like Seaver bound for the Hall of Fame a few decades down the line, was also off to a fine start: Nolan Ryan began the year with a 4-2 record. Ryan had tied an unbreakable major league record on April 19th, when he struck out the side on nine pitches, and would go on to record a strikeout per inning for the year. A fifth promising young starting pitcher, Jim McAndrew, who wouldn’t come up to the major leagues until mid-July, would pitch brilliantly in his twelve starts, posting a 2.28 season’s ERA, giving the Mets five young potentially dominating pitchers in 1968.
Of course, in 1968, most teams’ pitching would look very good. That was the year of the pitcher—the entire league had an ERA of 2.98 , a mark the Mets surpassed neatly. Their ERA was 2.72, an achievement the team had never before approached, and have not matched since. Seaver’s 2.20 mark and McAndrew’s 2.28 were topped by rookie Jerry Koosman’s 2.08 (third in the NL). With 19 wins and 7 shutouts, Koosman came as close as a player can come to winning the Rookie-of-the-Year Award that season: only a single voter’s abstention kept Koosman from tying Johnny Bench for that honor. Like his team, Koosman got off to a fast start, shutting out the Dodgers and then the Giants in his first two games. (The shutout of the Giants on April 17th began with maximum drama: Koosman loaded the bases in the first inning, and then struck out Willie Mays, Jim Ray Hart and Jack Hiatt.) Five of the Mets’ first six games, in fact, were shutouts, including two portentous 1-0 losses. With runs scarce for the entire league in this year of the pitcher, 1-0 games would become excruciatingly common as the year went on, but at this early point in the season, the young Mets just seemed snakebit: if they could only have won those two 1-0 games, they would have taken 5 out of their first 6. The second 1-0 loss is remembered as a particularly spectacular heartbreaker, the sole run coming (on an error) in the 24th inning to their expansion rivals the Houston Astros; the loss put the team into a hole that they would spend the year clawing out of. Their new centerfielder, Tommie Agee, (acquired from the White Sox for Tommy Davis and Jack Fisher) entered the game batting .313 (5 for 16) , but went hitless in 10 at-bats, emerging with a batting average under .200, which would linger for much of the season. Occasionally replaced by Don Bosch in centerfield and at leadoff, though Bosch was one of the few players whose bat was weaker than Agee’s, the fast young outfielder had a dispiriting introduction to the National League, scoring and driving in the grand total of 47 runs in 132 games. Agee’s ability came into sharp question that season: a coach was quoted in Chris Stern’s Where Have They Gone?, as saying that Agee’s “knowledge of Greek is greater than his knowledge of the strike zone,” but only new manager Gil Hodges’ assessment of Agee counted, and Hodges liked Agee’s talents. Analyst Bill James attributes Agee’s overall low statistics to the deadly combination of playing in pitchers’ ballparks in a pitcher’s era for virtually all of his career: according to James, only five outfielders played in more run-scarce environments in all of baseball’s history.
What was awful for young hitters was joyous for young pitchers, of course, though their season was remarkable not only for its overall quality but for its overall inconsistency. Koosman (11-2), Selma (7-1) and Ryan (4-2) got off to fast starts (their initial w-l record comes to 22-5; Selma’s entire Met career consisted of fast starts and agonizingly slow finishes—Selma began his four Met seasons with a collective 14-5 mark, and ended them with a record of 3-16. He would be traded after 1968 to the rival Cubs, where true to form he would post another 7-1 record for Chicago at the start of 1969, and wind up with a losing record anyway.) The good beginnings by Selma, Koosman, and Ryan were offset by the discouraging records with which Seaver and veteran pitcher Don Cardwell began the year. Cardwell won only 3 of his first 12 decisions, and Seaver’s record stood at 2-5 after a Memorial Day loss.
Seaver was widely acknowledged to be suffering mostly from a lack of support, and Selma, in fairness, was riding high on a fairly generous supply of runs: in his first five victories of 1968, the Mets averaged more than six runs per game for Selma, never scoring fewer than five. This inequity was addressed in the All-Star team voting for that year: the NL players chose Seaver, despite his unseemly early won-lost record, and rejected Selma. (Signaling the Mets’ new respectability, the players for the first time voted to send more than just a sole Met to the All-Star game, by having Koosman and catcher Jerry Grote join Seaver.) That 2-5 record also briefly, and for the final time in his career, returned Seaver to the .500 mark to date, his lifetime record standing at 18 wins and losses.
But almost as quickly as Seaver’s luck turned, and Cardwell’s record improved, Selma and Ryan and even Koosman began to struggle: After their collective 22-5 start the Koosman-Selma-Ryan trio combined for a 12-26 mark, while Seaver and Cardwell combined for an 18 and 11 record the last part of the year. The strangest season of them all, though, belonged to rookie pitcher Jim McAndrew, whose season (and career, for that matter) is a complete oxymoronic oddity.
A half of an earned run separated the Mets’ six starting pitchers in 1968 into two distinct groups: three pitchers posted ERAs below 2.30, and three wound up with ERAs above 2.70. The three whose ERAs were up around the league average (Cardwell, Ryan, and Selma) ended up winning a little better than 40% of their decisions, which is about what one would expect, given the Mets’ generally poor run support. Two of the other three starters with ERAs way better than the league’s had impressive winning records—Seaver and Koosman won almost 60% of their decisions. Only McAndrew’s record stood out for its poor results in the face of his excellence in preventing runs: McAndrew won 4 and lost 7 for a winning percentage of .364. How was such frustration possible?
McAndrew had almost no support, and literally none at the outset. In his first four losses, the Mets scored exactly 0 runs for him. (Four straight shutout losses set an unenviable new major league record.) His first two victories, over the Cardinals’ Steve Carlton on August 26th and the Cubs’ Ferguson Jenkins on September 11th, were 1-0 , as were his third and fourth losses, a week apart, against the Giants on August 10th and the Astros on August 17th.. In addition to these four 1-0 games in a month’s span, McAndrew also lost three games by the score of 2-0, and one game by a score of 2-1. By the Pythagorean method, McAndrew pitched well enough in his rookie season to win 6 and lose 3. Perhaps the most unkind result of the lack of support was the reputation that McAndrew got as an unaggressive pitcher. Nicknamed “Moms” (by some of those teammates who left him on the short end of so many well-pitched games), he was derided as a pitcher who pitched just well enough to lose. Unlike Koosman, Seaver and Ryan, who blew away batters with punishing fastballs, McAndrew relied on changes of speed and precise location, which may have caused some to suspect his competitive nature, but his ERA speaks volumes for itself, as does his control. McAndrew walked fewer than 2 batters per nine innings in 1968, and his lifetime mark was a hair under 2.5 walks per game.
Nolan Ryan, on the opposite end of the spectrum, walked over 5 men per nine innings, while occasionally throwing an unhittable –or unseeable—fastball past terrified batters. Ryan missed a large chunk of the season due to military obligations, and McAndrew played in AAA ball through July, but their combined records—30 starts, 213 innings pitched, 2.79 ERA—looks very impressive, though it resulted in only a 10-16 won-lost record. The bullpen, beyond relievers Ron Taylor and Cal Koonce (who racked up 25 saves between them), was very thin, and probably caused a disproportionate number of late inning losses. An original Met, Alvin Jackson, rejoined the team, no longer a starting pitcher, and only effective sporadically, to witness the club’s record for lifetime shutouts (which he held) being challenged by the onslaughts of Seaver and Koosman. (They would pass him early the next season.) Perhaps Jackson’s best performance of the season came at the finish of Selma’s victory on June 21st, which he saved by striking out four of the five Dodgers to face him.
The offense also set new marks for futility: dead last in NL in the big three offensive categories (batting average, slugging percentage, and on-base percentage). Scoring fewer than 3 runs per game, the Mets led the league in batter’s strikeouts (by the wide margin of 200 Ks), setting a new major league record with 1203 Ks. Early in the year, the Mets’ offense had two bright surprises, the hitting of third baseman Ed Charles and catcher Jerry Grote, which sustained the team through the springtime. Charles, acquired early in 1967, was a surprise because few Mets fans expected that the 35-year old veteran had a lot of hits remaining in his bat, and Grote had long demonstrated his complete ineptitude at bat (Grote’s average through his first four big league years remained stuck below .200), but Grote earned his spot on the All-Star team by doing a superb job handling the Mets’ young pitching staff, and with his bat, hitting over .300 into late June. On the aforementioned high point of the season, June 21st, Grote and Charles were both averaging .300, and Charles was hitting the ball with power. In the victory over the Dodgers that afternoon, Charles drove in three runs, giving him a total of 28 RBIs (and a team-leading 9 HRs) in the team’s first 65 games, a pace that would give him 70 RBIs (and 23 HRs) for the season --if he kept it up. (Charles had averaged 72 RBIs during his first three years in the majors leagues, so such a late-career resurgence seemed possible.) Unfortunately, the Glider wound up the year with only six more home runs and 25 RBIs, while batting just .256 the rest of the way, and the Mets had no one to pick up the slack. Charles brought something else to the young team, in the way of vocal leadership, and his spirited, glove-smacking style lent confidence to his young teammates. Grote likewise lost twenty points off his average after that first day of summer. Only Cleon Jones swung a consistently hot bat through the year, batting .297 for the season with 14 HRs, one behind Charles for the team lead.
In hitting homeruns in four consecutive games (from April 19th-21st), Ron Swoboda seemed like he was going to deliver on his early promise yet again, but Swoboda (again) hit the vast majority of his season’s homeruns in the first quarter of the season. (On April 30th, he homered off Philadelphia’s Chris Short for the only run in yet another 1-0 game.) Incredibly, his puny 59 RBIs led the team, but for every RBI, it seemed, Swoboda was making an error on the basepaths or in the field. On June 11th, Swoboda overran his third base in two games, despite which the Mets shut out the Dodgers and won both games, in the middle of the most successful road trip in team history up to that point. During this early June road trip, the Mets won 7 out of 9 games, which felt even sweeter since the teams they beat were their old rivals the Dodgers and the Giants, and their rivals-to-be, Leo Durocher’s Chicago Cubs. The first of those back-to-back shutouts against the Dodgers was an extra-inning game won by the score of (you guessed it) 1-0, on a dinky bloop single by Al Weis in the 10th inning (Dodgers’ centerfielder Willie Davis argued vociferously that he had made a shoestring catch but lost the argument). This rare extra-inning victory snapped LA’s 7-game winning streak, and was the kind of tension-packed game that the Mets had in the past seemed always to lose. This June 10th victory featured a great match up of young pitching stars, the Mets’ Seaver and the Dodgers’ young star Don Sutton, both of whom pitched complete games, and both of whom richly deserved to win.
The next game, with Selma on the mound, the Mets racked up their 10th shutout of the year, matching the total of the entire previous season. (Rod Kanehl attended —and enjoyed--- this game, according to the NY Times; during Kanehl’s first two full seasons with the Mets—1962 and 1963-- Met pitchers had managed a total of only 9 shutouts. The 1968 staff would go on to throw 25 shutouts for the year.) At one point in the month of June 1968, the Mets won 12 of 18 games, scoring 3.9 runs per game during this stretch, a full run better than their season’s average, while surrendering about 2.7. (A 12-6 record is exactly what the Pythagorean method says should result from this ratio of runs scored to runs surrendered.) In other words, the Mets were capable of playing pennant-winning ball with their current pitching staff’s level of performance, provided their offense could improve a notch. The Mets wilted in the heat of summer: a six-game losing streak in mid-July and then a five-game losing streak at the end of the month, put their winning percentage at .454, and that’s where it would stay for the season’s final two months. But the idea had been planted in their heads that they could play winning baseball, an idea they would share with the world during the next season.
