A Pitcher named Tom. A Manager named Gil. A Vet named Terry.
The start of the 2024 baseball season stirred a cherished memory, and made for a new friend. I hope you enjoy it. Please consider subscribing if you like this kind of storytelling. Thank for reading.
Terry Queally is a beefy, six-foot veteran who is 76 years old and has a large tattoo of a Cobra AH-1G helicopter on his upper left arm. It has been more than 50 years since he piloted a Cobra over the jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam, but the memories of it are as vivid as the tattoo. Going to war at 20 years old will do that.
Home for Queally is a senior living community along the Hudson River, north of New York City. To commemorate the opening week of baseball season, I visited his community to talk about a few of the baseball books I’ve written, and my long-since-dashed dream of following in Mickey Mantle’s footsteps in centerfield at Yankee Stadium. (I would’ve been fine with following in Tommie Agee’s footsteps, too, just so you know. It turns out that being undersized and undertalented are two big obstacles.) Anyway, the book Queally was most interested in is called They Said It Couldn’t Be Done: The ’69 Mets, New York City, and The Most Astounding Season in Baseball History
(www.amazon.com/They-Said-Couldnt-Done-Astounding/dp/1524760889). It should’ve been called Wonder Year, because 1969 was all of that, in so many ways, but you don’t get mulligans in publishing.
The book came out in 2019 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Mets’ 100-to-1 shot of winning the World Series over the mighty Baltimore Orioles. The Mets, as most baseball fans know, had been historically inept prior to that year. The joke was that man would walk on the moon before the Mets won a championship, and that turned out to be true. The Mets began life in 1962 in the Polo Grounds, an expansion team planted in New York in the hope that it would assuage the pain that the city’s National League fans suffered when the Dodgers and Giants bolted for the West Coast. It did and it didn’t, but that’s another post, and probably a 5,000-word post at that. Led by the fabled former Yankee manager, Casey Stengel, the Mets finished that first season with the worst record in baseball history: 40-120. Their two best starting pitchers, Roger Craig and Al Jackson, combined to lose 44 games. Their incompetence was epitomized by first baseman (Marvelous) Marv Throneberry, who actually was a decent power hitter who hit 16 home runs in 1962, but is most remembered in Mets lore for a triple he thought he’d hit. It came in the bottom of the first in Game 1 of a doubleheader against the Chicago Cubs. It was June 17, a hot day in Upper Manhattan. Throneberry belted a ball into the cavernous Polo Grounds outfield, driving in two runs and winding up at third base. The trouble was that Ernie Banks, the Cubs’ first baseman, noticed that Throneberry failed to touch first base on his way around. The Cubs appealed, and Throneberry was called out. Stengel came out to argue with the first-base umpire when the second-base umpire joined the discussion.
“Don’t bother, Casey. He missed second base, too.”
Throneberry was not much more deft in the field. He committed 17 errors in 97 games. When he turned 29 late in the year, he didn’t get a birthday cake, as most players did on their special day. When he asked Stengel why, the manager supposedly said, “We were afraid you would drop it.”
The Mets’ fortunes didn’t get much better in the ensuing years, but they became quintessential lovable losers. Sharing a city with the Yankees, the most celebrated of all baseball teams, the Mets and their fans leaned into their underdog status, spawning a large and growing cult-like following. I was part of the cult. By the time Shea Stadium opened in 1964 and the Mets moved to Queens, I was watching games on TV, devouring box scores and standings each morning in the New York Times, hoping that maybe the Mets wouldn’t be in last place anymore. I attended as many games as I could, usually with my grandfather, who would treat me to our $3.50 box seats. In 1965, I got an autograph from a reserve infielder named Bobby Klaus on the same day he hit a home run. I put it on my bulletin board at home, where it was later joined by my Bill Wakefield and Dick Rusteck autographs.
Everything began to change for the Mets in 1967, with the arrival of George Thomas Seaver, a real-life boy wonder from Fresno, California who became the Mets’ first true star. He won 16 games and was NL Rookie of the Year, and as handsome 22-year-old Tom mowed down hitters and his pretty, blonde wife Nancy rooted him on, the Mets had their own Camelot couple, and hope. It felt strange and wonderful.
When another star pitcher, Minnesota farmboy Jerry Koosman, joined the rotation a year later, the Mets were charting an entirely new course, and doing it under a new manager, Gil Hodges, a beloved former Brooklyn Dodger whom the Mets acquired from the Washington Senators by paying $100,000 and sending them a promising young pitcher, Bill Denehy. It remains one of the greatest trades in franchise history. Apart from being a smart baseball man, Hodges was a person of high character and quiet strength who had a unique gift not just for leading, but making everybody on his club feel important.
Under Hodges, the Mets had their finest season in 1968, and when they actually reached the .500 mark (17-17) in May 1969 (usually they were deep in the cellar by then), the baseball world began to take note. The Mets had two star outfielders who were high school teammates in Mobile, Alabama, Cleon Jones and Tommie Agee. They added more quality starting pitchers with Gary Gentry, Jim McAndrew and a Texas kid named Nolan Ryan. Tug McGraw threw nasty screwballs out of the bullpen. Jerry Grote was a pugnacious catcher. Bud Harrelson played a brilliant shortstop and Ed Kranepool, the only holdover from the 1962 Mets, platooned at first based with Donn Clendenon, who became the World Series MVP. In right field, Ron (Rocky) Swoboda showed power and promise, and at third base, Ed Charles wrote poetry and moved so smoothly his nickname was “The Glider.” Charles grew up in Jim Crow Florida, on the wrong side of the tracks in Daytona whose life changed as a teenager when he saw a man with the same skin color as his – Jackie Robinson – playing for the Dodgers in a spring-training game.
Still, the Mets looked to be going nowhere by mid-August. They were in third place in the NL East, 10 games behind the Cubs. The next day, Seaver and reliever Ron Taylor shut out the Pittsburgh Pirates, 2-0. The Mets went 38-9 through the rest of the regular season, while Leo Durocher’s Cubs went into a freefall. The Mets won the division by eight games.
I won’t go game by game for the postseason, because it’s the weekend and you probably have things to do. Suffice it to say the formerly hapless New York Mets played two heavily favored teams in the playoffs, the Atlanta Braves and the Orioles, and won seven of the eight games.
Having an opportunity to write a book about one of the highlights of my young life was something out of a reporter’s dream. I traveled the country to track down every Met I could find who was willing to reminisce. Most of them were wonderful and generous. I talked to Kranepool in a Long Island diner about what it was like to go from James Monroe High School in the Bronx to the major leagues at the age of 17. I talked to Koosman in a northern Wisconsin coffee shop about how the Mets found him only because of the catcher for his Army base team at Fort Bliss, Texas. The catcher, John Lucchese, was a kid from Queens and the son of a Shea Stadium usher. The lefthanded Koosman was the best pitcher he’d ever seen. He told his father the Mets should check him out. Farm director Joe McDonald dispatched scout Red Murff to take a look. Koosman was the man on the Shea Stadium mound on October 16, 1969, pitching the whole way to finish the job for the Miracle Mets in Game 5 of the World Series.
Terry Queally and I revisited much of this during my stop at his senior community, before I asked about his life and career. He grew up in Yonkers, just north of New York City. He enlisted in the Army after his college career didn’t get off to a great start. He served for almost two years in Vietnam, mostly flying the Cobra, a so-called attack helicopter in an Aerial Rocket Artillery unit in the 2nd Battalion and 1st Cavalry. One night a U.S. patrol was under heavy enemy fire and called for cover from Queally’s Cobra. He and his co-pilot launched their first few rockets but were almost instantly shelled by .51-caliber machine guns in a triangular formation.
“It was a trap,” Queally said. “We found out later that there was a bounty on Cobra pilots and these crews were looking to collect.”
Making a series of steep, plunging runs, Queally and his co-pilot managed to destroy the guns and get back to safety. It earned Queally an award called the Distinguished Flying Cross.
Queally’s tour of duty ended in December 1969, but Vietnam stayed with him. He wound up getting his undergraduate degree in physics and beginning a 25-year career as an engineer for the phone company. He struggled for years with Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome and would sometimes fly into rages when he would hear fireworks or other loud noises.
As our conversation veered back to baseball. Queally smiled as he recalled collecting baseball cards and putting them in the spokes of his bicycle, and winning a championship on his high-school baseball team. He talked about how much he loves the baseball playoffs. I asked what it was about opening day of the baseball season that was special to him.
“It’s another chance,” he said.
Two months before Terry Queally came home from Vietnam, I was at that historic Game 5 in Shea Stadium with my grandfather. We were sitting about 15 rows behind the Mets’ dugout. When Davey Johnson’s fly ball to deep left settled into Cleon Jones’ glove, Jones dropped to one knee, Koosman jumped into Grote’s arms and then all hell broke loose, fans by the thousands storming the field. Mets players ran for their lives. Within minutes, fans had somehow pried the pitching rubber and home plate out of the dirt. One of the Mets batboys told me that someone tried to rip the jersey off his back. I have never run on a ballfield, before or since, but I told my grandfather that this time I had to.
“Be careful, Joe,” he said. My grandfather always called me Joe. I never knew why but I loved it.
I hopped the railing and ran onto the infield. I bent down and grabbed a hunk of turf, maybe three-square inches, and then got out of there, climbing back over the fence. I planted it in the backyard of our house in Huntington, L.I.
“I remember where I was that day, too,” Queally told me.
“Where was that?”
“I was in my Cobra, listening to the end of the game on Armed Services radio, whooping and hollering when the Mets won,” he said.
Please don’t hold it against me that I ran on the field. I still feel guilty about it. If you need a character reference, Samanthat Coffey might - might - give you one.
I remember you talking about those blades of grass at school! This walk down memory lane was perfect timing as I had just dropped off at the Denver airport a fellow classmate who was visiting to take in the Rangers vs Avalanche on Thursday.