Tom Seaver: A Terrific Life

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Review "A biography that bolsters Seaver’s reputation as a thinker on the mound, who won by outleveling hitters in their mental preparation." (Oskar Garcia New York Times Book Review)"Tom Seaver is among the greatest pitchers of all time. He is also one of the most thoughtful and perceptive athletes I have ever known. Sadly, this deeply interesting man is now unable to provide us with a memoir of his own. The closest we will ever come is found here, from the Hall of Fame baseball writer who was exceptionally close to Tom and chronicled his entire career. Bill Madden renders Tom Seaver’s story with the detail, insight and care it deserves." (Bob Costas )"A vivid portrait of one of modern baseball’s legendary players. . . . A fitting tribute to a great, memorable pitcher." (Kirkus Reviews)" New York Daily News columnist Bill Madden witnessed and chronicled it all—the misbegotten trade of The Franchise, the failure of the front office to ensure his place on the team after his return, and the cruel descent into dementia that forced him to withdraw from public life. Drawing on their longtime friendship and thirty hours of exclusive interviews with Seaver and his wife Nancy, Madden has crafted a biography as terrific as its subject." (Jane Leavy, author of New York Times bestseller Sandy Koufax: a Lefty’s Legacy )"I've known Bill Madden since my playing days in New York. Never was there a more straightforward writer on the New York beat. He brings all his knowledge and experience to the fore in this terrific book. Add in his special relationship with Tom Seaver and you have a must-read about one of the game's most intelligent and greatest players to ever put on a uniform. Bravo Bill!" (Keith Hernandez )"Bill Madden was the only person who could write this book of our dear friend Tom Terrific. Tom Seaver was Terrific. A Man's Man. Brilliant, funny. the best competitor I ever knew and my friend." (Johnny Bench )“This is the biography an icon like Seaver deserves.” (Tom Verducci ) About the Author 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. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 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 Sox” World Series fix scandal, in which eight White Sox players were banned for life from baseball for conspiring to throw the 1919 World Series against the Cincinnati Reds. “I’ve never even been in Comiskey Park, or Fenway Park in Boston, where I’ve always wanted to pitch. This is going to be exciting for me.” As it was, he would win fifteen, but it was more than any other Sox hurler in ’84, as the previous season’s most successful starting rotation in baseball would all have off-years in ’84—none more so than staff anchor LaMarr Hoyt. The twenty-nine-year-old righty went from leading the league with twenty-four wins and earning the AL Cy Young Award to a league-worst eighteen losses. (In the off-season, the White Sox traded Hoyt to the San Diego Padres for a promising twenty-one-year-old minor league shortstop, Ozzie Guillen.) Meanwhile, the old man of the staff was a model of consistency at 15-11, never missing a turn, while putting in 236? innings, his most since 1978. “I was very satisfied with that first year in Chicago,” Seaver told the Chicago writers. “I was a different pitcher here, but I was still pretty darned good. I could still get batters out.” Left unsaid: Fifteen down, twelve to go. He breezed through the first six weeks of ’85 with four wins, one loss, and four no-decisions in his first nine starts, but pitched well in all but one of them, a no-decision, April 20, against the Red Sox at Comiskey in which he gave up five runs in five innings, including a pair of homers by Mike Easler and Tony Armas. Then from May 20 through June 30, he went through a spell of five losses in nine starts, but again pitched fairly effectively and ended June with a 7-6 record and a more-than-respectable 3.28 ERA. No longer the power pitcher with a ninety-six-, ninety-seven-mile-per-hour blazer, he was doing it now on guile, command, and smarts. Fisk marveled that Seaver was the brainiest pitcher he ever caught. After his bullpen session before one game in Minnesota, on June 9, Seaver saw White Sox pitching coach Dave Duncan shaking his head. “You ain’t got squat today,” Duncan said, frowning. “I know that, Dunc,” Seaver replied. Then, pointing to the Twins’ dugout, he added: “But they don’t! Today we’re just gonna have to fool ’em.” And he did, limiting the Twins to five hits and just one run in 7? innings to run his record to 6-4 and reduce the magic number to three hundred to five. After the game, he said to Duncan, “Can you imagine if I’d had good stuff tonight, Dunc?” And they both laughed. “One of the first things Tom said to me when he came over to us, and we were talking pitching, was there are three ways to get guys out: with velocity, location, or ball movement,” Fisk related in a 2017 interview at the Hall of Fame. “Of the three,” Seaver said, “velocity is the least important. If I can have two—because you’re not gonna feel a hundred percent every time you get on the mound—if I can have two of those elements, I can get guys out.” “That was his craft,” Fisk said. “Getting guys out, the pitching part of the deal, working on hitters’ tendencies—aggressive tendencies or nonaggressive tendencies. He was a master at changing speeds, running the ball, cutting the ball. He always knew what he was doing out there. It’s like he could read the batters’ minds. That was the fun part of him and I working together.” They could rag on each other pretty good, too, sometimes right in the middle of a game. Fisk recalled one instance when Seaver was having a particularly hard time with his breaking ball, bouncing it in the dirt, missing the plate by nearly a foot. After a couple of these errant pitches in succession, Fisk, who fancied himself a pretty good thrower, decided to retaliate. Retrieving one of the balls out of the dirt, he straightened up and fired the ball back to Seaver, nearly hitting him in the ribs. “I could see that startled him,” Fisk said. “Then the next inning, it happened again. He bounced another one, and I did the same thing, firing the ball back to him where I knew he’d have trouble catching it. This time he waves me out and I say to myself, ‘Oh, boy, this is gonna be fun.’?” When Fisk arrived at the mound, Seaver was scowling. “Okay, Fisky,” he said, “who’s pitching this game? You or me?” “Well, with that shit you’re throwing up there today,” Fisk shot back, “I think I should be pitching and you should be catching!” From June 20 through July 30, Fisk caught every one of Seaver’s nine starts, in which he went 4-4 but at the same time lowered his ERA from 3.28 to 3.02—while achieving double digits in strikeouts only once. “He was a wonder to watch,” said Fisk, a Hall of Fame inductee in 2000. “As we got closer to three hundred, however, not once did we mention ‘Oh, we’ve got ten left, we’ve got seven left.’ We just kept at it. We knew in the back of our heads. He knew. But he kept his nose to the purpose. He never talked about it.” Even after Seaver gutted out a 7–5 complete game victory in which he gave up a couple of home runs and struck out only three against the Red Sox in Fenway Park, on July 30, for number 299, it didn’t initially dawn on him that his next start would be against the Yankees—in New York! “I never looked ahead,” Seaver said in a 2016 interview. “Someone pointed it out to me in the clubhouse afterward; I don’t remember who. I just remember thinking, ‘Well, isn’t that gonna be nice. At least it’ll be an easy commute for Nancy and the girls.’?” A few days before arriving in New York, Seaver was asked if he would feel any special revenge toward the Mets by winning his three hundredth game in their backyard. The passage of time had mellowed him. “I’m not going back with any idea of that,” he said. “I have some very, very good memories of New York and its fans. When I left New York this last time, it was an honest mistake. There was no animosity leading up to the point where I was left unprotected. [Mets co-owner] Nelson Doubleday called me and apologized and told me he hoped I’d get my three hundredth real soon. So, it’s not anything where I’m trying to show anybody up.” When the White Sox arrived in New York late Thursday night, August 1, for the four-game series against the Yankees, Seaver went home to Greenwich. Only when he was reading the newspaper at breakfast Friday morning did he learn that Sunday, when he would be making his hopefully historic start, had long before been designated “Phil Rizzuto Day” by the Yankees to honor their beloved former shortstop and longtime broadcaster by retiring his uniform number 10. So be it, Seaver thought; while the Rizzuto festivities were going on prior to the game, he would be otherwise indisposed. Sunday, August 4, dawned to an unsettling commotion in the Seaver household. Somehow a bat—the flying kind—had made an unwelcome intrusion through a window in the old converted barn, arousing Tom and Nancy and sending them scurrying about to find a broom. Once one was located, Tom began flailing away at the bat until the creature finally winged off out the window whence it had come. Their rude awakening having subsided, Tom and Nancy went back to bed and were able to catch a couple more hours’ sleep before the forty-year-old pitcher was to start preparing for the biggest day of his career. It was a fitful morning, Seaver would later reveal, that had nothing to do with the bat invasion. His stomach was uneasy, and he could hardly get down an English muffin for breakfast. He had a headache, too. When he arrived in the visitors’ clubhouse at Yankee Stadium later that morning, Jerry Reinsdorf and Eddie Einhorn, the White Sox owners, were waiting for him, along with a small group of reporters and a clubhouse man holding a case of baseballs for him to sign. “How do you feel, Tom?” Einhorn asked. “I’ve got a headache, and my stomach is queasy as hell,” Seaver said, laughing. “Otherwise, I feel just great.” LaRussa knew otherwise. Between the ceremony to honor Rizzuto and Seaver’s “homecoming” going for his three hundredth win, the White Sox manager could envision all the theater that was about to unfold in the House that Ruth Built. Privately, he was anxious and worried about his pitcher. “I remember the atmosphere in the stadium like it was yesterday,” LaRussa said in a 2017 interview. “At least half the fans were Mets fans, while the Yankees had all these formidable hitters, future Hall of Famers like Dave Winfield and Rickey Henderson, and there’d been so much buildup. I’m saying to myself, ‘I know he’s Tom Seaver, but this is so unfair to Tom to have all this attention and, likely, you know they’re going to get him, and we’re not going to play well, and it’s just not going to be a storybook ending. How wrong was I?” Shortly before two o’clock, Seaver began making his way down to the bullpen for his pregame warm-up session. By now, the Rizzuto Day ceremonies had taken on the air of the TV game show The Price Is Right , as one corporate CEO after another presented the sixty-eight-year-old Yankees legend with a slew of expensive gifts ranging from cars and boats to golf clubs, lifetime supplies of soft drinks, and a trip to Italy. It was John Campi, the longtime vice president of promotions for the New York Daily News , who supplied a welcome bit of levity to the interminable proceedings by coming up with the idea of presenting Rizzuto with a cow, adorned with a golden halo, in recognition of the signature “Holy cow!” phrase the Scooter was so fond of invoking throughout his broadcasts. Taking the reins of the cow from legendary Daily News cartoonist Bill Gallo, Rizzuto was suddenly jolted when the frisky bovine, who’d apparently had enough of all this shlock, stepped on his foot and knocked him to the ground. Fortunately, Rizzuto, who came up laughing, was not hurt, although years later he would frequently complain in jest about being upstaged on his own day by a cow and, of all people, an ex-Met, Tom Seaver. “It’s funny,” said Reinsdorf in a 2017 interview, “I have absolutely no memory of the Rizzuto ceremony that day. That’s how so consumed I was with Seaver.” Because the Rizzuto Day ceremonies dragged on as long as they did, Seaver twice had to stop throwing in the bullpen. It was not until 3:06 p.m., after the White Sox