Where Were You?

[Benjamin Grimm]

I should also point out that June 15 isn't all bad. The Mets made one of their best trades ever on that same date in 1983.

[Guest cooby]

Just graduated. Would you believe, I was more upset about the Mike Phillips trade than Seaver or Kingman

[stevejrogers]

metsmarathon wrote: i was but a mere fetus, several months away from my first gasp of fresh air.

Heh, I wonder if m.e.t.b.o.t. was under the same conditions, about to be born from some first year toy!

Seriously, I was just turning 4 months old.

Jody McDonald often tells this story on whatever radio station he works for, that he actually had a hand in getting Dan Norman in the deal. Basically McDonald (mid teens at this point) was a baseball junkie so he knew the top players in other teams organizations.

Anyway, the Reds were giving up Flynn, Zachry, Henderson and Rawly Eastwick who was adamant about not wanting to be traded to New York (Reds sent him to the Cards but lo and behold he signs as a free agent with the Yankees that off season) So the Mets needed one more player to add to the deal, Joe Mac decided to let his baseball crazed son do the picking, and Dan Norman was the guy.

Guess thats why McDonald is now a sports talk radio host!

[Guest Edgy DC]

Everything I've read about Young suggests that he was a groundbreaker and important iconoclast when he came on the scene. Nonetheless, he was frustratingly retrograde by the time I could tell the difference. And, as you could tell, it wasn't until late 1977 that I was paying attention.

Still, such figures fascinate me and I love to read up on them, searching for a tipping point, trying to see if he changed, we did, or some combination of the two.

In fact, if you scratched out Young and wrote in Ratzinger, I'd probably let my post stand.

[Valadius]

I wouldn't be born for nearly another 10 years.

[Guest Johnny Dickshot]

Young got worse every year. The other day I was looking up the earliest mentions of Strawberry in the Sporting News -- most of the hits were Young, ALL of them bemoaned that he got 200,000 to sign (except the more accurate ones where he says 180,000). tool.

[Batty31]

I was 9 at the time, and to be honest, it didn't phase me one bit. I was not big on Seaver and I could not stand Kingman (my brother had a friend who would talk about Kingman 24/7, enough to make me not like Kingman!) I remember my brother being upset about Seaver.

You're probably all going to throw things at me for saying this, but I ended up becoming a big Flynn fan...ok, had a big crush. I also was a Zachry fan (no crush there, just always had a respect for pitchers).

[Guest cooby]

Batty31 wrote: You're probably all going to throw things at me for saying this, but I ended up becoming a big Flynn fan...ok, had a big crush. .

Pete?

[Batty31]

Ha ha, cooby. You know I meant Doug!

[Guest Edgy DC]

I dug pretty much all the guys we got for Seaver ('tweren't their faults). But, when it came to digging pitchers, Seaver was the best pitcher in a New York uniform since Christy Matthewson, and I immediately felt stupid for being too young to realize what we had lost until ten minutes later.

[Frayed Knot]

The problem with Young is that - although he was considered almost an anti-establishment writer in his early days - he became the symbol of old-school status quo as time went on and his "Young Ideas" became anything but towards the end. That retro outlook put him dead against the free agency era - despite his jumping from the News to the Post (or was it vice versa?) at a hefty salary increase during that time - and he spent much of the rest of his career railing against the new era and the players who used it to do exactly what he did for his career. He, like Grant, was too fond of the decades-long rigged system that kept the player compensation "in line" and resented the new breed getting rich via the new rules.

Not surprising then that, in addition to taking Grant's side in the Seaver dispute, he also harped on the Strawberry bonus money.

[Guest Edgy DC]

I'm more of the belief that he took Grant's side for whatever reasons, and then spent the rest of his career married to that angle just for the sake of consistency.

[Guest cleonjones11]

Dick Young reminded me of the biased "reporter" in The Natural. He was a tool.

Seaver day..I was smoking pot....

Seaver is and was my alltime favorite and I find it ironic the one time I met him he was a total dick.

[G-Fafif]

Still trying to make sense of it. Still can't.

http://faithandfear.blogharbor.com/blog/_archives/2007/6/15/3023768.html

[Guest iramets]

G-Fafif wrote: Still trying to make sense of it. Still can't. http://faithandfear.blogharbor.com/blog/_archives/2007/6/15/3023768.html

The hindsight in this traumatic deal still runs amazingly high. I've been mulling over the concept of getting Guerrero and Sutcliffe from the Didgers for Seaver: if that would have been the structure of the trade, and we would have improved the club vastly, I wonder if we'd be remembering our initial feelings with such justified outrage, or if it would just be "I was a little ticked off, but clearly it was a great move, LGM, etc."

[MFS62]

iramets wrote: The hindsight in this traumatic deal still runs amazingly high. I've been mulling over the concept of getting Guerrero and Sutcliffe from the Didgers for Seaver: if that would have been the structure of the trade, and we would have improved the club vastly, I wonder if we'd be remembering our initial feelings with such justified outrage, or if it would just be "I was a little ticked off, but clearly it was a great move, LGM, etc."

To many Mets fans of the time (there are fewer and fewer of us now) who had felt the pain of losing our team to Los Angeles, losing "the franchise" to that same city would have been unbearable trauma.

Later

[Guest Edgy DC]

Zachry was a past Rookie of the Year and Sutcliffe a future one, but I don't think Sutcliffe would've necessarily given the Mets more than Zachry. His freak Cy Young Award was two trades down the road. He could've stayed healthier, though Zachry was less healthy. Zache put up better relative ERAs while Sutcliffe pumped out more innings (as AL pitchers did back then).

Now Guerrero giving the Mets more than Flynn, Henderson, and Norman, yeah, that's a pretty safe bet. But he was a role player on the Dodgers until 1981-82, when the Cey-Russell-Lopes-Garvey mafia was breaking up. So he would've had to wurvive the late seventies as a Met.

Ws Lasortda bringing him along slowly in '80 or was he hurt? He seems to have been grossly underused.

[Guest iramets]

I think he would have played on the Mets--the late 70s Met team sucked pretty badly, and the Dodgers were in hot contention all the time. LA had good corner outfielders in 80 (they played Guerrero in CF at first, which is nightmarish to imagine) and I suspect we have used him exactly as we used Henderson, only he would have improved as his career advanced.

I suspect if you put Sutcliffe's career, post 1977, next to Seaver's, Sutcliffe would come out ahead. (OE: 171 wins after 1977, as opposed to about 120 for TS.) He was a pretty good pitcher apart from the Cy Young year. It was a career year, sure, but I would have gladly taken several of his other years to boot.

[Benjamin Grimm]

Pat Zachry is getting a lot of attention on the UMDB today, 30 years later.

When I was at Shea on June 2, they played the "Where are they now" video segment that Joe Figliola mentions in his post at the bottom of the page. It was nice that the Mets checked in with a guy who's probably not anybody's favorite Met. If I saw Pat Zachry on the street today I'd never recognize him as the former Mets pitcher. (He's 57 years old now! How time flies!)

I also like the Vin Scully quote that "Ramblin' Pete" posted on October 4, 2006: "He was towering, scowling, shaggy looking, bearded... When he entered a game vs. the Dodgers one time, announcer Vin Scully questioned whether Zachary had 'arrived by raft...'"

Looking at Zachry's stats, I notice that he had 20 complete games and 6 shutouts as a Met. That probably doesn't rank him all that high on the all-time Mets list, but there's a decent chance that in the future nobody will ever pass him in either category.

[Guest Johnny Dickshot]

Raft. ... That's a good line.

I think the first thing anyone remembers about Zachary, other than his beard, was the fact that he kicked a dugout step in frustration and broke a foot.

We should get Joe Figiola to post here in the event he doesn't already.

[Guest Edgy DC]

I'm (1) assume Sutcliffe doesn't stay with the Mets his whole career, and (2) reject wins in favoor of Wins Above Replacement Player.

His ERA was above league average. Seaver's (even old Seaver's) and Zachry's were below. what he had going for him was that he was really a horse some years.

[Guest Johnny Dickshot]

The name that hasn't come up but I certainly recall reading about in trade speculation was Don Sutton. That at least would have been an apples-for-apples kind of trade.

Only we weren't shopping for apples.

[Benjamin Grimm]

I remember the Sutton rumors too, but for some reason I seem to think that those rumors came up about a year earlier, perhaps before the 1976 season? Maybe they appeared again in 1977, but Sutton/Seaver smells like 1976 to me.

It's the Mets' closest thing to the Yankees/Red Sox, DiMaggio/Williams deal that never happened.

[smg58]

I was still 6, and rooted for both local teams equally. In hindsight, I think it's interesting that I continued rooting for the Mets after that despite the large disparity in success they had with the Yankees during that stretch, but gave up entirely on the Yankees when they let Reggie go.

I was too young to have good opinions on the trades, I guess. I remember the previous year getting mad when they traded Del Unser and Wayne Garrett -- they were up among my favorite Mets because I had their baseball cards. (What kind of name is Pepe Mangual, anyway?) I knew Seaver and Kingman were the stars, so I didn't understand why the Mets would want to trade them. But Steve Henderson made a good first impression, and life went on.

[Guest Johnny Dickshot]

The Pepe Mangual trade bummed me out every bit as much, if not more, than the Seaver trade did.

[stevejrogers]

From the 2005 Parody Acrhives:

mlbaseballtalk
Oct 21 2005 10:39 PM
The Mets Traded Seaver Today More Brush up with The Possum

The great George Jones and one of the greatest country music songs of all time, "He Stopped Loving Her Today"

Grant was mad that he was called "The Franchise"
He told him he just could not be signed
As the months went slowly by,
The deals were rolling through his mind

That 69 pennant hung on the wall
Drove the Mets brass crazy now and then.
But the fans still loved him through it all,
Hoping Tom would still pitch again.

Then came an offer from the Reds,
For Zachry, Flynn and Hendu
So on June 15th Seaver's run came to an end
Dick Young's response was "What can you do?"

The magic of 1969 died that day,
It was hard to fight back the tears.
The team's heart and soul had gone away
Last time you'd see Shea smile for years.

The Mets traded Tom Seaver today,
Got him for Flynn, Zach, Henu and Norm,
And soon the fans will stay away,
The Mets traded Seaver today.

You know, he did come back one last time.
Oh we all wondered if he would.
And it kept runnin' through my mind,
Mets fans will never be over that trade for good.

The Mets traded Tom Seaver today,
Got him for Flynn, Zach, Henu and Norm,
And soon the fans will stay away,
The Mets traded Seaver today.

[MFS62]

Yancy Street Gang wrote: Pat Zachry is getting a lot of attention on the UMDB today, 30 years later.

Pat Zachry was announced as an upcoming guest on one of the NY Sports talk stations today, in honor of the 30th anniversary of the trade. It may have been the Beningo/Evans show. I had to go to work before I heard him.

Later

[metirish]

Pat Zachry has a funny memory of his time in NY.....

The Midnight Massacre

[Guest Johnny Dickshot]

Good job by Madden though I'm not sure what makes it any "truer" than the other stuff. I'm glad he tracked down Geary.

Awesome Zachry story.

[Guest iramets]

An angle of Madden's story that I find interesting is how the blame finally rests on Seaver for forcing the deal after they had worked out a contract extrnsion. The Young story that supposedly pissed him off so much really doesn't seem so bad: Young implied that Seaver (and his wife) resented Nolan Ryan's generous salary in LA. Even if Seaver was happy as a pig in shit that Ryan was making much more than he was (which I doubt, knowing how competitive, egocentric, and sensitive Seaver was and is), Young had every right to say that in print if he wanted to. Seems to me Seaver is still on his high horse of "How dare he write bad things about me and my family in hte newspaper" and so cost the Mets his services. If he'd wanted to, he could have stayed, it says right here:

the Mets had locked Seaver in with a three-year, $675,000 deal, making him baseball's highest paid pitcher - temporarily - with a base salary of $225,000.

That distinction was short-lived as the first wave of free agents hit the market over the 1976-77 winter, 11 of them, including Yankee pitcher Don Gullett, signing multi-year contracts of $1 million or more. And although Ryan, Seaver's friend and former teammate (whom the Mets had also traded in 1971 before his brilliance could even begin to be realized), was not eligible for free agency until after the 1979 season, notoriously generous Angels owner Gene Autry was already paying him $300,000.

[jump ahead a half-year]....

In the days leading up to the deadline, a concerned Lang, who didn't want to see Seaver traded, suggested to the star pitcher that he go over Grant's head and call Mets owner Lorinda deRoulet in an effort to resolve the impasse. And in a series of phone calls between the two, a deal was worked out the night of June 14. Instead of getting a salary increase, Seaver's contract would be extended by three years, at $300,000 the first year and $400,000 the next two. Seaver then called McDonald, who had been engaged in trade talks with the Cincinnati Reds, and told him not to proceed any further. He was staying a Met.

But the next day, as he sat in the coffee shop of the hotel where the Mets were staying in Atlanta, Seaver was informed of the column Young had written on the "battle page" - in particular a paragraph toward the end of it - that sent him into a rage.

"….Nolan Ryan is getting more now than Seaver," wrote Young, "and that galls Tom because Nancy Seaver and Ruth Ryan are very friendly and Tom Seaver long has treated Nolan Ryan like a little brother."

Bolting from his chair in the coffee shop, Seaver stormed back to his room and rang up Mets public relations director Arthur Richman. "Get me out of here, do you hear me?" he bellowed. "Get me out of here!" He then told Richman to call Mrs. deRoulet's daughter, Whitney, and inform her that the contract deal was off. "And tell Joe McDonald everything I said last night is forgotten."