To the experts who study the psychology of sports in America, the Tom Seaver trade is much more than just a loss by the New York Mets. These sports psychologists view the trade as a serious loss to New York City …
EDWARD EDELSON, DAILY NEWS, JUNE 19, 1977
ON the morning of June 16, 1977, the city woke up to the news that the Mets had traded Tom Seaver to the Cincinnati Reds.
A wholesome, handsome, smooth-skinned former marine and current spokesman for Sears, Roebuck & Company, Tom Seaver had
never enjoyed Reggie Jackson’s national profile—clean-cut was a tough sell in the 1970s—but in New York anyway, he was a god. How could it be otherwise? After all, he had arrived in Queens in 1967 and in two years almost single-handedly transformed the hapless Mets from a comedy troupe into World Series champions.
Sputtering, mutinous fans promptly lit up the switchboard at Shea Stadium. “Mets fan reaction was so outraged,” Paul Good wrote a few months later in Sport magazine, “that one might have imagined that Washington had traded Jimmy Carter for Idi Amin, even up.” The Mets were playing at home that night, and security forces were beefed up for the game. Fans opted for an unofficial boycott instead; fewer than nine thousand turned out. Those who did show up came bearing Reds’ banners, and SEAVER LIVES and WHERE IS TOM? signs. (The protests continued through the summer, and the Mets ended up drawing fewer fans than they had since leaving the old Polo Grounds in 1963.)
The loss of Seaver felt like the loss of hope, not for the Mets, who already were hopeless, but for the city itself. It was more than the man; it was the moment the man represented, that improbable pennant run during the glorious summer of 1969, when John Lindsay owned New York and the city still felt full of possibility. “For the years he [Seaver] worked among us, he was an ornament of New York,” Pete Hamill wrote on June 17 in the Daily News. “He leaves behind a diminished city. This is not simply a sports story. It is a New York story … A city struggling for survival can’t lose a single hero.”
In a sense New York had lost two heroes, for there was a villain in the Tom Seaver story: the city’s preeminent baseball writer, Dick Young. For more than three decades Young had been manning the press box for America’s largest daily newspaper, the multimillion circulation Daily News. In the 1940s and 1950s, when Young covered the Dodgers, untold numbers of Brooklyn boys had teethed on his prose. He wrote audaciously, breezily, irreverently, and often badly, abusing puns, torturing metaphors, surrendering to hyperbole. But
that hardly mattered. His copy had a street-wise, smart-ass New York feel to it. (Young on the Dodgers’ departure from Brooklyn: “Preliminary diagnosis indicates that the cause of death was an acute case of greed, followed by severe political implications.”) A few years after the Dodgers decamped, he moved over to the Mets’ beat, hyping these lovable losers as New York’s new people’s team, delighting in their comic failures much as he had reveled in Brooklyn’s tragic ones. Young was a social progressive too, one of the first men to knit the broader story of race into his sports coverage. In 1949, when Jackie Robinson won the Most Valuable Player award despite being unable to find lodging in numerous cities, Young wrote that he had “led the league in everything except hotel reservations.”
In the sixties and early seventies, Young became the patron saint to a generation of whippersnappers, the so-called Chipmunks, a new breed of sportswriter who wrote with attitude and favored a look known as the Full Cleveland—mint green or baby blue polyester pants, a wide snow white belt, and flowered shirts with oversize collars that broke like tidal waves.
But as the seventies progressed, Young grew increasingly cynical. The proliferation of night games, of militant black athletes, of ballplayers who listened to loud music in the clubhouse, rankled him. His city was changing too. Young’s New York was a place where men still wore suits and fedoras to ball games. He seemed to recoil from the modern spasms of the city. When the freshly renovated Yankee Stadium reopened for business in 1976, Young urged his Spanish-speaking readers to leave their cans of spray paint at home. He was the press box equivalent of a neoconservative. He still had his admirers—“Surrounded by left-leaning New York anti-establishment types, he has the courage to tell the truth,” one of them wrote to the Sporting News in the summer of ’77—yet Dick Young was no longer the voice of the New York sports fan but rather that of the city’s blue-collar fury. The joke among his fellow newspapermen went that after reading Young’s copy, you needed a handkerchief to wipe the spit off your face.
Young’s problem with Tom Seaver—“Tom Terrific,” or in Young’s mock baby talk, “Tom Tewwific”—was that he had the gall to complain about his $225,000-a-year contract. And so the scribe hammered away at the ace. Seaver, Young wrote, was typical of the “selfish modern-day ballplayer”; he had “an extreme maturity deficiency”; he was “destructive to club morale,” a “pouting, griping, clubhouse lawyer poisoning the team.” Then came the knockout punch. On June 15, 1977, Young implied that Seaver’s wife, Nancy, was jealous of Nolan Ryan’s wife because Ryan was outearning Seaver. Moments after hearing the offending line from Young’s column, Seaver demanded a trade. The following afternoon he was cleaning out his locker at Shea.
It was the Post’s Maury Allen who first reported on Young’s role in the Seaver trade in a June 16 piece headlined DICK YOUNG DROVE SEAVER OUT OF TOWN. Allen was known for his ability to tap out a story in the time it took most of his colleagues to change their typewriter ribbons, but this had not been an easy one for him to write. Growing up in 1950s Brooklyn, Allen had idolized Young. In recent years, though, he’d watched his boyhood hero turn bitter, angry. “He expected things to be the way they were in the forties and fifties,” Allen says. “But they weren’t. The world was different.”