Bookshelf Review: The Last Icon

Tom Seaver and His Times, by Steven Travers. Taylor Trade, 2011.

I have very mixed feelings about this latest effort by Travers (A Tale of Three Cities: The 1962 Baseball Season in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco; The 1969 Miracle Mets: The Improbable Story of the World’s Greatest Underdog Team; and Dodgers Past & Present, among others). On the one hand, a good, solid biography for the Mets legend is long overdue. On the other hand, despite what the author writes somewhat immodestly — “Curiously, the ‘quintessential Seaver book’ was never written…until, finally, this one!” — this still might, in fact, not be it.

Oh, there’s certainly enough information about Seaver and his exploits on the field, how he helped propel the New York team from a bunch of losers in spectacular and surprisingly winners just two years after his debut, and how he continued to excel from that point, even while his teammates failed to provide enough offensive support, thus depriving him from being a multiple 30-game winner (according to Travers). But there are also enough mistakes, redundancies, hyperbole, and a questionable writing style to make the effort unworthy of its subject.

With all due respect to Travers,  truth be told, I only finished the book because I wanted to see how deep these issues went. First and foremost, there is no attribution for the vast majority of the quotes the author uses, which might lead the reader to believe Travers actually interviewed the former ballplayer. There is no introduction or epilogue that suggests otherwise.

• In 1968, Bob Gibson posted “a record earned run average of 1.12, a mark that may never be broken.” But that is not the mark; the modern record belongs to Dutch Leonard, who posted a 0.96 ERA in 1914. Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown holds the second spot at 1.04. If you want to claim that Gibson’s ERA was the best for the expansion or post-war era, that’s fine, but identify it as such. To do otherwise is deceiving.
• Travers identifies Seaver’s teammate Jerry Koosman as Rookie of the Year in 1968. In fact, the honors went to Johnny Bench that year. Koosman was named “The Sporting News” rookie pitcher, but, again, if that’s what the author meant, he should have stated it clearly, since it is obviously not the “official” award and does not carry the same gravitas.
• He states that “A crowd of 58,436 came out to see Seaver versus Jenkins in a game that defined why baseball still was and remains to this day our national pastime” (more hyperbole). I don’t know what source he used, since there are no notes in his book, but according to Baseball-Reference.com, the highest attendance that year was 55,901 for a Mets-Pirates game (Don Cardwell vs. Steve Blass) in September.
• There is more to the book than just baseball. There’s also social commentary. In referring to Seaver’s comfortable California childhood, Travers writes: “Eventually, he was allowed to leave the house on his own, to venture into a street past sprinklers watering lawns. The music of the era was Pat Boone, not Nirvana. It was the age of innocence, the last vestiges of a bygone era before drugs, the antiwar protests of the 1960s, pornography, and the bone-chilling fear of child molestation.” Goodness, how did the last generation of children every survive to reach adulthood?
• In referring to a poor outfield play by Ron Swoboda in the 1969 Wold Series, Travers writes: “He had bumbled around, letting [Don] Buford’s fly land for a homer, Jose Canseco-style, in Baltimore.” Sorry, but I don’t recall Swoboda taking a ball on the noggin and having it bounce over the fence. I don’t know what else Travers could have meant by referring to it as “Canseco-style.”
• Travers often goes on tangents in trying to make a point. To quote at length:

“As 1969 dawned, there were high hopes that change was in the air. So much had gone wrong that it seemed there was no place to go but up. Richard Nixon was sworn in as president on January 20. He was a Californian, but like so many of New York’s greatest sports stars over the years, he was a bona fide New Yorker. He had taken a job with a ‘silk stocking’ Wall Street law firm in 1963 and lived in a fancy East Side building that also housed Nelson Rockefeller.”

Excuse me, but what does this have to do with Seaver, and how would you compare the president to one of “New York’s greatest sports stars”?

• Another example: “‘What’s going on here?’ was Seaver’s best Slim Pickens imitation of the light-hitting Mets scoring 27 runs in three playoff games.” Unless your a movie buff, I don’t expect you’d know Mr. Pickens’ work. The same goes for the line “The Mets were surrounded like British soldiers in Zulu,” a 1964 feature film.
• Travers credits President Ronald Reagan with the phrases “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” Perhaps Reagan did say that at some point in his life, but it’s usually associated with Al Jolson.
• The author waxes poetic about Seaver’s near-perfect game in 1969 to an extravagant extent: “Just 29 hours and 45 minutes after Lindsey Nelson announced, ‘It’s absolute bedlam. You could not believe it. It’s absolute bedlam,’ when Ed Kranepool drove in Cleon Jones to beat Chicago 4-3, another event occurred that utterly eclipsed that one [Editor’s note: I had to check what the “event” was, since the Mets were merely in second place, 4.5 games back]. It was at 9:55 p.m. on Wednesday, July 9, the Year of our Lord 1969. In the pantheon of greatness reserved only for that most heroic of all heroes, the New York sports superstar, beyond that the American  [emphasis original] hero — ‘in the arena’ as Theodore Roosevelt liked to call it, the bright lights of Broadway, the Great White Way…and Shea Stadium illuminating him in all his splendor; well, he is rare indeed and rarer still is his debut.”

What? Never mind that this was simply a failed no-hitter, which happens frequently enough. I’ll even go so far as to say it was certainly one of the greatest games in team history, but am I alone in thinking this is a wee bit overdone? Is it even a complete thought?

• In discussing Seaver’s excellent 1971 campaign, Travers opines that “upon closer examination, [it is] one of the greatest in history without question.” [emphasis added]. The author likes to make definitive statements such as this one, whereas other writers might try to be a bit more circumspect.
• Travers notes on several occasions that Seaver’s teammates admired and resented him for his devotion to his wife, Nancy, and that he was a highbrow who liked the opera, reading the classics, etc.
• If you read, “In a rematch with the Dodgers Seaver pitched his heart out until almost collapsing in  a game that ended up going 19 innings,” how many frames would you think he actually pitched? I’m guessing more than the six he contributed to that particular contest. Maybe he wasn’t feeling well that day. It’s this kind of hyperbole serves to diminish the Hall of Famer’s accomplishments: if everything is great, then nothing is great.
• Travers seeks to compare  the 1973 Mets, who were in last place as late as August 30, with other worst-to-first teams. “‘Last place to first place in six weeks–wouldn’t that be something?’ [Editor’s note: The quote is attributed to Tug McGraw on August 20.] Talk started: Had it been done before? The 1914 Miracle Braves, the 1951 New York Giants…the 1969 Mets. Wow!” Well, if you want to split hairs (which is what I seem to be doing), the Giants were in last place on May 15 with a record of 13-16, really too early in the season to be considered “mired” in the basement. They spent every day since June 12 in second place and didn’t reach first until September 29, more than four months since their last-place posting. And the 1969 Mets were never in last place in 1969. It’s this lack of accuracy by an author who should know better than makes me a bit uncomfortable.
• When he does refer to outside sources, Travers can be a bit confusing. In his “1973” chapter, he writes, “In a modern statistic called ‘earned run average adjusted to the layer’s ballpark,’ Seaver’s was 175 (according to BaseballReference.com),” as if that’s sufficient to readers who don’t understand the significance of the stat. It turns out that Seaver led the NL in that department in ’73, but Travers doesn’t explain that.
• I dog-eared dozens of pages with questionable references, but I’ll finish with this one regarding the 1973 playoffs against the Reds: “[Pete] Rose was the first hitter. The crowd was in bad form. The future Hall of Famer’s homer the previous day was a poke in the eye to the Shea faithful….” Do I even need to add any emphasis here?

I don’t mean to come across as mean-spirited here and dog-pile on Travers, but truth be told, a player of Seaver’s stature deserves a better accounting.

Tagged as: Tom Seaver