Shea Quest '08: How about Seaver, for openers

Shea Memory No. 5: April 8, 1975. Mets 2, Phillies 1

Tom Seaver took the mound on Opening Day 16 times for three teams. And I witnessed the best of those games in 1975.

My grandmother was my baseball buddy, and took me to the first game of the 1975 season, a huge deal because we knew Seaver was pitching. We even asked for seats on the third base side because we thought we’d have a better view of the right-handed hero.

Then, as now, I drag companions to the stadium as the gates first open. After snagging a program, we hurried out to our field level seats and I ran right down to the rail by the Phillies dugout.

And there was the recently traded Tug McGraw, in his powder blue and maroon Phillies road uniform, about to be interviewed by Ron Swoboda, then a sportscaster.

Two Mets heroes!

I remembered that one of Swoboda’s baseball cards said his nickname was “Rocky.” I’d never heard that before, but Topps wouldn’t make stuff up, right?

Mustering up all the courage an 11-year-old unsure of his facts could muster, I broke out a “Hi, Rocky!”

Swoboda looked up, said “Hi,” and went back to whatever he was doing. But I, having experienced a conversation – of sorts – with the player who made the amazing diving catch of the 1969 World Series, was pretty darn thrilled.

But the main business at hand was a stellar match-up of Tom and Steve Carlton, the third year in a row these future first-ballot Hall of Famers would battle on Opening Day.

The Phils took the lead in the third when Bob Boone walked, went to second when Carlton sacrificed and scored on a Dave Cash double.

But the Mets tied it in the fourth when celebrated acquisition Dave Kingman launched his first Met home run.

Seaver and Carlton proceeded to match zeros. Then in the bottom of the ninth, Felix Millan singled and moved to second when John Milner walked. Then, as if called for in the script, the other celebrated off-season acquisition, Joe Torre, singled home Millan for a walk-off win.

Both starters went the distance – Carlton is credited with only eight innings because the Mets scored before making an out in the ninth – which is something you’d never see today.

And both were masterful. Seaver gave up six hits but struck out nine, including future Hall-of-Famer Mike Schmidt three times.

Carlton only gave up four hits and two walks, done in when three of those seven trips to first happened in a row.

Seaver and Carlton would pair up on Opening Day again, in 1981 when Tom was with the Reds. Again, there was a 1-1 tie when each left late in the game, this one ending with a walk-off walk at the hands of the bullpen.

And it's only appropriate that Carlton was on the hill for the Phillies again when Tom made his glorious homecoming on Opening Day 1983.

Check out Seaver’s Opening Day performances:

Yr: IN H ER R BB K HR

1968 8.1 7 4 3 0 3 1 ND

1969 5 6 4 2 3 5 1 ND

1970 8 9 3 3 0 5 0 ND

1971 5 4 2 2 4 4 0 W

1972 6 5 0 0 0 6 0 W

1973 7.2 5 0 0 2 8 0 W

1974 7 7 3 3 0 8 0 ND

1975 9 6 1 1 2 9 0 W

1976 7 5 1 1 1 8 0 W

1977 7 9 3 3 1 7 1 W

1978 3 6 5 5 0 3 3 ND

1979 1.2 6 7 4 1 0 0 L

1981 8 6 1 1 3 4 0 ND

1983 6 3 0 0 1 5 0 ND

1985 6.2 5 2 2 2 3 0 W

1986 5.1 7 5 5 0 3 2 L

There are a couple nice games in there – and one terrible day in 1979 with the Reds – but I still think that 1975 duel with Carlton was the best of the lot. And it’s a Shea memory that will last forever.

Top 10 reasons why this Opening Day is a beautiful day

The forecast calls for rain here in Michigan today. But it’s a beautiful day. Opening Day is always a beautiful day.

It is, quite possibly, my favorite day of the year. Will always has advocated for it to be named a national holiday.

But it’s not, and I’m finally OK with that. I wouldn’t get it off anyway – you need your newspaper every day – and I like getting mail. So it’s OUR holiday.

And I’m even more excited about this year’s Opening Day than usual, if that’s possible. Here are the top 10 reasons.

1) SheaQuest 2008. Through my awesome cousin Tim and even more awesome parents, I’m getting to the Shea one last time.

And this isn’t just any glorious game. No. Tim scored tix to the Ultimate Throw Down Between Good and Evil. That’s right, a Subway Series game.

Considering I get choked up when I get to see the Mets in a spring training game, I’m likely to be a puddle by the end of batting practice and a complete wreck when they send the Yanks back home in shame. But that’s not going to stop me from booing Derek F. Jeter, cheering every single Met and sending the grand ballpark out in style with some of the people most special to me.

2) April 21, Mets vs. Cubs. Speaking of special people, Will’s in a Wrigley Field season ticket group and members rotate games. For the second year in a row, he scored a game with the Mets and his lovely sidekick graciously allowed him to bring me.

3) July 19, Mets vs. Reds. BaseballTruth.com is a memory – and a grand one at that -- but the Executive Game lives on! Board members voted to see a game in the Bronx, but that fell through. So after great deliberations and only a modest amount of lobbying/begging from me, we’re going to Great American Ballpark to see the Mets again.

That’s right, three regular-season Mets games this year! My records show that hasn’t happened since 1989 -- the last of our three years in Connecticut.

I know what you’re thinking. I’m a known jinx. I haven’t seen the Mets win a game since 1991, coincidently my last game at Shea. Perhaps that’s the team’s way of saying it was time to come home. That’s happening, and the streak is going down.

4) Johan Santana. Do you think he’s going to like throwing in a pitchers’ park against batters not used to his filthy stuff? I see great things.

5) Pedro’s back! Pedro Martinez’ cameo at the end of last season was nice, though way too short. He’s healthy, he’s back and hopefully we have him for the entire season.

6) Jose Reyes is serious. No one knows what happened when Jose fell into his September funk, but he’s focused and starting anew. I expect nothing short of a magical season.

7) You think David Wright is honked off that Jimmy Rollins in walking around with Wright’s MVP Award? I think D-Wright’s going to ensure that this one’s a no-brainer – by the end of May.

8) No more Tom Glavine. I was tired of his reluctant-Met routine. Let Mr. Homesick pitch for the Braves.

John Kruk was just all over ESPN talking about how John Smoltz and Glavine were going to lead the Braves to the division title. Kruckie seems to have forgotten that both those guys are on the wrong side of 40 and Smoltz is already hurting.

And we know what happens with Glavine as the season progresses. He runs out of gas then coughs up seven runs in the top of the first without getting a second out in the ultimate must-win game – then acts like he doesn’t give a damn. Tell Chipper we said “Hi,” Tommy.

9) And speaking of Glavine and Game 162, I am so ready to move on because I am so tired of hearing about last season. I swear, the ESPN announcers spent two-thirds of the spring training game against the Braves last week talking about “the collapse.”

Yes, we sucked. But the Phillies played out of their minds. They get credit for that.

And as if 4:10 p.m. today, it’s old news.

10) No Barry Bonds, no Sammy Sosa, no Roger Clemens. All of the alleged major juicers are done and out of the game. Maybe, just maybe, we don’t have to hear about steroids quite so much.

It’s been a long winter in so many ways. And it ends this afternoon in Miami.

In other words...

If this photo of Tom Seaver doesn't scream all that is good with baseball and life, I don't know what does. It's from a site called Steve's Baseball Photography , one of several great new baseball sites I've discovered.

Steve shares with us baseball photos he's taken over the years, and the shots from the 1960s and 1970s are just stunning. Enjoy.

Glories of Opening Day

Tom Seaver delivering on an Opening Day for the Mets.

My buddy Will insists that Opening Day of the baseball season should be a national holiday.

Of course he’s absolutely right.

It’s a national day of optimism, when all teams start with a clean slate and have a chance at the pennant. It means spring is here, or here in Michigan it means at least spring has the potential to arrive within the month. Maybe.

I’ve been blessed to attend a number of Opening Day games in my life. Here are some of the favorites:

April 5, 1975 -- Mets 2, Phillies 1: My Grandmother lived with us when I was growing up, and she was a big baseball fan. We’d go to a couple games a year, and this year we made it to Opening Day — my first one. I had just turned 11 two days before and was in full boyhood baseball hero mode.

Tom Seaver, my hero, was pitching. We sat on the third-base side because Seaver’s a right-hander, and his back would be to the first-base side when he pitched and we wanted the best view.

That was a big winter for the Mets, having traded fan favorite Tug McGraw to the Phillies and acquired all-or-nothing slugger Dave Kingman from the Giants and Joe Torre in a trade from the Cardinals.

My grandmother completely spoiled me and we were at the game as the gates opened. She bought me a yearbook and program and as we headed to our seats I saw McGraw by the dugout being interviewed by the former Met Ron Swoboda, who was a sportscaster for one of the television stations.

I remember running down to the front row to watch. It was my first time being that close to a major league player in uniform. I remembered from Swoboda’s 1973 baseball card — I could recite all the little cartoons on the backs in those years — that his nickname was "Rocky." I mustered up the courage to say "Hi Rocky," and Swoboda looked up and waved. Contact with a baseball player! Yes! it didn’t get much better.

The game was awesome, a pitcher’s duel between Seaver and Steve Carlton, each throwing a complete game. Kingman hit his first homer as a Met and Torre drove in the winning run in the bottom of the ninth.

To show how much times have changed, Baseball-almanac.com -- a great site -- lists the attendance that day at just 18,527. And that’s before the rise of the Yankees and the Mets were still the toast of the Big Apple.

April 5, 1983 -- Mets 2, Phillies 0: Tom Seaver’s return the Mets! I was in college by now and some of my friends at the college newspaper also were Mets fans. To celebrate my birthday we all decided to go see the Mets and Seaver. It was one of the first times driving in to the city and going to a game without parental assistance.

Being college kids, we didn’t think about details like getting tickets ahead of time and we were stunned to find the game was sold out. After walking around the stadium a couple times in shock, we walked up to the subway platform outside the right-centerfield seats where you could get a decent view of the action.

My friends humored me and we stayed up there for most of the game. Again it was Seaver against Steve Carlton. Neither team scored through six, and Doug Sisk came in to pitch the final three innings to get the win.

It was an emotional day for a Mets fan, and especially a Seaver fan. He’d been run out of New York in 1977 by the previous regime, and the new owners sought to heal those wounds by bringing Seaver back. It was a year-long lovefest, and I remember seeing the "Welcome Home Tom" banner from the subway platform.

Seaver's 1984 Topps card has always been one of my favorites because the photo was taken on that Opening Day -- you can tell by the bunting in the background.

April 5, 1993 -- Marlins 6, Dodgers 3: My parents also spoil me. They had moved to Florida a couple years earlier, and we were all excited that a major league team was coming to Miami.

I had come oh-so-close to getting tickets to the team’s first-ever game over the phone. I somehow got through right as they went on sale, and was put on hold. I figured I could keep typing — I was working — if I switched to the new headsets we got a couple days before. I heard a "click" and the dialtone — and my colleagues heard something unpleasant coming from my cubicle. Dooh! It was 40 minutes before I could get through again. The first game was sold out, but I could buy four upper deck seats to the second game, which I snapped up.

A couple days later my mother called and said my Dad found a way to get a ticket for Opening Day. It was expensive, but it could be my birthday present. I told her that was really kind, but that was expensive and not to worry about it. I called her back about a half hour later and said "Go for it!" She knew I would.
The Marlins take the field for the first time.

What a fantastic day! Brilliant Florida sunshine for an out-and-out celebration of baseball. Charlie Hough was the Marlins’ starter, throwing against Orel Hershisher.

Wearing my cool teal cap, I was in prime souvenir mode, buying official first-day programs and a way-cool foam rubber Marlins hat.

Virtually every movement on the field was a franchise "first" and brought cheers. Scott Pose, who beat out Chuckie Carr for the starting centerfield job in spring training, was the first batter, Bret Barberie for the first hit and Benito Santiago scored the first run.

I’ve been privileged to attend a number of historic baseball games, and the first day for the "Fish" is up there at the top of the list

April 13, 1993 -- Tigers 20, Athletics 4: Two Opening Days in one year! The Tigers started on the road that year, and I got home from Florida in time to get to Tiger Stadium for my second Opening Day there. The Tigers were pretty awful through the 1990s, and apparently well into the 2000s. So to see this offensive outburst against a decent A’s team brought some hope and cheer to D-Town.

I had a streak of Tiger Opening Days going for a while. I was able to link some to work, attending in 1995 to interview fans about the first game back after the player’s strike and again in 1999, the last Opening Day at Tiger Stadium.

My mission for both games was to find people from the Flint area for the story. It’s actually not that tough to pick out Flintites in a crowd of 55,000. A lot of them wear UAW jackets that list the location of their local, and a lot of high school kids wear their school jackets. The upper deck in Tiger stadium wasn’t that far from the lower seats, and I learned that I could go to the upper deck railing, look down and see the backs of a lot of fans below then run down and ask them questions for the story.

It also didn’t hurt to have some plants among the spectators. I knew our friends Tom and Glennie would be attending the openers, and I’d get their seat locations ahead of time, guaranteeing that I’d have at least some local fans quoted in the story.

I haven’t been to a major league opening game since then, but we’ve attended most of the openers for the West Michigan Whitecaps, the Tigers’ Midwest League team here in Grand Rapids. The Caps are hoisting this championship banner at this week’s opener and we’ll be there!

And go to Will’s Web site -- Baseballtruth.com -- and sign his petition to get Opening Day named a national holiday.

Birthdays and Opening Day

The grass in a Major League stadium is a brilliant green on Opening Day, radiant compared the the still-brown lawns in our Midwestern cities.

Of course, the stadiums have an advantage. They paint the grass.

I didn't know this -- and probably wouldn't have believed it -- until I saw it for myself.

My birthday is in the first week in April, and sometimes falls on Opening Day, which my family says is appropriate. But my birthday came in 1991 and I remember going through a rough stretch at work and being in a foul mood.

Then my colleague and buddy, John Munson, arrived with one of the best birthday presents ever. John was a photographer at the Flint Jounral and we often worked together. He convinced the editors that what we really needed was a story about how workers get Tiger Stadium ready for Opening Day, and how I should tag along to supply the words for his photos.

The editors signed off, and what an awesome day we had.

We had lived in Michigan just over a year at that point, and had been to Tiger Stadium many times. It was a wonderful old stadium, full of little oddities -- and some big ones, too. And I was thrilled to get a chance to see things going on behind the scenes, stuff fans don't typically get to experience.

We arrived around mid-morning, picked up our credentials and were excited to see that we had complete run of the stadium.

The Tigers' opening series with the Yankees was still a couple days away, but the stadium was bustling with activity. We went out to the field first, following the loud noise coming from centerfield. Out in the middle was a crew covered in green spraying what appeard to be paint on the grass. I was stunned. It was one of those "pull-the-beard-off-Santa Claus" moments. We walked on the crushed gravel warning track to centerfield, touched the base of the famous in-play flagpole -- because we could -- and chatted with the crew members. The explained that the "paint" was a mixture of fertilizer and food coloring, enough to keep the grass looking great in April and May.

We then poked around the dugouts, which are really cramped, and walked up the narrow tunnel that leads to the clubhouse. There's a small sink in the tunnel, just deep enough in so that it can't be seen from the stands. Goodness knows what the players do to or in it.

We checked out the Tigers clubhouse first. Workers were installing new blue carpet and tiger-striped wallpaper in Sparky Anderson's office. Player lockers are not like lockers you see in schools. There are no doors, just spots along the wall separated by something that looked like a small chain-link fence. Director chairs with the team's Old English D logo were on top of each locker, I assume because of the carpet work. Boxes of new batting helmets were arriving. We tried them on because, again, we could!

We then ventured into the trainer's room, which is off-limits to reporters during the season. Tiger pitching legend Jack Morris had left the team for the Twins during the winter, and Morris had written a personal note to the trainers and taped it to the wall for them to see when they came north with the team. It was neat because Morris had a reputation of being very grumpy, so it was nice to see another side of him.

The visitors clubhouse was really spectacular. The walls are covered in white ceramic tiles like you'd see in a bathroom, expect players through the years had augraphed them. The guys fixing cracked tiles told us they spent a couple hours walking around the room reading the walls.

We then moved into the bullpens, which are cages sunken into the ground. The view is horrible -- probably the worst seat in the house -- and it's got to be hot in there during the summer months. It's also so deep that players need a little wooden staircase to get in and out, and that wasn't yet in place when I jumped in, so it was a little tough getting out.

We later walked around the press boxes and boxes that run along the roof of the stadium that must have been used when the Lions used the stadium, too. They ran all the way along the top into rightfield. There wasn't much inside, just something that looked like a running shelf or desk where you would set a drink or laptop on. There were no seats or anything, and it was nothing like the luxury boxes I've seen in other stadiums. Unlike the bullpen, the view was awesome. I was higher than any seat in the stadium, and still closer to the action than anything in New Comiskey Park's upper deck. We opened another door and ended up on the actual roof of the stadium.

It was fun talking to the workers, who seemed to have an appreciation for the historic building they were working in. I remember one of the guys in the visitors clubhouse pointing his chisel around the room listing players who must have passed through at one point.

We also spent time with the man responsible for painting the logos on top of the dugouts. It's a tougher job than you think because the Tigers logo at the time was pretty complicated and there weren't stencils. And unlike some stadiums that have pre-painted boards attached to the top of the dugouts, this man was painting these logos right on the roof. He said it took about two days of kneeling on concrete to get the job done each year. But it was a point of pride for the artist, a sign-maker from Troy. He had done it since 1985 and loved to come back to the park during the year and inspect his handiwork.

Tiger Stadium was open another nine years after that, and each time I returned I'd look to the boxes on the roof, the sunken bullpens and the brilliant green field and think of that birthday.