I was listening to the Brewers game last night when Bob Uecker declared over the radio that pitcher Tom Seaver had died. For the remainder of the game Uecker and his boothmate, in between balls and strikes, had a discussion about Tom Terrific’s influence on the 1969 Mets, and on baseball over the course of the past 50+ years more generally. I had noted with great sadness a little over a year and a half ago when Seaver’s family announced that he had dementia and was thus retiring from public life. It was a combination of the dementia, Lyme disease, and COVID-19 from which he succumbed. I remember like yesterday when he threw his no-hitter for the Reds again the Cardinals in June 1978. It is no wonder Sparky Anderson, the Reds skipper that season, once famously declared that, “My idea of managing is giving the ball to Tom Seaver and then sitting down and watching him work.”

A friend of mine from where we grew up in Florida remembers meeting Seaver at what we used to call Little Yankee Stadium in Fort Lauderdale. (The stadium was so-named because the Yankees used to hold their Spring Training there.) Back in the day Spring Training was more laid back and one could get closer, even walk straight up to, a player waiting to get on the bus or what you. Seaver was leaning against a poll working on a crossword puzzle when my friend, probably all of twenty at the time, approached and got a gracious five minute audience with the pitcher. Seaver’s final season was 1986 when he played in Boston. His record that year wasn’t very good but I always felt he was a stabilizing force in what was a tumultuous season for the Red Sox as they closed in on the pennant. Unfortunately he got injured and so did not play in the post-season against the Mets, which would have been something.

More than just a pitcher and ballplayer, Seaver was a cultural force. There was just something about him that appealed to people’s better and wiser sensibilities. People connected with and through him. I was emailing with someone about all this today, who said that Seaver, and the Mets more generally, were the sole cultural connections he had with his father-in-law, an immigrant who’d fled persecution in Europe and settled in New York in the mid-twentieth century.

(image/Sgt Randall A Clinton USMC, via Wikimedia Commons)