Reese Kaplan -- A Man Greater Than His Baseball Card

Life often asks you to endure unexpected and gut wrenching twists when you are least prepared to handle them.  First we hear one of our writers is going in for oral surgery.  Then another is down for back surgery.  I'm starting off a four-day holiday weekend not with a long motorcycle ride or a trip up to the mountains, but instead at a military burial tribute to a friend who never recovered from a fractured skull earlier this year.  

Still, we are accustomed to adapting to ever changing circumstances.  The COVID-19 virus cost many of us friends or family.  It cost others jobs as companies were forced to downsize.  Still people are surviving and somehow making it through to the next day.  Nothing proves insurmountable.  Or so we thought.

 
Earlier this week the word spread like wildfire about the death of George Thomas Seaver.  Yes, he's been out of the public eye for quite some time at his winery coping with the aftermath of several health problems.  He was having trouble articulating his thoughts and the last interview I saw with him it was obvious that it was a struggle for Tom to be Tom.  But that never once changed the perception we had of him as a baseball superman who transformed a joke of a franchise into a totally unexpected World Series Champion in 1969.  Little did we know at the time that his Rookie of the Year debut, his first Cy Young Award (of three) and his indelible imprint on Mets history was merely the beginning of his impact.

As childhood baseball fans, Tom Seaver was respectability, he was professionalism and he was a winner.  These perceptions extrapolated themselves onto our very lives, making us feel we weren't merely rooting for the loveable losers in Queens, but now we felt something brand new to Mets fans -- pride.  For once we weren't the laughingstocks of the Yankee fan neighborhood, but we felt their envy because Tom Seaver was indeed The Franchise, larger than life, and he singlehandedly transformed the entire experience of being a Mets fan.

As I personally turned from a single digit age into my 10th and older years, Tom Seaver was almost like having a perfect parent in my life who never let me down, who always performed far better than anyone could have anticipated and who reinforced all those things that were good in my life.  It couldn't possibly get any better, but soon we found out how it could get worse.

In Seaver's first foray with the NY Daily News' Dick Young who sided with the owners and fueled the false narrative that their all time greatest player was somehow unappreciative of his salary level and disloyal to the club that had given him his chance.  We all know about the great Midnight Massacre in which the family parted ways with Tom Seaver and Dave Kingman on the same day, sending one to Cincinnati and the other to San Diego.  It was the ultimate rug pulled out from under your feet and made many people question not just the wisdom of the baseball move, but their own value in life.  No longer would we have the reliability of the win every fifth day and we would have to somehow continue our fandom with the very owners who banished our guy away.  Many tears were shed that day.

I won't belabor the return of Seaver, the gamble that saw him plucked from the roster onto the White Sox or how he didn't finish his career where he started it.  What little we got out of Tom Terrific was more than any of us could have imagined and even after some of Dick Young's colleagues decided to side with the sportswriter, he still set a record with over 98% approval for induction into the Hall of Fame.  That achievement alone showed that he was not just the greatest Met of all time, but recognized at the time as the greatest pitcher in the major leagues.  

Now when he passed away it was a crushing but not entirely unexpected announcement.  He had withstood a variety of health problems, including Lyme Disease, dementia, Lewy Body Syndrome (which also afflicted Robin Williams) and then COVID-19.  Still, 75 seemed way too young to lose someone whose influence went far beyond what he could do on the pitching mound or in the locker room.  He was responsible for making a great many people in the New York City area finally feel a whole new acceptance and value to their lives that they had never before enjoyed.  Losing Tom Seaver took a little bit out of your heart but, as they say, he is gone but not forgotten.  Once we push past the pain of the loss we'll remember what he did.  And we'll smile.