Dementia. Damn it!
Sad to say I saw it coming. And I hardly was the only one. At the very least, I had disturbing suspicions, some from four and five years ago.
But now this episode in the life of Tom Seaver comes with a diagnosis, an unsettling one and a future for a most accomplished former athlete that no one wants to contemplate.
Now it seems official. As a result, it also sounds more ominous. And it feels worse than it sounds for those of us who have known Seaver for decades.
Now, the diagnosis has removed whatever hopes we’ve had for him and prompted us to suspect that the worst case scenario is unfolding. How bad is it?
We know he won’t participate in the Mets’ June weekend saluting the team Tom pushed to a World Series championship 50 years ago. He’ll be home in Calistoga, Calif. when Koosman, Cleon, Krane and Rocky come to the Big Citi. It will seem like the Beatles without John.
Travel had become an unwanted ordeal for Seaver long before we heard of the diagnosis. He hated merely getting to an airport and going through all the checkpoints. Who doesn’t?
And now what? Would he recognize Koosman? Does he recognize Nancy? Is he still obsessed with his vineyard?
We’re unsure of what to think, don’t know whether he knows us or to what degree this insidious malady has affected him. We might be in the same circumstances as he – we don’t know what we don’t know. We can hope, we can fear, but we cannot know. We can remember, and someday that will have to be enough. It isn’t right now.
George Thomas Seaver was to have aged gracefully, become an octogenarian with all his wits about him and a baseball memory as pinpoint as his best slider on the black. He was to have joined the party at the firepit behind the Otesaga in Cooperstown in the summer of 20-something and regaled those gathered with tales of drop-and-drive dominance, anecdotes about his dirty right knee, reviews of his magnificent cabernet, narratives of his conflict with M. Donald Grant and his feud with Dick Young. And, of course, expressions of his abiding appreciation of Gil Hodges.
Seaver would do that. He would fill an hour with a brilliant, impromptu monologue that was entertaining and baseball-educational. Perhaps he still can. But we can’t know whether he still is capable, not after his family and the Mets announced last week that he no longer will appear in public because of his dementia.
We can speculate – and hope – that lucid and spontaneous conversation aren’t beyond his presumably diminished capabilities. If they are, then we are at a loss for words – his.
As recently as summer, 2012, Seaver could – and did – stand at the bar downstairs at the Otesaga, with Pudge Fisk, Jack O’Connell of the BBWAA and me and share anecdotes, his well-received sense of humor and boundless baseball wisdom. He was quite the entertainer. Nothing we noticed then suggested diminished capacity.
He dropped two 20s on the bar and ordered a round that night. But the bartender declined to accept it. “You’ve got the highest percentage in the Hall,” is how he explained his gesture and demonstrated his respect for the most accomplished pitcher in New York City’s long baseball history.
But that was then, and Seaver’s Hall of Fame vote percentage was the highest ever. That was before the percentages of Griffey Jr. and Mo Rivera pushed his 98.8 to third place. And that was when Seaver graciously said – in advance – that he had no problem with Junior displacing him as No. 1. “He was a better hitter than I was,” he said. “And I’m not sure I could have made the catches he made.”
That was Tom at his most Terrific – unguarded, spontaneous, self-effacing and a fastball of fun, yet fully aware of who he was, a master of the vineyard, and who he had been, a master on the mound.
How many folks are so successful in two so divergent endeavors?
Johnny Bench, after his tongue had been loosened a bit at the bar that night, spoke of Seaver’s two disciplines and connected them: “We know he’s one of the all-time grapes,” he said.
Of course he is, even though his fastball has lost a foot or 20. He acknowledged as much one spring training morning in 2001. He stepped from the clubhouse kitchen holding a grapefruit aloft and announced to no one in particular “This is how big my fastball looks now.”
I decided I’d bite. “Okay,” I said “How did it look in ’71?” Seaver turned his back for a moment, his hands hidden from me. When he turned back, he said nothing but held a grapefruit seed between his thumb and index finger. Point made.
And when the Wine Spectator gave his GTS cabernet a 97, he found humor in the same area. “When I couldn’t hit that on the gun anymore,” Seaver said. “I had to change careers.”
He always could laugh at himself, but his readily recognized laughter came more easily after his time on the mound and in the booth had ended. Time and working the vineyard had brought out his best.
Before – and after – his decline began, he was a joy at the bar or in the Otesaga lobby or on the veranda or at the breakfast table. Without question, he recognized his failing memory. “I think I’m probably a seven today,” he’d say, assessing his mental capabilities. He’d admit to being unsure of his baseball past and say he’d prefer to talk wine. I never heard him admit to being less than a six. Now, who knows?
* * * *
My first experiences with Seaver occurred in 1971. He was two years removed from the Miracle of the ’69 Mets and the summit of his career. I found him condescending and aloof to the point of being rude. But God, he could pitch and explain in detail how he had dismantled the Pittsburgh Lumber Company or the Phillies’ Bull-Schmidt lineup. His post-start sitdowns with reporters were required listening, not only because he was a star, but because he was sharing absolute genius.
Seaver was news every fifth day – and sometimes more often. I was a rookie and in position to report news every day and tried to engage him regularly. Our relationship was slow to develop. Without spoken notice, he demanded that I pay some dues. He admitted as much years later after we’d become friendly.
He was tough on writers he didn’t know and on some teammates as well. His return to the Mets in 1983 was less than a smashing success. And then he was gone again, kidnapped by the White Sox in January, 1984.
The Mets released veteran pitchers Craig Swan, Dick Tidrow and Dave Roberts early in the ‘84 season when Dwight Gooden, Ron Darling and Tim Leary were making their first marks.
Darling and Leary expressed their regrets. “I feel a little guilty,” Leary said. “Those guys helped us take their jobs.”
And Darling added this footnote: “Not like the dick who was here last year.”
Even some of Seaver’s contemporaries were not always pleased with their relationships with the man who unquestionably was the team’s conscience in the late 60s and until the Mets traded him in 1977.
Former Met Jerry Koosman, Seaver’s lefthanded counterpart in the Mets’ rotation, was in St. Petersburg with the Phillies in spring training, 1984. I told him, we’d be covering Seaver’s start against the Mets in Sarasota the following day.
Koosman scribbled his phone number on a scrap of paper and gave it to me. “Here, tell Tom to call me,” he said laughing.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
He said “No chance. Tom never calls. We’ve always had to call him. . . in the winter, in the hotel. He never called us.”
And Buddy Harrelson, Seaver’s best friend among the Mets, supported that story.
Years earlier, Seaver was collaborating on a book with Newsday baseball writer Steve Jacobson who developed a serious brain problem. The book project ended. Seaver never inquired about Jacobson’s health.
Yet in the winter of 2000-something, I was working on a story about pitching. Who better than Seaver to consult? Then I developed a brain bleed. Seaver called – unsolicited – three times to check on me and then a fourth time to share his wisdom in a two-hour conversation.
Clearly, he had changed – softened – in the 35-year interim. Who wouldn’t in such an extended period? But there had been good and bad moments in between.
Seated next to him on the Mets’ team bus in June, 1977 in Montreal, I mentioned that the 10th anniversary of the release of Beatles’ “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” was the following day. He asked if I’d still love him when he turned 64. It was a break through. I thought, when we discussed the album. We had something in common. It was getting better all the time.
But when he returned to Shea Stadium later that summer after being traded to the Reds, he essentially ignored me.
Jump ahead six years, following his return to the Mets, he was angry with me because I had reported the terms of his new contract before he had signed it. Weeks later, after his first start in spring training, I asked him a legitimate question. He rudely refused to answer and insulted me.
We didn’t speak again until May 11, in Houston, after he had thrown his 56th and final shutout in the National League.
He suggested to the reporters gathered around him that they speak with me about something from his past. I took that to mean that he knew I was covering the team and that he had some respect for me. We spoke at length the following day, and he kinda-sorta apologized for how he had treated me.
We were good again. His narcissism faded. He was fun to chat with and more than willing to share his knowledge and memories. It remained positive. He appreciated the telegram I sent him when he won his 300th. He gave me time and good insights as a wallflower during the ’86 World Series.
Seaver joined the Yankees’ television crew in 1989. (George Steinbrenner considered it a coup to hire the Mets’ brightest personality). And I was assigned to the Yankees that year.
When he arrived in Fort Lauderdale for spring training, his presence hardly was celebrated. Not Dallas Green nor any of his coaches greeted the former pitcher they all knew on that first day though he was recognized.
“What, am I a bad guy now?” Seaver asked me a few days later. We discussed it over weeks. And I shared my sense of his diminished aloofness. He began to understand and, I thought, change.
He acknowledged working with uninhibited Phil Rizzuto on Yankees telecasts that year loosened his on-air personality.
* * * *
Seaver’s election to the Hall and his 98.8 percentage prompted a sea change in his public persona. He felt appreciated again, though I never quite understood how he could have felt anything different. He became far more open. Strange how such a powerful mandate had chipped away so much of his egocentric nature. It might have reinforced his self-worth.
* * * *
When Seaver and I last spoke in August – and evidently we will not speak again – we had a few laughs. It was early morning in Calistoga. He answered his cell in the vineyard. He had suggested in previous conversations that early mornings were best times for his memory.
He called me “Noble rot” which has something to do with wine. I called him “Franny”, short for Franchise. He liked that. He reveled in being called The Franchise when he was with the Mets.
His memory was evident. He recalled a morning in 2004 spring training when he made his first appearance in Mets camp, wearing a loud Hawaiian shirt. He jumped up the dugout steps and on to the field before I knew he had arrived.
Once I recognized him from behind, I called out from the dugout “Hey Franny. What shirt would you have worn if you won the bet?” He laughed.
Later that day, with most of the players hours away in Fort Myers, he and I walked around the Mets’ Port St. Lucie complex. Out of nowhere, he said “You know I wish I could have one more dinner with my brother [Charlie who had died a few years earlier].” And he explained.
An hour later, our paths crossed again, and I asked for three more choices of dining companions. He named some impressionist artist I can’t recall and Thomas Jefferson because he had brought grape vines to America. And he paused.
I thought, “Jeez, this guys givin’ me pretty good stuff, And not a mention of baseball. Cool.”
Then he said “Christy Mathewson,” and that blew my “no baseball” thought.
‘‘So Franny, if I can guess the reason you want Mathewson with Charlie, Jefferson and that artist guy, will you admit it?” He agreed.
I said “You want to have the two greatest righthanded pitchers ever in New York City at the same table.”
“Exactly” was his response.
Seaver knew exactly where he stood in the game’s history – near the top of any serious list of elite pitchers. He had no use for modesty when discussing his place in the game.
Doing some research in the Shea Stadium press box in April , 2007, I stumbled across facts that afforded me another snapshot of his remarkable pitching prowess, though it seemed a tad peculiar. He had pitched on April 26 in four of five years in the early 70s and produced four complete game victories, two shutouts, 36 strikeouts, one walk and a 1.00 ERA.
When Tom happened by, I told him what I had discovered and requested an explanation. “I was a pretty good pitcher,” he said.
“C’mon, you can do better than that,” I said. “How the hell could that happen? Four years, four complete games and almost four shutouts on the same date.”
He provided a better explanation. “What, are you surprised? I was a fuckin’ good pitcher.”
* * * *
My suspicions began the first time Seaver missed Hall of Fame Weekend. He loved the event. Came early, stayed late. Hs place in the game was reaffirmed each summer, and he reveled in the camaraderie.
He so enjoyed when the wine guys got together – Koufax, Carlton, Gibson, Sutton and Seaver. And they allowed an outsider – Fisk, that catcher – to attend. And Tom’s cabernet was the best.
But then one year, Seaver was missing and more conspicuous than he would have been had he attended. Whispers were on many lips as was one word, Alzheimer’s. He didn’t answer his cell in the morning.
Seaver’s fellow Hall of Famers were unwilling to speculate on the record or, at best, uncomfortable saying anything for attribution. “If we don’t talk about it,” one of them said, “it won’t feel real.”
But there was more evidence that it probably was. When the Mets’ network, SNY, presented the club’s all-time team a few years back, it saved the best for last. Seaver was introduced after Keith, Straw, David and all the rest. He spoke, he said the right things about the right people. But he was searching for words in a manner unfamiliar to my ears. To me, how he spoke was as telling as what he said. It seemed to support what I had heard, that he was “losing it,” whatever that means.
It was earlier that year that Seaver had made a speaking appearance at the Triple A All-Star Game in Buffalo and stumbled through introductions. Some folks who witnessed his performance assumed he was drunk.
In no circumstance would Tom Seaver have appeared drunk in public. But now I wish it had been alcohol speaking.
* * * *
And now we’re not going to see him anymore and I’ll probably never taste GTS again. Lyme disease got him in 1991 when he still lived in Greenwich. Damn tics, damn deer. And it got him again; I’m not certain when. Probably some early Calistoga morning in the last 10 years when he was inspecting his vines. Lyme disease was diagnosed a second time. Occupational hazard, far more perilous that a hot comebacker.
Are Lyme disease and dementia connected? Does it matter now in this narrative? The Seaver we have known is gone now. Damn dementia.
Marty Noble covered the Mets for decades, primarily for Newsday, the Long Island newspaper, and knew Seaver more intimately than any other reporter.