The Day That Changed All Of The Other Ones

By Mike McGann
Posted Sunday, June 10, 2007

“Daddy, why is Aunt Cathy a Red Sox fan?”

Kids, being kids, will ask the most annoying questions. This one, asked by my kids a couple of weeks back, amplified by the fact that both of their cousins, ages three and four, were very clear to announce themselves as Sox rooters, too, much to the pain and suffering of my brother-in-law, a life-long Yankee fan, was kind of hard to explain, especially to a pair of six-year-olds who remain confused that the locals here in metro Philly root for the hometown Phils, instead of their beloved Mets.

This rather complicated issue goes back some 30 years. Actually, 30 years exactly, this week.

As a good older brother, I forced my younger sister to watch the Mets pretty much from the time she was in diapers. I guess she was nominally a Mets’ fan, certainly able at age seven or eight to make fun of Lindsay Nelson’s awful sportscoats and know the difference between Jerry Koosman and Dave Kingman.

Then Wednesday, June 15, 1977 happened. Just a few days after I turned 13 and having worrisomely followed the Tom Seaver-M. Donald Grant saga unfolding in the papers, I got the news in a text crawl along the bottom of the TV screen that night. I was watching something awful, probably BJ and the Bear, and there it was: Tom Seaver had been traded to the Reds.

None of it seemed particularly real, but there it was. None of us could believe it. Even Seaver seemed shocked...and was left speechless, commenting by scrawling on a reporter’s pad: “...The ovations the other night after passing S. Koufax will be one of the most memorable and warm moments in my life.” The later, tearful, video of him, said it all, said it for all of us who couldn’t understand how it had come to this.

Obviously, I was a Seaver fan. But not like my best friend at the time, Tom, who not surprisingly worshiped him. Tom, like myself, was an aspiring writer (and would end up writing and editing for The Cincinnati Enquirer, as irony would have it) and he wouldn’t accept the trade. He stopped being a Mets’ fan that day and switched loyalties to the Boston Red Sox, and ultimately attended college in Boston and lived there through the horror (from his perspective) of 1986.

My little sister had something of a crush on Tom, which of course she denies vehemently to this day, and also, suddenly, became a Red Sox fan. Tom moved on, but somehow for my sister, the Red Sox never did. I remember bringing her home stuff from Boston in 1986 when I got sent up there by The Dispatch. She liked Roger Clemens (until he became a Blue Jay). And then, of course, she married a Yankees fan.

That was a very lonely week to be a Mets’ fan. Many, like Tom, just walked away. And worse, there were Yankee fans, thumping their chests over a team that would win the next two World Series. As 1977 morphed into 1978, the Mets got new uniforms and smaller and smaller crowds. Seaver, of course, threw a no-hitter for the Reds. Shea Stadium was literally rusting away. 1979 was even worse and the end came for Lorinda DeRoulet’s ownership.

The funny thing, 30 years later, is arguing which side really benefited from the trade more. Seaver didn’t help the Reds win another title and some would argue that the depth the Reds traded that night was needed to spell a team whose core was getting old quickly. Since Seaver was going to be gone as free agent, sooner or later, the Mets got some semi-useful players, yes, but the trade cost the Mets first Grant and then ownership, possibly the greatest example of addition by subtraction in sports' history.

In fact, from the day of that trade, it took the Mets less time to get to the World Series than the Reds.

When you talk to Mets’ fans of a certain age, or older, we wear those dark years as a badge of courage, a mark of honor. We can argue, “we stuck it out. We made it through when it seemed like everyone else was bailing out.”

But something else changed that day, too, something that has echoed down to fans who would not be born for decades more. We stopped trusting the magic carpet ride, the sense that everything would work out in the end. Today’s paranoia by some fans, even the “Fred Coupon” jokes (after all, it was DeRoulet and Grant who really were cheap, not the Wilpons) can be traced directly back to that one day.

Mets ‘ fans worry that the sky is falling for a good reason. On June 15, 1977, it did, and we remember. Still.