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Guided by steady, low-keyed Manager Gil Hodges, the Mets' young prodigies are the happiest, hungriest, hustlingest team in baseball, and they seem to have acquired the emotional wherewithal to stand up 'under pressure'. They demonstrated that the last time they faced the Cubs, when they won four of six crucial games. In the opener of a three-game set at Shea Stadium, their home ballpark—the first crucial series ever to involve the Mets—Chicago's crack righthander, Ferguson Jenkins, entered the ninth inning with a 3-1 lead. Minutes later he stalked off the field in disgust, a 4-3 loser. The following night Tom Seaver, 24, the husky, hard-throwing ace of the Met pitching staff, put on the most dazzling one-man show in Met history. He faced just 28 batters to achieve a 4-0 victory. Only a line single by Rookie Jim Quails in the ninth inning spoiled his bid for what would have been the eleventh perfect game since professional baseball began 100 years ago. Cub Manager Leo Durocher was roundly unimpressed. The next day, when the Mets committed two errors in one inning and went on to lose to the Cubs 6-2, Durocher, who is neither magnanimous in victory nor mellow in defeat, smugly observed: "Those were the real Mets."
Durocher may have to munch on those words. While the Mets were blasting the San Diego Padres last week, his Cubs were pulling out of the mire of a four-game losing streak. For a time, though, Durocher's dig seemed prophetic. Through late July and early August the Mets played down to their past reputation. In one horrendous doubleheader in Houston, the Astros pasted Met pitchers for a total of 27 runs. The Mets lost 3-2 to the last-place Expos when Rookie Gary Gentry yielded an embarrassing total of three home runs in one inning. As summer waned, the New Yorkers found themselves in third place, 9½ games off the pace.
Then they snapped out of it. They whipped the poor Padres four straight and took five of six tumultuous games from two of the Western Division's toughest teams, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Said First Baseman Ed Kranepool: "We've come back from the dead again."
A Taste of Winning
Clearly the new Mets are a far cry from that congeries of castoffs, has-beens and never-would-bes who made their debut in 1962 by losing a record 120 games—and learned to laugh about it. To today's brassy Wunderkinder, those days are ancient history. Says Manager Hodges, a 17-year veteran of the majors who is not given to superlatives: "These boys have had a taste of winning, and now they know how to win. They're thinking ballplayers. They bounce back as well as any club I've ever seen."