When Shea Was Home by Brett Topel

Author:Brett Topel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sports Publishing
Published: 2016-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

After being named the American League’s Manager of the Year in 1974, the Yankees’ Bill Virdon did not make it through the entire 1975 campaign.Photo courtesy of the National Baseball Hall of Fame

The Mets and Yankees had much more in common in 1975 than sharing Shea Stadium. Each team had arguably the best pitcher in its league—Seaver with the Mets and Hunter with the Yankees; each team imported a slugger during the off-season—Kingman with the Mets and Bonds with the Yankees; each team had a sixteen-game winner—Matlack with the Mets and Doc Medich with the Yankees; and each team had a fourteen-game winner—Koosman with the Mets and Rudy May with the Yankees.

All of these similarities probably made Mets manager Yogi Berra more than a little nervous when the Yankees decided to fire their manager, Bill Virdon. As it turned out, Virdon’s fate was sealed on July 20, when the Texas Rangers fired Martin as their manager. From that moment on, Yankees owner George Steinbrenner was on the hunt—he wanted Martin to lead his team. So when Virdon was finally fired, it was not a total surprise.

Berra’s fate—it turns out—was actually sealed two days before Virdon’s, when he had a run-in with one of his players, veteran Cleon Jones. Jones had already had serious issues with the front office earlier in the season, after an incident that occurred in Florida during spring training. Jones was arrested for indecent exposure after being found in the back of a van with a woman who was not his wife. Jones was never prosecuted, but the Mets fined him heavily and forced him to hold a press conference and apologize. Jones was incensed, and everything came to a head on July 18.

After pinch-hitting late in the game against the Atlanta Braves, Jones refused to go out and play in the field. Berra ordered him to go into the game and the two ended up having a shouting match, which included Jones throwing his glove and other objects in the dugout. Berra was quoted at the time in the Sporting News as saying it was “the most embarrassing thing that has happened to me since I became a manager.”

It was not the first time Jones was surrounded by controversy. In 1969, two and a half months before Koosman watched the final out of the Amazin’ World Series drop into Jones’s glove, there was a real concern whether Jones would still be on the squad come October.

On July 30, 1969, Jones—who was an all-star that season—was the leading hitter in the National League with a batting average of .346. The Mets were taking on the Houston Astros in a doubleheader at Shea and from its earliest stages, it was a miserable day for the New Yorkers. Playing on a rain-soaked field, the Mets lost the first game to the Astros, 16-3. However, it was in the second game that the real problem started. With the Mets already trailing 7-0 in the bottom of the third inning, Houston’s Johnny Edwards doubled to left field.

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