Big-league baseball had changed a lot when pitcher Cy Young died in 1955. Ballparks were smaller. Home runs were more of an attraction. And players of color had entered the game, in large numbers.
Pitching—throwing the ball fast enough, and with enough movement, to make the batter miss—remained key to winning games. No one in professional baseball did it better. And that’s why, the year after he died, baseball’s highest honor for pitching was named for him.
Tom Seaver was the lynchpin of the astonishingly successful 1969 Mets, an expansion team that went from cellar-dwelling losers to World Series champions in seven years. The Mets won a second National League pennant in 1973. Seaver and his wife Nancy were the toast of New York.
In 1977, contract renegotiations between Seaver and the Mets broke down. A newspaper column by a firebrand sportswriter made matters worse by implicating Nancy as a factor in the breakdown.
The next day Seaver had been traded.
