A Year Ron Swoboda Won’t Forget : Former Outfielder Recalls His Days With the 1969 Mets

Ron Swoboda had a mediocre career at best, a lifetime .242 batting average. He never equaled the promise of 1965, his rookie year, when he hit 19 home runs at age 21. He was rushed into the big leagues after only one season of minor league play and would fail to acquire a hitter’s needed finishing touches. Still, he was an emotional player who had his moments of glory.

The most meaningful one came in the fourth game of the 1969 World Series when he made a brilliant catch of a Brooks Robinson liner to right field that prevented the Orioles from taking a ninth-inning lead. The Mets went on to win the game in the 10th inning, 2-1, and completed their dramatic World Series victory the next afternoon.

Swoboda, now 41, lives in Phoenix, where he is sports director of television station KTVK.

“Things kept happening. It was a year of strange things. We went into Pittsburgh and beat them, 1-0 and 1-0, and Don Cardwell and Jerry Koosman both drove in the only runs in their ballgames to shut them out. In a four-game series with the Pirates, I went 1 for 4 in all four games and all four hits were off the same pitcher--Chuck Hartenstein. That was unusual.

“There were enough things that occurred that made you feel not only did you have something working for you, but there was a more elusive quality afoot. For instance, I hit two home runs in St. Louis off Steve Carlton in a game where he’s striking out 19 and setting a record. None of it figured, none of that stuff. A guy like him who is a Hall of Fame pitcher is having the greatest game of his life and a guy who is hitting .240, who really can’t claim to be a power hitter, takes him deep with a man on each time and beats him, 4-3.

“It doesn’t figure. But things were happening like that. I was the guy that day, it was somebody else the next and so on. We really started to roll. The ’69 Cubs have taken a lot of heat down through the years for choking, but for a meaningful period there we were playing .750 ball. They were in a footrace with a club that was coming on like a thoroughbred. We just had the gas. We platooned more than they did. We were fresher.

“A lot of things broke for us. Gil Hodges was pushing the buttons, and nobody pushed them as well as Gil. But he had somebody under all the buttons. He had a platoon setup, and everybody did a little something. Bud Harrelson even caught a break when he went away to National Guard camp, and Al Weis filled in like an all-star.

“Then there was the pitching. That could be the best stuff any club ever had on a pitching staff. That was an awesome staff. That ball came into play real tough. I still think that was the key. We tend to look back at the base hits we got, but those base hits are relative to what you’re giving up. We were tough to put the bite on. Seaver, Koosman and Gentry. Somebody in there is not going to let you lose three in a row. The game was in your favor when your guy had the ball.

“I don’t know how anybody else felt going into the World Series, but I felt like I had just been born. I felt like my body was brand new, and I had never played any baseball. I didn’t have the faintest idea what was going to happen. There was so much wonderment. I was pretty well overwhelmed by it. I had never been Mr. Cool anyway. Don Buford, the very first hitter for them, hit a Seaver pitch over my head for a home run that I should have caught.

“I didn’t go back on the ball properly. I jumped for it and didn’t even get my glove in the right place. The ball came down on the side of my glove. I screwed that one up about as good as you can and that was their first batter. But after losing that first game, the Series was like everything else we did that year.

“That may have been the best Oriole team ever fielded. If they didn’t have an all-star at every position, they were close. We didn’t have an edge in every-day players. But the thing that has to be kept in mind is we could run those arms at you. And you don’t need your whole pitching staff for a short series. If you condense that pitching staff to the six or seven guys (the Mets used six pitchers) that you wanted to see, we were pretty rough. There weren’t any breathing spots even for a great team like the Orioles (Baltimore hit .146 as a team in the five games).

“Plus, when we had to make a play after that first game, we made it. There were Tommie Agee’s two catches in the third game, Cleon Jones made one and then I made mine the next game. It surprised me that I got to it because that ball was a base hit. You look at that film 100 times and that’s base-hit trajectory.