Steve Christilaw: Seattle Pilot Jim Gosger resurrection rekindles memories
No one has ever confused former Seattle Pilot Jim Gosger with Mark Twain.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens is one of America’s greatest writers, but he couldn’t hit a curveball to save his soul and if his Facebook page is anything to go by, Gosger flunked remedial punctuation and capitalization.
But the pair now have something significant in common.
In 1887 Twain was in London on a speaking tour and grew ill. Reports of his illness were recorded in U.S. newspapers and a few went so far as to report his death.
Frank Marshall White, a reporter for the New York Journal, contacted Twain in London to inquire about his health and later about reports that he was on his deathbed.
“I can understand perfectly how the report of my illness got about, I have even heard on good authority that I was dead,” he responded. “The report of my death was an exaggeration.”
If Twain’s obituary was an exaggeration, Gosger’s was both an extravaganza and an embarrassing faux pas.
The former outfielder/first baseman was traded by the Pilots to New York in July 1969 and he played 10 games for the Miracle Mets as they overcame a 9½-game August deficit to top the slumping Chicago Cubs and win the first National League East title, swept the Atlanta Braves in the first National League Championship Series and the Baltimore Orioles in the World Series.
Now, 50 years later, the Mets are celebrating that season and on Sunday they invited members of that team to a celebration at Citi Field.
Jerry Grote, Jerry Koosman, Cleon James and Ron Swoboda, among others, were in attendance, and the team played a video tribute to team members who have died – including a reference to the late Jim Gosger.
Gosger noted his inclusion on Facebook: “WOW LOOK AT ME I MADE THE BIG BOARD … THANK YOU N.Y. METS FOR BRINGING ME BACK …”
Gosger is very much alive, although his grammar skills are quite obviously on life support.
Leave it to the Amazing Mets to commit an error on their own commemoratory celebration.
Not that he was a major contributor that season, although I must add that there is a large Midwest contingent of baseball fans who refuse to acknowledge the Miracle aspect of the Mets pennant drive. To them it’s simple. The Cubs choked.
It’s hard to believe that all happened 50 years ago. It was 1969 when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon and Jimi Hendrix played an electric rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” to open Woodstock. A sore-armed pitcher named Jim Bouton was busy taking notes of everything that happened that summer for a book that revolutionized, some say scandalized, major league baseball: “Ball Four.”
That was the summer when I became a die-hard baseball fan.
Oh, I’d dabbled with baseball before then. I followed the Impossible Dream Red Sox in the newspaper and on the Game of the Week. I learned how to spell difficult names – Yastrzemski and Petrocelli and Conigliaro and rooted for guys like Jim Lonborg, Ken “The Hawk” Harrelson and Reggie Smith.
And I also followed the team those Red Sox lost to in the World Series, the St. Louis Cardinals. Bob Gibson was fun to watch and they had my favorite player, Orlando Cepeda.
It’s something you youngsters out there will not grasp right away, but in those days they did something unusual in the baseball world: They played games during the day. On grass fields. In fact, that’s all they ever played at the friendly confines of Wrigley Field.
My grade school set up a television in the gym so we could watch World Series games if we were caught up on our work. It was a treat.
Two years later, during the same summer that the Mets and Cubs were battling it out, we got our own baseball team to follow. Sadly, that team was the short-lived Seattle Pilots.
That one season was monumental for the generations that lived it.
It was a time when kids my age learned about Tommy Harper and Diego Segui and Don Mincher. It was also a time when no kid my age could say the name Gene Brabender without snickering.
It’s the summer that started the tradition of trading away future stars when the Pilots shipped the American League Rookie of the Year to Kansas city – a kid named Lou Piniella.
For some reason, we made shortstop Ray Oyler our hero. The fact that he hit .165 that year never dimmed our enthusiasm.
The standard for batting ineptitude, a .200 batting average, is called “The Mendoza Line,” and it’s named after Mario Mendoza, a lifetime .215 hitter. And of course, he’s a former Seattle Mariner (he hit .198 his first year in the Kingdome).
To be perfectly honest, if it weren’t for the fact that his baseball card is still sitting in my closet along with a Steve Hovley, a Wayne Comer and a couple of Tommy Harper cards, I would be hard-pressed to remember Jim Gosger. To this day I still confuse him with the player the Pilots traded him for – Greg Goosen.
Goosen was the subject of one of the all-time great Casey Stengel bon mots. In 1966 the retired former Mets manager pointed Goosen out in spring training. “Goosen is only 20, and in 10 years he has a chance to be 30,” he said.
That year was a good time to become a baseball fan. You followed players through the box score in the newspaper and learned to recognize them from collecting their baseball cards – you could still buy a pack, with bubble gum that tasted like it was left over from 1954, for a nickel. Yup. You could buy two packs of baseball cards and a comic book for a quarter.
It was a time when you could get dropped off at the fairgrounds to watch Tommy Lasorda lead the Spokane Indians with a couple bucks in your pocket, get a ticket to the game, buy a program, a hot dog and still have enough left to have a soda.
Sadly, those bargain days are long gone. But the memories will last forever.