One of the headlines in Tuesday’s Salisbury Post grabbed my attention and delivered a twinge straight to my heart.
“Tommy Agee dies.”
The words made me wince, but not because his first name had been misspelled. Agee, you see, was one of the ballplayers I grew up rooting for. He wasn’t my father’s centerfielder, he was mine. Unlike the great DiMaggio and the beloved Duke Snider, whose glory moments are well-documented in black & white, Agee crossed my life’s path in brilliant, living color.
And now he was gone.
It made me think of something prolific sportswriter Red Smith once told a group of mourners. “Dying is no big deal,” he crowed. “The least of us will manage that. Living, now that’s the trick.”
Put that on Tommie Agee’s tombstone.
No, there will never be a bust made for him in Cooperstown. Lifetime .255 hitters who strike out once every 4.3 at-bats don’t merit consideration for baseball’s greatest honor. But me, I can still close my eyes and remember the day when Agee fooled me — and everyone else watching Game 3 of the 1969 World Series — into believing he was Willie Mays.
October 14 of that once-upon-a-time year brought a warm Tuesday afternoon to Flushing, N.Y., for the first World Series game ever played at Shea Stadium. I still can recall, quite vividly, much about that classic fall contest: that Agee led off the bottom of the first inning with a home run against Jim Palmer, Baltimore’s 16-game winner; that teammate Ed Kranepool also homered; and that youthful righthanders Gary Gentry and Nolan Ryan combined to four-hit the favored Orioles in a 5-0 New York victory.
Entrenched in my memory and stored in a safe place are the two seeing-is-believing catches Agee made that transformed, right then and there, the once-hapless Mets into the Miracle Mets.
His first robbery came in the fourth inning. With two runners on and two out, Baltimore’s Elrod Hendricks drilled a screeching line drive to the left-centerfield gap that seemed destined for extra bases. Agee, who was swung around to right-center, raced to the opposite 396-foot sign, extended his left arm and made a twisting, over-the-shoulder grab at the wall. I felt chills when the long-deprived crowd thundered its approval.
Three innings later he made an even more spectacular catch, belly-sliding along the warning track in right-center to snare Paul Blair’s sinking liner with the bases loaded and two out.
Amazing? You bet.
Two decades after the happening they said could never happen, I met Tommie Agee at the grand opening of his beverage center in Coram, N.Y. He told me that Hendricks had cursed him and that Blair still believed he lost an inside-the-park home run. Number 20 reportedly lost five inches of skin on his forearms to save five runs that day.
Then Tommie Agee told me this: “You know, I spent 12 years in the big leagues and no one wants to talk about the other 11.”
He was right. Nineteen sixty-nine defined Agee’s career, froze it in time. Few remember him as the American League’s Rookie-of-the-Year in ‘66, when he stole 44 bases and knocked in 86 runs for the White Sox. Or that he languished through an absolutely miserable 1968 season for the ninth-place Mets, when he batted 368 times and collected all of 17 RBIs.
Ironically, it was the future Hall of Famer Mays who squeezed Agee out of a job in the spring of 1973. When the Say Hey Kid came home to finish his career, nostalgic New Yorkers no longer wanted Agee partolling centerfield. He was quickly discarded and spent his last major league season platooning for the Astros and Cardinals, his fourth and fifth teams. He quit baseball without regret, at age 31, following his release by the Dodgers during spring training, 1974.
It marked a sad ending to a career that percolated, for the most part, without distinction. Yet the memory of ‘69, and Agee’s magical contribution remains timeless and full of life.
“When you win in New York,” he told me that day at the beer distributorship, “it just happens to carry on. Every day I walk around the city and people stop me and want to talk about 1969. They remember some home run I hit or the time I stole home in the 14th inning. They remember that team. That tells you something.”
What it told this lifelong Mets fan is that you don’t have to play a perfect game to produce something remarkable. Most things wonderful are not meant to last, and that, perhaps, is what makes them so special. Tommie Agee, I believe, knew that all too well.
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David Shaw covers sports for the Post.
David Shaw