The 1969 Miracle Mets; The Improbable Story of the World's Greatest Underdog Team

Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2009. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good. Format is approximately 7.5 inches by 9.5 inches. xx, [2], 185, [1] pages. Illustrations (some in color). Foreword by Bud Harrelson. Appendix A: 1969 Team Roster. Appendix B: Batting Statistics. Appendix C: Pitching Statistics. Appendix D: Fielding Statistics. Bibliography. Index. Aside from journalism, Travers was a star pitcher in High School. Travers helped lead his team to the mythical national championship of high school baseball, according to polls conducted by Collegiate Baseball magazine and the Easton Bat Company. Travers attended college on a baseball scholarship, where he was an all-conference pitcher, and played collegiate summer ball in Colorado, Nevada and Canada. Travers played professionally for the St. Louis Cardinals' organization. Travers once struck out 1989 National League Most Valuable Player Kevin Mitchell three times in one game. Travers wrote for the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Daily News, and was a sports reporter on San Diego's XTRA 690 AM radio. This book tells the tale of the single most impossible, unbelievable, and wonderful sports story of all time-of the 1969 "Amazin' Mets" and their incredible spring, summer, and fall. But it does much more than simply recount how the worst sports franchise ever ascended to greatness in a few short months. The 1969 Miracle Mets is the story of tumultuous times: the 1960s. Against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, the New York Mets proved to be a metaphor for a changing America and, in retrospect, the catapult for the eventual comeback of a battered-yet-unbowed Metropolis. Tom Seaver and his teammates come alive in these pages as the final symbols of an innocent age, an age when the greatest icons in American culture-New York sports heroes-mounted the stage in awesome splendor, before Watergate, before free agency, before the mercenaries took over.