Miracle Met Ed Kranepool still hoping for miraculous donor kidney

Ed Kranepool hopes that many of his 1969 Mets teammates will be able to attend the 50th anniversary ceremonies honoring their group in June. He hopes he will be healthy enough to join them. He really hopes it will be a double celebration, for remembering the World Series and for getting the new kidney that he needs.

Having been a member of those Miracle Mets, he has a healthy regard for the power of hope.

Kranepool and the rest of them even sang about it on the Ed Sullivan Show, days after they closed out the Orioles, four games to one. Belting out the lyrics from the song “Heart” from Broadway’s “Damn Yankees,” they chimed, “You’ve gotta have hope/Mustn’t sit around and mope.”

That team’s championship was more than just an upset. It was a triumph of spirit and imagination. The Mets had not been just a bad team in each of their previous seven seasons, they were a universal symbol for losing. Five times in that span, they lost 100 games or more and only twice did they manage to climb all the way up to ninth in the 10-team National League. Then all of a sudden, they hit the moon (as did U.S. astronauts that year).

Only one player was on the Mets for all of those horrible seasons and then that stunning great one: Ed Kranepool. “There was nothing like it,” he said in his home in Jericho this week. “I don’t believe there was ever a World Series team that got as much recognition as the ’69 Mets.”

Current Mets management announced this week it will reunite them at Citi Field June 28-30 during a series against the Braves (the franchise the ’69 Mets beat in the first-ever National League Championship Series). It figures to be a last hurrah for the group that lived up to the moniker “Amazin’ Mets,” authored by their (and Kranepool’s) first manager, Casey Stengel.

“Guys are getting older, some guys are not feeling well. We all have our problems,” Kranepool said. “But you always look forward to a reunion because we were such friends. It was a tight group of guys. The 1969 Mets were something special for New York. Everyone seems to know it, remember it, speak fondly of it.

“It’s not very often that we get together as a group,” he said. “I don’t think we’re going to be around for a 75th.”

For his part, Kranepool, 74, is doing all he can to be around as long as he can. His kidneys are failing because of diabetes, complications caused him to lose the toes on his left foot last year. “I’m trying to avoid dialysis,” he said. “My kidneys are barely functioning. In hot weather, it’s a little more difficult for me. I get tired. I can’t walk as much as I used to.”

So, he is actively seeking a donor. He is in touch with specialists at Stony Brook Hospital and Hackensack University Medical Center. He has had encouraging talks with Renewal, a Hasidic organization in Brooklyn that specializes in finding kidney donors. Meanwhile, he does not sit around and mope. He still works in his credit card processing business and gets around without a cane, thanks to a special boot on his left foot.

The former left-handed hitting first baseman, a bonus baby from the Bronx who joined the Mets at 17, looks and feels good. “I look a lot better, I guess, than I really am,” he said. “But my numbers have been holding. You just hope you outlast the ordeal.”

Hope. He smiles when he remembers that in spring training of 1969, the team’s greatest hope was to finish with a .500 record, something the Mets never had done. Manager Gil Hodges turned the players into strivers and believers.

“Everyone came of age under his leadership and guidance,” Kranepool said. “We were all receptive. We all wanted to win. But we didn’t know anything about winning. Once we got a taste of it, it was great. From June on, we played fantastic.”

Memories are still vivid from the series against the seemingly dominant Cubs. Tom Seaver nearly pitched a perfect game on July 9. A day earlier, the Mets scored three in the ninth to beat ace Ferguson Jenkins, a rally capped by Kranepool’s walk-off single.

He and his Mets buddies, such as his old roommate Ron Swoboda and longtime friend Art Shamsky, plan on reliving all kinds of moments when they gather this June: Sweeping a doubleheader with 1-0 scores, both runs having been driven in by the pitchers; watching the moon landing in the Montreal airport, where they were stuck because of mechanical problems; seeing Cleon Jones go down on one knee after making the final putout of the World Series; performing as a team for three postseason weeks in Las Vegas, reprising “Heart” and singing “The Impossible Dream.”

However many ’69 Mets can make it, they will raise toasts to those who have died: Hodges, coach Yogi Berra, Tommie Agee, Tug McGraw, Cal Koonce, Don Cardwell, Ed Charles. Those who gather in Queens will salute the idea that anything is possible.

Kranepool lives that concept every day, hopeful that he will find a kidney donor.

“I think that’s the athlete in you,” he said. “You never want to give up. I think you’re bred that way. You always have challenges and you have to work towards them. You have to be positive.”

Being positive comes easier when you’ve been through a miracle, when you have instantly graduated from being the butt of Johnny Carson’s jokes to being the toasts of the town on Ed Sullivan’s stage. As those Mets sang: “Nothin’s half as bad as it may appear/Wait’ll next year and hope.”