SNY to air entire 1969 World Series, including Mets' Game 1 loss to Orioles
New York City Mayor John Lindsay celebrates with the Mets in the clubhouse after their World Series victory over the Baltimore Orioles at Shea Stadium on Oct. 16, 1969. Standing from left are Bud Harrelson, Mayor Lindsay, annnouncer Lindsey Nelson, Ron Swoboda and Rod Gaspar. Credit: AP
SNY has shown its share of live Mets losses since launching in 2006, but only once have the Amazins tasted defeat in the replay of a classic game — when the network showed Game 1 of the 1969 World Series in July 2009.
At the time, the losing pitcher himself, Tom Seaver, endorsed the idea in an interview with Newsday, saying: “We still won four games to one, no matter how you shuffle them. Oh, God, it’s in the record books, for crying out loud.”
So it is, but local sports networks traditionally are extremely reluctant to subject fans to replays of home team losses. That was before the COVID-19 pandemic created a dire lack of programming, though.
National and local sports channels have had to get more creative — and flexible — in filling empty hours.
This week, SNY again will show all five games of the ’69 World Series, one each night. It starts Monday with that 4-1 loss in which the Orioles’ Don Buford shocked Seaver and Mets fans with a home run on the second pitch he threw.
“It was as bad a game as I think I could ever have had at that stage of my career,” Seaver said in 2009.
After Game 1, it appeared the mighty Orioles, who had won 109 regular-season games to the Mets’ 100, would roll over the National League’s surprise pennant-winners.
Curt Gowdy Jr., who is SNY’s executive producer and whose father called that World Series for NBC, said he had lunch last year with former Orioles pitcher Jim Palmer and asked him what happened.
Palmer, who called those Orioles “maybe the greatest team ever assembled,” said the team got overconfident after Game 1, with visions of a sweep.
“ ‘Their pitching, their clutch hitting, their clutch defense, they just kept wearing us down,’ ” Gowdy recalled Palmer saying. “He said, ‘If we played them 25 more times, we would have beaten them 23 out of 25.’ ”
Not so that October, and it all will be there to relive this week.
Some then-new innovations of pioneering baseball director Harry Coyle are modern and familiar, such as the shot from the third-base side that shows the pitcher, first baseman and runner on first in the same frame.
But there are many quirks from a bygone era — for example, the fact that Gowdy is joined in the booth in Baltimore by Orioles announcer Bill O’Donnell and in New York by Mets announcer Lindsey Nelson.
Gowdy’s “Game of the Week” partner, Tony Kubek, instead worked as a roving reporter. The games include an eclectic array of interview subjects, including Ted Williams, Casey Stengel, Jerry Lewis, Earl Warren and Toots Shor.
Games 3, 4 and 5 are in color and in excellent condition. The surviving versions of Games 1 and 2 are in black-and-white kinescope and less pristine.
Gowdy Jr., who was a teenage Red Sox fan in Boston when the Mets won, recalled it was the second New York championship over a Baltimore team his father called that year; he also did play-by-play for Super Bowl III.
“What strikes you right off the bat is the innocence and simplicity of it all,” Gowdy Jr. said. “They were day games. You would hear my father say right off the bat, ‘Beautiful day here in Baltimore, 75 degrees, bright sunshine.’
“He would just set the scene with the weather first, and the games all had that beautiful fall weather and it really hits you.”
Gowdy Jr., like all sports television executives, is scrambling to provide meaningful content to viewers in a time without live games.
“It’s hard,” he said. “A lot of fans that have come to our network certainly are Mets fans, and we are trying to attempt to give them the most compelling Mets programming we can.”
That 2009 replay of Game 1 ended a 361-game Mets winning streak of classic games on SNY. But Monday night is only the start. SNY also plans to show the 1986 NLCS and World Series in their entireties in the coming weeks.
For many years, the YES Network never showed a “classic” Yankees loss. It since has done so on rare occasions, such as Mariano Rivera’s final game.
In these no-live-sports times, though, YES is preparing to further loosen up, with plans to show Game 7 of the 1960 and 2001 World Series, both of which the Yankees lost in heartbreaking fashion.
Those Yankees seasons ended with those losses, but for the Mets in 1969, that Game 1 loss became a footnote.
As Seaver said in 2009: “I think it’s good to show that stuff. It’s part of the story. Can that club get off the mat, or do they fold their tents and go home?”
Neil Best first worked at Newsday in 1982, returned in 1985 after a detour to Alaska and has been here since, specializing in high schools, college basketball, the NFL and most recently sports media and business.
