Tom Seaver In Action! | My First Cards

#31 Tom Seaver In Action!

November 17, 2009 @ 11:48 am

One of the best “in action” cards, featuring Tom terrific with the ball just released from his hand. You can just feel the effort put into hurling a hard fastball to the plate. It’s a pure classic shot.

Until this year, I hadn’t seen this card since the 1990′s. First thing I noticed when I saw it a couple months ago, is how Tom Seaver looks amazingly like Barry Zito to me in this shot. His face; not so much his delivery. It’s actually pretty uncanny.

What’s more amazing though, is something I read a few months ago about Seaver’s delivery. Apparently it was very very similar to Christy Mathewson’s pitching motion. Yeah, that’s Keith Olbermann’s blog, so it’s reliable. There’s a picture there from a surviving piece of film of Mathewson in the middle of his motion, and it looks just like his follow through will take him to the exact stance we see in Seaver’s 1982 “in action” card! Amazing eh?

Yeah, amazing.

We can also get some clues about what game this was, from the photo on this card—

Seaver’s pitching on the road.
the outfield wall is green.
the outfield grass looks…well, not so grass colored. Looks artificial.
Day game

When we look at Tom’s game logs from 1981, we see he pitched 10 road games.

We can scratch out a few possibilities immediately though. Places like Houston, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. Houston was a dome and that would be obvious, Chicago has ivy, and the other two stadiums have blue outfield walls. That leaves us with games in San Diego, St Louis, San Francisco, and Atlanta. Now, if my memory serves me right, Candlestick and Altanta-Fulton County Stadium both had see-through walls in the early 80′s. So that would count them out too.
That leaves us with San Diego and St Louis, which makes it really easy. The game in San Diego was a Monday, which means it was probably a night game, while the St Louis game was on a Sunday afternoon. I don’t remember what Jack Murphy’s outfield wall looked like back then but St Louis is the only place with artificial turf at the time. I’m pretty sure Busch Stadium had a green outfield wall at the time too. I seem to remember it being green in game 7 of the ’82 World Series. Somebody correct me if I’m wrong, I haven’t seen the game in almost a year & a half.
So I’m 99% sure this photo was shot sometime on Sunday afternoon, May 3, 1981 in St Louis. Seaver got a no-decision, when he was pinch hit for in the 7th inning of a 4-4 tie. It wasn’t one of his best days, as he walked 6 batters in 6 IP, and K’d 5. The Reds lost this game by 1 run in the 11th inning when Darryl Porter drew a bases loaded walk off Tom Hume to end this game.

Mike, in the comments below, let me know this game had to be at Shea Stadium because he recognized the huge Shafer beer sign that used to hang below the Mets scoreboard. That led me to look up when the Mets changed their outfield fence to blue, and Mets history website Centerfield Maz let me know that it was after the 1981 season that some changes were made to Shea stadium. Thanks guys for the help. I didn’t watch the Mets ’til ’83, so I never would’ve known this before.

Looking back at Seaver’s ’81 game logs, we find that Seaver twice pitched in Shea that season, Thursday June 11, and again on Friday August 28. He went the distance in both games. Is it possible to figure out which game this photo is from? Yes, because it’s a day game. See, it’s extremely rare for a day game to be played on a Friday, so I have to conclude this is from the Thursday June 11, 1981 game. As I said before though, I could be wrong on this. If I am and you know it… show me the proof. There are plenty of afternoon games on Thursdays, so this is very reasonable.

In this game, Seaver K’d 7 and walked only 1 batter, allowing just 2 runs. Nice pitching. He did make a mistake to Dave Kingman, who shot a blast to deep left field in the 2nd inning. It was Seaver’s 7th win of the year. The Reds knocked 13 hits that day. It put the Reds record at 35-21… 1/2 game behind the division leading Dodgers.

What makes this photo most interesting though, is that it’s from the final day of games before the strike was on. Nobody knew when there’d be another major league game.

Seaver would go on to finish 2nd in the Cy Young voting in ’81 with a 14-2 record and a 2.54 ERA, for the best team in the National League. Who finished 2nd, twice.

Yeah, the Reds won more than anybody but didn’t make the playoffs. If you really want to stump your friends, just ask them what team won more games than anybody in their league but didn’t even earn a playoff spot. They sat home watching one of their division rivals win the World Series.