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My 78th Birthday Card to Tom Seaver
It’s November 17, 2022, and Tom Seaver would have been 78 years old today.
When the iconic Hall of Famer died two years ago August as a result of complications from Lewy Body Dementia and COVID-19, I was six weeks short of Medicare age and way too old to cry, as I had that long-ago June day in 1977 when the New York Mets banished my boyhood idol — rightly known as “The Franchise” — to Cincinnati.
I was 22 then and pitching for my college baseball team. But Tom Seaver had become my ultimate baseball hero even before I’d turned 12. From that day in April of 1967 when Seaver pitched his first game for the then-awful Mets, I was obsessed with both his ability and his aura. In my South Bronx neighborhood, I would endlessly throw a Spaldeen rubber ball against a chalked strike zone on a building wall, imitating the classic Seaver delivery that always left his right knee caked in dirt. I’d barely notice that I was scraping mine to a bloody pulp on the asphalt. When I threw my imaginary Seaver games on the streets of the Bronx, it was always a no-hitter.
But Tom Seaver had become my role model in every respect. He was clearly the smartest of all the Mets (admittedly not a very high bar) — confidence personified — and in…
