NEW YORK _ Forty years ago, the Mets did the unthinkable. They traded Tom Seaver _ The Franchise _ to the Reds in a deal that many longtime fans have neither forgotten nor forgiven.
The trade deadline of June 15, 1977, became a day of reckoning as the Mets sent their future Hall of Famer packing over a salary dispute with board chairman M. Donald Grant.
"What were they thinking?" former teammate Bud Harrelson said recently, echoing a question that Mets fans have been asking since the deal.
Seaver's departure was a seismic event that lit up the Shea Stadium switchboard with calls from angry fans shaken by the trade of the team's star, who had won three Cy Young Awards.
With the beginning of big free-agent contracts, Seaver, in spring training in 1977, wanted to renegotiate the three-year deal he signed in February 1976 that paid him a base salary of $225,000 a year.
Before signing that deal, Seaver had told then-team president Lorinda de Roulet, daughter of founding owner Joan Whitney Payson, that the time had arrived for the $200,000-plus price tag
"She said, 'Over my dead body,' " Whitney de Roulet Bullock, the owner's daughter, said from her home in upstate Millbrook.
Grant, who ran the baseball operations, would not consider renegotiation. Seaver was shipped to Cincinnati for top minor league outfield prospect Steve Henderson, pitcher Pat Zachry, utility infielder Doug Flynn and minor league outfielder Dan Norman.
Harrelson recently visited Seaver and his wife, Nancy, at their Napa Valley vineyard in Calistoga, California. Seaver has been coping with some effects of Lyme disease, a bacterial infection transmitted by ticks that he traced to when he lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, in 1991. "The Lyme has impacted his short-term memory, but he is in great physical health," said Seaver's daughter, Anne.
Harrelson said Seaver "looks good, he's happy."
Seaver, 72, declined to be interviewed.
Harrelson, 73, said he recalled that evening in Atlanta when Seaver was traded. "I cried," Harrelson said. "He was my buddy. We were roomies. I went and hugged him and cried."
Seaver, coming off a season in which he went 14-11 with a 2.59 ERA, was 7-3, 3.00 at the time of the trade. He had extricated the Mets from their early years as baseball's bumblers and led them from 1968's ninth-place finish to the 1969 World Series championship.
Lorinda de Roulet was appointed team president by her father, Charles Payson, who took over ownership of the Mets when Joan Payson died. The Harvard-educated Payson identified himself as a Red Sox fan. Grant had been Mrs. Payson's financial adviser. Grant, who lived on Long Island in Lawrence, honed his financial skills as a broker on Wall Street.
Grant wanted no part of free agency when it appeared on the horizon in a December 1975 ruling by arbitrator Peter Seitz that essentially nullified the reserve clause, which bound players to one team for life. The ruling was upheld by a federal court in March 1976, and shortly thereafter, Major League Baseball and the players association agreed to allow players with at least six years of service to become free agents.
Seaver's salary seemed a pittance when Andy Messersmith signed a three-year deal for $1 million with the Braves and Wayne Garland got a 10-year, $2.3 million pact with the Indians.
The Yankees were flourishing in the Bronx under free-spending owner George Steinbrenner, who in November 1976 signed Reggie Jackson to a five-year deal worth $3 million after signing Catfish Hunter to a five-year deal worth $3.35 million.
"Donald did not want to get involved with free agency like Steinbrenner was," former Mets pitcher Craig Swan, 66, said from Fort Myers, Fla. "We were just getting retreads mostly."
