Miracle Year, 1969: Amazing Mets and Super Jets

by Bill Gutman

Sports fans in the city of New York will never forget 1969. Act One took place on January 12, when the New York Jets, led by a flamboyant, image-breaking quarterback named Joe Namath, turned the football world on its ear by defeating the heavily favored Baltimore Colts in just the third Super Bowl ever played. Not only had an upstart American Football League team pulled off one of the greatest upsets in sports history, but the victory gave New York sports fans the biggest jolt of excitement they had seen in years. The strong-armed Namath had even been so bold as to guarantee a victory over a team considered the very best the established National Football League had to offer. The Jets' victory would have been more than enough to satiate the appetite of rabid sports fans, but in 1969 New York there was still time for an encore. In late summer, the New York Mets, perennial cellar dwellers since entering the National League via expansion in 1962, stormed into first place, catching the fancy of the baseball world. Led by a pair of hard-throwing young pitchers, Tom Seaver and Jerry Koosman, and a manager who was already a New York legend, Gil Hodges, the Mets completed their improbable run by winning the first-ever National League divisional playoff series against the Atlanta Braves before blasting the Baltimore Orioles out of the World Series in five games. Miracle Year, 1969: Amazing Mets and Super Jets is the story of two teams that defied almost insurmountable odds to win it all for a city that has always loved champions, underdogs, and its heroes.

Genres: Sports, Baseball, Nonfiction

250 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2004

About the author

Bill Gutman is the author of more than two hundred books for both children and adults in a writing career that has spanned some five decades. His first book was an adult-level biography of former basketball star Pistol Pete Maravich, and since then he has written children's and young adult biographies and profiles of many prominent sports stars such as Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Shaquille O'Neal, Ken Griffey, Jr., Bo Jackson, Brett Favre and many others.

Some of his adult books include a biography of former football coach Bill Parcells, Parcells: A Biograpy; When the Cheering Stops, interviews with some 25 former baseball players from the 1940s through the 1960s on life after baseball; Won For All: The Inside Story of the New England Patriots' Improbable Run to the Super Bowl, written with former linebacker and then Patriots assistant coach Pepper Johnson; Twice Around the Bases, written with former big league manager Kevin Kennedy; The Giants Win the Pennant! The Giants Win the Pennant! which was the story of the 1951 pennant race between the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers, written with home run hero Bobby Thomson; Miracle Year, Amazing Mets, Super Jets, the story of both New York teams winning championship in 1969; Being Extreme, interviews with 22 of the most daring, high risk athletes in the world of mountain climbing, BASE jumping, ski diving, big wave surfing rock climbing, extreme skiing and snowboarding. Of more recent vintage is What if the Babe Had Kept His Red Sox: And Other Fascinating Alternate Histories from the World of Sports, a book of What Ifs. His most recent sports book is a young adult biography of Yankees outfielder Aaron Judge called All Rise: The Aaron Judge Story.

Bill's current passion is The Mike Fargo Mysteries, a series of novels and novellas about a tough detective working in the New York City of the 1920. The novel, Murder on Murderer's Row is available as both an ebook and in paperback on Amazon, an ebook on other venues. The novellas, Death of a Flapper, Murder on Broadway, Seven Days to Murder and The Grab-A-Cab Murder are currently available as ebooks. A sixth book, Roaring Twenties Cop, Mike Fargo's Own Story is told in Fargo's words and serves to bring the lead character of the series to life, as he talks about his childhood on Staten Island, the reason he became a cop, the New York City of the 1920s and some of his cases. The book serves as an introduction to the series and is available for free on the Amazon, Barnes and Noble, iBooks, Kobo and Smashwords websites.

And hopefully there is much more to come.

Reviews

[Christian Carlson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Great research about a great year but not written well enough to make you care about these teams if you didn’t already.

Country Don Maynard is the man

[Ron Kaplan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mets