In the popular 1977 movie "Oh, God!" George Burns, playing the deity, is asked in a courtroom to prove His divinity by performing a miracle. Burns tells the attorney, "The last miracle I did was the 1969 Mets. Before that, I think you have to go back to the Red Sea."

Man has engaged in athletic competition at least since the ancient Greeks. Baseball has been played, according to legend, since Abner Doubleday invented it at Cooperstown, New York in 1839. Through the travail of ages, in the entire history of sports, the 1969 "Amazin' Mets" remains the single most impossible, unbelievable, improbable and wonderful sports story of all times.

This book tells the tale of that incredible spring, summer and fall, but it does much more than simply recount how the worst sports franchise ever ascended to the very heights of greatness in a few short months. The Last Miracle is the story of tumultuous times: the 1960s. Amidst the backdrop of the Vietnam War, the Mets remained the last, best hope of a city on the verge of bankruptcy. Through the lens of time we now can view them as a metaphor for a changing America, and in light of the Big Apple's phoenix-like comeback over the years, the catapult for this battered-yet-unbowed Metropolis.

Somehow, while the Mets became the mods of baseball, the "new breed" athlete, Tom Seaver and his teammates are viewed herein as the final symbols of an innocent age; an age when the greatest icons in American culture - New York sports heroes - mounted the stage in awesome splendor; before Watergate, before free agency, before the mercenaries took over.

Here they are: Seaver and Harrelson; Hodges and Stengel; Grote and Swoboda; Jones and Agee; all the characters of the greatest comedy act ever performed, all the while upstaging a tempestuous Mayoral race, President Nixon's "secret plan," a Moonshot, and Woodstock.

By Steven Travers - Foreword by Bud Harrelson

Table of Contents

Foreword

Introduction: The glory of their times

The true New York Sports Icon

The reincarnation of Christy Mathewson

If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere

"Can't anybody here play this game?"

The eve of destruction

High hopes

In the "big inning"

Meet the Mets

The leaping corpse

The first crucial day

The birth of a true New York Sports Icon

After the Pentecost: July 11 - July 16, 1969

The wrath of Gil

Resurrection

The march to the sea

David vs. GoliathThe perfect game

The Promised Land

Fall from grace

Plato's retreat and subsequent comeback

The empire strikes back

Whatever happened to . . .?

Those Amazin' Mets

A shining city on a hill

NotesBibliography

Index