Jerry Koosman, who teamed with Tom Seaver in the lefty-righty pitching combo that propelled the Miracle Mets of 1969 to an astonishing World Series championship, died on Sunday at his home in Osceola, Wis. He was 83.
After about a year with various ailments, he died of heart failure, Jay Horwitz, a spokesman for the Mets, said.
He was usually overshadowed by Seaver, the future Hall of Famer. But Koosman, a onetime farm boy from Minnesota, became a New York celebrity in his own right when he went 17-9 for the 1969 Mets and threw a complete game in their World Series-clinching Game 5 victory over the Baltimore Orioles. It was the first World Series championship in the franchise’s history.
A power pitcher relying on a lively fastball and sweeping curves, he pitched hitless ball into the seventh inning of Game 2, and the Mets came away with a 2-1 victory.
With the Mets leading in the Series, 3 games to 1, Koosman was handed the baseball once more by Manager Gil Hodges.
Protecting a 5-3 lead going into the ninth inning, Koosman got the jitters.
“In warming up, I couldn’t get my curveball over,” he told the Mets’ former broadcaster Howie Rose at a 50th anniversary celebration of that unforgettable October. “All I threw were fastballs.”
With two out and an Oriole on first base, Koosman got Davey Johnson, Baltimore’s second baseman and a future Mets manager, to hit a fly ball to left fielder Cleon Jones at the edge of the Shea Stadium warning track.
“I turned around and looked at Cleon,” Koosman remembered. “The first thing is your heart drops. I said, ‘Don’t drop the ball; squeeze it.’”
The baseball settled into Jones’s glove, and he took a knee. Thousands of fans poured onto the field. The long-downtrodden Mets, who overtook the Chicago Cubs to capture the National League’s East Division title and swept the Atlanta Braves in the League Championship Series, were World Series victors.
Catcher Jerry Grote ran to the mound. The photo depicting Koosman having jumped into Grote’s arms while third baseman Ed Charles charged toward them, flashing a wide grin, became an enduring image in Mets history.
Hodges, who had become the Mets’ manager in 1968, died of a heart attack during spring training 1972.
The Mets, managed by Yogi Berra, who had been one of Hodges’s coaches, captured another pennant in 1973.
Koosman pitched six and one-third scoreless innings starting against the Oakland A’s in Game 5 of the World Series, a 2-0 Mets victory, but the A’s won the last two games for their second straight Series championship.
Koosman won 21 games in 1976, struck out 200 batters and finished second to Randy Jones of the San Diego Padres in balloting for the Cy Young Award as the N.L.’s best pitcher.
The Seaver-Koosman duo was severed in June 1977 when the Mets traded Seaver to the Cincinnati Reds in a cost-cutting move.
“Although both were terrific, their pitching styles were so different,” Art Shamsky, the Mets’ outfielder on their 1969 championship team, wrote in his book “After the Miracle,” a collaboration with Erik Sherman, 50 years later.
“Tom was an artist, like Leonardo da Vinci out there on the mound, whereas Kooz was more like Gen. George Patton, willing to throw at an opposing batter if their pitcher threw at one of us. Seaver was the great pitcher, while Kooz was the great battler.”
The Mets retired Koosman’s number, 36, in 2021.
Jerome Martin Koosman was born on Dec. 23, 1942, in Appleton, Minn., one of four children of Martin Koosman, a farmer, and his wife, Lydia, a homemaker.
By the time he was 13, he was pitching in semipro ball and American Legion baseball.
He attended the University of Minnesota, Morris, which didn’t have a baseball team, and then entered the North Dakota State College of Science in Wahpeton, but was ineligible to pitch there because he was a transfer student. He considered obtaining an engineering degree but was drafted into the Army in 1962.
While pitching for the Fort Bliss baseball team in Texas, Koosman was scouted by the Mets, who signed him to a minor-league contract in August 1964.
Koosman pitched briefly for the Mets in 1967, then became the No. 2 starter in their rotation, behind Seaver, in 1968, when the Mets finished ninth in the 10-team N.L. in the final season before a playoff format.
He was selected for the All-Star Game that year, posted a 19-12 record with 178 strikeouts and finished second behind Reds catcher Johnny Bench in the balloting for rookie of the year.
Koosman remained a stalwart of the Mets’ pitching staff through the mid-1970s. But after he posted losing seasons in 1977 and 1978, when the Mets fell into decline, he asked to be traded. The Mets sent him to the Minnesota Twins, and he won 20 games for them in 1979.
Koosman also pitched for the Chicago White Sox and the Philadelphia Phillies, then retired after the 1985 season.
He won 222 games and lost 209 in his 19 major league seasons with an earned run average of 3.36 and 2,556 strikeouts.
Koosman won 140 games and lost 137 in his 12 seasons with the Mets and was a two-time All-Star.
He was a minor league pitching instructor for the Mets in the early 1990s and later ran a business that designed machinery.
In 2009, Koosman pleaded guilty to failing to pay federal income taxes for 2002, 2003 and 2004, and defrauding the government out of as much as $90,000. He spent six months in prison. He said that he had been “naïve” and mistakenly believed that federal tax laws did not apply to him.
Shamsky, Koosman and their 1969 teammates Bud Harrelson and Ron Swoboda visited Seaver and his wife, Nancy, in May 2017 at their home and vineyard in Calistoga, Calif., when Seaver was experiencing the effects of Lyme disease, which included memory loss.
Seaver died of complications from Lewy body dementia and Covid-19 in August 2020 at 75.
Koosman is survived by a daughter, Danielle, two sons, Shawn and Michael, and several grandchildren. His marriage to the former LaVonne Sorum ended in divorce.
Koosman said he had no problem with Seaver outshining him for the most part among Mets’ fans.
“I was a farm kid pitching in the biggest media market in baseball,” he told Sports Illustrated in 1999.
“Imagine how a lifelong New Yorker would fare on a farm, and that’s how shocking it was to me. So no, I never minded missing the spotlight. I just wanted to win.”
As for 1969, “It was a dream season.”
Alex Traub and Richard Sandomir contributed reporting.
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