Tom Seaver Has No Friends

MetsBlog.com has a quote from Tom Seaver about Johan Santana’s no-hitter:

I’ve never met Johan personally, but, what I’ve heard about him is that he has a big heart and is a huge competitor. I didn’t watch the game last night. I found out when I picked up the morning paper.

Two things came to mind after reading this:

(1) If Tom Seaver is right, Johan Santana should see a cardiologist, because I think having a big heart is probably not a good thing, medically speaking, and he probably needs to take some medication or have some sort of surgical procedure to correct it.

(2) Really, Tom? You didn’t find out about the no-hitter until the next morning?

The game ended at 9:45 Eastern Time. I believe Seaver lives in California, so that would be 6:45– but even if we assume 9:45, that’s not that late. Even if I thought my friend Tom Seaver might be asleep at 9:45, I’d probably give him a ring at some point during the game– or at least at the end of the game– to let him know that something was going on, and, at the very least, maybe some reporters might be calling him for a quote. I understand Seaver is no youngster, and maybe he isn’t big on the Internet, or television, or cellular phones, but surely he must have some way to be reached on his vineyard, and surely you would think someone would give him a heads-up about this big news in Mets-world. I got two e-mails from friends and a call from my mother about the no-hitter, and I am not anyone. So you would think Tom Seaver would have someone in his life who would think, hey, I should tell Tom about this, or, ooh, I wonder what Tom thinks about this, or, oh goodness, I hope Tom is watching this. Seaver spent a bunch of time as a broadcaster for the Mets. It’s not like he retired and then wandered over to a monastery in Tibet and cut himself off from civilization. I assume his vineyard is somewhere with electricity and phone wires. It seems to me that if Tom Seaver really has no one in his life who would think to alert him about this no-hitter, he may need to seriously rethink the kinds of personal relationships he has and whether there may be room to let some people into his circle. And even the next morning– he found out from the newspaper? So even the next day, no one had called him, e-mailed him, texted him, nothing? Bizarre.

Reading the comments on MetsBlog.com, there’s another interesting piece to this story. Apparently Seaver and Santana did an interview special together where they talked about pitching and Seaver suggested to Johan that he might be the first Met to throw a no-hitter. So when Seaver says he has never met Johan… does he just not remember? Was the interview put together through the magic of green screen technology? I’m sure Tom Seaver meets a lot of people– or at least I would have thought so, except that he apparently doesn’t know anyone who watches Mets games– but to not remember meeting Johan Santana seems a little alarming. And, hey, even if he wasn’t sure they’d met, to be so sure as to say it in his released statement seems a little, I don’t know, strange. He’s never met him, and yet he has this personal medical information about the size of Santana’s heart….

Okay, maybe not.

UPDATED TO ADD: Or, of course, there’s Google. Search for “Tom Seaver Johan” in Google Images and you get the picture I’ve put at the top of the post, of the two of them (and Ron Darling) sitting on a couch together. So, yeah, Tom Seaver needs to see a neurologist. Hey, I’ve used the words neurologist and cardiologist in a post about Johan Santana’s no-hitter. Anyone else on the Internet doing that? I don’t think so.