It is difficult to say which was the best individual season of Tom Seaver's brilliant career. Tom Terrific won three Cy Young honors and led two successful pennant drives in a brief six-year span. For a record nine straight seasons, he struck out more than 200 batters. Twice with the Mets he was the league's top winner, three times the ERA leader, and five times the National League strikeout king. His 1.76 ERA of 1970 was one of the stingiest in modern baseball history. And his first Cy Young trophy was the first ever awarded to a pitcher toiling for a miserable last-place ball club.

But his final Cy Young season may well have been Tom Seaver's best outing ever. This seems especially the case when one considers the team around him that season, a third-place also-ran club that barely played at a .500 pace from wire to wire. Without Seaver in the rotation that summer, the Mets were assuredly destined to be a last-place ball club. The big right-hander's accomplishments were, in fact, about all the Mets faithful of 1975 had to boast about. His 22-9 record represented the most wins in the senior circuit. His 243 strikeouts were also tops, and his 2.38 ERA trailed only San Diego's Randy Jones and LA's Andy Messersmith. Stretching his string of 200-strikeout years to eight that summer he overtook the longstanding major league record. He also led the New York staff in starts (36), complete games (15), shutouts, and innings pitched. And for toppers, he reached another personal milestone when he passed 2,000 career strikeouts.

The only personal failure for Seaver seemed to come in the All-Star Game in Milwaukee's County Stadium, where he surrendered a three-run homer to Carl Yastrzemski and, in the process, became the first Mets pitcher to allow an earned run in the traditional Midsummer Classic. And all this came on top of the fact that Tom Terrific had experienced a dreadful slide to 11-11 only one season earlier. It was one of the best comebacks ever, and also one of the best end-to-end pitching performances ever witnessed from a mound ace wearing a New York Mets uniform.

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