Another TTM Success, Old-Timey Mets Style
December 17th, 2009 by slangon

2009 SlangKo Heroes of the Diamond Jon Matlack

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Jon Matlack pitched for the Mets from 1971 to 1977. His overall stats with the Mets is a line of perfect mediocrity – 82 wins against 81 losses, 3.02 ERA, 1023 K’s. When you look a bit deeper, though, things begin to look a little less mediocre.

Take for example, his 1972 stat line, which was his first full year with the club. 244 innings pitched, 15-10 record, 169 strikeouts, and a miniscule 2.32 ERA. That year he also threw 8 complete games, 4 of which were shutouts.

When the Mets made it back to the post season in 1973, Matlack started one game in the Championship Series, where he only pitched 9 innings, giving up 2 hits and no runs. Oh, and he sat down 9 guys via the strikeout, including some guy named Rose and some guy named Bench.

His World Series record that year was a little less impressive at 1 win and 2 losses, but when you look at his 2.16 ERA, and the 3 un-earned runs that were scored, that might be more bad luck than bad pitching. In Game 1, he was pegged with the loss, despite giving up no earned runs.

His bad luck would seem to have followed him into 1974, judging by his 13-15 losing record coupled with his 2.41 ERA and 195 K’s. He also continued with his complete game-i-ness, throwing 14 of them, half of which were shutouts.

He really seemed to hit his stride in 1975-76, or at least shook off some of that bad luck. Over that 2 year span, he went 33-22, with a combined 3.15 ERA and 307 strikeouts.

He fell off pretty badly in 1977, with a 7-15 record and 4.21 ERA. After that he was involved in a massive 4 team, 11 player trade that landed him with the Rangers.

In the post I wrote for the Johnny Lattner autograph giveaway, I mentioned how I had been getting in the habit of sending extra copies of the SlangKo Originals that I had been sending out to get signed. For some reason, I had unfortunately neglected to do that in Mr. Matlacks case. And you know what happened?

He sent me his business card.

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And he called me out on it. How cool is that?

Hang tight, Mr. Matlack. Rest assured your card is on it’s way.

2 Responses to “Another TTM Success, Old-Timey Mets Style”

  1. that’s cool… and how could you not send one?
    Nice to see older players staying in touch with the hobby.

  2. Yeah. I sent him a copy yesterday.

    Like you said, it’s nice to see the old timers interested in the cards. It makes it extra cool that he was interested in it even though it just some card that some guy made himself, and not an “official” card.

    Another nice side effect was that, since I was sending him the card, I got the chance to write him a note thanking him for signing the other one, which I normally don’t get the chance to do when they just mail the card back.

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