New York Mets: Jay Hook won’t call himself a sign-stealing whistleblower

New York Mets: Jay Hook won’t call himself a sign-stealing whistleblower

Hook’s place in Mets history is secured by his having started and won the first-ever Mets victory, a 9-1 win over the Pittsburgh Pirates that ended their life-opening nine-game losing streak. “I still get seven, eight, nine letters a month with cards in them,” he says, “and after that whole period of time it’s amazing people would still remember.”

He didn’t pitch much for the ’61 Reds after suffering a bout with the mumps that April, and he didn’t get to pitch in the World Series. (The Reds lost to the Yankees in five.) He had his occasional moments, from a respectable 1960 season in Cincinnati to a remarkable 1963 duel as a Met, near on September 2, 1963.

The boyish-looking righthander faced the Reds in the Polo Grounds. He went the distance against his former teammate Jim Maloney and lost, 1-0, with Maloney striking out thirteen while Hook settled for five strikeouts and keeping Hall of Famer Frank Robinson hitless. The game’s only run came in the top of the first, when Pete Rose leading off hit the first pitch into the seats. It was three decades since that had last happened in a major league game.

A graduate of Northwestern University, with a bachelor’s in engineering and a Master’s in thermodynamics (he chuckles when I call it, mistakenly, thermonuclear physics), Hook ended his baseball career after the 1964 season. He went to work for Chrysler in product development, subsequently moving to a similar job at Rockwell International, then to Masco Corporation and others, before retiring early, becoming a professor at his alma mater, and buying the farm where he and his wife, Joan, still live.

Hook once described to New York Times writer Robert Lipsyte the exact science behind a curve ball’s movement and behavior. Lipsyte’s article, “Why a Curve Ball Curves,” eventually provided the title for a Popular Mechanics anthology about the sciences of sports. Once, after Hook was knocked out of a Mets game early and talked to Lipsyte in the clubhouse, Mets manager Casey Stengel happened by and cracked, to Hook’s continuing amusement, “You know, if only Hook could do what he knows!”

The former pitcher says he didn’t think about anything like the ’61 Reds or anyone else taking sign stealing from on-field gamesmanship to off-field cheating until one of his daughters called to say, “Dad, you’re in Sports Illustrated.” (The Hooks are parents of four, grandparents of thirteen, and step-grandparents of two.) She told her father he was mentioned in an article about sign-stealing history that mentioned the 1961 Reds.

“You know, I really have not spent a lot of time trying to evaluate the significance. I know the significance of it,” says Hook, who acknowledges he follows high school baseball mostly unless he catches the Show on television. “Back in the day of Babe Ruth and others, people were always trying to get a leg up, somehow. That’s probably where it began. But I felt bad for the guys who might have lost their jobs” because of the Astros’ sophisticated espionage. “That’s too bad.”

That was one time Hook didn’t chuckle.