Dr. Taylor in Residence

The late, great Dennis D’Agostino had a forthright way of handling blank space in his seminal 1981 volume This Date in New York Mets History. For any date on which nothing discernibly Metsian had yet occurred (understandable, in that there hadn’t yet been two decades of official franchise operation), Dennis wrote, simply, “Nothing of importance happened on this date.”

That is how I choose to address the events of June 18, 2025, a.k.a. Wednesday Night’s game in Atlanta; process the significance of the Mets’ 5-0 loss at the hands of Chris Sale, Ronald Acuña, and reverse momentum as you wish. But as long as I have This Date open, allow me to turn to and share the entry for February 10, 1967:

“Mets purchase pitcher Ron Taylor from Houston’s Oklahoma City farm team.”

Now that’s something of importance Metwise. That innocent-sounding transaction heralded the building of a bullpen that would serve as a cornerstone of a world champion. Taylor had become a world champion for the Cardinals two years and four months before the Astros decided they didn’t need to hold onto him, and he’d become a world champion for the Mets two years and eight months after they took a flyer on him.

When you consider the credentials of the righty reliever who was available for a song and where he would help take his new team, February 10, 1967, towers like one of the skyscrapers in the Met logo over the Met calendar.

Dr. Ron Taylor passed away on Monday at the age of 87. He wasn’t a doctor when he was a Met, no matter how he operated in and around the strike zone. The medical certification came later, as did his longtime association with the Toronto Blue Jays as their team physician. Ron was Canadian, the Jays are Canadian, it was a relationship that clicked as well as Ron’s with the Mets’ elevating aspirations in the 1960s. Whenever Ron was introduced at a ’69 Met reunion, he always received his honorific. “Welcome back DOCTOR Ron Taylor!”

Mr. Ron Taylor did very well by the Mets across five seasons. Being Dr. Ron Taylor made him a little more special. In A Magic Summer, in which Stanley Cohen visited with 1969 Met after 1969 Met to see how they were doing nearly twenty years on and what they remembered about that championship season, Ron made time for the author while on the job at Exhibition Stadium, the Jays’ pre-SkyDome nest. Their interview took place during a game, meaning the doctor was on call all evening. He had to keep an eye on the action in case he was needed. Cohen noted Ron had “apparently mastered the technique of following the progress of a game while focusing his attention elsewhere.” For the former pitcher, it was just the way his weeks — which included a private practice and other sports medicine commitments — wound down.

“I always set aside Friday night for doing interviews with people writing books,” Ron told Stanley.

That line and that image have always stayed with me, the idea that writers were queuing up to hear the story of the 1969 Mets from the perspective of its ace fireman. That’s what a reliever used mainly at the end of games was called in those days. Closing was not beyond the realm of the pitchers who did the starting. The Mets’ staff completed 51 games in 1969. That still left 111 in which assistance was required. Some of those games were tight. Some of those results hung in the balance of what Ron Taylor and his penmates could do. Fires got put out with regularity. The future doctor had a knack for providing necessary aid.

The first time Ron Taylor notched a save for the Mets it was in relief of Tom Seaver, specifically Seaver’s first big league start. That win, in the game of April 13, 1967, went to the pitcher who worked between them, Chuck Estrada, but Seaver-Taylor would prove an effective combination. When the Mets traveled to Atlanta for the first game of the initial National League Championship Series — October 4, 1969, a date when something of unquestionable importance happened — it was Seaver going seven for the Mets’ first-ever playoff win and Taylor nailing down the first save anybody had seen between the end of a regular season and the beginning of a World Series. Taylor would work the next day, and earn the W in relief of Jerry Koosman. We were not only one win from a pennant, we could claim the very first full-fledged NLCS bullpen ace, a role said ace essentially invented on the fly.

Ron would lend a hand in the World Series as well, culminating in his second postseason save, again in support of Koosman, in Game Two at Baltimore. In the moment, it was enormous. In a few days, it became a component of a world championship. It would take 37 years for a Met to surpass Taylor’s saves output for a single postseason. He likely thought he was just getting critical outs in critical games. He was actually setting a standard at the dawn of the relief age. As sports medicine would be for him post-pitching, standard-setting was his specialty.

Ron Taylor saved 50 games between his arrival in 1967 and departure following 1971, not counting those clutch performances in the playoffs and the Series. He saved games when the Mets weren’t good, were getting good, had gotten great, and were doing their best to stay great. The Mets’ club record for saves in a single season is 51, set by Jeurys Familia in 2016, when times had very much changed (Jacob deGrom threw one complete game; no other Met threw any). Context is everything when tempted to juxtapose contemporary closing with firefighting way back when. Those 50 saves of Taylor’s in those five years represented the most for any Met reliever during the first ten years there were Mets. Tug McGraw was second, Cal Koonce was third. They were all 1969 Mets.

A combination of visionary strategy — Gil Hodges and Rube Walker embracing their bullpen members’ skills rather than seeing relievers as failed starters — and the assembled abilities of the non-starting arms in Flushing gave pitching’s evolution a kickstart. “Hodges did one of the greatest jobs of managing in the history of the game,” Ron reflected for Cohen. “We were given what amounted to job descriptions, like in industry.” Taylor led the Mets in saves four consecutive years, though never with more than fourteen. Three times, however, he ranked in the National League’s Top Ten in the category that was just gaining a foothold in baseball’s consciousness. He was in on the start of closing. His role in the development of the reliever holds up to this day. Ron Taylor stands fourteenth among all Met pitchers ever in saves, ninth among all righties coming out of our pen.

He certainly got my young attention, whether it was for earning the win that was the Mets’ 100th as 1969 was ending; or the first that ever accrued in the Mets favor on an Opening Day, in 1970; or for his stoic pose at Shea Stadium on his 1970 Topps baseball card. Beyond our announcers telling me he was coming into a game and the box scores summing for me exactly what he did, it was that card that really introduced me to Ron Taylor. It told me, on the back, that he’d been around a while. Other Mets had space for a biographical cartoon. Ron’s rows of numbers, dating back to 1956 in the Florida State League, precluded cheekiness. Topps did manage to note Ron “holds a degree in engineering,” which is why I didn’t think anything of it when I learned from one of the 1969 anniversary celebrations that he was a doctor. Good at science was good at science in my mind.

Good at pitching is what concerned me as I was becoming a fan in 1969 and digging in as a fan in 1970. The card made mention of his 13 Saves (capitalized) in the same blurb that informed us of his engineering acumen. While saves didn’t yet rate a column all their own, his yearly wins and losses definitely got compiled and printed. He was 9-4 in 1969, and I didn’t need any kind of degree to recognize that his .692 winning percentage (also listed) was outstanding.

As indicated by all those rows of minor and major league experience and, I suppose, his birthday of December 13, 1937, Ron was kind of old as Mets of that vintage went. I was seven in 1970. Every ballplayer was a grown-up to me, but that picture on the front of card 419 did project a touch of No 42 having seen plenty. He had seen life the minors since ’56; the majors since coming up with Cleveland on April 11, 1962, the same day the Mets got going; a World Series in ’64 when he and the Cards decked the Yankees — I’d find out about that later and be retroactively grateful. The card told me he was from Toronto, a tidbit I tucked away and didn’t read anything into until I read Wayne Coffey’s They Said It Couldn’t Be Done in 2019.

In this book about the ’69 Mets (aren’t you glad Ron left his Friday nights open for authors?), Taylor explained he was Canadian because his mother, from Wales, had attempted, with her siblings, to emigrate from Wales to Australia but missed her boat by minutes. She asked the dockmaster where the next ship was going. Canada was the answer.

“Can we get on that one?”

Be glad the Astros missed the boat on Taylor in 1967, and be glad Maude Evans missed the boat she missed, or Maude doesn’t meet Wesley Taylor in Toronto and have two kids, one of whom caught onto baseball adjacent to the country where the Mets would someday play. Maybe a kid born in Australia with a different father would have found his way to Queens — the Miracle Mets were a team of destiny — but Ontario was surely a lot closer. And the Mets got a lot closer to their destiny because of the man who was, effectively, their prototype closer. No, the save totals don’t compare with the ones that were accumulated by others later, but, as Joe McDonald, who was the farm director in 1969, put it in Coffey’s book, “Unfortunately, they don’t have stats for guts. Ron Taylor had guts. He wanted the ball no mater what the situation, and he was never scared.”

He certainly wasn’t scared of the Braves or the Orioles. He wasn’t scared by what he saw when he went to Vietnam on a goodwill tour during the war. He was, instead, inspired by the wounded soldiers striving to recover from literal battle scars, inspired enough to become a doctor. His life after baseball was coming. In 1970, though he continued to be Hodges’ main righty out of the pen, age began to catch up with Taylor as the season wore on. Ron didn’t pitch after September 14, despite no reported arm problems and the Mets attempting to repeat as division champs. Danny Frisella became Tug McGraw’s righty fireman complement, as Hodges decided Ron wasn’t any longer up to the role the veteran had filled for the manager since 1968. Such changes happen in industry, too.

Jack Lang, as plugged in a reporter on the Met beat as there ever was, figured Ron would be a goner in the offseason, but he returned for 1971, pitching less than he had in any of his preceding four years as a Met. Quick stops in Montreal, where he didn’t pitch, and San Diego, where he made a handful of appearances, followed. Ron Taylor was done as a major leaguer by 1972…and on to the rest of his life, which lasted a helluva long time. Some of it was devoted to telling anybody who asked about 1969 what they wanted to know. He sure devoted a lot of Friday nights to keeping the story going.

Ron’s passing represents a tipping point of sorts in the 1969 Mets as a going entity. Twenty-five players were on that World Series roster. Only twelve are still with us — slightly less than half. Thirty-five players participated in the course of what is known as the regular season, though there was hardly anything regular about 1969 where the Mets were concerned. Eighteen of those players are still around — barely more than half. Unfortunate statistics of that nature are inevitable. Nineteen Sixty-Nine was also a helluva long time ago. Yet it’s still a going entity for us.

Thank you, Dr. Taylor, for extending its life as you did.