Tom Seaver was brilliant in more ways than one

He was the brightest athlete I ever interviewed. He kept you on your toes. You had better bring your “A’’ game when you drew near, because that approach was entrenched so deeply in Tom Seaver. He gave his best, so why should he expect anything less?

He didn’t suffer fools. And yet there was his sense of humor, so thoroughly refreshing. If you gained his trust, and that took some doing, he was as great off the mound as he was on it.

I remember a time in Montreal during his second go-round with the Mets. There was a gentlemen’s club next to the hotel where the ballclub was staying. Myself and three other reporters took up space at the club’s bar. Shortly thereafter, in walked Seaver with utility infielder Brian Giles. With Giles in the rear flank of Mets players and on his way to being a .228 career hitter, it seemed a strange pairing.

“This is either a case of Seaver being unable to get anybody to go with him, or he’s trying to make the 24th guy on the club feel welcome,” I told my younger compatriots. I believe the latter because that’s what I want to believe, just one more reason to know why Tom was Terrific.

At one point the reporters got an entertainer to dance at the ballplayers’ table

to the tune of “Nancy (With the Laughing Face)” for Seaver and “Brian’s Song” for Giles.

Enough tomfoolery. Seaver, whom I had known from his first 10 1⁄2 seasons with the Mets, stopped at the bar on his way out, and with a wide grin on that handsome face, he said, “Donnelly, someday I’ll get you! I’ll get you!”

And so I wish he could. Oh, how I do!

There are those who will be surprised, or worse, by the above anecdote. That’s understandable because Seaver’s reputation is pure. Clean and noble. And wife Nancy Seaver knows it best of all.

I witnessed some of their togetherness. During a spring training, I booked my family’s stay at the La Playa in Reddington Beach, Florida. We stayed there because they charged us what Newsday would allow. Players with families put up there because they could bring pets.

On nights when the weather was right, and that would be most nights, Seaver would be out on the lawn barbecuing for Nancy and their two girls. They did family things. You can’t say the same for all of his teammates. And when he was outside reading a newspaper, my friendly wife asked if he had read the sports and he replied, “Didn’t get there yet.” He was so not one-dimensional.

I wish I can say I knew he was going to be great. Far from it. In spring training of 1967, the Mets already were beginning to pry info from Washington on what it would cost them to shake Gil Hodges loose from his Senators managing contract. They were told it would take a promising young pitcher. I kept hearing the name Bill Denehy, and I lobbied that it be Seaver instead.

Thank God there are baseball people who don’t listen to reporters. The Mets wouldn’t get Hodges until a year later, 1968, and the cost was Denehy. I had preferred him to Seaver because I thought he had a better pitcher’s body, tall and lean compared to Seaver’s stocky frame below the waist.

“Tom had to buy two pairs of pants to make one pair, he was so thick through the thighs and calves,” Bud Harrelson would tell me years later. And those muscular legs proved the sound foundation for the drop-and-drive technique that would help carry Seaver to pitching greatness.

Denehy? He had a career record of 1-10.

Seaver proved brilliant from the very beginning. He had a 16-13 record for the 1967 Mets, who had an overall 61-101 record. He was named Rookie of the Year in his league.Seaver was 16-12 as the 1968 Mets improved to ninth place and an overall 73-89 record. We all know what happened in ’69. The Mets rode Seaver and Jerry Koosman to baseball divinity.

He would finish that 10 1⁄2- season run with the Mets with a 189-110 record. The club had a 868-907 record in those 11 seasons. And if you subtract Seaver’s W-L, the club was 679-797. In other words, other than Koosman’s meaningful aid, they stunk more often than not.

Then M. Donald Grant, the dreaded Mets chairman of the board, engineered the trade to Cincinnati that Seaver had hoped to avoid.

Seaver would go on to pitch well, if not quite as brilliantly as he had in all of those seasons with the Mets. And Grant would just add to the futility he had created. After that June 15, 1977 trade, the Mets didn’t have another season with as many as 70 wins until 1984. Shea Stadium appropriately became known as Grant’s tomb.

Seaver did get back to the Mets, but only for one season. Frank Cashen, an otherwise skillful general manager, foolishly thought nobody would draft a 39-year-old pitcher making good money and failed to protect Seaver. He was wrong.

Seaver would get his 300th victory in New York, but it was at Yankee Stadium while pitching with the White Sox. Of course it was a complete game. Seaver specialized in those.

He was headed for his crowning moment: Induction in Cooperstown.

Rest in Peace, brother. You were one of a kind and we were blessed to have had you in our midst.

Joe Donnelly is a former longtime baseball writer for Newsday.