The Almost Official Site of Mets Author Matthew Silverman

June 28, 2009

An Organization to Hang Your Hat On

While I was away recently, Metsilverman.com got its first makeover. My cousin, Blair Rafuse, who keeps this thing running and looking good, worked for weeks in his spare time to get everything organized to make it easier for readers to go back and look for stuff they might have missed or—God, love them—read again.

If you’re extremely observant, you’ll note that there is now an “Archives” icon among the six headings on the main page. You can go back to earlier in 2009; everything for year one of this Blog (2008); my book reviews, which I will be doing for through the end of My Darling Year (aka February 2010); My Top 10 Shea Moments, which actually total 13 events and include more than 30 actual games (it’s a lot of reading, but it’s like a true novella of a lifetime spent at a one’s touchstone home); and East Coast Cardinal, my odd dual life since 1976 as an St. Louis/Phoenix/Arizona Cardinals fan—it’ll never come close to the devotion I have for this poorly-run baseball team—but if the Cards can get to a Super Bowl, maybe a remarkably flawed Mets franchise can someday soon take us to within minutes of a world championship.

“News & Events” is now in two sections: News and Events (we try to keep it simple). Events is a listing of what’s coming up—speaking of which, my next event will be a radio interview with “The Happy Recap” at 6 p.m. on Sunday, July 5. One that is not included because we’re focusing on Mets and tri-state area based stuff, is for anyone reading for the Windy City, that there is an event with my Cubs by the Numbers co-authors Al Yellon and Kasey Ignarski at the Book Cellar at 4736 North Lincoln in Chicago on Sunday, June 28, from 4-6 p.m.

The “News” part of the “News & Events” pulldown bar features some PR triumphs that would have made my sporting life mentor, the late PR maven Mike Gershman, proud to witness my level of self promotion. Mike taught me to be shy on my own time, not on the clock. And the clock is always running.

“Books” include summaries that I’ve put together as well as independent reviews. We could use some more of the latter, so anyone who’s written one—or any columnist, blogger, or big timer wants to write one about Shea Goodbye (hint, hint), please send it along to matt@metsilverman.com. Or upload it yourself on Amazon.com.

Then we come to “About Author” section. That’s a list of some of the books and other things I’ve worked on since I moved from journalism to publishing in 1996. The “Inquisition” is kind of an FAQ, though some of those questions have never been asked, much less frequently asked. For those of you who’ve actually read that before, it’s been updated to include some info about working with Keith Hernandez.

“Contacts & Links” is just what it sounds like. If you want to do a link swap and you have a site that is appealing to baseball fans, especially those persecuted by the Mets, and are willing to link to my site, please drop me a line.

Letters to the Met-itor Challenge

As I said a paragraph or two back, I started out in journalism and have a background in that field. I like the concept of the “Comments” section on most sites, but I can imagine myself getting bummed out when my musings register a big fat zero in the comments portion. So I’m going to borrow from the newspaper tradition—and one used by columnists and writers with the big boys—and gather the best of them into an occasional “Letters to the Editor” posting. I have a handful that I’ve gotten over the past few months that are so well written I haven’t known what to do with them, but I thought of this idea just now and this seems like a good way to do a few more posts and to keep everyone involved. Please indicate when you send in a letter whether you want to use your name. If I don’t hear back, I’ll go with initials and town names or something else identity concealing. It doesn’t have to be in epistolary form; do it however you feel like doing it. Mets fans speak from the heart.

Thanks everyone for reading—and if you’ve read this all the way through, give yourself a double thumb snap.

June 24, 2009

Keith’s to the Citi

It was a long day Sunday, but it was my best personal Citi Field experience so far—nine games and counting—and up there with anything I’ve done at any ballpark. Of course, the Mets didn’t play worth a darn in a 10-6 loss to a superior Tampa Bay team. (Note to MLB scheduling czar Katy Feeney, why couldn’t the Mets have played the Devil of a Rays team when they stunk year in and year out? The 2001 season was the last time the Mets played Tampa—I love leaving off the “Bay” to infuriate Vince Naimoli, the club’s first managing general partner, who got in a tizzy because the Mets simply put “Tampa” on the Shea scoreboard when they first met in 1998.)

The reason I moved heaven and earth to cut short an annual event to get to Sunday’s game was a Shea Goodbye signing with Keith Hernandez at the clubhouse shop before the game. It was a great turnout and I was amazed how many people referenced the site. Thanks to all who came. It was a little melancholy because it was the last scheduled appearance with Keith, the crowned prince of Metdom. (He’ll do a signing solo at Borders Books, 1260 Old Country Road, Westbury, Long Island, this Saturday, June 27, at 1 p.m.) I guess I’m not the first to have a “man crush” on KH.

People practically fell on the ground to worship Keith at the signings. When the publisher asked me last year who would be a good person for this project, I said “Keith Hernandez” without hesitation. There was no second choice. (Not to sound pompous as in “I won’t work with anyone but Keith Hernandez,” but he’s simply the best choice thanks to his perspective and popularity.) When I got the call that we would indeed be working together on the book, I got a feeling as close as I will ever get to hitting a drive off the upper deck at Tiger Stadium—God rest that place.

Sunday also afforded me my first chance to step on the field at Citi. Or is it the Citi Field field? There is so little foul territory—they wouldn’t let me in fair territory and turned me around beyond first base and third base. I sat in the seat right behind home plate and when the security guard came over, he said, “Good seat, huh? That’s where the boss sits.” I didn’t have the foresight to find out who’s the boss: Fred Wilpon? Jeff Wilpon? Tony Danza? It was a cushy place to rest one’s rear and was so close to the plate I felt like I should have been wearing a mask.

After the signing, my Field Pass enabled me to walk the circumference of the service tunnel from the Rotunda to the Mo Zone. It felt more like being in a convention center than a ballpark and had security personnel at various stations as if it were a windowless bunker. Each security person eyed me suspiciously if I slowed or even looked like I was going slow, like the guy on the field who had told me I couldn’t walk past the tarp. “Thanks, I was still 10 feet away from it.”

The Mets were gracious enough to hand out the Field Pass but stopped short of letting me up in the press box. It would’ve been interesting to have seen a game from up there, but it’s a little too stiff and nonpartisan for my liking. My trips to the Shea and Yankee Stadium press boxes years back helped solidify my feeling that if my goal was to spend life in press boxes and locker rooms, I should find a different goal. It just wasn’t for me.

I arrived at the Mo Zone for the Gary, Keith, and Ron event at the Mo Zone with enough time to witness the national anthem. It was weird hearing the song and not seeing the big American flag, though there are small flags on the top of the stadium to look at during the song. You immediately familiarize yourself with the right fielder—Ryan Church for the Mets and Gabe Gross for the Rays. When we got our second Gabe of the day in RF, Gabe Kappler, I immediately noticed because you sort of have to jockey with the right fielder to get a good angle of home plate. We had no moment where either RF had a ball run all the way to the wall, with him chasing it, oblivious to the runner while us Mo Zoners could see that the guy was going for third. The closest was B.J. Upton’s double that fell next to the line and bounced off the side wall to Church. It was interesting watching the relievers go through their rituals—and we’re about the only ones who can see them. (I don’t understand why they don’t mount a camera in the bullpen so they can show the relievers warming up on TV.)

There were a lot of hits from the Rays—17, to be exact. That’s a good number for a day that began with Keith Hernandez, but if a team’s going to get 17 hits, I wish the Mets were that team.

I also wished I’d brought my camera, but I was coming from an annual gathering upstate and had to hustle out of the house and my camera was buried under layers of soggy gear. Sharon Chapman had her camera, though. I recognized from her Inside Pitch column of a few years back and from her mention in Faith and Fear as having the spectacular Wiffle ball field complete with Shea and Vet seats at their house in New Jersey. In fact, Sharon took the photo of Mike Pelfrey warming up you see here at the top. The shot also gives you an idea of what it’s like looking through the fence in the Mo Zone. It’s distracting at first, but you get used to it. I also met Taryn Cooper, who filled me in about all I missed at Metstock. I came across a crew from my neighborhood supermarket, Emmanuel’s. I got to meet Lynn Cohen, whom I’d contacted many times before but had never met in person. She’s the one who makes GKR events like a family picnic. I got to meet a bunch of nice kids as well and even accompanied three of them to the dunk tank. Christian dunked the employee dressed as a Ray on his first throw, Connor showed a power arm, and his older brother Lucas threw as hard as I did.I also met Mets merchandise coordinator Tyrel Kirkham, a big fan of the site and a nice guy.

Coming into the day, the only person I knew at Citi Field was Keith Hernandez. But I felt right at home with GKR in the Mo Zone. Now if only we could put Lynn Cohen in charge of running the Mets.

June 19, 2009

Father’s Day Signathon

Despite the name omitted by the poster, I will actually be at Citi Field for the Father’s Day book signing with Keith Hernandez for Shea Good-bye at the rotunda on Sunday, June 21, from 11-12:30. We did one of these last week on Fifth Avenue—thanks to all who came—and met many nice folks and signed many books. (The sign in the window is accurate. Keith can only sign these books so he can get to everyone in line.)

I brought what I thought was enough metsilverman.com bookmarks to give out to everyone at B&N in New York and ran dry after less than an hour. I’m marshalling the last of what was once a seeming lifetime supply of bookmarks for the final push. Some people were lined up in New York six hours early for the B&N signing. I’m not saying you should get there anywhere near that early Sunday, but Keith has to hop to the booth for the game with Tampa Bay. Man, he is quicker with a pen than he was with a bat. And I thought all those years of Catholic School punish assignments would’ve made my writing hand nimble enough to keep up. Have a great Father’s Day, you’ve earned it—being a dad can even be harder than being a Mets fan.

June 14, 2009

Lessons of Luis

I play softball on a handful of Sundays each year. The people are nice, there’s just enough competition and animosity to give it a mild edge, and I’m in the middle of the pack as far as age goes. There’s another reason I play: As a reminder of how hard baseball is. Because it looks awfully easy on TV.

Softball isn’t baseball, but it’s the closest a schlub like me will get to the game outside of a rare heated Wiffle ball game. By going to a high school in a wimpy league, I was able to play second base and be issued #2, a number that described the way I hit. I could only hit slow-throwing pitchers—provided they didn’t throw sharp curves, which I also couldn’t hit. The reason I bring any of this up is that as a perpetual top of the order/bottom of the order swinger, there were three things I always made sure I did to make up for my hitting deficiency and because it’s the right way to do things: run as fast as I could whenever there was a ball in play, know exactly what was going on when any given pitch was thrown, and how to get in a position to field a ball. Despite all this, I had one pronounced weakness: Those knee buckling pop flies straight up that powerful righties sky between first and second. Those gave me way too much time to think about them, about how the wind might take them, about whether they were spinning toward the outfield or the infield, what’s the length of a day on Neptune…I dropped two such flies my senior year, though I was fortunate enough that there was a man on first and I simply threw to second for the force. Luis Castillo must have thought the force would still be on when he threw to second after the drop—or maybe he assumed the Yankees took everything as lazily as the Mets and he’d get the force at second because no one was running.

Shudder to think it, but Loathed Luis and I have a lot in common. There’s a few glaring differences however: I never played professionally, never won a Gold Glove, and never conned anyone into paying me a pile of money for more years than I could possibly play with declining skills. So if you’re Luis Castillo, you get your free hand on top of that glove and you squeeze for the final out. For the love of Tommie Agee, you catch that damned ball.

So I drove over to the muddy ball field in Rosendale for the pickup game on Sunday (the usual spot at Tongore Park had a dog show going on). I will not bore you with a lot of details, but I went out to second base and had about two levels of added attentiveness to the game—perhaps since I was wearing a bright orange Mets shirt, I didn’t want anyone to compare me with Castillo. (Confession: I dropped a pop a couple of weeks ago, but a teammate grabbed it, ran to the base, and collided hard with the runner. He got the out. Wow. Imagine if Ryan Church had done something like that? But this isn’t about Church. Even on a Sunday.)

I never got the knee buckling popup, but I caught a dying quail out behind second base on the run. I made the other plays, too. And even had a couple of flair hits singles would have made Luis proud. 

Since Luis’s drop was a Subway Series game, people will talk about it for years every time the teams play this tiresome series that really should be limited to three games per year. If that many. When the Mets wind up the year in – place, – games out, Luis’s drop won’t make much difference, unless the answers are “second” and “one.” (Been there. Done that. A lot.) But this team doesn’t seem good enough or interested enough for even that close a finish this time around. And they won’t concentrate any more or push themselves to be better. And wins will turn to losses in the blink of an eye and players will be treated like war heroes because they give incoherent answers to pressmen on deadline when they miss bases in extra innings, overthrow home plate, swing at ball four with runners on base, or drop a ball that most high schoolers would catch (yes, I missed two way back in ’83, but I did catch the others). And I should be content that the player loses sleep because of a Fred Merkle-esque play. And we’ll count the days when Luis Castillo can finally be released and it won’t cost so much. And until then they’ll pay for the blunder of having Luis Castillo over and over again. Like a sleepless nightmare.

June 12, 2009

Review: A Magic Book

Let me first get all the disclaimers out of the way. Yes, I know A Magic Summer author Stanley Cohen. Yes, he wrote the introduction to The Miracle Has Landed a celebration and in-depth book I’m editing about the 1969 Mets—due out at the end of this summer. Yes, I was invited to Metstock with Stanley Cohen, Greg Prince, and Jon Springer, but I will be out of town on an annual trip organized long ago. And yes, getting back to the point, A Magic Summer is one of the best books ever written about the New York Mets.

One thing that may be surprising is that I hadn’t read A Magic Summer until, well, last summer. I had skimmed it, read pieces of it for various books I worked on, but I had not sat down to read it straight through until I was fully engorged in work on The Miracle Has Landed. How I cobbled together a top 10 of Mets books in 2007 without having read it was as big an error as Baltimore’s Pete Richert’s throw clipping J.C. Martin’s wrist and bouncing away to allow Rod Gaspar to score the winning run in Game 4 of the ’69 Series. Not familiar with that play? READ THIS BOOK! Lived through everything that happened with the ’69 Mets? BUY THIS BOOK. A new edition of the 1988 classic has been re-issued by Skyhorse in this 40th anniversary year of the 1969 Mets, making it available to a new generation of fans who certainly aren’t getting any Mets history lessons inside Citi Field.

A Magic Summer tracks down almost every player on the postseason roster for the 1969 Mets during the summer of 1986, as the Mets put together the second great team in club history. (We’re waiting very patiently for the third such year.) There is no index to A Magic Summer, but I loved the first version of the book so much I made my own index. The Skyhorse re-issue has the same number of pages as the original, so here—lest the Post-It note that I wrote it on one day come off—is the metsilverman.com one-of-a-kind Index for the first mentions of each player in A Magic Summer:

Art Shamsky, p. 24

Tommie Agee (told by others), p. 39

Tug McGraw, p. 47 (also p. 193)

Wayne Garrett, p. 61

Jack DiLauro, p. 73

Ed Charles, p. 83

Donn Clendenon, p. 91

Ed Kranepool, p. 108

Tom Seaver, p. 117 (also p. 271)

Ken Boswell, p. 129

Rod Gaspar, p. 141

Cleon Jones, p. 145

Jerry Grote, p. 153

Duffy Dyer, p. 169

Cal Koonce, p. 177

Jim McAndrew, p. 207

Don Cardwell, p. 207

Ron Swoboda, p. 213

Gary Gentry, p. 229

J.C. Martin, p. 243

Ron Taylor, p. 251

Nolan Ryan, p. 257

Bud Harrelson, p. 272

Al Weis, p. 278

Jerry Koosman, p. 294

Kooz is at the end for a reason. Though ’69 was the year Tom Seaver made the transition from All-Star to Name Someone’s Who’s Better, the Mets won that World Series because of Koosman. Everyone turns to his superb outing in the Game 5 World Series clincher, which is arguably the most significant game in Mets history, yet Kooz’s start in Game 2 was as important, if not more so. A day after the Orioles had roughed up Seaver in the Series opener, everyone who had already written off the Mets now considered them to be as done as the 1966 Dodgers—a team that featured Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale—that the Orioles had swept just three World Series earlier. The ’69 Orioles were almost all veterans of that world championship club—the main differences were left-handed ace Mike Cuellar, shortstop Mark Belanger, and fiery manager Earl Weaver.

Lefty Dave McNally, who’d thrown a 1-0 shutout against Drysdale in the ’66 clincher, faced second-year southpaw Koosman in Game 2 of the ’69 Series in Baltimore. If the Orioles got off to a strong start against Koosman—or even nicked him for a couple of early runs—the Series might have gone in a completely different direction. Instead, Kooz had a perfect game going into the seventh inning. The O’s broke up the no-no and scraped together a run to tie it, but the Mets pulled ahead in the ninth on a single by Al Weis. (In a move that would be second-guessed incessantly today, there was a base open, two outs, and Koosman on deck, but McNally pitched to Weis and Baltimore paid dearly.)

Leading 2-1, Koosman got the first two outs in the bottom of the ninth. He then walked two straight and gave way to reliever Ron Taylor, who got Brooks Robinson to ground to third. The Mets had their first-ever World Series win and more importantly, it was all even heading back to New York. The next time the Mets returned to Baltimore was for a screening of the 1969 World Series Highlight Film in the winter of 1970.

Cohen superbly frames the 1969 action against how each of the characters in his narrative consider that Amazin’ moment two decades later. These face-to-face interviews are revealing and nearly all of the players cherish that moment as much as the fans do. For most of the ’69 vet Mets, winning the world championship was clearly the summit; nothing else would ever touch it. Even for the two Hall of Famers on the team who were still active when the interviews were done—Seaver and Nolan Ryan—this was the only World Series they ever won. And if you look at the roster above, there will never be a championship team as punchless as the ’69 club. Gil Hodges—sadly, he died just three years after the championship—is one of two pivotal characters not interviewed (Tommie Agee would not sit for an interview without being paid). Yet Hodges is all over this tale—he is a part of these men’s everyday lives, his lessons going beyond the diamond in almost every case (there are a couple of bitter bubs I’ll let you uncover yourself).

Cleon Jones, famously removed mid-game by Hodges during a dreadful doubleheader loss to Houston at Shea at the end of July 1969, laughs at the memory. “We were getting our ass kicked and something had to be done, and that was his way of showing us that he wasn’t satisfied in the way we were playing. We got the message too. It turned the team around...Hodges instilled that winning attitude into us. When we left Chicago [in July], our feeling was, ‘We’re going to beat you guys. You’re a bunch of old men.’ We felt we were as good as anyone then.”

In honor of Gil Hodges and of this great book, I’m righting a wrong from 100 Things Mets Fans Should Know and Do Before They Die and placing A Magic Summer in the pantheon of great Mets books. Like the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown (though not exactly as prestigious), I won’t be removing anyone from their already decided on pedestal. Instead, number 11 and up is part of a new wing. Number 14—not coincidentally, Gil Hodges’s number—takes its rightful place among the unique books that chronicle this entertaining, agonizing, and yes, occasionally inspiring franchise (books are listed by year of first publication, except for the last one):

1. Can’t Anyone Here Play This Game by Jimmy Breslin

2. The New York Mets by Leonard Koppett

3. Screwball by Tug McGraw and Joseph Durso

4. If at First by Keith Hernandez and Mike Bryan

5. The New York Mets: Twenty-Five Years of Baseball Magic by Jack Lang, Peter Simon

6. The Complete Year by Year NY Mets Fan’s Almanac by Duncan Bock and John Jordan

7. The Worst Team Money Could Buy by Bob Klapisch and John Harper

8. The Bad Guys Won by Jeff Pearlman

9. The Ticket Out by Michael Sokolove

10. Pedro, Carlos, and Omar by Adam Rubin

11. Mets Fan by Dana Brand

12. Mets by the Numbers by Jon Springer (and some other blowhard)

13. Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History by Greg Prince

14. A Magic Summer: The 1969 Mets by Stanley Cohen

The Magic Summer of 1969 is like that first summer you fell in love. There will longer-lasting relationships and many more important things that happen in your life, but you always remember that first summer when you loved and were loved back, when there didn’t seem like anything you couldn’t do together. Everything ends, including most first loves, but a bit of it always stays with you.

And keep in mind, I was in love with re-runs of Underdog as a four-year-old in 1969 and have no memory of the real underdogs as they were pulling off their Amazin’ coup. Get this book and you will live what you missed or re-live your first love. It is something every Mets fan should know and cherish.

Meet the Mets Authors: Though I will be at Citi Field at 11 a.m. on Father’s Day for the Rotunda clubhouse shop signing with Keith Hernandez, I will be out of town for Metstock. But three of the luminary authors on the above list addendum will be there: Jon Springer, Greg Prince, and Stanley Cohen. Two Boots Tavern on the Lower East Side will be the site of the event on Thursday, June 18, at 7 p.m. Fittingly, the Mets will be playing the Orioles on TV from Baltimore at the very same time. Where’s Kooz when you need him?

Tuesdays with Keith: You can hear Keith Hernandez on Tuesday, June 9, from noon to 12:40 PM on WNYC-AM (820 AM) on “The Leonard Lopate Show.” The show is described as featuring “the best conversations with writers, actors, ex-presidents, dancers, scientists, comedians, historians, grammarians, curators, filmmakers, and do-it-yourself experts.” Keith is indeed a jack of all trades. That’ll come in handy at 5 p.m. when he’s on WEPN-AM 1050 AM (ESPN radio) on “The Michael Kay Show.” Kay’s interlocking pom poms will go down for a few minutes to talk to one of the greats from the good side of town. Don’t forget, I’ll be with Keith in person at noon on Thursday, June 11, at Barnes & Noble, 555 Fifth Avenue (at 46th Street). I’ll have metsilverman.com bookmarks for the easily impressed.

June 5, 2009

Metnography

Even after reading Richard Grossinger’s The New York Mets: Ethnography, Myth, and Subtext —and taking anthropology in high school and college, I had to look up what the term ethnography meant.

eth·nog·ra·phy (ĕth-nŏg'rə-fē)

The branch of anthropology that deals with the scientific description of specific human cultures.

I’m still not 100 percent sure how this specifically relates to the Mets and Mets fan as a people, but this book led me to the next level of pondering the Mets and their meaning. My meaning. Deep stuff. Richard Grossinger has written books on a variety of subjects, including others with words in the titles that my thick skull can’t quite wrap itself around: “Embroyogensis,” “Alchemical,” “Slag” (not a big word but a little obtuse, however you want to define that), and then there’s evocative “The Long Body of the Dream.” But while I probably won’t be reading some of these works because they are not in my particular field of study, I must read his Out of Babylon: Ghosts of Grossinger’s, about how the author, perceived heir to the Borscht Belt kingdom of the Catskills, Grossinger’s resort, took a different path just as a tectonic shift in the vacationing habits of New Yorkers turned Grossinger’s and many of the other Catskill enclaves—all built to entertain thousands for weeks at a stretch—into veritable ghost towns. Like the village outside the Concord, where blocks of boarded up buildings have crumbling signs written in Yiddish, Grossinger’s now too masses of empty buildings that the author once knew quite well yet now stand empty or don’t stand at all. Being future king to a kingdom that ceases to be just as one is to assume the throne is a subject of personal interest…and those resorts are not far from where I live now. It is staggering to witness the magnitude and quietude of these abandoned compounds. Though a lot of these places have top notch, if underused, golf courses that are still in operation.

But I digress…and that’s OK because Grossinger’s best moments in his Mets book digress from the subject. One could call it 316 pages of digression. Facts are used to illustrate points and bring one to a deeper plane of Metdom, fandom, and lifedom. A stray fact may be misconstrued here and there, and in a lesser book I might rail in anger…but we’re dealing with genius here. He’s been dissecting this team from afar since before I’d ever met a Met. Grossinger has lived in northern California—and in many other stops without good Mets reception—for several decades. He is loyal, to say the least, despite only glimpsing the team in person at Candlestick Park or at the park named after whichever phone company most recently hijacked Pac Bell. He has followed the team voraciously via satellite for years, doing so when it took engineers, a consortium of relocated East Coasters, and other baseball-mad acquaintances putting mucho dough into a pot to pay for the privilege of having a satellite dish the size of China Basin. Juan Hernandez, Keith’s dad, was on the fringes of this crowd, though he did almost all of his watching from home and often called in to analyze his son’s at-bats or pick up pointers about reception.

It’s a fascinating Quixotic world, tilting at Mets windmills just for the opportunity of seeing John Pacella pitch against the Expos. It’s a level of dedication that the many people, including those running the franchise, cannot begin to fathom. When the author writes a letter to Fred Wilpon, a family acquaintance from years past, and giddily tells him about his Satellite Baseball Club, the Mets owner’s reply is that he “intended legal action against those who were stealing his signals and I should take heed of law breaking.” It’s difficult to think of anything to say to that.

Grossinger went on a blind date at his high school prom with a knockout yet ended up in the bathroom with a transistor radio tuned to the Polo Grounds trying to gauge when Rod Kanehl would come up to bat for the ’62 Mets. Like many before him, Grossinger came of age as a Yankees fan, rooter of the familiarized victory, despiser of the arbitrary defeat. And he walked away from the glittering golden calf and embraced the 120-loss Mets. The girl at the prom respected him, too, not favoring any of the drooling non-Kanehl fans at the dance and going to a post-prom show with him. He never saw her again—though she remembered him years later when meeting his stepmother—while Kanehl indeed homered the night of the prom in a blowout loss to the Dodgers. “Clenching my fingers into brief fists, I mouthed a voiceless “Yes!” For someone like this, Maris and Mantle would no longer do.

The author, who is also a publisher, fashions this book from works both published and unpublished previously—he’s written several books on baseball as well as other varied subjects. Many of the stories in this book—with a surprisingly detailed index—are transferred to the page as if a game on September 15, 1971 has just occurred. There are countless golden moments, spilled out on the floor in random fashion, sometimes rambling, sometimes touching, often right on the mark. Recounting his life as a Mets philosopher in backwards progression, Grossinger transforms 1980s Met Terry Leach into a down-to-earth Sherpa among side-arming right-hander crowd (Grossinger published Leach’s memoirs); his mixture of wonder and melancholy in the immediate aftermath on the ’86 world championship is a clue into why the team never won again; he spends several days at Candlestick with Frank Cashen, Arthur Richman, Ron Darling, and the ’84 Mets; takes us to long-forgotten Parc Jarry in Montreal to let us taste the smoked meat; breathlessly recounts the comeback in 1973; and dreams of Wayne Garrett.

I dream of Del Unser. And I sleep better knowing there are people like this still hurling their time an energy into this team. Ah, but the payoff.

Non-Mets book recommendation: Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon (aka William Trogdon). Finally, a nonfiction recommendation! One day in the late 1970s, Mr. Moon was fired from his teaching job at Mizzou and his wife left him. Then he left. He toddled out to his vehicle, went down a small road, and he stayed on it. He circumvented the country, travelling solely on the backroads and documenting the people he came across in small towns throughout the country …and not just in the glamour states. He stopped and talked to whomever he met and wrote it up as he went along: essential people in their communities, eccentric characters, and people who came off as jerks initially and then upon further review were revealed as the complex characters that humans were made to be. A next-generation version of John Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley, Mr. Moon is not as well outfitted or connected as Mr. Steinbeck—and he also has neither a Nobel Prize nor a dog. Several years after devouring Travels with Charley (named after his companion standard poodle), I started the journey into Blue Highways. I began in 1992 and finished in 2007—the book is 450 pages, but it doesn’t take that long to read unless you put it down for a decade and a half. It sat on my shelf for all the years in between, its all-seeing book spine’s eye viewing my life through bachelorhood, marriage, two children, two dogs, two thousand pillows thrown during Mets games…and then one day I took the book off the shelf and the journey began.

Mets relevance: It’s a never-ending journey born out of desperation and taking one to places beyond imagination or comprehension.

June 2, 2009

Mets Got a

Guy, Guy, Guy, Guy

Named Broadway

I don’t usually break down transactions because there’s 50 sites that do it better. Plus I can’t foresee the future, so it makes it difficult to discern what’s a good deal and what isn’t so soon after players are exchanged. Though that doesn’t stop a lot of people from declaring a trade an unqualified stinker five minutes after it was made. Those trades are sometimes obvious from the get-go—the Kazmir-Zambrano deal didn’t take someone with a degree from the Steve Phillips Institute of Second Guessing to immediately know the Mets had screwed the pooch. But I’m generally happy whenever the Mets make a deal that allows me to start belting out the opening from Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol—my favorite cartoon in history (and don’t get me started on the greatness of the short-lived series 1960s cartoon spinoff, The Famous Adventures of Mr. Magoo—trust me, you don’t want to get me started on that).

Whether this Lance Broadway the Mets got for Ramon Castro is boffo or a yawner, remains to be seen. Broadway Lance—demoted to Buffalo after the trade, but the pitcher was drafted in the same opening round as one Mike Pelfrey in 2005—is a headline maker, even if Mr. Magoo is the only one who ever sees it.

Requiem for a Heavyweight Backstop

As for Ramon Castro, he was a Met for a long time. In Omar Minaya years, four-plus seasons is a long time indeed. Only David Wright and Jose Reyes have been around longer with the big club. (Carlos Beltran put on his Mets uniform for the first time the same year Castro did, in 2005.)

In 701 career Mets at-bats, he drove in 121 runs and had a slugging percentage of .452—that’s pretty good for a backup catcher. The problem with Castro, and the problem I think the Mets had with him, was that he was content to be a reserve and was as fragile as an oversized china doll. Despite the Mets having seemingly constant injuries to starting catchers since 2005, Castro was on the DL so often he caught more than 40 games only once, and that was in his first year with the club. He wasn’t the world greatest catcher, despite a catcher’s ERA—a stat devised by baseball wonder Craig Wright—that was a run less per game than Brian Schneider’s mark. The thing about that is Schneider isn’t that good, either. He bats left-handed and has too much in common with Ron Hodges—the last Mets lefty-hitting catcher and residing in the netherworld of the 1970s and early ’80s. I’m sure the Mets would’ve rather traded BS than RC, but Schneider has been hurt more recently than Castro even, and BS makes almost $5 mil a year. That’s almost twice as much as Castro, who can actually hit, and nobody else wants Schneider at that price. If Schneider is a Met after this year, I’d be surprised—unless it’s for a little sum with little playing time expected.

Just to prove that I am occasionally right about something before the fact, the summary from the Maple Street Press Mets 2009 Annual of Ramon Castro reads like what I wrote above and it has this: “The Mets have been wishing to see more Ramon and less of the fringe members of the backup catcher’s fraternity the club has had to employ to fill in for the oft-injured Castro. Yet when it comes to catching, the term ‘good help is hard to find’ has never been more apt.” So when the Mets found Omir Santos—signing him after the annual went to press and giving him #76 for spring training—and realized Santos could be a key contributor to the big club, Castro became expendable.

I don’t think there was any way Jerry Manuel was going to sit by and see Santos sent down to the minors to make room for Schneider when he came off the DL. Maybe Santos won’t pan out in the long haul, but he does a lot of things better than Castro…and anyone who hits a two-out, two-run homer off Jonathan Papelbon at Fenway Park is worth keeping around.

Upcoming and Outgoing

Thanks to the Holiday Inn LaGuardia and those of you who stopped by to say hello at the signing before the Omir Santos-produced victory on May 29. Mets writing colleagues Greg Spira and Jon Springer stopped by and served as special guest stars. We soon met Greg Prince under the big tent of Citi.

I’ll be signing with Keith Hernandez on Thursday, June 11 at noon at the B&N on Fifth & 46th and Sunday, June 21 at Citi Field at 11 a.m., and by my lonesome at the Stone Ridge Library Fair on Saturday, June 13 at 10 a.m. I’m also on Facebook now, for what it’s worth.

May 27, 2009

Rallying Readers

Kudos to the hearty patrons of the Barnegat Branch of the Ocean County Library in New Jersey. They put up with me being late—ugh, the traffic—and bringing just two copies of 100 Things Mets Should Know and Do Before They Die. Anyone from there, or anyone else, who wants a copy of that book as well as Shea Good-bye or any other of my wares, please email me and I can get a signed, inscribed, or blank copy of the book in time for Father’s Day or any other event (see the price guide). Thanks again to Barnegat, the library staff, and all Mets fans living in an in-Phil-trated land.

For those closer to Citi Field, I’ll be right next door at the Holiday Inn LaGuardia—don’t let the name fool you, it’s the former Bobby V.’s in Corona (37-10 114th Street)—and I’ll be there Friday, May 29, 4-7 p.m. before the Mets-Marlins game. It’s a “fly ball away from Citi Field” and a good place to meet people before a game. And pick up a few books.

May 20, 2009

Seeing the End to the World (Series)

New York is not for the provincial. The New York area loves its ballclubs, whatever hue of pinstripes they wear or how many different shirt, pants, and hat combinations a team can put together. That is why we all have to give a hip, hip, hooray that the postseason starting times have been moved to 8 p.m. Not the usual 8 p.m. followed by, “Oh, now we’ll bore you with a half hour of fluff and ads that we could have slipped in over the course of a game,” but actual start times at the top of the hour. Earlier even. Official start times are at 7:57 p.m. on Fox. They’re not sure about TBS—do we really have to have playoff games on what I like to call The Andy Griffith Show Station? Not that there’s anything wrong with Andy Griffith—but if Ange and Barn know what’s good for them, they’ll get with the program and go to 7:57 as well.

I will refrain from launching on a diatribe about how the later start times and the plodding tempo of games—especially those involving the Yankees, and yes, the Red Sox—have really put a hit on a generation of sports fans. A generation of sports fans that somehow has no trouble staying up for later start times for football or basketball postseason night games, yet somehow can’t make it through the third inning of a ballgame. I’ll refrain from that diatribe as well.

It is now 22 years since the last “daytime” World Series game, and that was in the might-as-well-be-1 a.m. perpetual darkness of the Metrodome. We’ll get a day game in the World Series one day (we’re just asking for one). Maybe another 22 years from now. I’m getting old and even I have never seen a weekday afternoon World Series game, though they frequently played afternoon Series games on weekends back in my day. It’s about time they made the games so people on the East Coast can watch the end as opposed to people in the West getting to see the whole game. (Listen on the car radio while you sit in traffic if you care so much.)

Who knows when—or even if—we will see the Mets in a World Series game at the relative dawn that is a 7:57 p.m. start. But all good baseball fans should catch a little of the World Series each year. Even if the Phillies or Rockies or Cardinals are there in the Mets’ place. Any World Series that the Yankees aren’t playing in is worth watching. If they are involved, curl up with a good book.

May 14, 2009

Journey to Metca

With the demolition of Shea Stadium, I have been searching for a place where Mets dreams and memories appear before my very eyes. I won’t call it a glorious past, because that would be inaccurate, but it certainly has been interesting. The commemorative DVDs and TV specials are great, but they’re only two dimensional. Citi Field, for all its charm, does not work as a reminder of past Mets glory once you get inside—though the outside looks great. Citi Field is the best place this side of New Orleans for a po’ boy, but the only tributes to the Mets inside the new park seem to be reactions to tough FAN love regarding the home team they forgot to honor (the old Apple repository, Doc’s signed wall, some bases in the parking lot…). I went to a subterranean museum of blue and orange gold (that statement makes sense if you want it to), a place not located in the Wilbert Robinson-Pete Reiser-Carl Erskine wine cellar at Citi Field, but far away from Queens, in the Iron Mountain of Mets Matter: Andy Fogel’s basement.

Vincent Mallozzi of the New York Times, who wrote a story about my little Mets life last year, chronicled the Fogel tale just after the Mets clinched their last postseason berth in 2006. I got the “you’re crazy” reaction when I told a recent interviewer that I bought two seats from Shea Stadium and put them in my basement, the first major memorabilia purchase of my life. My defense: “The cost of those seats included shipping and it was cheaper than four tickets in the Ebbets boxes for a Thursday night game against San Diego in April.” Which is true by about $100, I’m told. And not that I believe in Mets Mojo, but twice on the recent homestand I sat in my Shea basement seats with the game tied late and the Mets put it away that very inning. My butt has become a rally cap.

But this isn’t about me—or my butt—it’s about the great vein of Metrobilia found in Rockland County. Andy Fogel also has seats from Shea, along with seats from the Polo Grounds, stools from the Shea locker room, and a very rare wooden seat in pristine condition from the 1970s. New ownership burned the old seats in 1980. This came a few months after they removed and scrapped the signature aluminum panels that made Shea Shea.

For the End of Sheas, the savvy Mets sold everything. The sale went so well that there doesn’t seem to be much left from the old ballpark to transfer to the new ballpark. Nor does there seem to be much inclination to muss up the new digs with such dusty relics. As I’ve told anyone who asks, I like Citi Field very much. It’s very representative of the retro ballpark era that started 17 years ago. Unfortunately, you could airlift any team into the place and tell them it was their home and there would few indications to say you were wrong. There appears to be no truth to the rumor that the Dodgers will wear their home whites when they come to New York in mid-July.

Andy Fogel likes the new ballpark, too. But his basement has more Mets stuff than the million-plus square feet in Citi Field. (His collection recently moved from one of his children’s rooms to his clean, spacious basement and many of his items are newly returned from loans to NYC museums.) Andy has Joan Payson’s 1969 Styrofoam hat, not to mention her Mr. Met curtains, Casey’s uniform, Tug’s uniform, about 100 others Mets’ uniforms, the spiffy 1960s jackets worn by ushers, Ed Charles’s Mets jacket that looks like it just came off the assembly line this morning, 1969 Mets figurines, every advertisement Tom Seaver seemingly ever did (he makes Jeter look like he’s not even trying to hawk), every ticket stub save one—July 31—for the 1986 Mets, the top of the Shea foul pole that they could use at Citi Field (those paying attention will note Gary, Keith, and Ron have been discussing how short the new poles are), and more Mets pennants than the franchise could win if it lasted a thousand years.

I had a purpose for my pilgrimage. Since seemingly time began, Ken Samelson and I, plus many others have been working hard on a comprehensive telling of the 1969 Mets season and every player: The Miracle Has Landed, scheduled for fall release from Maple Street Press. It’s a group effort and a non-profit one at that for the Society of American Baseball Research. So this long-planned, much-delayed journey to Andy’s to take photos of the holy relics from his collection was well worth the wait. My reporting of his Art(Shamsky)ifacts does not do the collection justice, and neither has the team that inspired it.

So much for trying not to hop on the Citi-bashing bandwagon. I’m late to a party I tried to avoid in the first place. The wonderful Fogel basement pushed me over the top. Enough now from me about a little more Mets presence at the new stadium. I’ll let Andy’s final words from Mallozzi’s 2006 article speak for itself:

“Maybe the Mets will open a museum inside their new stadium,’’ he said. “I could certainly loan them some of my stuff for display.’’

Amen.

I wouldn't normally be so picky (oh, who are we kidding...) but I was forwarding the piece to ESPN.com to their uniform expert that I know--as well as Mr. Fogel himself--and wanted to make sure he could link up.

Thanks to Dave Doyle and the Mets Report http://metsreport.com/ for conducting an interview with me. You can win a book or two of mine there as well with your own clever commentary.