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Book Reviews:
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Three Cheers and then Some Recently, I’ve come across some Mets-related writing that knocked me out. The first, entitled “Incongruous…Remarkable…Mets” is a blog piece from Greg Prince at Faith and Fear in Flushing, but it’s the kind of writing that a periodical like Sports Illustrated used to run back when it was worth subscribing to. There is much the early Mets did wrong on the field, but the team has almost always tried to be fair to every man on its roster based on his ability, not anything else. That’s something that should count for a lot. Second, Mets Yesterday & Today is a solid pictorial history of the Mets. I don’t know author Bruce Herman, but I do know Andy Fogel, whose incalculably valuable Metrabilia finally gets it due for the world to see beyond his basement. I understand that the new Mets museum houses some of his prized collection. I can wait to see another edition of the Mets, honestly—a Mets team that can’t hit, I’m used to; one that can’t pitch makes me feel ill—but I cannot wait to see what a Mets museum at their actual stadium looks like. It’s only been half a century or so. Third, is the Amazin’ Mets Annual. As you may have heard, I help put out another fine periodical. AAA is an extremely solid effort. It was done on a volunteer basis by Eric Simon and the folks at Amazin’ Avenue. They were nice enough to review our periodical, as was Never Forget ’69. If there’s room for 100-plus Mets blogs and enough Mets book to make my office floor a hazard, there’s room for two top-notch preview magazines for the most obsessive fan base in a two-team market. Mets fans deserve it. Was there something else? Oh, yes. I managed to catch the 1980 Mets Highlight Film on SNY. I’ve only managed to catch a few of these. (Pssst, Mets. Put this and all your “Mets Yearbooks” on a DVD, videotape, Blue Ray, or film strip and I’d buy not only what you’re selling, but I’d even purchase whatever apparatus was required to watch it.) Hearing Bob Murphy talk about the 1980 team again is beyond any price. The fans back in ’80 speaking so passionately about a 95-loss team that was a marked improvement over previous editions was moving and inspiring. The magic wasn’t back, but thanks for trying. And thanks for waiting. |
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Review: Straw Poll My final selection in the Year of Reading Dangerously was penned by one of the greats in Mets history (and co-author John Strausbaugh almost sounds like a German version of the star’s last name). Straw: Finding My Way explains why he’s not in the Hall of Fame and why it’s taken 20 years for the most productive hitter in club history to get into the Mets Hall of Fame (the answer to that also lies in the team forgetting it had a Hall of Fame for seven years or so). For 20 years, the only thing Darryl really measured up to as Hall of Fame caliber was as a screw-up. He came from a broken home and a father who beat his mom, yet Darryl did the exact same thing. Darryl blew it. Repeatedly. He wound up with nothing. The money, the second chances. Gone. He lost count of how many times he failed rehab. The guy was even getting loaded at the same time he was getting chemotherapy treatments. The Mets got more out of him than anyone. He’s the all-time Mets leader in homers, runs, RBIs, extra-base hits, and almost everything else that once belonged to Ed Kranepool. Straw paints the picture of how out-of-control he and many of the Mets were in the 1980s. And while he was as bad as anyone, he did put up top notch numbers…though we always expected more. He flat out stole money from the Dodgers. Darryl got cut after failing a drug test with the Dodgers, signed with the Giants, got his ex-cop brother a job in San Francisco to essentially to keep an eye on him, and then both Strawberrys were fired when, surprise, Darryl failed another test. He landed with the Yankees and tested the patience of Steinbrenner, who treated him like a long-lost son (Darryl is more loveable than Hal). And in the end he finds himself while finding God. There are way more references to God here than in Gary Carter’s book, believe it or not, but after what Darrly did to himself—and his family, friends, and even us fans—he finally found his center with two forces that didn’t care that he was a baseball star: his third wife and God. I have to admit, I was always a little tired of Darryl as a Met and wasn’t disappointed to be rid of him after 1990. He could have stayed in New York in 1991 if he’d taken less money and he wishes he never left. After that, his body really started breaking down from playing and partying every day. He became a full-on drug addict out in his native Los Angeles. I was never surprised when I heard of Darryl’s numerous relapses. Yet when Doc Gooden was caught for the second time in 1994, I felt like my best friend had stolen my car and sold my computer to go on a binge with the girl I always had a crush on. Having grown up in the Mets dark ages, I could not believe that in the great turnaround year of 1984, the Mets had two players who could be the best at their positions in the major leagues. In their early 20s, they were better than any Mets I’ve ever seen save for Seaver and Piazza. And yet…they prove that this game is played by humans for the entertainment of humans. We all screw up, we all disappoint someone, but in the end it’s what we make of ourselves that matters. I wasn’t a choirboy in the ’80s either—or, I suppose, much of the ’90s—but I guess I was just another hypocrite who expected his ballplayers to be perfect. In this case, I expected perfect partiers who could stop themselves at 3 a.m. instead of 6, be at the ballpark ready to play by the time I bought my first beer and made my way to my seat. That these Mets fell short because of their hard partying is not news, but it is still a little melancholy to think what might have been. Or what might have been for me if I’d gotten that job in the city or at any of the 100-plus newspapers I applied to (out of those, I worked at four). But no one was watching me. We were all watching Darryl. Watching him hit a ball clear out of sight. I was at Shea when Straw got his first major league hit in 1983, was there when he hit game-tying home runs off Bob Knepper and Nolan Ryan, respectively, in a three-game span in the ’86 NLCS, and saw him break the club single-season record for homers with two bombs on the last day of ’88. And I was listening on the car radio on the way to Citi Field when I heard Darryl talking about his father on Ed Randall’s Talking Baseball this past Father’s Day. Even while planning to read every recent Mets book I could get my hands on this year, I didn’t want to read his. But the man who told a million lies when not on the field in New York, won me over with his sincerity on the air. I asked for—and got—his book as a gift. The end of his story isn’t written, and even he admits that. Unlike many recovering addicts and alcoholics, Darryl can sign his name for a few hours and make a nice payday without lifting anything heavier than a pen. He paid off his massive debts this way. And he knows that he can’t live in places where he’s easily tempted. No New York, L.A., or Florida; he’s failed in those places so many times, he now stays with loved ones when he goes there. That’s why he’s out in Missouri. But I’m glad he comes back to town to work on SNY. It’s good to have him back. And I’ll be watching when he’s inducted into the Mets Hall of Fame and try not to think of what might have been. That won’t do anyone any good now. Non-Mets Book Recommendation: This last one is a tribute to a lost soul I came across inside a red jacket—Holden Caulfield. This was my first book assignment at a high school where I didn’t know anybody and just wanted to get out. Holden showed me how not to do it. I stuck it out and was glad for it. Author J.D. Salinger died early this year, in seclusion in New Hampshire, leaving behind those who exist only to criticize. He published just a handful of stories, thumbing his nose at sequels, movie rights, all of it. He came from a time when an author could write a single work of literary fiction and live handsomely off the royalties forever (Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, did the same, to a lesser degree). He sold a quarter of a million copies per year for almost half a century. As Holden said in 1951—and forever—“A little cabin somewhere with the dough I made and live there for the rest of my life,” away from “any goddam stupid conversation with anybody.” Mets Relevance: The Catcher Raised in Rye, B.J. Surhoff was a Mets killer. The Westchester County kid was much more likeable as a Brewers catcher and Orioles outfielder than as a bastard Brave. |
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Review: Le Grand Rusty In my first year as a Mets fan, which turned out to be my only year with a loveable, red-haired, RBI machine in right field, I came up with my own musical tribute to Le Grand Orange to the tune of “Meet the Mets”: Rusty Staub, Rusty Staub, Hitting homers is his job. But picking All-Star teams of Mets is apparently not. This is a tricky review. Few and Chosen: Defining Mets Greatness Across Eras, is Rutsy’s list of the five best all-time Mets at each position. I don’t want to give the secrets away. Each selection includes an extensive writeup with stats and plenty of unknown nuggets from Rusty (not to mention Phil Pepe, who you may recall also co-wrote our last review, Gary Carter’s Still A Kid at Heart and has written Few and Chosen for the Red Sox, Cubs, Cardinals, Dodgers, Giants, Negro Leagues, and, ugh, Yankees). So what do I say here if I don’t want to give away all the choices? I dug up my own such list from Triumph, Mets Essential, which according to some paperwork I got this week is still selling a handful of copies per month somewhere (thank you) despite ending with the sky is falling because Carlos Beltran hath struck out. Imagine the horror show moment in the middle of the night, as the bleary-eyed, past-deadline, pained and exhausted Mets me of three-plus years ago, types away on Essentials, and is startled to find a decked in white Sebastian Cabot specter whispering—“This is as good as it will get for your Mets, Mr. Valentine. Mr. Ellis Valentine. Hahahahahahahahahaha…” Scary stuff indeed. Fortunately, Ellis Valentine didn’t make Rusty’s top five—but Bobby Bonilla did. NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!! There are a few other head scratchers as well as Rusty rates ‘em five deep at each position. So I’ve created a parlor game to compare Rusty’s list to mine in Mets Essential. Given that mine is a pretty traditional and, of course, wise list, that should give some hint as to might have placed first in each position on Rusty’s list. I’ll go first. 1B—Same as mine (hint: he also wrote Rusty’s foreword) 2B—Different SS—Different 3B—Same LF—Same CF—Different RF—Same C—Same RHP—Same LHP—Same Closer—Different Manager—Same Now comes the inquisition. Rusty makes a couple of baffling choices, including bypassing his former teammate as best closer: Tug McGraw. I consider Tug the best Mets reliever ever. No doubt. I take most of those saves the later closers have and dump them in the recycle bin because the conversion rate of a John Franco save to a Tug McGraw save is Pi (3.14). As an example of his give me the ball and leave me in ability, consider this: Tug McGraw pitched six innings of relief for the Mets in a World Series game. And got the win. His five games in the 1973 World Series covered 13.2 innings, or more than Jesse Orosco and Roger McDowell combined (13 IP) in the 1986 Series. Orosco deserves honorable mention for closer, and I’ll take McDowell, too (they also make Rusty’s list). Everyone else, keep your bullpen jackets on. Up the middle, we’re in complete disagreement. At second base he picked an All-Star but the problem is this guy played one full season as a Met—he was acquired and traded in the middle of seasons and two strike years don’t a full season make. His only 162 schedule season he put up decent numbers for a 103-loss team. Bet you Kent guess who it is. His shortstop had a Mets slugging percentage that was 23 points lower than Rey Ordonez’s! Hey, we’re comparing different eras and all, Bud when I put together my list after the 2006 season, Jose Reyes was so far beyond any other Mets shortstop that I picked Howard Johnson as the backup infielder on my 25-Met all-time roster (along with Ron Hunt, giving the early 1960s Mets a little love). Rusty’s center fielder was already mentioned in this piece and he wasn’t on my team because in 2006 he hadn’t been a Met long enough. I’d have him on my team now, but I’d be booking the knee operations for him. Rusty has some very good stories I’d never heard in this book. And he’s modest enough to take himself out of the running for best right fielder. It’s Strawberry hands down, anyway, but that’s a classy move by Le Grand Orange. Pepe, who covered Rusty in New York, gives readers a rundown on how good his co-author was. And Rusty was extremely good. Especially for a Mets hitter in the 1970s. In December 1975—after just one season of my worshipping him from my Channel 9 altar (he’d come to the Mets from Montreal in 1972)—Rusty was sent to Detroit for a big-time southpaw who was by then just big. The Mickey Lolich of 1976 did not inspire song. Rusty’s book of all-time Mets might inspire outrage in some readers, so be careful. But I’m giving Rusty the benefit of the doubt. Rusty earned his way onto my all-time Mets roster for his production in right field in the 1970s and his legendary off-the-bench bat in the 1980s. His book’s worth a swing or two as well. |
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Review: The Kid Is Hot Tonight My most distant memory of watching my first Mets night game on TV came from the high-pitched PA announcer at Jarry Park: “The catcher…Number 8…Gar-ee Car-tar…” This pronouncement, of course, came moments after the PA man had said the exact same thing in French. As my disinterested brothers tried to relax after spending all day working, my 10-year-old self followed behind like Columbo, peppering them with questions, “Now let me get this straight…not only is my team playing a game in another country, but they’re speaking French there? Are all the Expos Canadian? Does the game follow the same rules up there?” A definitive and stereophonic, “I don’t know!” followed perhaps the ninth such question. I went back in front of WOR where Lindsey, Bob, and Ralph filled in what I needed to know…on Quebecois baseball and all other matters. I kind of thought Still a Kid at Heart, Gary Carter’s 2008 autobiography with former Daily News columnist Phil Pepe would fill me in on some of the questions about Montreal baseball that I’d never gotten answers to. Well, the book told the story of Carter’s growing up in California, getting drafted by the Expos, being converted to catcher, coming up to the majors at age 20, and actually spending gobs of time in the outfield because of a schlub named Barry Foote. Carter finally got to catch full time when manager Dick Williams got to Montreal and said, “You’ve got to be kidding me!” Foote soon began his odyssey in the backup catcher’s union with a trade to Philadelphia and Carter became a full-fledged star. He immediately became the second-best catcher in the league next to Johnny Bench; when Bench’s days as an everyday backstop ended c. 1980, Carter immediately became the class of the field. Carter won three straight Gold Glove Awards before the voters fell in love with Tony Pena’s catching-while-doing-a-split-technique and starting handing the award to him. Yet as far as best all-around catcher in the NL in the 1980s, there was no question it was Carter. He even starred in games that didn’t count—winning MVP of two All-Star Games as an Expo—and homering twice in Cleveland in the only Sunday night in August All-Star Game. That Late Summer Classic kicked off baseball’s “second half,” a Cracker Jack prize of an idea (that means it was cheap, plastic, and should have been thrown under your seat). I thought a split-season was a stupid idea then and it sounds even dumber writing about it now. But that convoluted season did help the Expos finally reach the playoffs. The Expos of that era made the Mets gaggers of the recent past look cool under late-season pressure. Montreal finished second by two games in 1979 and one game in 1980 to clubs that wound up as world champions. The Expos won the ’81 second-half title by a half game over the Cardinals, who had the best record in the division for the season and didn’t qualify for the expanded postseason round-robin tournament (the same thing happened to the Reds in the NL West). The Expos clinched their only postseason appearance at Shea Stadium, the same place where they began and ended their existence. All this would have been great to hear more about from a key participant, but there’s only about 30 pages in the book on everything that happened up until he got to the Mets. I did learn about such things as the since-revoked tax laws that required him to live in Montreal, and his efforts to speak French (he even uttered a couple of sentences in French during his 2003 induction speech as the first Expo in Cooperstown—to be joined this summer by Andre Dawson; hope he’s boning up on his Français). Carter had hoped to spend his whole career in Montreal and signed a seven-year contract at the early 1980s for $14 mil (that’s US dollars and that’s the total sum). The club instead made Carter the first in a depressingly long line of Expos home-grown stars traded away. If you want insights on Montreal’s run to the abyss, I’d suggest http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSyCu5b_UYs. Fellow Mets fanatic/closet Expos lamenter Greg Prince turned me on to the panel discussion about WTF happened to les Expos. That MLB let that franchise whither and die while Bud Selig’s Brewers were permitted to switch leagues in order to line his stadium with Cubs fans’ money several times per summer and the Diamondbacks were brought in as an NL franchise when they should have been a frigging AL team is one of many reasons I’m storing up ice balls to put in a cooler and hurl at the head of the Bud Selig statue that is being erected in Milwaukee this summer. A bronze relief of Milwaukeean Leather Tuscadero would be more appropriate. Obviously, don’t get me started on how MLB screwed the pooch on Montreal ball. But I thought the man who was once the face of the Expos might have strong feelings on it. Maybe he will for his third biography. (He wrote A Dream Season in 1987 with John Hough Jr.) It’s pretty obvious Carter treads light because he spends a good part of the latter portion of the book lobbying for a managing job. He does toss in a nice Tony Bernazard story about when, as a manager in the Mets minor leagues, Carter was told to go to Binghamton, while the Hall of Famer and Florida resident preferred to stay at St. Lucie. Tactful Tony told him it was Bingo or No-go. Kid then managed in independent ball in his native California. While promoting this book, Carter made his fateful comments about wanting Willie Randolph’s job while Willie still had it. Jerry Manuel, Carter’s former Expos teammate, had one less contender for the job after that. Now listen, I enjoyed reading the book. It was a quick read and I got some pleasure out of reliving the heroics of 1986. I met Gary Carter at a New Jersey event Jon Springer and I were working and Kid signed a book for me. I even gave him a copy of 100 Things Mets Fans Should Know and Do Before They Die. He really is a nice man—and said he couldn’t wait to read my book (it only took me 22 months to read his). He’d want me to give my honest view. And here it is: If you want to relive a little of the ’86 magic now that the Mets seem as likely to finish fourth as they are to wind up first, this book will do the trick. Carter kept the God references in check, which surprised me. His mom died of leukemia when he was 12. Enduring that as a preteen had to be harder than the thousands of balls he took off his body in nearly two decades behind the plate in the majors. It was easy to knock Carter in the ’80s as a goody-good when the Mets were filled with bad guys and hard partiers in a bad-guy, hard-partying era, but at the end of the day, the choir boy started the Game 6 rally for the ages and he’s the only ’86 Met in the Hall of Fame. And he belongs. If I had my way, I toss out about a third of the plaques in Cooperstown, but Carter is clean—both record and soul. If you want your son to grow up to be a ballplayer, Carter is one you’d want him to emulate. Kid you not. Non-Mets Book Recommendation: Given Gary Carter’s spirituality, I go with Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel. So as not to confuse anyone, the title is more spiritual than the content, but this is a book in which the way things are written far surpasses any action in the book—and it is far from dull. I have to admit, though, I was actually more taken with Wolfe’s subsequent novel, You Can’t Go Home Again, about the way people in his North Carolina hometown picked apart the young writer for his coming of age novel Look Homeward, Angel. (The angel in the title refers to the father of the main character, whose powerful craving for drink overshadows his almost divine ability to carve seemingly perfect angels on headstones.) But maybe You Can’t Go Home Again speaks more to what happened in Carter’s attempt to work his way through the ranks as a manager with the club he helped make into a champion long, long ago. Mets Relevance: Like Kid Carter, Thomas Wolfe was a no doubt Hall of Famer who did just fine without the approval of those he once treasured. |
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Review: The Echoing Green I have to admit, for my year of reading dangerously, I read most of the good Mets books early. I needed some stories I hadn’t heard 20 times, so I added the Red Sox and Cubs’ interesting—if not star-crossed—histories to the list. I wanted something a little closer to home and nothing can touch the blood feud the Giants and Dodgers shared in New York. While there are fierce baseball rivalries today—including the Red Sox-Yankees, Cubs-Cardinals, and the California version of Giants-Dodgers, they pale in comparison to two teams located a few miles apart playing 22 times per year in an era when interest in the game was at its peak. I owed it myself and you, dear reader, to look into this a little deeper. The Echoing Green, the title borrowed from William Blake’s 18th century poem, is the story of the Giants’ sign-stealing during the fateful 1951 pennant race and, to my surprise, in their championship year of 1954 as well. (They did not try their flim flam in either World Series.) As long as there have been signs, there’s been someone trying to steal them from the coaching box, the dugout, and while dancing off second base. While those have always been accepted cheating practices, “the book” dictates some things are fine and others aren’t—spitballing, OK; loading up on speed or greenies, OK; injecting yourself with testosterone, human growth hormone, women’s fertility drugs, or a myriad of other substances that wouldn’t pass an Olympic Drug Test, is bad; and using high-powered telescopes and electronic signaling devices to instantly relay which pitch is coming, is bad, too. Bobby Thomson’s home run into the lower deck at the Polo Grounds in the ninth inning on October 3, 1951 is still considered by some to be the landmark moment in New York sports. The man who surrendered that home run, Ralph Branca, has carried around not just the brunt of this defeat for close to six decades, he also knew for most of that time that the Giants had used mechanical means to steal his signs. And he said little about it. Branca, renowned as a goat for most of his adult life, comes out as the hero in Joshua Prager’s incredibly researched—and occasionally overly detailed—book on the pennant-deciding game and its decades long aftermath (the paperback version came out in 2008). But I always knew Ralph Branca was a hero. The Brancas lived in my hometown of White Plains and are still close with my family. When eldest daughter, Patti Branca, was first tormented by a classmate about the home run at Our Lady of Sorrows School in 1960, my sister was in the classroom down the hall. My first ticket to Shea Stadium—for 1975 Yankees Old-Timers Day (one of the last in which the pitcher would serve as Thomson’s gopherballing stooge)—came courtesy of the Brancas. My first spring training was at their behest in 1979; inviting my parents and me to Vero Beach for the opening of Dodgers camp, where I got a fake punch in the belly from Terry Forster, was informed I shook hands “like a dead fish” by Tommy Lasorda, and played catch with Steve Garvey. True to my Mets and myself, I maintained my hatred of the Dodgers even after their extreme courtesy. I still hate those Brooklyn-abandoning bums (not the affectionate use of that term) as much as any team not named the Yankees. But they were screwed out of the ’51 pennant. Prager, whose 2001 Wall Street Journal article once and for all blew the whistle on the clandestine sign-stealing rumors, painstakingly recreates the Polo Grounds as if he’d just come from it on the banks of the Harlem River. The room he spends the most time in, however, is Giants manager Leo Durocher’s office, located above dead center field in the Polo Grounds with a perfect view of home plate. Well, perfect if you’re holding a Wollensak telescope. Three nondescript ballplayers: Herman Franks, Hank Schenz, and Sal Yvars, the latter a Westchester County chum of Branca’s, did most of the sign-stealing. Durocher, upon learning of Schenz’s scoreboard spying at Wrigley Field, asked his Giants, 13 games out at one point: “Who wants the signs?” Monte Irvin said no. Durocher stopped asking and started making arrangements for Abraham Chadwick, Dodgers fan and union electrician of the Polo Grounds, to install a simple buzzer system from Durocher’s office to the bullpen, where Yvars relayed the signs to the batter. In an eight-team league with pitchers tossing a limited assortment of pitches, it wasn’t hard for Herman Franks to get the hang of the system and move from third base coaching box to a more valuable perch. And that’s where I’ll leave you. It is a fine book that tells the complete tale of perhaps baseball’s greatest secret. Many—but not all—of the participants kept mum for decades. Franks, later a manager of the Giants and Cubs, took his role to the grave a year ago. Thomson often denied it until old age and guilt finally got him to tell Prager his version. Thomson comes off as a well-meaning, hard-working guy, who succeeded after his career as a paper bag salesman, just as Branca did in insurance. They both did extremely well by showing up for events as the memorabilia boom grew and grew. And in the end, if Thomson knew what was coming, he still had to hit it. And hit it he did. Around the world. I feel a little guilty myself for bringing up my relationship with Ralph Branca. I told a friend at Camp Pelican in 1976 of how I knew the Brancas and before you knew it he was inviting himself over and we were in the Branca foyer with a couple of baseballs to present for signature. Though neither Ralph nor Ann Branca minded and she and my mother spent a half hour talking in the kitchen while we listened to stories of the grand old game, I felt like I had broken some great secret. It’s perhaps somewhat fitting then that Topper later ripped the cover completely off my signed ball. (Yes, my dog ate it.) I’ve run into Ralph Branca at baseball events we both worked, plus an unforgettable day when my dad gave me a ticket to play in the Baseball Assistance Team golf outing (Ralph was BAT president). But I never asked for another autographed ball or even an on-record interview. When a minor Daily News story mentioned a Mets by the Numbers event in 2008, I got a surprise call the next day from Ralph Branca asking how it went, wishing me well, and saying he was proud of my accomplishments. I knew he was a hero long before I ever knew about any telescope. Non-Mets Book Recommendation: Jeff Pearlman is another expert researcher, storyteller, and deconstructor of sports myths—even if he dwells on the more salacious exploits. The author of 1986 Mets myth-buster The Bad Guys Won takes down a team in dire need of humbling, the 1990s Dallas Cowboys. The Cowboys are the reason I’m an Arizona Cardinals fan. A Cowboys-Cardinals game was on the set—a rare break from the normal double helping of Giants or Jets snoozefests in the mid-1970s—and while I didn’t know enough about football to have a favorite team, I knew from the one previous football game I watched, Super Bowl X, that I disliked Dallas. When the Cards beat them, I was on the board for the worst football bandwagon in history. Boys Will Be Boys detonates the overcrowded “America’s Team” bandwagon. After the heavy-handed firing of Tom Landry, the only coach in club history, jackass Jimmy Johnson built the Cowboys up from nothing—in spite of jerkoff Jerry Jones. Dallas won two straight Super Bowls, something even Landry couldn’t do and something only Lombardi, Shula, and Noll had done previously. (It helped that the ’90s Cowboys faced a very weak AFC and would have rolled San Diego if they’d avoided one bad quarter against the 49ers in the 1994 NFC title game. Oh well.) During the reigns of Johnson and bumbling Barry Switzer, the Cowboys did so much boozing, snorting, smoking, stripclubbing, and whoring, it’s remarkable they even woke up on Sundays, much less won. For all Cowboys haters—and even Cowboys fans who like a good debauch tale or a thousand—this is entertaining and, better yet, true. Going another 12 years without a playoff win wouldn’t be retribution enough. Mets Relevance: You know you wish there were these kinds of stories about the Yankees. Well, there’s always A-Clod. |
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Review: My Teddy Ballgame One day after a 1976 whirlwind eight-hour trip to the Baseball Hall of Fame—and getting my first glimpse of a shop that sold every item imaginable from every major league team—my father took me to dinner to an Italian restaurant in Silver Lake, five minutes from our house. He dragged me away from the TV, where the Giants would beat the brand-new, cool-helmeted Seahawks (Tampa Bay, an AFC in ’76 only, would lose every game and make Seattle look a brilliant expansion franchise). My dad and I left for what I didn’t know was a “big talk” at Casserella’s. I remember I was eating salad when he announced his “big plan” for me. I know it was salad because I kept looking at the orange French dressing, unable to look up after he said, “I think you should go to the Ted Williams Baseball Camp this summer.” I suppose that during the long ride in the car up the windy roads to Cooperstown I had let on that I indeed wanted to play baseball, if not professionally, at least well. And having watched my first two years ever playing the game, well, I was just terrible. My first year I struck out every time up—save for one glorious walk—and was hit in the mouth with one of the few balls hit to me in right field. Year two, I choked up like Felix Millan so as to make contact—and did! A swinging bunt on a frozen April day got me my first ever hit—they did not stop the game to present the ball to my dad—and then the rest of the year I defied Felix the Cat’s guaranteed contact technique by striking out my other eight times up (plus a couple of walks). My fielding was timid, at best. I needed help and my dad didn’t have the large time commitment required to turn me into an even passable player. And he firmly believed that if you want to learn to do something, you take lessons from a pro. I generally eschewed directions and tried to figure things out as I went. Still do. Between dinner in Silver Lake and the eve of my departure, I actually got better at the game. I practiced every day and played in a very competitive softball league in a sixth-grade class that had enough kids to draft four teams (I was taken, alas, by the Yankees, but I was a mid-level pick and played second base). The day before I left for Massachusetts, we got a call from a classmate’s mom that my gym teacher, Mr. Castallano, who’d helped my confidence and my ballplaying, had died in a river rafting trip. I’d never known anyone under 30 who’d died before, though I recalled the death a few months earlier of 29-year-old Bob Moose, hurler of a no-hitter vs. the ’69 Mets (pp. 355-56 of The Miracle Has Landed; ironically, the story is written by my first baseman on the sixth-grade Iona Yankees, Bruce Markusen). I was stunned. I now feared about both the end of my own life and leaving home for the first time. I was 12. And being 12, I soothed myself the only way I knew: by watching the Mets. This Seaver-less collection of bastards and castoffs of 1977, a team who would be mocked by a camp full of Red Sox and Yankees fans, was all that was keeping me going. The innings clicked on in this tie game: 14th, 15th, 16th, letting myself get wrapped in the tepid tenseness on TV, knowing it would be the last Mets game I would see for at least three weeks. And then finally, in the 17th inning, Lenny Randle homered. The Mets won. Paul Seibert, one the nameless crew acquired in the Midnight Massacre of less than a month earlier, was on base for the homer and got his first Mets win. As Ray Liotta said in Goodfellas: “Now take me to jail.” I did not swallow any painkiller sans water like in the Scorcese film, but I’d have probably tried some if offered. When my dad drove me into the city that Sunday to step onto the bus for the long ride to Lakeville, it sure felt like prison to me. It needn’t have. I learned a lot about baseball and about what life is like when 40 kids are in one large dorm room and Mom isn’t there to make beds and Dad isn’t around to try to give you perspective on things you have no clue about. I hit a baseball over someone’s head for the first time (a shortstop’s), pitched off a mound for the first time (sidearm, like Gene Garber), and I got spiked for the first time in my first All-Star Game (there were a lot of these—so forget the instant transformation movie angle). I actually went back two more times, and asked Ted Williams a question. (“Mr. Williams, who do you think are the best players in baseball today?” “Well, I don’t follow the game like I used to, but I’d say George Foster and Greg Luzinski.” Um, all right.) And in the summer of 1980 a bespectacled coach, whose name I’ve long forgotten, took me aside in the batting cage and gave me sorely-needed advice after I’d just gotten my first set of glasses (the result of season unable to hit with authority or read with clarity the blackboard as a high school freshman). The TWC coach told me, “You either wear glasses all the time or you spend your life looking for them.” Indeed when I went to college three years later, the one thing I held in my favor as a calm yet petrified college freshman, who’d played high school baseball—thank you, Ted—was that six years earlier I’d gotten on that bus to Lakeville. How hard could this be? Turns out it wasn’t so bad, either. Sooooooooooooooooooooo…what does all this have to do with Ted Williams : The Biography of an American Hero? This interminable back story is the alternate beginning to this piece. “I’ve loved Ted Williams for more than 30 years.” Now you know why. I later edited his final autobiography, Ted Williams: My Life in Pictures and helped choose, locate, and lay out (with designer Todd Radom) the book’s photos in 2001. And if my dad, who never would have gone to Shea if not for my incessant prodding, trusted Ted Williams with his youngest child—after spotting the camp’s ad in a Mets scorecard—then what’s not to love about The Splendid Splinter? And Ted Williams sure could play. It’s a tall task to write about baseball’s version of John Wayne, but Leigh Montville swings back with his own swagger. Armed with more than 400 interviews, he eschews the “and then in the seventh inning” approach. He rather tells us about the man and sets the scene for what happened the night before he went 6 for 8 to hit .406, his All-Star walkoff homer in Detroit, and adding new insights to the already well-documented HR in final AB legend. It covers the cussing, the fishing, the generosity, the naivety, the women, and yes, the sad demise of the “Greatest Hitter Who Ever Lived.” I’d liked to have known Ted Williams enough to ask him if Nap Lajoie, Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, Tris Speaker, Babe Ruth, or Rogers Hornsby before him might have laid equal claim to the greatest hitter mantle, but he probably would have thrown a telephone at me. Or, he might have said, “That’s a friggin’ good question. Why don’t any of you friggin’ ‘yes men’ ever challenge me like that!” Because you never knew what was going to come out of his mouth. But like anything off his bat, there was a good chance it would come at you hard. If anyone should receive credit for the birth of “Red Sox Nation,” it’s Teddy Ballgame. Sure, the Sox were dead in Boston before Yaz and Lonborg revved up the Impossible Dream machine in ’67, but Ted Williams’s stature grew and grew the farther away from the game he got. If there was a Mount Rushmore of Baseball, you can bet your ass one of those heads would be Ted Williams. And that brings us to the sad conclusion of the book. The decapitation of the dead Ted for cryonization. Just warning you that it’s there. All the details, the seemingly stable family members I actually had dealings with for My Life in Pictures, gone right ’round the bend, hiding behind answers like “private family business” when discussing the subject. I’m sorry. You don’t do that to the man or the public that loved him, not after this icon of millions and generations made a whole nation cry by doffing his “hitter.net” cap (oh, Montville, goes into that wardrobe travesty as well). That night at Fenway in the 1999 All-Star Game, the Kid, almost 80, essentially said goodbye to us all. And I wish Montville’s book could have closed with that image, like we were able to do for My Life in Pictures. But what happened to Ted in the last three years of his life and the months that followed his death needs to be chronicled in such a painstaking way so that perhaps the heirs of other great men will think before being so callous to the man who made their fortunes and the millions who helped create an icon with their worship. Williams did what he wanted, lived however he felt, and his growing legion of admirers made sure that he was never went lacking, whether it was lucrative post-ballplaying endorsements with Sears—where he probably gave them a lot more feedback than they were expecting—pitching Nissen bread, or just signing his name on anything. He even had a house and a Hall of Fame built for him just for moving to godforsaken, landlocked Hernando, Florida. I was there on a business trip after our Williams book came out—Ted was in the hospital—and no one went to Hernando after he died; hence the reason the museum has moved to Tropicana Field post-Ted. But read the book, whether you like the Sox or hate them. It’ll make you realize why the Mets even broke tradition in 1999 by honoring someone from another team not called the Dodgers. The Tommy Ballgame of the Mets, the boastful Seaver, was truly humbled when he drove the great Williams around Shea Stadium, a place where Williams never played or even managed with the Rangers/Senators. Teddy Ballgame transcends team loyalties. Williams was a good man all the way through, unlike some other icons of the day, he fought in two wars and didn’t want to be in either, but he did it. And nearly got his butt shot off. We really should be careful in our days of constant war when we attach the word hero to any ballplayer, but with Ted Williams, hero only begins the conversation. Non-Mets Book Recommendation: I thought about this one for a while and there’s no great biography I’ve read that I can compare this to. I often go for novels or nonfiction histories that deal with a time rather than an individual. A book that gives biographical vignettes of the men who made the game and never let it go, even in old age, is among the greatest of sporting books: Lawrence S. Ritter’s The Glory of Their Times. If the names Smoky Joe Wood, Harry Hooper, Sam Crawford, Edd Roush, Fred Snodgrass, Lefty O’Doul, Goose Goslin, Paul Waner, and Davy Jones (not the Monkee) don’t mean anything to you, you must read this book to call yourself a true baseball fan. I bought the book and did not read it for several years and when I finally did I thought of myself as a horse’s ass for not having done so before. There is even an audiobook with all the actual interviews of these greats conducted by the late Ritter, then an unknown who just wanted to hear the stories from the source, not the versions diluted by reporters of yore on deadline or those with too much imagination. Mets Relevance: The old-timers tell of a purer baseball that did not need gimmicks or sluggers who shot themselves with needles while those who should have been looking out for the game instead looked the other way. There are no Mets without these oldtimers. We need this type of men of character in this game again. Desperately. |
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Crazy ’08: Trio of Bear Cubs In my year of reading dangerously, I’ve gone through a bunch of Mets books and come out the other side. Before it was the Red Sox. This installment is the three little bears. Cubs, for short. Some Mets fans have a problem with the Cubs. I’ve tried to be mad at them, but life’s too short to hold much enmity for a city that houses the best ballpark still standing. But rest assured Cubs fans hate the Mets and the city. It all goes back to 1969, when the Amazin’ Mets stole a division title the Cubs had in their paws all season. Though the Cubs have subsequently beaten out the Mets for division titles in 1984 and 1989, left the Mets on the outside looking in for the 1998 wild card, and the teams took turns spoiling postseason parties for the Cubs in 2004 (the Victor Diaz home run game) and the Mets in the last week of the 2008 season (trashing our Shea Goodbye moment). It’s a nice rivalry, what’s left of it since the Cubs shifted to the NL Central 15 years ago, but I’m taking you back before there was even the Mets, way back… Crazy ’08 by Cait Murphy I’ve long been crazy for ’08. And I don’t mean 2008. A hundred and one years ago, the Giants and Cubs were bitter enemies indeed. And it was not a one-way hate. The Cubs-Giants rivalry led F.P. Adams, a New York columnist who’s word count had come up short, to quickly pen the most memorable filler item of all time. It’s the year that baseball became the passion of American sports and Murphy paints a beautiful picture—I’m going to use present tense for this review because she so beautifully uses it that tense to create an immediacy to the proceedings a century gone. She tells how every major league city feels about baseball in 1908. Cleveland, Detroit, and Pittsburgh run hot and cold with their baseball teams (not unlike today). The White Sox have an inferiority complex. In three starts Stan Covelski does more for the Phillies than anyone in their previous quarter century of existence…and the Phillies aren’t even in the race. This is just about the best written baseball book I’ve ever read. But it’s about much more than simply baseball. I’ll let a real sportswriting heavyweight tell you—as he does in the introduction: Robert W. Creamer (and if you don’t know his work, you’ve got some more reading to do). “You might think her background as a writer for Forbes magazine, dealing with business and economics, could weigh down her prose, but you would be wrong,” Creamer writes. “She bops, if you’ll forgive an antique verb that she probably wouldn’t use. Her prose bounds along. It moves.” And I’ll break in that she doesn’t misconstrue a single fact. She doesn’t hide any truths that would be inconvenient. She tells it as it happens. It reads like a novel. Only better. Only truer. She took her considerable smarts and put them into the season that made baseball baseball. And she’s a Mets fan, I’m told. Even if I hadn’t known that…it just figures. What Cait relates that makes ’08 so great is she shows—not just tells—how attending a ballgame at the Polo Grounds feels, how hot a Pullman car gets in August with everyone in wool suits, how crazy it is on the field and why Fred Merkle would want to light out for the clubhouse without touching second, how crammed those same stands get the day of the Cubs-Giants makeup game in New York, and how the Cubs that day truly had to be protected from the mobs, bribers, and even cops. She doesn’t wring out drama that doesn’t exist. She rightfully says that after this knock-down drag-out race in both leagues, the World Series is a flat-out, one-sided bore. Cubs beat the Tigers in five—that’ll have to last ‘em. Three Finger by Cindy Thomson and Scott Brown I used to devour previously unopened coffee table books on baseball history I found on dusty book shelves. I found myself drawn to the deadball era, when games were won on hustle and smarts rather than brawn or a lively ball or lively bodies like those that have scarred these last 20 years of the game. Give me McGinnity, Matty, and McGraw, or their despised foes: Tinker, Evers, Chance, Steinfeldt, Schulte, Orval Overall, and Mordecai “Three-Finger” Brown. Even in the present day, as you hunch forward in the tight moments at Citi Field, you get that same rush as the cranks clinging to a cliff on Coogan’s Bluff. That’s why the ballpark beats Plasma and HD. At the park, there’s only the game being played right now. Look sharp! Turn your head at Chicago’s West Side Grounds at the wrong moment, you might miss something you’ll never see again. It’s gone in an instant, only left to the oodles of scribes writing up the action in great detail for a dozen papers. Imagine if there was no replay, no “Mets Classics,” only what your eyes could see. No radio. For a big game, they might put up a board on a streetcorner and onlookers could follow pitch by pitch. But look sharp, man. Here’s the pitch… In the 1908 makeup game between the Giants and Cubs, with the Polo Grounds packed beyond all understanding, and the crowd roaring, Jack Pfeister is clearly not up to the task in the bottom of the first inning. Cubs player-manager Frank Chance—the only one of the trio in the F.P. Adams poem actually worthy of enshrinement in Cooperstown—calls in his ace. Quoting another poem, this one by W.J. Lampton, used in both the Murphy and Brown books: “And come to this town To razzle the Giants With Mordecai Brown. Mordecai, Mordecai, Three-fingered Brown.” The authors describe Three Finger’s entrance onto the field as “pushing back Giants fans who tried to block his way. He dared a faceless foe to threaten him in broad daylight instead of with letters. He joked that he’d die before a capacity crowd if the Mob cared to come after him.” No one in New York wanted Brown to pitch, but he did, and he got out of the inning, and he won. Brown won twice more in the last World Series the Cubs could call their own. Then there’s his name: “Three Finger.” Let’s get this straight, he actually had four fingers—his index finger was cut off in a childhood accident on the farm—but his unique grip made the ball move in ways that baffled hitters for the better part of 14 seasons. A master of changing speeds, he won at least 20 games six straight times, and six times his ERA was below 2.00. His 2.06 career ERA is the lowest in National League history. Co-author Scott Brown is part of the family Mordecai’s kin left behind in Kentucky. The authors believe that the 1869 move to Indiana was based on the Browns having some Cherokee blood, and given that time period, the idea of relocation to reservations because of heritage is something no one would have wanted to risk. Nyesville, Indiana was safer, a great place to farm, and birthplace of Mordecai Peter Centennial Brown in 1876. The book includes the only known photo of the boy with all five fingers on his right hand at age five. According to Mordecai’s own writing, “Every finger on my hand was chopped to ribbons” by a feed-cutting machine. A subsequent fall in a tub while playing with a pet rabbit broke six more bones. The familiar children’s refrain, “Don’t tell dad,” led to a poor bandaging job that inadvertently created a Hall of Fame hurler. “Manhattan is busted, The pennant is down, And the Giants are walloped By Mordecai Brown. Mordecai, Mordecai, Three-fingered Brown.” Miracle Collapse by Douglas Feldmann A University of Nebraska book—as is Three Finger—this is the tale of the first really good Cubs team since World War II. The ’69 Cubs were blessed with a remarkable infield, a Hall of Fame left fielder, one of the most tireless catchers in history (Randy Hundley, Todd’s dad), and a stellar starting staff back in the days when you could still win without a greatest bullpen. Manager Leo Durocher used the same players over and over and over again in the hot Chicago sun. Feldmann doesn’t see the overuse of his stars—remember there were no lights at Wrigley Field, so every game was an afternoon game—to be as big of a factor as the surge by the Mets, who got every break known to man and had a superb stable of young pitchers. If there is one thing in baseball I most regret not seeing—and this covers everything from the aforementioned Three Finger, Honus Wagner, Christy Mathewson, Walter Johnson, Tris Speaker, Babe Ruth, Rogers Hornsby, Ted Williams, Willie Mays, and so forth—“Look Who’s Number 1”…the ’69 Mets. It was interesting reading Miracle Collapse while also putting together The Miracle Has Landed. and just after finishing work on another Cubs book, Cubs by the Numbers. Full disclosure, I did contact Mr. Feldmann and used his excerpt about “The Black Cat” at Shea on September 9, 1969 for The Miracle has Landed. I’ll also disclose that it’s important to know the team the Mets beat out in their greatest year and why the Cubs still hate us, when we’re—or at least I’m—not that angry at them. Wait’ll the Cubs and Mets meet in the postseason some day. One of these teams will have to win. And maybe a feral cat will get the idea to come out midgame again and tilt the odds once more. Purrrrrrrrrrrrrrrfect. Non-Mets Book Recommendation: Since this entry isn’t long enough or already has enough books, here’s one for the fiction shelf while you’re shopping for that fan on your holiday list…oh who are we kidding, it’s for you. On the subject of the oughts—not our current oughts but those of Mordecai and Matty—I must recommend Eric Rolfe Greenberg’s The Celebrant, one of the best novels on sport that I’ve read. Meticulously researched, there’s not a fact out of place, yet the narrative has a life of its own. I learned an awful lot about the game back in the day, the personality of the players, and jewelry—read it and you’ll find out why. As superb as a Three-Finger curve. Mets Relevance: Much like a true Mets fans should know everything possible about the ’69 Mets, dig deeper, man—or woman—and you’ll find a Giants crank in your seat at the park in suit and tie, with bowler hat perched on head (of course a woman of the day might be dressed differently). You work at a job simply because it lets you out in time for the game each afternoon at Coogan’s Bluff. Yes, sir. That’s the stuff. |
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Review: Escaping to a Better Place (in the Standings)
This year I’ve been reading baseball books at a prodigious rate and dutifully reporting on their readability. It’s been swell, really, but the way this season went, I needed a little escape from the Mets morasses. So I fled to New England through the power of books. And man, was that freakin’ sweet. In fact I did it twice: Game Six: Cincinnati, Boston and the 1975 World Series: The Triumph of America’s Pastime by Mark Frost and ’78: The Boston Red Sox, a Historic Game, and a Divided City. by Bill Reynolds. I went to the Book Expo in New York back when the Mets were in first place in those heady days of late May. Uncorrected proofs of Frost’s Game Six were doled out at the Javitts Center and I grabbed one. I waited in line for a few minutes and talked to the bestselling author, hoping some pixie dust might wipe off on my book sales or writing skills. Frost’s book is just coming out now in stores, but it made for a fun summer read because…drumroll, please…I was once almost a Red Sox fan. Let me explain. I was sent home from school in early October 1975 because my cat, Lorelei, had just come in from a summer outdoors with fleas to spare infecting me while she was at it. I was sent to the nurse’s office and summarily banished. Not quite head lice disgrace but still subject to sufficient ridicule. The rash—and humiliation—stayed with me for a few days and in the meantime, the World Series got going. My first World Series. I didn’t know much about the teams, but I knew I didn’t like the Reds, who’d slaughtered the Mets in my first summer as a fan. I’d seen just enough Mets games that year to fall for the big lugs in blue pinstripes, making me impervious to attempts by other teams to steal my heart. Though the Yankees played at Shea that year—and I was taken to a Yankees game at Shea before I ever attended a Mets game!—I quickly learned an ever-riding principle of life and love: Most Yankees fans are jerks. Not all, but enough so I never really gave a thought to being one of those Met-kees fans you’d like to drown. But this 10-year-old was rooting hard for those ’75 Sox. Dewey, Rooster, Yaz, Lynn, Fisk, Tiant, Rico, Spaceman, Denny Doyle. My mom brought home the first copy of Baseball Digest I’d ever laid eyes on with Fred Lynn on the cover. There was an article about best contact hitters—and it featured Felix Millan! I read that edition of Baseball Digest from the time my mom handed it to me—I still have a subscription—until the first pitch that night. Game Six. Finally! Rain had postponed the game for three days with the Reds needing one win to clinch. The wait had been so long I’d gotten over my flea-bitten stage, returned to school, caught a cold, and was sent back home. My mom didn’t realize I was still watching the game in extra innings until she heard me scream when Fisk hit the foul pole after four hours and one minute of exquisite baseball. My dad, who worked late Tuesdays, got home as I was celebrating. Both parents were miffed as they put my ebullient ass to bed, but I remained home the next day even though I was well enough to go to school. My dad and I watched Game Seven (the last game at Fenway ever played without a DH, as it turned out). I cried when the Sox lost on that bleeder by damned Joe Morgan. My dad told me to never waste tears on a sporting event. The only time I cried at Shea was when my dad took me there two years later in a vain attempt to cheer me up after Lorelei got run over by a car. And I wasn’t shedding tears about an April loss to the Pirates, though that hurt, too. I watched the second greatest game of my childhood in 1978. (I watched the Mets plenty in the 1970s, but few of those games could be called great…or even good.) The 1978 one-game playoff at Fenway Park was the game that allowed me to tell future generations of my epic baseball memory experienced as previous generations had: sneaking bits of the game on radio while sitting in class (I didn’t think to bring a transistor radio, but I watched for hand signals from friends). Iona Grammar was filled with Yankees fans and I was part of the not-so-underground resistance pulling hard for their unhappy ending. It felt like a family event where you’re told, repeatedly, “Why can’t you be like your cousin Reggie?” Or on this particular day, Bucky. I’d been to Ted Williams Baseball Camp in Massachusetts that summer—attending my first Fenway game with a camp group that July—as Boston built its 14-game lead. It was almost painful to hear the Red Sox fans torment the Yankees fans in our cabin. Almost painful. The Yankees caught the Sox before school even started, but it’s easy to forget now that by mid-September the Yankees were actually up by four games in the loss column. I was invited to a game at Yankee Stadium the day the Sox started their 11-2 finish that caught the Yankees on the final day with 99 wins. For the first time in my lifetime, there’d be a one-game playoff. Loser goes home. The wild card was for football. Just as in ’75, I was pretty wired leading up to the game; so much so that I got in a food fight at lunch (hey, Animal House came out that year). We had to write out our weapons from the skirmish—“milk potato chips”—a thousand times each. Even in a place where punish assignments had replaced corporal punishment as a method of general discipline, I’d never hit the four-digit mark. By eighth grade, though, I’d learned how to handle such assignments while using three pens at a time. So I was writing furiously next to the curb when Bucky Dent hit that pop fly. Even with all the bandbox parks built in the last three decades, that’s still the cheapest home run I’ve ever seen. Or, in this case, heard. My mom arrived moments after the home run to pick me up and the Yankees continued scoring on the now traitorous radio. I turned on the black-and-white TV at home just in time to see the Red Sox rally snuffed out by Goose Gossage. I had gotten into the mid-hundreds in my writing repetition when Jerry Remy pulled a ball into the blinding sun in right. With Boston down by a run, Lou Piniella sticks out his glove and the ball hops right into the webbing. (You know if it’s the Mets, it bounces off the glove, rolls into the corner, and goes for a walkoff inside-the-park home run.) Rick Burleson stops at second and moves 90 feet on Jim Rice’s long fly. The Rooster dies at third—along with New England—when Yaz pops up. Just like the end of the ’75 Series. Well, now that you’ve heard my version of these two games, you might want to read what happened in the eyes of people closer to the action. Game Six focuses mostly on the game and its participants, with lots of wonderful details: star broadcaster Dick Schaap waking up on the couch of a rookie reporter’s suite because of the dearth of hotel space caused by the rainouts; or Peter Gammons getting doe-eyed Globe rookie Leslie Visser a press credential only to have Sox broadcaster Dick Stockton end up taking her out for Hungarian food and never letting her go; how Bernie Carbo—he of the pinch-hit homer for the ages—had major off-field problems, which explained why he was perpetually traded; how manager Darrell Johnson, who had his own demons, was hated by the Sox players; how Sparky Anderson, in the other dugout, was both feared and adored; and how Johnny Bench suffered enough physical and other pain to put the greatest all-around catcher on the downside of his career at age 27. Game Six has the longest afterword (64 pages) I’ve ever read. It also pauses action constantly for sentences like, “Billingham missed outside with a slider to even the count at 1-1.” I found several mistakes, but given that it’s published by Hyperion and they have a big enough ad budget to give out free copies—technically, my copy wasn’t free because I dropped the suggested dollar in the kitty at Book Expo—I trust those mistakes got fixed before the final version. I’m available for a late proofread for future printings. ’78 wraps its climactic game around the brutal Boston bussing crisis of the 1970s. I’m not going to get on a soap box and comment 30 years after the fact on that horrible situation. Providence Journal writer Bill Reynolds strives for Jonathon Mahler’s Ladies and Gentleman, the Bronx Is Burning miniseries, Yankees, and everything else aside, The Bronx Is Burning is a superb book that ties baseball to a time and place (1977) with a society on the brink. The Boston of ’78 is torn apart for the world to see. Reading a book that can make you mad three decades after the fact is good writing. Those agonizing losses at Fenway were actually bright spots by comparison. |
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Review: Oh, Darling At Posman Books at Grand Central Terminal, the very knowledgeable, Met-centric, and elastic clark shimmied behind the front window display, leaned across an array of other books, and snagged the store’s only remaining copy of Ron Darling’s The Complete Game from it perch about seven feet above the ground. He grabbed the book with his right hand, steadied himself with the other, and handed the scarce copy to me. “Thanks” alone seemed insufficient for such service. This was the first week Citi Field was open—and his was still more effort than I’ve seen the actual Mets put forth in a game. This was proof enough that the book was indeed a major hit. You could almost feel the books rumbling off the presses somewhere in the U.S. and being packed into boxes to fill the waiting orders. And even if you couldn’t infer all that from a guy reaching up and grabbing a book off the top of a display, there was the Amazon listing to tell you how well Darling’s book was selling. The Amazon “Product Details” bar is the siren song of the author. Or at least the insecure author. (I think of myself as many things, but if I’m going to fancy up myself and go with the author sobriquet, I like to at least go out dressed in my insecurity.) The number under “Amazon Sales Rank” changes hourly based on a shifting level of criteria that no one really knows. For most of us schlubs not privy to the insider publishing numbers the houses receive through paid services each week, this is all we’ve got to go on. The lower the Amazon number the better. For me, anytime I check one of my books and it’s in the realm of five digits, it feels like the Mets closer just got the first out of the ninth inning. A number under 50,000 and it’s like someone got the third out to end what could have been a really big inning. There are less desirable scenarios generated when the number grows larger, inevitably. Many have become obsessed by the shifting number in the Amazon sand. A couple of days—oh, who are we kidding, weeks (months?)—of checking a new book, and the urge slowly fades. And I can say with confidence that some books I’ve worked on—not ones paying a royalty, mind you—I have never checked on Amazon. But if I were Ron Darling—and if Darling were being completely frank in one of his “dog track money” moments of truth—he’d probably respond to my “Being Ron Darling” scenario by responding, “It doesn’t suck.” If he’s not checking Amazon, well…I did it for him. Though it was over the course of many months (hey, his book was on the “Frequently Bought Together” category of one of my books, along with Greg Prince’s). Darling’s book deserves whatever numbers he got and still gets. Daniel Paisner should also be credited—let’s not forget to tip our waiters and waitresses and give nods to our ghostwriters and lower-profile co-writers—for putting together a standout manuscript. If you haven’t read The Complete Game, you should. And I’ll give you a quick spin around the book without giving away too many details. This isn’t the Times Sunday Book Review—not that he didn’t get a great review there as well. The Complete Game goes from innings one through nine; Darling and Paisner retell what happened in an inning in Darling’s career, what set it up, and what came after. A lot of the intricacies are obviously about pitching, but it sometimes reaches that Men at Work level (like or dislike George Will, but before I read that book 20-odd years ago I didn’t know that managers, coaches, and players crammed information, tendencies, and weaknesses of opponents like it was chewing tobacco). The Complete Game taught me things about the art of pitching—and certainly about Ron Darling—that I didn’t know. My favorite chapter is probably the first, where he describes in detail the first inning of his first major league game. It’s not just about that inning, it’s about the week leading up to it, Al Jackson working him relentlessly in the minors to make sure he’s never satisfied with living on the beach in Norfolk, and the almost cruel reception by the major league veterans when he arrives. I’ll never see Ron Hodges as a “Virginia gentleman” again. The ironic thing, and what I never considered over the ensuing quarter century, was that at the exact same time Darling reached the major leagues alone and unsure in New York, I was also alone with all my belongings, hang-ups, and loneliness in a dorm room in Virginia. Like Darling, I felt I belonged at the next level but I had doubts I was ready. Darling had been to college, C. Montgomery Burns’s alma mater, and Darling was somewhat embarrassed to even bring up his Yale background lest anyone think the callup was putting on airs. It made me glad that Darling outlasted most of the veterans who treated him shabbily on arrival. “Ninth Inning,” the 1988 clincher against the Phillies, is riveting because it takes you to one of the rarest places in professional sports in the 21st century: the final inning of a complete game. Not just any complete game but one with a division title waiting. And it’s no blowout, the tying run’s at the plate. And Darling loses his focus midway through the inning, but manager Davey Johnson lets him come out on the other side with probably the greatest reward of his career. Well, there’s that other moment when he’s on the field for “The Star-Spangled Banner” and his father happens to be on the field with the local veteran’s group and it’s, oh, just minutes before his start in Game 4 of the 1986 World Series and it all happens at the ballpark where he rooted as a kid and had never pitched before…and his team really, really, really, really needs to win. But now I’m giving away too much. How Timesian of me. Beg pardon. I will say, if I might, that the parts I wasn’t as keen on were the two chapters devoted to innings by Mets pitchers since he became an announcer. (That’s already been done, Ron. Look to your right in the booth, man!) Darling—and Paisner—still provide expert commentary in those chapters, but the stories about himself are so insightful and interesting, I would’ve rather seen him devote two more chapters to two other make-or-break innings of his career. But that’s nitpicking. He even gives us a bonus inning from the game that made him a first-round pick, but I won’t say when it was, though I will say the location is one of the great old-time minor league parks and where I spent the last night before the 1994 strike. I debated for a while whether to put this book in the addendum of great Mets books that weren’t around when I first did my top 10 list of greatest Mets books for 2007’s 100 Things Mets Fans Should Know and Do Before They Die. Seeing that the list is up to Number 15 (Darling’s last uni number as a Met); seeing how this is, after all, My Darling Year (referencing his original Mets number, 44); and seeing how the list has lately become a register of talented cronies (I just happen to know talented people), I give you Ron Darling, who doesn’t know me from Adam. And I’m not even talking Adam Schein. 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 Amazin’ Story of the 1969 New York Mets by Stanley Cohen 15. The Complete Game by Ron Darling with Daniel Paisner I mulled over adding The Complete Game to this list for a month. In the end, Darling belongs on here, just like he belonged in the ’86 World Series rotation with Dwight Gooden and Bobby Ojeda; though he’ll be the first to tell you that Sid Fernandez saved his bacon—and everyone else’s greasy pork products—with a long relief job for the ages in Game 7 against Boston. The last three-plus years have often felt like a 1,300-day heart attack, I will say that having Darling in the booth, mixing seamlessly with Mex and Gary, has made watching the Mets a treasure and something I think many of us will look back at down the road and say that we were lucky to have been able to watch them. They make a poorly-conceived product into something I want to buy. And that’s all you can ask, whether you’re selling National League baseball or Slap Chop. Non-Mets Book Recommendation: Darling’s good, sure, but the first Yalie author I’d recommend is Sinclair Lewis, whose birthplace—and campground their way onto the Metsilverman ’09 itinerary as part of my first camping trip in a decade. Back in college, I was assigned Babbitt for class and before the year was out I had read Elmer Gantry and Arrowsmith—and they’re not short—on my own time. I’ve read most of his other works, plus Richard Lingeman’s brilliant biography on the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. If you’re going to choose just one Lewis book, though, I would pick his landmark Main Street. I read it before I took my first job out of college at a small-town newspaper. The book opened my eyes about swimming in the backwater--it’s far deeper than you can imagine. A New York boy going to live in rural Massachusetts two years after Billy Buckner? Why, I might have drowned without Main Street. Mets Relevance: You’ve got to know your neighbors—whether they’re in Philly, Miami, Atlanta, or even Montreal—and always remember that they’re watching you, ready to report you to the Fun Police the first time you smile on the field. |
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Review: Where Are They Now? I recognize it’s kind of cheating to review a magazine, but I have come to the conclusion that I can’t review The 1969 Miracle Mets by Steven Travers (Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2009), even if the book is dedicated to Tom Seaver and Christy Mathewson. I’ve been editing a 1969 Mets book for well over two years and am too close to the subject and to the end to give an honest appraisal of someone else’s new work on that team. If I give a beaming review, might that potentially hurt sales of my competing work? If I give it a bad review, won’t I look small and petty? Though publishing exists with fewer inherent conflicts than journalism, I look at the recent painful lesson learned by the longtime bastion of ethics, the Washington Post. I suggest you take a look at the Travers book in the store or online and judge for yourself whether it’s worth a purchase. Just leave some space in your Mets budget—and baseball library—for The Miracle Has Landed, due out in the fall. And make sure you tune in or turn out for the Mets game on August 22 for the ’69 Tribute Night. That said, Greg Prince tantalized me with his Sports Illustrated just out of the postal box with Tom Seaver and Nolan Ryan on the cover. SI even got Ryan to pose again with Seaver in a Mets jacket—the Texas Rangers president sporting a Mets hat—while acknowledging that he was part of that ’69 team and enjoyed getting his only World Series ring. Of all the Mets on that world championship team, only a handful—including the lefty-righty bullpen duo of Tug McGraw and Ron Taylor—ever got World Series rings with another organization. After Greg flashed the copy before the game against the Dodgers, I spent the better part of a week trying to find a copy in my environs. As a kid, I had a long-running SI subscription and stored almost every Sports Illustrated from April 1977 to January 1989…until they were all engulfed in a fire. That was the least of the losses, but I continued getting the magazine. As time passed, though, few issues seemed worth saving from the recycle bin. I put aside an hour on Saturday mornings to read it, but kids eventually took away that hour. I cancelled my SI subscription and started a new one so I could get Arizona Cardinals promotional gear (I always thought it poor marketing and ill treatment of repeat customers that new subscribers got gifts, while renewals got squat). When the football Cardinals changed their logo, I changed my reading habits. I now read it at the doctor’s office and buy three or four SI issues a year, usually while at airports or when a Met is on the cover. I do enjoy the baseball and history part of their web site, but that doesn’t fill the coffers of Time Life. This week I coughed up $4.99 for the July 13-20 Seaver-Ryan double issue at a gas station after a few days searching other locales—I never thought I’d get blank stares from clerks when asking if they carried Sports Illustrated. If you are a subscriber and this issue is sitting amidst a pile of unread summer mail, push the bills aside and start reading. I recall the thunderbolt from on high 13 years ago when I saw Al Simmons and the Philadelphia A’s in black-and-white cover glory. The 1929-31 Athletics were the only team between the mid-1920s and World War II to offer any AL opposition to the damned dynastic Yankees. SI did an exceptional job with that issue and every black-and-white cover since then has followed suit. The Seaver-Ryan cover lives up to expectations. The Mets story is not pursued in tremendous depth—you want in-depth, wait just a little bit longer for The Miracle has Landed—but like a good journalistic piece, Michael Bamberger covers the bases, gets in touch with the principals, and takes you back, however briefly, to that giddy time in the last months of the 1960s when the Mets were one of the few things people could agree on. Or agree on if they weren’t from Chicago or Baltimore. A pull quote sums it up: “The ’69 Mets are part of no era but rather a one-off, charmed and charming, frozen in time.” The ’86 Mets are a touchstone team for many Mets fans—and ancient history to a new generation of fans who think of Hernandez, Darling, Gooden, and Carter as old timers—but the ’69 Mets are the great franchise love story. These ultimate underdogs put together two years worth of wins—they won nine more regular-season games in 1969 than the ’62 and ’63 Mets combined—and then barreled over the competition in improbable and incomparable style in October. The SI double edition features many other “Where Are They Now?” pieces on teams and people from ’59 (the AFL—it really started in 1960, but we’ll give it to ‘em), ’79 (Kent Tekulve, Omar Moreno, and other Steel City heroes), ’89 (Monica Seles, Dave Dravecky, Lanny McDonald), and ’99 (Brandi Chastain and a handful of names hard to recall just 10 years after). They also have a bunch of “Where Will They Be?” teens, continuing the tradition of putting national pressure on kids who should be buying baseball cards, not worrying about when they’ll appear on them. But SI has been doing that for a long time, and they do it with more class and style than ESPN, which has an unreadable magazine that thinks the “E” in its name stands for E! Entertainment and the “P” is for People. I think I’ve said enough about media giants for now, but here’s one last thought. There’s a great piece on Earl Weaver in the SI double issue about how the Orioles manager was the father of the modern management style: eschewing the bunt, steal, and hit-and-run; focusing on pitching (177 pitching changes in 159 games on the way to Baltimore’s 1971 pennant); and knowing which player excelled against which pitcher in which situation. While reading the Tom Verducci piece, I realized that this should be the story of Gil Hodges. He made more in-game moves, was more personable and less bombastic than Weaver, and beat the Earl of Baltimore in ’69, but the O’s consistently had better personnel—not just starters but reserves. Compare Benny Ayala, Pat Kelly, John Lowenstein, and Gary Roenicke in ’79 to the ’69 Mets crew of Rod Gaspar, Ron Swoboda, Art Shamsky, and Al Weis. It’s not even fair. Gil died before he got the chance to reach another Mets October. Meanwhile, Weaver won in ’70, but he lost two winnable World Series to Pittsburgh. That Verducci piece should have, could have been a story about another beloved Hall of Famer. Tis the pity that that story can’t be written about Gil Hodges, that it can’t be known. |
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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? |
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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. |
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Review: You Think Today’s Mets Can Be Hard to Watch? Though Jamie Moyer is the only player in the major leagues I can call my elder, there was a time when I was a mere pup at the ballpark, when baseball was my entire life—and my life stunk. Of course, it was a wonderful childhood that I think about often, but when you’re a baseball fanatic at the level that only a kid can be and your team is the Mets of the 1970s, then life is not good. I grew up with parents and relatives who had survived the Depression and they all had stories of one sort or other from “the war” and how Senator Joe McCarthy used our fear of communism as an excuse to strip people of their livelihoods. My elders repeatedly informed me about how easy I had it, but they had been raised by parents who’d made it through the flu epidemic, the Great War, and various panics; they claimed their kids had it relatively easy. It’s generational. My early years were a breeze,
by comparison, but I at least had the Mets in the 1970s to keep me
humble. While the Yankees won and won and won some more with seeming
ease, overcoming deficits and beating the Dodgers in the World Series
like it was the 1950s, the Mets, on the other hand, were just about New
York’s most anonymous and pathetic franchise. As a result of time served
in M. Donald Grant’s Gulag, I can haughtily say anytime a fan boos a
current Mets player, “You want to boo someone, you should have booed
Bruce Boisclair, not Carlos Beltran.”
(By the way, look at that Boisclair card. Is he holding an aluminum bat?
He still couldn’t have gotten a ball out of the park with one of those
bats, thanks to his wide-splayed stance and lack of skill.) From First to Worst: The New York Mets, 1973-77 by Jacob Kanarek (McFarland, 2007) brings back the suppressed memories of this era in a day-by-day format. Like me, Kanarek wasted a nice chunk of his youth following the unfollowable Mets, a team that inspired “friends” of Greg W. Prince to call him to resign their Mets allegiance. (Many applied for reinstatement in 1986. They deserved deportation.) For all I know, Kanarek, Prince, and I might have all been sitting in the same empty expanse of Shea, shaking our heads unison as Doug Flynn popped up with the bases loaded against a scary stovepipe hatted Pirate. From First to Worst looks at the deterioration of the franchise on a day-by-day level. Just like when you’re a kid, you’re not really aware of your physical growth on a daily basis, you can’t really see your team coming apart at the seams. At least you couldn’t until they traded Tom Seaver. Then it was obvious. Your team wasn’t having a bad season, it was going to be really bad for eons. And six year is an eon to a kid. When they started stinking I wasn’t even of junior high age and when they stunningly came out of it in 1984, I was in college. But that’s not to say there weren’t some Amazin’ moments that this book helped me relive. It starts in 1973 with a team that seemingly is on the path to oblivion, but somewhere, somehow, at the last moment, the team plays brilliantly and the rest of the division can’t do diddley squat. The Mets stole the NL East, outfought the Reds for the pennant, and were a bloop and a clue away from beating the mighty A’s in the World Series. That’s the story I was taught in the constant watching of the 1973 World Series highlight film that Channel 9 put up during every rain delay. I didn’t come aboard the S.S. Met until 1975, and I would in due course realize that in this context, “S.S.” stood for “Sinking Ship.” First to Worst enabled me to relive the miraculous finish of ’73 that I just missed. The book made me smile remembering the first game I ever turned on and sat down to watch from start to finish on TV, a Tom Seaver three-hit shutout. Or the series against the Dodgers where I would have sworn that Davey Lopes was Felix Millan’s twin. Or the game where Tom Seaver recorded his 200th strikeout for a record eighth straight season and blanked the first-place Pirates to boot on Labor Day. Knowing the ending—and having read a portion of the book earlier (full disclosure, Mr. Kanarek let me look at one part of the 1975 chapter of his manuscript during writing and he subsequently let me use some his 1970s photos, like the one at the top of this article of Hendu and Dude)—I read the book back to front. That is, I started with 1977 and worked my way backward, so it ended with the “Ya Gotta Believe” team in 1973. If only time could be bent in such ways. Kanarek’s superb website has more great photos and welcomes you with Bob Murphy telling you “there’s no better way to relax than withy the eaaaasy taste of Budweiser”. Trust me, the book and the site are more effort—and more fun—than anything the Mets organization did in the post-belief 1970s. Kanarek’s book is Mets history without any fluff, straight medicine for a fan base that acts more and more like it’s entitled to something. Enitled to what, I don’t know. To those who hold this false sense, let me add a final piece of advice before I drink my Ensure and lace up the dentures, “You could be stuck wearing striped bell bottoms in an empty stadium with a lousy manager, a worse owner, and no end in sight. Stop complaining already.” And start reading this book… |
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Review: Read All
About It! They say that newspapers are dead. Maybe they are, maybe they should have seen this coming and stopped being so self-important and saved themselves. But one thing you can say about the papers, they got it right for a long time. Despite four years of high school French, I can’t read a sentence in any other language and I’ve only read the London Times and Toronto’s Globe and Mail in passing, so I can’t definitively say if there are better papers in the world than the New York Times. Having spent a lot of time around newspapers in an earlier life, I don’t think I’m going out on a limb by calling the New York Times the best paper in America, nudging out the Wall Street Journal, which doesn’t have a Sunday paper or devoted weekly Book Review section or magazine or daily sports section, all of which I find essential to newspaper enjoyment. And if there’s one thing newspapers can still do is give us a sense of the past. Our past. And the New York Times: The Greatest Moments in New York Mets 1961-2008, 64 Historical Newspaper Pages is absolute gold. It not only tells you about the team you came from, it includes some of the biggest headlines on its pages: “U.S. and Russians Pull Back Tanks from Berlin Line” (10/29/1961). That makes you gulp about what might have been. Plus other sports infiltrate these pages, laid out as they were the day they were first printed: “Ewbank ponders benching Unitas” (10/11/1961)—Don’t do it, Weeb! There are also advertisements for other sports: “Rangers vs. Bruins: General Admission $1”—get me two, please; and “Tonite, 8:30: Knicks vs. Cincinnati. Preliminary Game, 6:45.” What? Plus there’s enough Scotch ads to keep you reeling into the computer age. And of course there’s plenty about the Mets presented in the context of its times. Or Times. --Stuff so commonplace you don’t even bat an eye: “Shea Stadium Opens with Big Traffic Jam” and one I always agreed with “ ‘Fabulous’ Stadium Delights Fans” (4/18/1964). --Stuff so Amazin’ you can’t help but smile: “Mets Are First! They Top Expos, 3-2 in 12 innings and 7-1, as Cubs Bow, 6-2” (9/11/1969). --And one that just about made me mist up to see it in print. “Mets Win, 5-3, Take the Series and a Grateful City Goes Wild” (10/17/1969). --Here’s a headline you don’t see much any more: “Met City Explodes with Joy” (10/11/1973) It’s a few years before the headlines start coming with much frequency and then the Mets presses start rolling again. --“Keith Hernandez Sent to Mets for Allen, Ownbey” (6/16/1983). --“Gooden Rookie of Year” (11/20/1984). --“Finally, the Mets Achieve the Inevitable Title” (9/18/1986). --“Mets Wins, 6-5, on Dykstra Homer” (10/12/1986). --“Mets Win on Carter’s Hit in 12th for 3-2 Edge” (10/15/1986). --“Mets and Red Sox Gain Series: It Wasn’t Easy” (10/16/1986). -- Page 1 news in your Sunday Times: “Mets Force Final Game with Dramatic Rally” (10/26/1986) -- And an even bigger part of Page 1: “Mets Get Magic Back, Take 7th Game and Series” (10/28/1986) I’m going to stop there. These pages indeed stop time. The news keeps going—though there’s just one page between the ’86 world championship and the first interleague win over the Yanks in ’97. There’s not much bad news: no Seaver trade, no Scioscia homer, but there is enough space devoted to Yadier %&@$+%* Molina. The quality of typography. photos, and layout increases with time while the team never again reaches the dizzying climax of 1969 or the bully who’s about to get knocked over, then rights himself and wins the fight in 1986. But he’s our bully. Long life to him. I cannot state articulately enough just how great this small bundle of broadsheet is. All this mist and time of the Times for $12 at the Market at Citi Field? For the price of a sandwich? (A good sandwich, mind you.) With bylines by Leonard Koppett, Joseph Durso, Arthur Daley, Murray Chass, Robert Lipsyte, George Vecsey, Tyler Kepner (Buster Olney was stuck covering the other team in town), and a list of All-Stars that rivals the players they covered in terms of talent. Buy a copy before they run out. It may be the best news you read about the Mets all year. Warning: While I found this gem at the ballgame without even knowing it existed, I could not find anyone selling it on the web, even when I used the ISBN: 9781934653067. By all means, let’s bury the team’s past as deep as we can… Ask about it at your local bookstore or inquire about it at the World’s Fare Market at Citi Field and then search near the checkout counter if you get a blank stare. Non-Mets Recommendation: Read a newspaper. Any newspaper. Today. And I mean the kind with the dark print that sometimes gets on your hands and is helpful in wrapping fish. Trust me, you’ll miss newspapers when they’re gone. Mets Relevance: Without papers, the news is just a lot of pap. No substance or context, with too many opinions permeating everything. |
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Review: Prince of
Shea The reason I’m only reviewing Mets books written since 2007 is because that was the year I put together a top 10 list of personal favorites in my book 100 Things Mets Fans Should Know and Do Before They Die. The list, which I finished before the baseball books came out in ’07, generally included books I felt were innovative and presented a unique exploration of a team that requires explanation, a lot of explanation. In case you don’t have 100 Things—and if you want to find out why these books made the list, and a few other Metsian things, order one here—here’s a quick rundown from #81 in that tome, listed in order of first publication: Can’t Anyone Here Play This Game by Jimmy Breslin The New York Mets by Leonard Koppett Screwball by Tug McGraw and Joseph Durso If at First by Keith Hernandez and Mike Bryan The New York Mets: Twenty-Five Years of Baseball Magic by Jack Lang and Peter Simon The Complete Year by Year NY Mets Fan’s Almanac by Duncan Bock and John Jordan The Worst Team Money Could Buy by Bob Klapisch and John Harper The Bad Guys Won by Jeff Pearlman The Ticket Out by Michael Sokolove Pedro, Carlos, and Omar by Adam Rubin Of what I’ve read since then, and I admit I haven’t read everything, I want to add one book I’ve already reviewed, Mets Fan by Dana Brand; one I worked on, Mets by the Numbers —and I include it here because of the groundbreaking work by my partner and mbtn.net founder, Jon Springer, not my modest additions; and at #13, the Edgardo Alfonzo of the field—smart, classy, and coming through when you need it most—is the definitive book of the Mets experience: fan’s view, history, and how the fortunes of an often second-rate team can affect a person’s life in ways that the casual fan could not imagine. Faith and Fear in Flushing by Greg Prince (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2009), 320 pages. Greg Prince is the grand poobah of the Mets blogosphere. And the Mets blogosphere isn’t restricted to five guys typing away in cramped rooms next to piles of Mets yearbooks four feet high. It’s more like 595 guys typing away in cramped rooms next to piles of Mets yearbooks four feet high…but I digress. To me when I read something that Prince has written on Faith and Fear the blog with Jason Fry (who writes a nice foreword—and the afterword is a riveting discussion with Gary Cohen, the field marshal of Mets fans made good), I’m better than 99 percent sure that any history included is correct and perfectly accurate. I feel the same way when I look up something in the indispensible Jack Lang’s The New York Mets: Twenty-Five Years of Baseball Magic. Lang knew everything that happened to the Mets through the ’85 season; Prince has got everything since (and he knows plenty about the Mets before Bobby O., too). I grew up reading Lang in the Daily News and he spoke directly to me between the lines of type in the paper after the Seaver trade—don’t give up…do you know how great this will feel when they finally win it? He was right. Eventually. Prince does the same speaking in Mets tongues to the disillusioned who have stared vacantly at the dingy Shea concrete in disbelief after an unfathomable loss at the worst possible time. Price does it without the veneer of objective newspaper reporter, one required to say, “I don’t care who wins the game” if he is ever captured by the enemy or questioned by a commoner. Lang, God rest his soul, might have said that tired old line, but I don’t think he meant it. Prince wouldn’t dare say that. This book is proof, as if any were needed. Prince loves the Mets more and expresses his feelings on them better than anyone I’ve ever encountered. He spares nothing, from personal tragedy and how it relates to the public tragedy we’ve all experienced as Mets fans. The only negative is that this book wasn’t in print form to be handed out to every person who left Shea for the last time on September 28, 2008. This is even more poignant as we embark on a new life at a new park and try to change our spots. I miss Shea—the bathrooms? no, the concept of a place where people of all classes, backgrounds, and walks of life getting together with a common interest without having to sell a kidney to pay for it—but Prince misses the old gal far more. He is uber fan and everyfan. I’m a reformed (fingers crossed) superstitious Mets fan who’s worn glasses since Claudell Washington was in right field and even I never wore a lucky pair of old glasses to watch a crucial game. (Though I did misplace my glasses before Game 2 of the 2000 NLCS and watched the game on TV with 1980s frames so big I thought they were a spare pair of Elton’s from his Crocodile Rock days.) This book is your Mets affirmation. You have not wasted your life following a franchise that could screw up a three-car funeral—because they certainly have screwed the pooch in terms of getting a third championship ring fitted—and has no sense or seeming interest in its own history. But Greg Prince picks up the slack for those paid to get it right yet don’t get it all. And whether you know Prince or just read this book—which, by God, you should—you’ll be a better man and fan for it. And I say man because it rhymes with fan and it enables me to end this with the words: “Bring your kiddies, bring your wife, Guaranteed to have the time of your life.” And you will when you read this book. Now come on, the game’s starting! Non-Mets book recommendation: A Sunday doubleheader. My copy of Faith and Fear arrived the day after I finished the second volume of Jeff Shaara’s twin works on the American Revolution as retold by the main participants, Rise to Rebellion and The Glorious Cause. People think of the Revolutionary War as something that happened so long ago as to be of no practical value today—Bunker Hill, Crossing the Delaware, Valley Forge, Yorktown, yada, yada, yada. If not for George Washington, we’d all be sitting here typing away about cricket with a cup of tea at one’s elbow and saying of events like the ending of the 2008 season, “Tough finish that.” Washington galvanized a bunch of rag-tag farmers turned soldiers that numbered about as many people as you’d find at Shea Stadium for a game in 1978—in September--and defeated the most feared professional army and navy in the world (plus all those Hessians). Shaara is a master at these books, taking up his father’s pen and carrying it like a flag in battle. The men he writes about gave us the world we have today and neither those liberties nor the sacrifices made to secure it should ever be forgotten. I had the rare pleasure last year of being at a one-sided win at Shea where the conversation freely flowed from the state of the Mets to the state of the country in the 1770s, spurred by the terrific John Adams mini-series on HBO at the time. It was quite fitting that the company was what I would call three of the founding father of Mets blogging: Prince, Jason Fry, and Jon Springer—the Washington, Nathanael Greene, and Daniel Morgan of Mets blogging. If you don’t know why all those names are important, commence reading. Mets relevance: The Continentals were the original American underdog. Ya Gotta Believe…and Don’t Tread on Me, either. Imagine Tug McGraw in a three-cornered hat. |
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The Reviewer’s Doubleheader: Shea It Again, Sam Remember when you’d hold the Mets schedule in your hand for the first time, back before the internet, when you actually had to find someplace that had the full sked, be it a newspaper, magazine, scorecard, or yearbook? If you’re going back with me far enough, you’d see at least one Sunday per month—more in the summer, plus holidays like the Fouth of July—with two dots next to it. That could only mean one thing: Doubleheader. Not because of a rainout. Not the let’s-incovenience-everyone-and-make the-managers-feel-like-they-have-the-weight-of-the-world-on-their-shoulders-with-a-godforesaken-split-admission-doubleheader. No, an old-fashioned, two-for-one twinbill that was printed on the schedule and was sometimes completed in its entirety in the span that it now takes to clean up the stadium from the tiny day-game crowd that easily could have fit in the ballpark with the second-game crowd, if they’d just had a two-for-one twinbill. That’s an around the barn way of saying I’m looking at two books with this review of Mets tomes turned out since 2007. Both book below are about the stadium that’s now in the big parking lot in the sky—and in our hearts.
Shea 1964-2008
(Baltimore: PressBox
Legends, 2008), 72 pages Because when you have a doubleheader, you want to win a first game and this gives you your best chance. I wasn’t aware of this publication during those tumultous final weeks of Shea, but I came across this at the Hall of Fame at the end of October. At $19.95 for 72 pages, it’s a book about Shea with a Citi Field price—and, truth be told, if you’re going to buy one magazine-esque Mets periodical this year, make it the 128-page, $12.99 Maple Street Press 2009 Mets Annual. But I will say this, Shea 1964-2008 is well written and almost mistake free. I just came across it again last night and Charlie Vascellaro’s piece about the Sign Man, in one of Karl Ehrhardt’s last interviews before his death, is amazin’ly great. Len Klatt’s “Saturday Plan” on tracing the team’s history through countless Saturdays at Shea, Bob Herzog’s “All Baseball All the Time” about the very busy 1975 season, and Adam Gold’s self-explanatory “Goodbye, Shea” are all gems. That doesn’t even mention the work of heavy hitters like Lee Lowenfish, Thom Lovero, John Delcos, and recently-retired Newsday columnist and 1969 beatman Steve Jacobson, plus Bob Heck, John Rowe, Michael Yockel, David Ginsburg, Mike Lurie, and David Sandora. (If they want a more ringing endorsement, maybe they should have called me to contribute something! But when you do your own blog, doesn’t it always come back to yourself?) Though Shea is gone forever, you can still find this worthwhile publication on the Baltimore company’s site (and don’t confuse it with some of the pictorial mags on Shea that were slapped together). Adding this to “your baseball library” for $20—and you can now get two for one now—is good advice for you Shea-o-files out there.
Shea Stadium: Images of Baseball
by Jason D. Antos (Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2007), 128
pages You may have seen Arcadia books at museum shops and local stores throughout this great country of ours, with pictorial histories of cities, towns, and places, brimming with sepia-toned photographs and fact-filled captions about life gone by. Arcadia also has books on baseball in cities such as Richmond and Atlanta, plus even a couple of books on the Yankees past that don’t include the annoying octives of John Sterling making every game sound as important as Bunker Hill. So thanks to Jason D. Antos for giving us the sepia-toned Shea images of both great moments (the celebrations of rare championship moments) and forgotten ones (Kingman’s Korner). I’ve been doing a lot of research on Mets photographs myself and it ain’t easy coming up with shots that don’t cost hundreds of dollars and fill the Corbis coffers; Antos did his work well in photo selection and acquisition and also in documenting the essential history of the area and the team. In an interview with Barry Wittenstein of SNY the author says he’s never been to one of the new ballparks. He and we will see soon enough how much of an amalgum Citi Field is of the new-old ballpark fad that peaked a decade ago. I would complain about Joe Torre being on the cover—Bill Shea is handing him the annual funereal wreath that makes it look like someone just died—but with the empty stands behind him on Opening Day 1978, that really is more symbolic of what Shea was about than a shot of an infrequent celebration. For several years each decade (2002-04 so far for this one), Shea slid into an abyss of horrible baseball that tested the already Job-like patience of its true fan base. Shea was a series of quiet, forgotten moments that meant something to those who were there. The loud, raucous celebrations were fleeting and far too few. Shea was about character. Anyone could play in a new palace where the food didn’t turn your stomach or your wallet inside out; you endured Shea because you loved baseball, it’s what you knew, and it’s where your people were. These images now go to the background, to history books, but Shea Stadium: Images of Baseball gives us the whole story, from an ash heap a century ago to a year before it returned to an ash heap once more. Before I can go in the new stadium, I need to stand where Shea stood. Pay my respects. Life and the game goes on, but always remember where you came from. Non-Mets book recommendation: You’d think that for a doubleheader review, there’d be two book recommendations. Nothing that simple. The brief and beautiful Pastures of Heaven tells a dozen short tales of the transformation of a fertile valley and its people over time. A couple of years ago I came across this John Steinbeck book at the late Nobel Prize-winning author’s superb museum in Salinas, California. I wasn’t familiar with this early title of his, though I had read much of Steinbeck’s work—I do not say this to make myself sound smart (because that would be a false impression); there are certain writers you just connect with no matter when they wrote or what they wrote about. Mets relevance: The name Pastures of Heaven turns one’s thoughts to a higher purpose and reflection about things past and what might have been. I came across this short passage from the newlywed bride to her groom as they stop to admire the pastures in fading light in the final pages of the final chapter—it reminds me of those who say to look forward when I’d rather look back: “There’s ambition to think of, and all our friends expect things of us. There’s your name to make so I can be proud of you. You can’t run away from your responsibility and cover your head in a place like this. But it would be nice.” And both smiles softened and remained in their eyes. |
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Book Review: The First As a college freshman, I had the good fortune of reviewing movies for the school paper. My roommate and I cobbled together the fabled “Matt and Drew’s Reviews” that are now almost as cringe-inducing to read as was the name of the paper we wrote for: The Brackety-Ack. But it was fun at the time for a couple of first-year students. That summer I wrote short book reviews among other pencil-sharpening tasks as a summer fill-in at a newspaper distributed internationally. The reviews they assigned me were for books no “real” reporter would read and were of such low significance that they would sit on the board with other nonpertinent items waiting to find their way into print only when a column of type came up a little short and a filler was needed. In the quarter century since then, my reviewing skills have languished. I’m back. If only I could also bring with me lost youth and the Mets renaissance that inadvertently came along in my glorious summer as a reviewer: 1984. The first Mets-themed review of books published since 2007 is Mets Fan by Dana Brand (McFarland & Co., 2007)—216 pages This series of essays on all things Mets from the mind of Hofstra professor Dana Brand is an enlightening read. This book came out after the 2006 season, when the worst Mets fans thought could happen was losing in seven games to an underestimated foe. Those, my friend, were the days. The author, someone I’ve gotten to know since reading his book, has deep feelings on everything involved with the club from its formation to the present—or at least until Carlos Beltran went down a lookin’. I wish I could express my feelings on the team as well or with as much conviction as Professor Brand. Dana also displayed the power of an author reading his own nonfiction work. He read at the 2008 SABR meeting in New York about Shea Stadium—an essay I’d read myself a few days before—and it not only sounded new, it sounded like poetry. Of course, he’s been reading poetry to college students for many years, but it was worth my schlep to the city just to hear it. I would certainly get the book on tape as read by the author, but I don’t know if that’s forthcoming. Perhaps his upcoming book on the last year at Shea will come bundled with a CD of the author reading his prose. No matter who’s doing the reading, if you’ve missed it somewhere along the way, Mets Fan at the very least is as an expert’s affirmation of the oft-tested Mets faith. Non-Mets book recommendation: With an English professor as a lead-in, what better book to begin with than the novel that made me first think about writing: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Mets relevance: First of all, the characters shuttle between New York and Long Island, constantly passing the massive and symbolic ash heaps in the location that will one day become Shea Stadium. My too-close attachment to Shea perhaps harkens from the namesake of my favorite book, latching on to a past re-imagined as idyllic and placed on a pedestal only to await inevitable destruction. Deep? Yes. And without doubt worth a second, third, fourth, or annual reading. |
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March 8, 2008
It’s Alive! Review: Mathematically Alive was shown at the Linda (the WAMC Arts Studio) last night in the state capital. Let’s get this out of the way up front, see this film. Here’s where it’s playing in the near future http://www.mathematicallyalive.com/page5aa.html or buy it on DVD. http://shop.mathematicallyalive.com/main.sc I told the filmmakers this, I told the people in the audience this, and now, lucky you, gets to hear this again: Mathematically Alive is better than anything on SNY, except for the 1969 World Series rebroadcasts. That’s not a knock on SNY, because it’s my favorite network and they have a lot of good programming, but Mathematically Alive is an engaging film that takes the audience on a ride of events in 2006 that they know the outcome of, and the viewer still clings to hope that on the big screen, Beltran will—let’s pretend—hit a check-swing doinker over first base that drives in two runs and then “Ronnie Belliard overruns the ball…and here comes Anderson Hernandez…with the winning run. The Mets win! The Mets win the pennant!” But that’s Hollywood. This film is made in Flushing, where fans are toughened like steel in purifying fire. They go in cold, are exposed to the white heat, and are then deposited in a pile with the others. Yet the Mets fans and their hearts of steel maintain hope through the hottest flame. That’s what creates the pathos. Pathos aplenty. When the film begins, I’m thinking, “Hey, why didn’t they ask me to be in this thing? I was there in the 1970s. I was at Shea for Dykstra’s home run. I’ve been to each of their last 21 postseason games. I’ve walked into Flushing Bay in a Mets T-shirt (and shorts).” After about 15 minutes, it’s clear that I am not worthy. The fans portrayed in Mathematically Alive have truly suffered for their art. No sacrifice is too much for the team, in their eyes. Hope is never extinguished until the very last out. I live two hours from Shea and even I am home before the guy with the Metsmobile starts heading back to that garage in the enemy territory of the Bronx. If I previously thought of myself as an officer in some Mets army, the four-star generals portrayed in this Mets fighting force could bust me down to buck private. And that guy from Rockville Center with Mr. Met’s number on his cell phone, he should be activities director in the Mets navy. The Oscars have been handed out and No Country for Old Men won (I didn’t see that film, but it sounds like it was about the 2007 Mets). Mathematically Alive filmmakers Joseph Coburn and Katherine Fornojy were jobbed by the Academy. As the fans in the film clearly say through their every action and word—with rational explanation of their behavior by a sports psychologist from Murray State—the Mets fan lives to see another day. For their sake, and all our sakes, let us all see that day together and make Hollywood and Flushing merge. After Effects: I was part of a distinguished panel at the Albany screening—distinguished except for me—that included Joe and Kathy, Steve Keane of kranepoolsociety.com, and Mike Silva of Gotham Baseball. And the place was packed. When I moved to the 845 area code in 2000, I didn’t think there were 100 Mets fans within 100 miles of me. It was Yankees this, Yankees that, Yankees on page 1, other baseball coverage (including two paragraphs on the Mets) on page 4. As Howie Rose likes to say at moments of great change: “The worm has turned.” Pockets of resistance are forming all over upstate: Albany, Delmar, Saugerties, Marbletown, Newburgh. This event was full of life and hope and fun. And people bought books! All this with the MAAC basketball tournament going on simultaneously across town at what was once the coolest-named East Coast arena—the Knickerbocker (for Rip Van Winkle’s buds, not for that boring, whiny, terrible pro hoops team)—that maybe drew a few hundred more than the Linda. Party: There was an after party at Valentine’s Bar at 17 New Scotland Avenue http://www.valentinesalbany.com/ , which should be noted as a safe haven for Mets fans. Yankees fans and their often annoying apparel are actively discouraged. There were tons of Mets caps there, including many worn by people who hadn’t even been at the screening. The feature attraction in the multi-band night was Grainbelt, proprietor Howe Glassman’s band (I had to buy a CD http://cdbaby.com/cd/grainbelt for a band that’s on the Kranepool record label). To top it off, there was Schaefer beer in a can for $2.50 and Red Dawn http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087985/plotsummary on the TV above the bar acting as a 1980s video to Grainbelt’s Cracker-esque sound. I’d been looking forward to this night for months. To explain, I’m married with two young kids in a fighting-to-stay-rural area and I’ve been accruing quality points at home for a few months in anticipation of the season (redemption starts Monday when I do my next signing at the Mets-Red Sox game at Port St. Lucie!) But this whole schmeer in Albany exceeded all expectations. Rock on, Joe, Kathy, Linda, Valentine’s, Grainbelt, and Albany. Rock on, Mets. |
