What can you say about the 2008 Mets? Another promising season derailed in gut-wrenching fashion. However, there are plenty of signs pointing to a playoff run in 2009: Johan Sanatana coming to New York and pitching as advertised, the signing of bullpen help, and the star-studded lineup to name three.

With so much to look forward to as the season approaches-including a new ballpark- there’s no way some national baseball preview magazine can cover all the storylines as a true fan demands. But Maple Street Press Mets Annual 2009 delivers 128 pages of Mets-specific analysis, along with beautiful full color photography to tide you over until Opening Day, and beyond, including:

• New this year: full color, graphical scouting reports on each player in the Mets lineup. Wondering how often K-Rod comes in with a deadly, first pitch slider? What Santana’s go-to pitch is when he needs the K? How often Delgado chases the ball in the dirt? These pages have it all, including a season preview and profiles of each potential contributor.
• The opening of Citi Field is a momentous occasion. Get a sneak peek into how the park will affect the team on the field and the fans watching, from the higher outfield fences, to the new food offerings.
• Of course, despite themselves, Mets fans will also miss Shea. Look back at some of its greatest moments, including its opening year, the numerous second-place teams it has seen, the Magical 1969 team, and the 1984 squad that instigated a revival.
• Omar Minaya has never been afraid to make the bold move, from Beltran and Pedro, to Santana and K-Rod. Famed sports economist Vince Gennaro, author of Diamond Dollars, reviews Minaya’s moves to determine if the Mets have gotten the expected value.
• Despite the bitter end, Jerry Manuel has to be deemed a success in his first season at the helm. Find out some of the philosophies and character traits that make him tick.

Of course, that’s not all. The Mets’ minor league system is dissected in great detail to determine the Top 10 pitching and hitting prospects, with an in-depth look at how top prospect Fernando Martinez is hoping to shake the “injury prone” label and contribute to the big league club-as soon as this year.

It’s all packed into 128 pages of information written by Mets fans for Mets fans. At $12.99, the Maple Street Press Mets Annual 2009 is unmatched for the level and amount of information it presents and is an essential guide for the serious Mets fan.

The New York Mets are one of baseball’s most vibrant and beloved franchises. Their miraculous seasons of 1969 and 1986 are virtually unmatched in baseball lore. Their near-misses of 1973, 1988, and 2006 are equally weighty topics among the Mets faithful. Mets Essential is the only book that gives the team’s complete history through insiders’ accounts, anecdotes, stats, trivia, and dozens of photographs. In the franchise’s unique lexicon, it’s simply amazin’!

From the Publisher
“The tales and statistics you’ll read in this book will reveal much about the New York Mets. That said, the best way for you or anyone else to learn about the team is to join us at Shea Stadium and see a new chapter in the team’s history unfold before your very eyes.”

–from the foreword by Ralph Kiner “Forget it, Casey, he missed second, too.” –first-base coach Cookie Lavagetto to manager Casey Stengel after Stengel prepared to argue a call that Marv Throneberry had missed first base on a potential two-run triple “It’s a fair ball. It gets by Buckner! Rounding third is Knight…. The Mets will win the ballgame…. They win! They win!” –radio announcer Bob Murphy’s call of the ending of Game 6 of the 1986 World Series.

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What do Dizzy Dean, Catfish Metkovich, John Boccabella, Bill Buckner, Mark Prior, and Kevin Hart all have in common? They all wore number 22 for the Chicago Cubs, even though seven decades have passed between the last time Dizzy Dean buttoned up a Cubs uniform with that number and the first time reliever Kevin Hart performed the same routine.

Since the Chicago Cubs first adopted uniform numbers in 1932, the team has handed out only 71 numbers to more than 1,100 players. That’s a lot of overlap. It also makes for a lot of good stories. Cubs by the Numbers tells those stories for every Cub since ’32, from 1930s outfielder Ethan Allen to current ace Carlos Zambrano. This book lists the players alphabetically and by number, but the biographies help trace the history of baseball’s most beloved team in a new way.

For Cubs fans, anyone who ever wore the uniform is like family. Cubs by the Numbers reintroduces readers to some of their long-lost ancestors, even ones they think they already know.

Authors

Al Yellon directs newscasts at ABC-7 in Chicago. He is also the founder and editor in chief of the popular site bleedcubbieblue.com and the editor of the annual magazine, Wrigley Field Season Ticket, published by Maple Street Press. He lives in Chicago, within walking distance of Wrigley Field.
Kasey Ignarski is founder and proprietor of the website Kasey’s Cubs Pages, which has a listing of every Cub who has ever worn a number. He lives in Chicago.

Matthew Silverman if you’ve gotten this far, you can read my other credits elsewhere on this page. I will say that since the first game I went to Wrigley in 1982—and I’d been to Shea, Yankee, Fenway, and Dodger Stadium—I thought it the best ballpark in the game. I still feel that way, though when I went to several games at Tiger Stadium in the 1990s I was deeply in love with that place.

This is the first team history of the New York Mets—or any other team—to be told through a lighthearted analysis of uniform numbers.

Ordinary club histories proceed year by year to give the big picture. Mets by the Numbers uses jersey numbers to tell the little stories—the ones the fans love—of the team and its players. This is a catalog of the more than 700 Mets who have played since 1962, but it is far from just a list of No. 18s and 41s. Mets by the Numbers celebrates the team’s greatest players, critiques numbers that have failed to attract talent, and singles out particularly productive numbers, and numbers that had really big nights. With coverage of superstitions, prolific jersey-wearers, the ever-changing Mets uniform, and significant Mets numbers not associated with uniforms, this book is a fascinating alternative history of the Amazin’s. 75 b/w photographs.

To many New Yorkers who came of age in the 1980s as Mets fans, Keith Hernandez is the Mets. Two decades after his last game in a New York uniform, the first captain in Mets history is still with them, literally. He’s spent most of the last decade in the broadcast booth at Shea Stadium watching the rise and fall of the club and, just as he did when he played, calling it as he sees it.

Opinionated, funny, urbane, and unafraid to poke holes in the team or himself, Hernandez is a master at relating the unseen game on the field.  Shea Good-Bye carries on the high standards of Hernandez’s earlier best-selling books. He recalls Shea Stadium both fondly and matter-of-factly in its last year of existence, lamenting the loss of the stadiums he knew, replaced with flashier bandboxes that favor home runs and negate strategy. He looks at the 2008 season and all the hope that arrived with the Johan Santana deal and how much of the optimism went out the window with the team’s stumble out of the gate. He speaks frankly on the taint of steroids in the Mitchell Report and how the game has been compromised, as well as the firing of Willie Randolph.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. That fabled line, a simplification of a more complicated quote by Plato, is simplified yet more when discussing ballparks. People love their ballparks, but the achitecture, form, and function can be appreciated by people who hate the team that plays there and can be admired by people who don’t know the first thing about baseball…but love a ballpark hot dog.

Ballparks have stood in many of America’s major cities since the 19th century. Fenway Park will celebrate its 100th anniversary in 2012. Wrigley Field will do the same in 2014. Many new parks celebrate the ballparks of old…with modern amenities added. And each new park tries to surpass the one built before it, or at least the one that housed the team previously.

Big League Ballparks looks at every ballpark built over the last century, plus many built before that. The book examines trends in ballpark architecture and breaks down the periods of ballpark building: The Pre-Ballpark Era, Classic Field, Stadiums, Superstadiums, and the current era that brought us Citi Field: the Retro Parks period. The book also includes reactions to the stadiums, key events that took place there, seasons to remember, unforgettable games, and photographs culled from dozens of different collections to make this the ultimate book on the subject.

The beauty of the ballpark is in the eye of the beholder, but Big League Ballparks lets the reader behold all the beauty of these parks and make their own judgments as to which is truly the best.

A second edition in paperback, revised and updated, is now available for 100 Things Mets Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die.

Enjoy the original? Well, this version is even better. It includes new sections on Carlos Beltran, Johan Santana, David Cone, Al Leiter, Dave Kingman, and Lee Mazzilli. Plus reflections on the Shea Goodbye Ceremony, Citi Field, and the Home Run Apple. There’s also new sidebars and revisions throughout the book. 100 Things Mets Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die is a book for the bucket list of every Mets fan or a good way to indoctrinate the unitiated into the cult of Metsdom.

Picking these moments takes a thorough knowledge of baseball history, a floor strewn with books and printouts, an electronic spreadsheet that allows for constant resorting, and a pressing deadline. One thing that wasn’t agonized over was the understanding that rooting for the Mets is the greatest test of a sports fan’s soul in New York. The sweeping highs and lows, the inferiority complex that comes from living in the shadow of Big Brother’s Evil Empire, the legacy that not one but two baseball teams had to abandon New York for you to even exist, and the underlying feeling that things can’t possibly get any worse. Well, sometimes they do. And sometimes you’re on top of the world.

Seven seasons after the Mets debuted with the most losses in modern baseball history, the franchise was still seen as a laughingstock, with 100-to-1 odds to win the World Series when 1969 began. The first year of divisional play started out as the Cubs’ year, while most onlookers figured the Mets would be happy if they could play .500 ball. Tom Seaver’s “Imperfect Game” against Chicago showed that the Mets could play with the big boys, but the Cubs still had a double-digit lead on the Mets in the middle of August. The Cubs stumbled, plagued by worn-out players, black cats, and bad luck, and magnificent Mets pitching turned the tide.

The Miracle Has Landed celebrates the loveable Mets like no other book, complete with photos and artifacts of the time. A project of the Society for American Baseball Research, this volume gathers the collective efforts of more than thirty SABR members and features profiles of every player, coach, broadcaster, and significant front-office member connected to that great Mets squad. Included are Hall of Famers Tom Seaver and Nolan Ryan, beloved manager Gil Hodges, the talented outfield of Cleon Jones, Tommie Agee, and Ron Swoboda, drill sergeant backstop Jerry Grote, crucial mid-season acquisition Donn Clendenon, scrappy shortstop Bud Harrelson, and a pitching staff that went far deeper than just Seaver and Ryan. Forty years later the Miracle Mets are still revered, the first world champion expansion team and the club that stole New York’s heart.