* RK Review: 100 Things Mets Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die

The Mets have had a relatively short history, not even 50 years yet, and much of their lore is based on failure rather than success. Except for a handful, the players for the first few years of the team’s existence were nothing to write home about.

So when authors like Matthew Silverman toss out names like Jerry Koosman, Ed Kranepool, Al Jackson, Steve Henderson…they might not mean much to baseball fans out of the NY area. But to those who faithfully follow the Mets, especially those who have been with the team since the beginning, they’re just as memorable as Seaver, Gooden, and Strawberry. Among the 100 things are players, dates, manager, front office people, trades…in short anything one would need know to be called a true fan.

With all the buzz about the final season of Yankee Stadium, there seems to be a lack of notoriety that Shea is also in its swan song. Granted, you can’t compare the two for tradition or sentiment, but this Queens abode was “home” for most of the Mets’ life. Silverman pays homage to the ballpark in his “to do” section. Go to Shea, he says, look at the game from various vantage points on each level chosen for optimum viewing pleasure. He also includes non-baseball events at Shea, such as the Jets championship in 1969 and the Beatles taking to the field 1965, followed by several other rock concerts since then.

Books like this are not meant to be great literature, and that is not meant as criticism. Rather the purpose seems to be to light a small flame of memory. Silverman mentions Ron Hunt and we see the scrappy little second baseman with a scowl on his face, posing for the yearbook picture. He reminds us of two playoff home runs from unlikely players that broke our hearts. All like a family album, but with fewer pictures. Other attempts have been made to capture this type of feeling, but none have succeeded like 100 Things. One can see a book like this for each team (although I think the novelty of the “die” theme has overstayed its welcome).

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Silverman — whose other books about the Mets include Mets by the Numbers, Meet the Mets and Mets Essential — offers his own must-reads for Mets fans, modestly omitting his own works:

• Can’t Anyone Here Play This Game, by Jimmy Breslin
• The new York Mets, by Leonard Koppett
• Screwball, by Tug McGraw
• If at First, by Keith Hernandez
• The New York Mets: Twenty-Five Years of Baseball Magic, by Jack Lang and Mark 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

Remember Jane Jarvis?

In the days before pre-programmed music blasting from the rafters, major league ballparks employed people to play the organ to entertain the fans. Jane Jarvis played the Thomas organ for the Milwaukee Braves and the New York Mets.

To be honest, I thought she had passed on years ago. But she’s very much alive and well in NYC. Well maybe not so well at the moment, Jarvis, 92, was displaced from her residence due to a recent construction accident that resultd in several fatalities and caused much damage.

After she left the Mets, she worked for the Muzak company, but found her niche late in life as a Jazz performer.

Here’s wishing her a speedy return to the comforts of ehr own home.

Happy Birthday, Terry Leach

The submariner journeyman pitcher turns 58 today. Leach was another of those players who came to the Majors relatively late (27). He had one great year, going 11-1 for the Mets in 1987, including a 10-innning, 1-0 shutout, but received relatively littl fanfare.

Leach wrote about his experiences, including his sense of betrayal by “the organization,” regardless of which team he was playing for, in a surprisingly moving and effective autobiography, Things Happen for a Reason.

The Amazon Report:

Things Happen for a Reason: The True Story of an Itinerant Life in Baseball

Author Profile: Matthew Silverman

Matthew Silverman has started his own cottage industry, writing about the Mets. This year alone he has three books out on the Amazin’s, including, Mets by the Numbers (with Jon Springer), Meet the Mets (with Greg Spira), and 100 Things Mets Fans Should Know and Do Before They Die. He has also contributed to such major collaborations as Total Baseball, Baseball: The Biographical Encyclopedia, and Armchair Reader: Grand Slam Baseball.

The New York Times ran this profile on the busy Mr. Silverman in today’s edition.

The Matthew Silverman Mets Opus, aka, The Amazon Report:

Mets by the Numbers: A Complete Team History of the Amazin’ Mets by Uniform Number

Meet the Mets 2008: An Annual Guide to New York Mets Baseball

100 Things Mets Fans Should Know and Do Before They Die

Mets Essential: Everything You Need to Know to Be a Real Fan!

Review: Mets by the Numbers

From Faithandfear, “the blog for Mets fans who like to read.”

Upshot: “Mets By The Numbers … is perhaps the most incredible repository of Mets data, Mets trivia and Mets Zeitgeist you will ever find between two covers.”

Review: 101 Reasons to Love the Mets

by David Green. 2008, Stewart, Tabori & Chang.

ST&C have published a series of these books for several teams already, including the Yankees and Red Sox. The binding/dust jacket is reminiscent of an old photo album and that’s exactly the feeling the reader will get. In fact, like that old keepsake, these little books are basically interesting to those with a direct relationship to the team.

Green does a nice job in picking the highlights of the Mets’ 40-plus year history, bringing to many of the highlights (and low ones) and some of the ball club’s most beloved characters/players, including Casey, Choo Choo, Marvelous Marv, Krane, Tom Terrific, Mookie, The Kid, Rusty, Mex, Nails, Straw, Doc, HoJo and a host of others. Then there are those great moments: The 69 world Sries, the Game Sixes of 1986: the playoff against the Astros and the Buckner Boot in the Series; the first interleague win against the Yankees; Piazza’s game-winning home run in the first game back after 9/11. The cover price, a relatively low $14.95, is worth the price of admission to a walk down memory lane.

A few more “Reasons”:

• Harry Chiti, the player who was traded…for himself
• Gil Hodges walking to the outfield to pull a lackadasical Cleon Jones from the field
• David Cone’s 19 strikeout game
• Bret Saberhagen’s 1994 season in which he won more games (14) than walked batters (13)
• Anthony Young’s 27 consecutive game losing streak (Hey, they’re not all gems.)

I could go on, but then there’d be no point in reading the book.

New stadiums for old

This will be the last season for the homes of both New York teams. Losing Shea Stadium is no big deal; it was a cold, cavernous ugly concrete structure from day 1. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
But Yankee Stadium is a cathedral and the though of it being demolished is truly a sad one.

Review: Mets by the Numbers

As an unabashed Mets fan I’ll read anything about the team. Of course, this non-discriminatory policy can lead to some time-wasting clunkers.

On the other hand, there are some time-wasters that can be lots of fun (you’re reading this, after all).  Mets by the Numbers: A Complete Team History of the Amazin’ Mets by Uniform Number (Skyhorse Publishing), a collaboration by Jon Springer and Matt Silverman, falls into this category. With an eye for detail that borders on the anal, they have put together this fascinating and entertaining collection as he explores the team’s history through a study of every players uniform number.

Among the bits of minutiae, he includes how many Mets wore each number; who did the numeral the most proud and who was a bottom-feeder. The authors also take the time to toss in all sorts on numerology, such as which position total stats per numeral). In his tenure with the team from 1989-94, Jeff McKnight set the franchise career mark for most uniform numbers (five).

The book is a natural extension of Springer’s Web site of the same name and promises to be a great companion during those interminable rain delays or pitching changes.

Lest we forget: Karl Ehrhardt, The Sign Man

Karl Ehrhardt was a fixture at Shea Stadium for much of the 1960s and 1970s. Fans marveled how quickly he could hoist a placard just right for the situation on the field. He passed away at the age of 83. The Times wrote this profile of him just two years ago.

 

Author chronicles Mets 2007 debacle

Author Neil Spagna announced that the long awaited update to his award-winning first book, Welcome To Pottersville, will be published in hardcover to coincide with the beginning of the 2008 baseball season.

Tentatively scheduled for an April 28 release date, the book will include insights on the September collapse of the New York Mets, the Mitchell Report, and the current state and future of New York baseball as the final season of both Yankee Stadium and Shea Stadium commences.

The book, originally planned for an October 2007 initial publishing run was postponed by  the author. In a press release, he said, “I thought I had a manuscript that was ready for the marketplace. Then the sudden September collapse of the Mets and the release of the Mitchell Report and all of the controversies surrounding illegal substances in baseball made the book seem aged before its time. I couldn’t see a book about New York baseball without tying in these topics in some sort of meaningful way,” said Spagna. “I feel good about the results.”

An excerpt from Welcome to Pottersville.

Albom’s For One More Day soon to be a minor motion picture

Sportswriter Mitch Albom, famous for his Tuesdays with Morrie best-seller, will have his latest creation For One More Day airs as an ABC-TV movie with the Oprah seal of approval.

According to IMDB.com, Day tells the story of “A suicidal former baseball player, played by Michael Imperioli, is granted one more day with his deceased mother (Ellen Burstyn).

Imperioli sat down for a Q&A for the Dec. 3 issue of Sports Illustrated (as the only baseball item, there will be no need for an additional “This week in SI“). Among other things, the actor, best known for his role on The Sopranos, says it’s all right for a Yankee fan to portray a Mets player, as long as it’s in the name of acting.

The movie airs Dec. 9. “Check your local listings for time.”

The Amazon Report: For One More Day

Author Profile: Richard Grossinger

Beyond the Sports Page

The 2007 season ended not with a bang, but with a whimper as the New York Mets frittered away a seven-game National League Eastern Division lead with 17 games to play.
Years from now, how will fans recall the events of this major disappointment?
If they are as thoughtful as author Richard Grossinger, the bad melds with the good to form a complete picture.
In his latest release, The New York Mets: Ethnography, Myth and Subtext, Grossinger goes beyond the team deconstruction that has become the standard in recentyears.
“It’s sort of a baseball book on the surface, but underneath it’s really a different book,” he said in a telephone interview from his summer home in Maine.
Grossinger, who has a PhD in anthropology and has written extensively on what would generally be considered more serious subjects, has edited several eclectic anthologies about the national pastime, including Baseball, I Gave You All the Best Years of My Life; The Temple of Baseball; Baseball Diamonds: Tales, Traces & and Voodoo from a Native American Life; and The Dreamlife of Johnny Baseball. He has learned that trying to market such esoteric books for the average fan didn’t work — “They didn’t sell worth a damn,” he said — so he decided to go in the opposite direction, starting up his own publishing company.
The 63-year-old Grossinger explained the meaning of his subtitle.

• Ethnography comes from his work as an anthropologist: “I considered a lot of the stuff I did on the Mets field work, especially some of the stuff in the 1980s when I interviewed players and went on the field.”
• Myth: “I’m writing about the mythic Mets, the Mets of my imagination rather than writing about the actual Mets.”
• Subtext: “That may be the trickiest. I may have used it because it’s a fashionable word, and it keys to the fact that it’s not really looking for what lies underneath the day-to-day coverage of the team.”

The son of Paul Grossinger — whose hotel in the Catskills was a staple of Jewish culture  for generations — the writer grew up a Yankees fan. “They had a tremendous influence over the hotel. So many of the players came there….[Y]ou’d have to say the Yankees always had that edge in New York. They’re deeper in [the city’s] history and consciousness, and in some ways they represent the New York that New York wants to see itself as.”
But when the Mets made their debut in 1962, he was hooked. “I went through my own personal transformation in college, when the culture was changing in the late ’60s and early ’70s and baseball came to seem sort of tawdry and uninteresting for a few years, and when I came back to it, it just looked different. Only the Mets seemed to relate to who I had become; the Yankees tended to relate to who I had been. [They] represented the New York in which I had grown up, which had been completely lost to me, and the Mets represented a kind of unknown future which I was looking at in my 20s.”
Jewish immigrant parents in the early 20th century disdained baseball for distracting their sons from more productive pursuits. So why would such an obviously thoughtful and learned man waste his time on such inconsequential matters? “Writing is writing. It’s what you make of the subject, the art of the subject that is interesting,” he said.
“It’s not the subject that’s trivial; it’s the way you relate to it. “What is ultimately important?”he asked. “The Zen monk sitting in the monetary getting to the bottom of the mind? The scientist trying to find the cure for cancer? The politician trying to end the war? All these things are very important but if you take a step back from any of them, you have to wonder whether they, too, are in some sense artifacts of existence and simply masks through which people find themselves. “I think baseball is one of those. It’s always better to dig into it and try and figure out the nature of the connection than to have this kind of ambivalence that says, ‘I’m not supposed to be involved in something so stupid and irrelevant [as baseball] but somehow I am.’”
The Mets’ collapse has one potential benefit for the author: Now that the team is done for the year, those more thoughtful fans will have plenty of time to read Grossinger’s books.

This article appeared in New Jersey Jewish News, Oct. 11, 2007.