* New York, New York: A “Freaky” assessment

From Stephen J. Dubner on The New York Times‘ Freakonomics blog (It’s okay; the original Freakonomics still sits on my bookshelf), this assessment of the decline of Western civilization, as evidenced by the boorish behavior of fans at last night’s interleague game between the Mets and Yankees.

* Author Q&A: Michael Shapiro

Metsmerizedonline posted this interview with the author of Bottom of the Ninth.

* Poetry. In motion?

Although I write a weekly hiaku for my newspaper on the week’s Torah reading, I rarely touch poetry. It’s too subjective.(Here’s my favorite, which I heard on an old Tony Kornhieser radio program: “Haikus can be fun /but sometimes they don’t make sense: /Refrigerator.” Hee.)

Anyway, that said, here’s an article from the Hudson Reporter on poet/author Frank Messina, who recently published Full Count: The Book of Mets Poetry.

More on Messina from The New York Times, and a previous entry on the Bookshelf here and here.

* Maybe someone should have thought of this awhile ago

The Yankee game was on TV last night and I noticed from the centerfield shot that many of the seats behind the plate were vacant. At first I just chalked it up to the early hour; people probably hadn’ arrived yet. I subsequently switched to the Mets game and thought no more of it.

Until this morning. In this piece — which appears on the front page (and is continued in the “A” — not the sports — section) of The New York Times, Ken Belson (with Richard Sandomir) writes that perhaps both local teams should have given building new ball parks a bit more thought. Granted, they might not have been able to foresee hoe the economy would fall into the wood chipper, but

The empty seats are a fresh sign that the teams might have miscalculated how much fans and corporations were willing to spend, particularly during a deep recession. Whatever the reason, the teams are scrambling to comb over their $295- to $2,625-a-seat bald spots.

The article quotes Jon Greenberg, executive editor of the Team Marketing Report, “This is the worst possible time to debut a stadium.”

Ya think?

“The price of an average premium ticket is $510 for the Yankees and $150 for the Mets. The prices of nonpremium tickets rose 76 percent this year at Yankee Stadium, which goes a long way toward offsetting losses from unsold premium seats.”

$510 for ONE ticket? DAMMMMNNN!

Heaven forbid they should drop the prices a bit. Why? Would that be admitting defeat of some sort?

“The teams are loath to cut prices for fear of alienating existing ticket-holders,” Belson writes. “Letting fans from other sections move to the premium seats behind home plate and above the dugouts could backfire in the same way.” Okay, I can understand that.

My wife and I have been offered tickets for a couple of games at Citi Field. Way down in the right field corner, $75 bucks a pop. No thanks.

The “pull quote” for the Times‘ story: “Even if you build it, sometimes they don’t come.”

A.J. Burnett of the Yankees pitching in front of sparsely populated premium seats on Sunday. Photo by Barton Silverman, NY Times

* 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).

---

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.