* Mets add author to their lineup

This afternoon, the New York Mets signed Chris Coste, author of Hey…I’m just the catcher: An inside look at a Northern League season from behind the plate and The 33-Year-Old Rookie: My 13-Year Journey from the Minor Leagues to the World Series.

A popular player with the fans, Coste, now 36, spent 3 1/2 years with the Philadelphia Phillies, finishing the 2009 season with the Houston Astros. He owns a lifetime btting average of .272, with 23 homers and 108 RBI, mostly in back-up mode.

* A new Miracle

(Full disclosure: I contributed a chapter to The Miracle Has Landed: The Amazin’ Story of How the 1969 Mets Shocked the World.)

On the Black, a Mets-centric blog, featured a three part series on this new collaborative effort edited by Matthew Silverman and Ken Samelson.

Part 1

Part 2 (an interview with Silverman)

Part 3 (interview continued)

* Well, they do have the time for it now

Kerel Cooper, who hosts OntheBlack, (“NY Mets Video Blog Providing News, Opinions and Analysis”), has a thought that applies to the entire organization:

Reading is FUNdamental.

In this video, he suggests the Mets’ would do well to devote part of their off-season (their long off-season) to boning up on the game via these titles:

• Getting Organized by Chris Crouch
• Baseball For Dummies by Joe Morgan
• Have Gun Will Travel by Ronin Ro (a book about the rap music label Death Row that, according to Cooper “tells a very fascinating story about a bunch of aggressive individuals who knew the goal that they wanted to hit in their careers and they got to that go, really by any means necessary.”)
• The Complete Game by Ron Darling
• The Bad Guys Won by Jeff Pearlman

You might think this is meant as a goof, but Cooper isn’t joking and he makes a lot of sense as he describes how these books might help the Mets get back to former greatness next year and beyond.

* Is it over yet?

You know the season is over for your team when the newspapers publish a feature article…and conclude with a brief graph of two about the game. Like today. The New York Times printed this piece on Daniel Murphy approaching a club record for doubles (stop the presses!) and winding up with a “and, oh, by the way the Braves beat the Mets” wrap-up.

* RK Review: Once Upon the Polo Grounds

The Mets That Were, by Leonard Shecter, Dial Press, 1970.

It is generally accepted that Shea Stadium was not one of the classic ballparks in the long history of the national pastime. Yet more than 56,000 were on hand for the final game on Sept. 28, 2008.

On the other hand, when the same Mets played the final game of the very historic Polo Grounds, less than 2,000 showed up to pay their respects. Granted there wasn’t all the hoop-de-do that modern events seem to balloon into, always looking for make an extra buck by playing on people’s nostalgia, but even so…

The dropped pop-up by Luis Castillo against the Yankees with two outs in the ninth inning could just as easily easily been seen during those first two seasons, as Shecter –  who is too often forgotten for his contributions to Jim Bouton’s essential Ball Four — captures so humorously in this little gem, as he focuses on the team’s first two seasons. They may have played in the home of the Giants of John McGraw, but they sure didn’t play like the Giants.

Did the Mets really seem to invent ways to lose that were heretofore beyond consideration or was it all just media spin? Surely the Dodgers (with Casey Stengel as their leader) or the Browns or the pitiful Pirates of the 1950s were just as creative. Perhaps it was the absence of a National League rerpesentative that made New Yorkers more tolerant. Bad baseball is better than no baseball at all. Or perhaps not, as Schecter writes during the 1963 season:

The fact, though, that while Mets fans loved the Mets when they lost, it was a love like that a mother bestows on a son who has just missed a scholarship. Better things had been expected.

Shecter, a sportswriter for The New York Post who died in 1974 at the age of 48, wrote Once Upon in the afterglow of the Amazin’  year and concludes with the consequences that success engendered:

It is different now, obviously. Casey Stengel is gone. A pennant has been won, and a world championship. It is a glorious thing, and yet somehow sad. For what we feel for the Mets now will never be quite the same as what we felt during those first two years. We have tasted victory and we shall root not for survival, but for more victory. It was inevitable, we understand now, for this to happen; it’s only that it happened so soon, so swiftly. Still, the Mets are there (at slightly higher prices) and there is still much joy to take from them. We cannot be blamed, though, those of us who sit amidst the thundering crowd and quietly tell our young ones a tale that begins: “Once upon the Polo Grounds…”

Speaking og “higher prices,” I wonder what Shecter would say these days. By the way, the list price for the original hardcover edition? $3.95.

As big a Mets fan as I am, I had never heard of this title but I’m glad I found it. Shecter is an overlookd writer. It’s too bad he couldn’t have stuck around longer to enjoy the success of Ball Four and add further oevures to his portfolio.

* Happy days are here again

In the form of  Rob Kirkpatrick’s new book, 1969: The Year Everything Changed.

Boomers will get a kick out of this piece of nostalgia, which covers the bad (Vietnam, the Manson murders, Days of Rage) as well as the good (Woodstock, Easy Rider, Wody Allen). But for our purposes, it’s all about the game.

Kirkpatrick, a senior editor at Thomas Dunne Books (this title was published by Skyhorse Press, so there’s no nepotiz here) includes several chapters on baseball and ‘The Miracle Mets” (look carefully at the bottom right of the book jacket), beginning with the first rumblings of success when they reached .500 after 36 games, to their triumpoh over the Orioles in the World Series.

One quibble: when the author describes the controversial play that led to the Mets’ 2-1 win in Game 4, he writes: “A replay indicates that [J.C.] Martin might have been running outside the base path on his way to first when he was struck by the ball.” Actually, Martin, who bunted as a pinch-hitter with Rod Gaspar on first, ran inside the lines, where he was hit by reliever Pete Richert’s throw.

Kirkpatrick also relates a story Jerry Koosman told author Peter Golenbock for his book, Amazin’: The Miraculous History of New York’s Most Beloved Baseball Team, regarding the famous Cleon Jones shoe polish incident. Accoding to the lefty- pitcher, when the foul ball came into the dugout, manager Gil Hodges told him to brush it against his shoe, thus creating the black mark. From everything I’ve read about Hodges, it seems out of character for him to, well, cheat like that. Sad, if true.

You can read more about the Mets via his website.

Kirkpatrick is also the author of Cecil Travis of the Washington Senators: The War-Torn History of an All-Star Shortstop.

* Ask the “experts”

Headline from The Star-Ledger (Newark), Tuesday, Aug. 25 (from the New York Daily News syndicate):

“Wagner unlikely to go to Red Sox”

Headline from The Star-Ledger (Newark), Wednesday, Aug. 26 (from the New York Daily News syndicate):

“Wagner relents, okays deadline deal to Boston”

* The Amazin’ Mets Plus 40

Weather permitting, the Mets will honor their 1969 World Championship team. George Vescey wrote an excellent column in yesterday’s New York Times.

Which sent me to my library to see what I’ve got specifically on that momentous event. Mant books about the team include a look back at that first championship, but the following titles deal exclusively with 1969 and the members of the team.

• The Incredible Mets, by Maury Allen
• The Year the Mets Lost Last Place, by Paul Zimmerman and Dick Schaap
• The Perfect Game: Tom Seaver and the Mets, by Seaver and Schaap
• Jimmy Breslin republished his entertaining 1963 Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?, with a new introduction.

Since nature abhors a vacuum but loves books marking anniversaries, Allen took a look back in 1989 with After the Miracle: The Amazin’ Mets 20 Years Later. Stanley Cohen got the hump on the occasion, releasing A Magic Summer: The ‘69 Mets the year before. He re-published this year with a new introduction.

The New York Daily News dipped into its archives to come out with Amazin’ Mets: The Miracle of ‘69, featuring an introduction by Eddie Kranepool, the last original Met from 1962, and an afterword from Art Shamsky.

Shamsky wrote about that iconoic year in 2004 with the unwiedly-named The Magnificant Seasons: How the Jets, Mets, and Knicks Made Sports History and Uplifted a City and a Nation.

This year will see a few new titles marking the 40th anniversary, including Steve Travers’ The 1969 Miracle Mets: The Improbable Story of the World’s Greatest Underdog Team and The Miracle Has Landed: The Amazin’ Story of How the 1969 Mets Shocked the World, edited by Matthew Silverman and Ken Samelson, due out in October from Maple Street Press (full disclosure: I contribiuted the chapters on the post-season).

* It gets late early this time of year

To paraphrase that eminent philsopher Berra.

You know your team is doing poorly when its home town newspaper starts giving them a box with just a few paragraphs, as The New York Times print edition did for last night’s 10-1 Mets loss to the Giants. Haven’t done a line-by-line comparison, but here’s the Web version, which is similarly skimpy.

The Times put the squeeze play on the Mets.

It’s probably the Mets fan in me, but I used to get quite annoyed if the Yankees, in defeat, got more ink than the Mets in victory. I’m just sayin’…

* Caesar’s wife

This one is a toughie.

Omar Minaya took time out in yesterday’s press conference announcing the firing of Tony Bernazard to point an accusing finger at NY Daily News sportswriter Adam Rubin. Aaccording to Minaya, Rubin had perhaps politicked (my phrase) for a player development job some time back and was therefore somewhat predisposed to be anti-Bernazard, who had that position with the Mets.

Rubin addressed the situation at length in today’s Daily News:

…instead of focusing on the horrors Bernazard inflicted upon Mets farmhands and team employees, Minaya tried to redirect the story from Bernazard’s reprehensible actions – which were validated or the Mets wouldn’t have fired Bernazard – to me. In an attempt to link my reporting to occasional discussions with Mets front office people about possible careers in baseball, Minaya basically left the impression that I had written the stories with some kind of ulterior motive in mind.

His fellow sportswriters are circling the wagons in his defense. Filip Bondy, a colleague of Rubin’s at the Daily News wrote that Minaya took a ‘cheap shot.”

Even the competition, recognizing the import of the issue, put aside their differences to back Rubin.