‘Dude, Hit the Ball Hard’
Mike Piazza is a special instructor in Mets camp. He is among the most special of all Mets, so the title fits. Nice of him to swing by St. Lucie, just as it was good thinking on Jeff Wilpon’s part to...
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Deconstructing Harvey
The infrastructure of a baseball season encompasses a surfeit of components that don’t show up in the box score, including intramural dustups in March that dissolve into the murkiest of memories by...
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The Beat Before the Tweet
The headline didn’t have much on The Onion. “Farnsworth,” it reported, “rides bus without being Met.” Well, I thought, that’s too bad. It would have been nice if somebody had picked up Farnsworth, but...
View ArticleTakin’ Caryn Business
Friend of FAFIF Caryn Rose has not one but two baseball books out that you should know about. There’s the e-book anthology, One Girl, One Team, One City: The Best of Metsgrrl.com, collecting a series...
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Head of the Class
Aesthetics aside, the Mets’ extended residency in Philadelphia is going pretty well: three of four games have been captured, with one still waiting to be bagged. We’ve seen what Jonathon Niese can do...
View ArticleImmortals at Play
It’s a long way from Matty vanquishing Athletics in 1905 to MadBum mowing down Royals in 2014, though if you’ve pitched yourself into the same conversation, the gap grows short. In Game Five of the...
View ArticleMeet the Mets Authors
Pitchers and catchers reported. Infielders and outfielders followed. Now it’s time for authors and books. March usually brings some promising titles of the Metsian variety, and this one has a couple to...
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The Life Gil Hodges Lived
Buddy Carlyle, baseball professional since 1996 yet a veteran of portions of only eight major league seasons to date, knows from whence he speaks when he says, “Baseball goes on. That’s the hardest...
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That’s Life
Of the 25 fine reasons to read Game Of My Life: New York Mets, perhaps the one that comes out of the farthest reaches of left field is the best. That’s the chapter author Michael Garry devotes to Eric...
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The Sandy Project
Not many books draw attention more for their subtitle than their title, but Baseball Maverick’s most striking come-on clearly sits below the marquee: “How Sandy Alderson Revolutionized Baseball and...
View ArticleCyber Monday Alert
If this is the day you shop online for the holidays — and if you define “the holidays” as the approach of the next baseball season — then do I have a deal for you. Go to Amazon or Barnes & Noble...
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Coming Around Again
“Someday there will be nostalgia for the seventies, as hard as that may be to realize now.” —Brendan C. Boyd and Fred Harris, The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book,...
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Magical Metsery Tour Continues
The Mets have played home games in two counties of New York City, so I’ll do the same in the coming days, as the preseason book tour for Amazin’ Again: How the 2015 New York Mets Brought the Magic Back...
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Signed, Sealed, Delivered
A few notes to pass along regarding Amazin’ Again, my book on how the 2015 Mets brought the magic, not to mention a pennant, back to Queens. 1) For those who are kind enough to ask, yes, you can get a...
View ArticleSticking Around
The Mets won a game with me recapping, so I guess I can stay! So can Steven Matz, who rebounded rather nicely from a horror show of a beginning to his 2016 season. Matz’s Sunday outing began with...
View ArticleThe Walking Ted
What was Chipper Jones doing in the Mets clubhouse before Saturday night’s game at Turner Field? Presumably signing over the deed on the joint to the visiting team. Remember when Larry was loathed and...
View ArticleSame Old & Some New Stories
Clayton Kershaw shutting down the Mets on almost no hits…where have we seen that before? Almost everywhere we’ve run into him, it seems, save for one buoyant October night, which attests to fine Met...
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Hello Brooklyn
Amazin’ Again, my book that tells how the 2015 Mets brought the magic back to Queens, makes its Brooklyn debut this Tuesday night at 7 o’clock when I join my longtime friend and esteemed blolleague Jon...
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We Can Hitch a Ride to Briarwood, Queens
My first brush with publication came 38 years ago this month in my junior high literary magazine, Pieces of Mind. The story I wrote was called “Saturday Afternoon Fever,” about four friends whose...
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Meet Me in New Jersey
2015: The best kind of history. Though our nation turned its Piazza eyes to mythic Cooperstown on Sunday afternoon, it is Hoboken that makes a convincing claim as the true labor/delivery room of the...
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