“The New York Mets: Celebrating Six Decades
of Amazin’ Baseball”
The editors: Sports Illustrated
The publishing info: Triumph Books, 232 pages, $35, released April 11, 2023
The links: At the publishers website; at Bookshop.org; at Amazon.com; at BarnesAndNoble.com
“The Last Miracle: My 18-Year Journey
with the Amazin’ New York Mets”
The author:
Ed Kranepool
With Gary Kashak
The publishing info:
Triumph Books
256 pages, $30
To be released Aug. 1, 2023
The links:
The publishers website
At Bookshop.org
At BarnesAndNoble.com
At Amazon.com
The reviews in 90 feet or less
We curbed our enthusiasm in hopes of checking out tonight’s opener of the Dodgers-Mets weekend series from Citi Field in New York as baseball comes back from the All-Star break.
It happened shortly after mom called this morning to ask what channel it might be on. The team’s website confused her.
She didn’t see it listed on the Dodgers’ SportsNet L.A. Nor was it on Fox, ESPN, FS1, Channel 9 (a place she still thinks it could be), Channel 13 (a place where sports often land when they have no cable home), Bally Sports West (home of the Angels, for now) or even MLB Network (the place she tried to follow the Dodgers during their contract dispute with Time Warner back in the day).
The answer: None of the above.
It’s on Apple TV+ (cost: $6.99 a month), as she finally figured out after the Dodgers’ website interrupted her search with a popup graphic generated by the MLB’s BetMGM showing her that 8.5 was the over-under for total runs if she wanted to put down a sawbuck.
That also could have been the over-under on her searching for the right channel. It was under. Due to lack of endurance and imagination.
She’d likely find more enjoyment burning an apple pie in the toaster oven than trying to order anything, even Ted Lasso, on Apple TV+ with her non-smart television, let alone her not-so-smart phone. Her Earthlink internet service has also been faulty. So she’s without a Dodgers broadcast now almost a full week, since they took the Sunday off before the All-Star break (who does that?) and now pick things up with a nine-game road trip by alienating whatever fans they have over the age of 70.
And, as they say when they have no answer to the solution, it is what it is.
These Metropolitans of New York start the second half of the season – or, really the last 45 percent of it – fourth in the NL East, a minus-3 in run differential that matches up with their 42-48 record, 18 ½ games behind Atlanta, but certainly not as bad off as the Washington Nationals. So that is what it is.
Except, in New York, it isn’t.
Sham billionaire Steve Cohen, who bought the franchise for $2.4 billion in 2020, spent about a half-billion on free agents last winter to win the off season and also rack up a bill for the most expensive team in the sport’s history — a record $353 million payroll on Opening Day, 2023. That’s almost $100 million more than the runner-up New York Yankees ($277 million), and there’s a distance now between them and the Dodgers ($223 million) and Angels ($212 million), who sit fifth and sixth in the rankings, right after the Padres ($249 million) and Phillies ($243 million).
In the New York Times, right after the Fourth of July, political columnist David Brooks wrote a piece under the headline “Why I Still Love the New York Mets” that included a photo of former pitcher Bartolo Colon following the flight of his one and only home run at age 42 in 2016.
Ah, nostalgia.
The Mets and their fans can default to excuses, such as the one where star reliever Edwin Diaz blew out a knee at the World Baseball Classic simply by cheering too hard.
Brooks writes: “At gametime, I flick on the M.L.B. app and tune in. The worst days are not the days they blow a five-run lead; the worst days are the off days when I don’t get to watch them. We assume that we are rational creatures who seek pleasure and avoid pain, which doesn’t explain why so many of us are Mets fans. Why do we do this to ourselves?”
He then references Devon Gordon’s outstanding book from 2021, “So Many Ways To Lose,” (our generous review here) that bases the team’s misfortunes at any point in time simply on the fact that they are just really good at embracing defeat.
Brooks concludes:
“This season’s meltdowns have served to remind us we don’t watch sports for happiness; we watch for drama. This is what the happiness industrial complex doesn’t get. In life and in sports, people want to experience the rapture of being fully alive, with struggle and defeat and misery and resurrection, heroism and enchantment and those short and misleading winning streaks that spark the flames of irrational optimism all over again.
“If the Mets can only win 80 percent of their remaining games, they’ll make the playoffs … and then, I swear, miracles will happen.”
The worst day, perhaps for a Dodgers fan, is when they can’t watch them either.
We will now go see if Brooks shows up for his weekly visit to the PBS News Hour to give us his thoughts on what’s going on in the world. It comes on right about the time the Mets and Dodgers are playing a game on that app thing. At least Brooks is more dependable.
How they go in the scorebook
Ah, right, these two books need some sort of review. Why again?
No surprise that anything trying to sell people on the Mets will either us the word “miracles” or “amazin'” to get some sort of point across. Sometimes both. Hardly ever neither.
This year’s Mets: Miserable. Middle-Of-The-Road. Messy. Money-heavy. Monotonous. So if they want to offload an outfielder like Tommy Pham on the Dodgers, let it happen sooner than later.
Here goes on the books: Exhibit A — The size of the SI thing – a foot tall and nearly that much wide, and farmed out to another publisher — speaks to how it feels Mets fans need to embrace their laundry wearers. Exhibit B — The fact Kranepool, who at 78 still elicits some kind of emotional connection, does remind us that Raymond and Robert Barone’s family dog in “Everyone Loves Raymond” was named Shamsky. Replaced by Shamsky II.
If your evening doesn’t include being in the Big Apple, nor having on Apple TV+, it may be better served re-reading “So Many Ways to Lose,” which has a 4 1/2-out-of-5 star rating on Amazon based on more than 400 reviews.
As for one of those few 1-star reviewer: “This would be an enjoyable book if the author didn’t insert his liberal views every chance he could get. Let’s bash Rivera and Strawberry because they are Trump supporters. Bonilla was treated badly by white sportswriters because he was Puerto Rican and Keith Hernandez was an angel because he was white? Really? I picked up this book to try and escape the constant political pandering from both sides of the aisle and only got more of the same. No one cares about your far left views, but then again nowadays everyone thinks people really care about their political affiliations and views. Garbage…I need to find a book that will focus on the great sport of baseball without a agenda attached to it.”
What would Ed Kranepool do?
Tom Hoffarth's The Drill: More Farther Off the Wall 
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