“Mets Stories I Only Tell My Friends”
The author: Art Shamsky with Matthew Silverman
The details: Triumph Books, $30, 256 pages, released March 11, 2025; best available at the publishers website and Bookshop.org.
“Get Your Tokens Ready:
The Late 1990s Road to the Subway Series”
The author: Chris Donnelly
The details: University of Nebraska Press, $34.95, 344 pages, released May 1, 2025; best available at the publishers website and Bookshop.org.
“Out of the Mouth of Babe:
Babe Ruth on Life: Pitching, Hitting,
Striking Out, and Coming Back Swinging”
The author: Kelly Bennett
The details: Familius Publishing, 200 pages, $16.99, released April 15, 2025; best available at the publishers’ website and Bookshop.org.
“Yankees, Typewriters, Scandals
and Cooperstown: A Baseball Memoir”
The author: Bill Madden
The details: Triumph Books, 256 pages, $30, released April 1, 2025; best available at the publishers website and Bookshop.org.
A review in 90 feet or less
The top five loudest news stories involving New York’s professional baseball teams in 2025, starting in spring training, have been, more or less, in this order:
1. Believe it or not, Yankees players can wear hair on their face (which had many pulling out their global hair). And then they got rid of Alex Verdugo, who immediately shed a large beard as an outfielder with the Atlanta Braves.
2. The Yankees won’t stoop to playing Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” if they lose a home game.
3. The Yankees leased George Steinbrenner Stadium in St. Petersburg to the Tampa Bay Rays this season — and no, the Yankees won’t play “New York, New York” after they defeat them from the oddness of sitting in the visiting dugout.
4. Torpedo bats are a thing. And legal. Alex Verdugo may want to look into this.
5. New York Mets owner Steve Cohen has, according to the Sports Business Journal, “an ambitious long-term vision for the area surrounding City Field” that will cost about $8 billion to turn 50 acres of asphalt parking lots into a Hard Rock Hotel and Casino, a food hall and a 5,000-seat indoor concern venue.
And it seems to be legal for someone who the story points out is a “$21 billion hedge fund titan.”
(Again, for more on all that, re-re-read the 2017 book “Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street” by Sheelah Kolhatkar and you’ll have chills down your spine when you think of how Juan Soto’s services were acquired).
It’s all a wonderful idea and a way to appease Mets fans who’ll never be content. Especially after Juan Soto waited until the May 1 bloom to bank his first home run at CitiBank Field, drawing the attention of Cornelius Finklestein:
And not long after Mets fans made some news for bitching about umpire Jim Wolf, because he not only was having a bad day but it should result in him losing a job he’s held fulltime for the last quarter century.
If Cohen has a role model for this idea, it’s Los Angeles Rams owner Stan Kroenke and what he did building SoFi Stadium in Inglewood. His love of trees, sagebrush and a large pool of water on land the size of an area that could have housed the entire population of Lennox was used to spruce up the lot, and it apparently allows for the neighbors to walk over and pretend they aren’t in abject poverty. Walking around the perimeter of the stadium you may never likely afford an entry pass for can look like the Disneyland Jungle Cruise ride at Disneyland if you traverse the outside of it via e-bike and a pith helmet.
Then again, there’s always the idea that Walter O’Malley once had for a glorious New York ballpark before giving up and moving to Los Angeles:
And in 2025, who’s not in for another casino!
At Butthead Steve Cohen’s Pleasure Paradise, Biff Tannen will park your Tesla Cybertruck for $75 (no tip necessary) and drive it over to nearby (in New Jersey) Frank McCourt Auto Lot/RV Rental Bargain Zone for safe keeping. Maybe the oldest member of the ’62 Mets, Jim Marshall, will come back to see it.
For more on Cohen and the Mets’ longtime history of disappointing anyone, we go back to Devin Gordon’s 2021 beauty, “So Many Ways to Lose: The Amazin’ True Story of The New York Mets – The Best Worst Team in Sports,” and our review of perhaps the greatest book ever done on any of the New York baseball teams, and included the line: “We won’t stop being the Mets. We’ll get back to our roots before too long. We’ll keep finding new ways to lose and thanks to Steve Cohen’s bottomless billions of dollars, no one can stop us now.”
So where does this get us?
All five of those “news” items above are already candidates, if not for their own book, then sooner or later ensconced, cross-referenced and stir-fry ready for something to sell in a LaGuardia Hudson Books bodega, further padding the New York baseball anthology of restoration, nostalgia and rehabilitation.
This is how the book business works with sports titles. Will it sell in New York? Likely. If it has the word “Miracle” or “Pinstripes” in it, good change it will draw someone’s attention on Father’s Day.
Here is the latest likely Amazon “if you liked this” bundle curated for those who don’t have enough rewritings of their Bronx/Flushing Meadows baseball tales:
The art of the book deal as far as Art Shamsky seems to be concerned — and I can’t think of that name without going back to the name of the dog that the Barone kids gave their pet dog on “Everybody Loves Raymond” — is squeezing out more verbiage. He’s already “written” a collection of brain drains on his brief four-year overlap with the ’69 Mets before he was out of the game at age 30.
With “After The Miracle: The Lasting Brotherhood of the ’69 Mets” in 2019 with Erik Sherman for Simon & Shuster (which we crammed into that year’s review on a post with several other New York books as we are doing here), and “The Magnificent Season: How the Jets, Mets, and Knicks Made Sports History and Uplifted a City and the Country” arrived in 2004 with Barry Zemen.
C’mon, there has to be more.
In the forward to this one, Mets broadcaster Howie Rose throws it right in your face: “I know what you’re thinking: What can possibly be said or written about the 1969 world champion New York Mets that hasn’t been already? Rose thinks he’s smelling pretty good when he points out (as Shamsky does later) that the idea for this is a way to repurpose a Dwight D. Eisenhower book format from 1967 called “At East: Stories I Tell to Friends.” The publisher has twerked that title a bit, but, in all honest, to little avail. No matter if Rose points out there are too many new generations of fans who have come into the fold since ’69 who “need to hear the stories about who those Mets were, what they represented and why they remain beloved today and will for eternity.”
OK, Boomer. But if we did some due diligence, we’d find generations today are far more into audio books disguised as podcasts. So, maybe this really works if the 83-year-old Shamsky reads it aloud.
He doesn’t. Someone named Barry Abrams is.
Co-author Matthew Silverman goes by the name “Met” Silverman on his official website, where it shows he’s written, edited or was the managing editor on more than a half-dozen Mets-related books and publications. He’s got all the listings on his site about where he (and sometimes Art) will appear to talk about the book that somehow manages to fill the 256 pages to hit a $30 price tag (see below).
Miraculous.
Moving on …
In “Tokens” — and what happened to the Metro Card? — writer Chris Donnelly admits this is really the third book he has purged from an idea years ago to try to capture the Mets-on-Yankees crimes that have taken place over a brief period of time.
After doing “Doc, Donnie, the Kid, and Billy Brawl: How the 1985 Mets and Yankees Fought for New York’s Baseball Soul” in 2019 (we jammed into that year’s review pile), and then the “Road to Nowhere: The Early 1990s Collapse and Rebuild of New York City Baseball” in 2023 (we jammed into that year’s pile), Donnelly crushes more paragraphs in the stone and pestle. He has now recapping the two franchise’s head-to-head competition starting with their first regular-season meeting 1996 during interleague play and then how that built up through the 2000 World Series.
Sorry, it was the “Subway Series.” We did not frame that properly.
As we prepared to give it more than a token look, we first wondered if Steve Cohen could ever figure out a way to monetize unused subway trinkets for his empire. Crypto coins of the past for lovers of the arts.
The publisher notes that this book will cover “moments you remember and some you may have forgotten.”
With us, it’s moments we never really interested in the first place.
We get the concept and appreciate all the heavy lifting, but it’s a book at least that can be tossed aside quicker than Clemens heaving Piazza’s broken knob back at him, insulted he is being asked to do extra cleanup.
Moving on …
The latest and not greatest Ruth-based book recently sparked this social media post on the occasion of his 130th birthday anniversary last February:
Clearly if there are more than 75 other Ruth books in circulation — including one by the person who curated this one (a children’s tome called “The House That Ruth Built” in 2023 by the same publisher) — who’s to say there isn’t at least one more worth generating for degenerate collectors.
ten, so let it be done.
In creating an adult-ish publication that turns out to be really just 85 quotes that Ruth is purported to have said, it can be called “the perfect gift for baseball lovers and history buffs!” as the marking people suggest.
Who’s kidding whom? At least the kids’ book had illustrations somewhat interesting. This book just has weird word breaks and compromising photos.
Moving on again …
Putting a -30- on this thing, “Yankees, Typewriters, Scandals and Cooperstown: A Baseball Memoir” smells like an AI-generated idea of what words might be the most algo-riffic in selling a baseball book. It may have come up hitting .750.
If “typewriters” creates any buzz, it’s appealing to a readership of 70 and older. Well, maybe here, you are.
First, we’re must show thanks that Madden’s career arch included the book he did on Tom Seaver in late 2020 and warranted a mention in our 2021 series. Fabulous work.
Second, we applaud the one book we’ve found in 2025 that uses a nice, large typeface with added clean space on each page in the margins. If it’s not a residual effect of the readership target, then it’s also an indication that there was dwindling content needed for a book of that sweet spot of 256 pages/$30 price tag these days.
(FYI: If a book is 256 pages, I’m told that’s the most cost-efficient in the publishing pricing world. Based on paper used. It it goes up in increments of more pages, every dozen will move the price of the book up the scale. If it’s less than 256, it’s doable, but it it will dip into the $25 range. Nothing wrong with that. It’s when a manuscript comes in a bit short of 256, and the publishers still want to charge $30, yet they’ve exhausted the number of photos, acknowledgements, index, appendix, dedications, re-dedications, footnotes to photos, photo credits and a lot of unnecessary charts, tables and graphs, this Madden book is what likely happens — larger font, wider margins, and this even has an index. A manuscript that exceeds 256 pages can lead to the publisher shrinking the size of typeface, widen the margins, maybe spike a few photos, and eventually, you may need the optional magnifying glass. Consider how Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was only 272 words, let alone a few pages.How would that go with a publishing house these days?)
The nearly 80-year-old Madden — we also imagine him to be the inspiration for the person who comedian Ray Romano created for his New York sportswriter character of Ray Barone — wrote for the wire services before joining the New York Daily News as a Yankees beat writer, then a columnist.
The odd turns his career took — he crossed the picket lines while the Daily News writers went on a 1990 strike. Then, five years after he was named winner of the Spink Award for his career in writing by the Baseball Hall of Fame, the Daily News laid him off. It talked him into coming back as an occasional freelancer. In between he written at least five Yankee-titled books.
Twenty years after he wrote “Bill Madden: My 25 Years Covering Baseball’s Heroes, Scoundrels, Triumphs and Tragedies,” Madden has produced an update, perhaps not all that worthy of a comeback story.
The most intriguing chapter we found explains the way he got involved in the baseball card business with Donruss (after the Topps monopoly was broken up). Madden, working on a story for The Sporting News, happened to be making phone calls and collecting information and stumbled into an interview where the exec on the other line from Donruss asked if he knew anyone who could help them produce a set of 605 cards in a couple of months in 1980. He offered himself. Moonlighting is a sometimes necessary evil in the poorly paying journalism world, as long as there’s no apparent conflict of interests. Madden’s suggested strategy to Donruss: Focus on rookies, hire unique artists to do the work instead of relying on photographers and … well, what else could there be. For awhile, it worked. Until the business collapsed 10 years later and he bailed out.
Pop the cork. You’ve fooled ’em again. It’s already in the Amazon Top 10 of baseball book titles for early May.
Nice moving the needle.
How it goes in the scorebook
Gadarene.
It’s a word we learned last year on our word-of-the-day calendar, representing the summer solstice. We saved it for the right moment.
We’ll use it in a sentence: The Gadarene scribes self-assigned to continue consuming ink and paper to chronicle New York’s baseball history would fly a book proposal into the side of a mountain if it stood a remote chance to capture at least a few hundred sales.
This just in for another book project pitch: Is Aaron Judge the greatest right-handed hitter of modern times?
Ripped from the headlines at The Athletic. For real. Sure, run with it. It is couched perfectly fine.
You can look it up: More to ponder
== Bill Madden explains more of the why and how of this project in a Q&A with TheFanFiles.com.
== It has been noted that “Rod Gaspar: Miracle Met” is an actual published book in circulation since 2019, with a co-writer (whom we won’t embarrass by point out).
Gaspar, a Lakewood High grad twice drafted out of Long Beach State by the Mets (he accepted the second time, in ’67), played in 118 of his career 178 games for the ’69 Miracles as a 23-year-old backup outfielder.
As Shamsky notes in his own book, Gaspar’s perhaps greatest claim to fame was going on TV’s “The Dating Game” right after the Mets won the World Series, with teammates Wayne Garrett and Ken Boswell as the other bachelors. Gaspar won the blind date and got a trip to Switzerland out of it.
“Rod didn’t have a whole lot of personality,” Shamsky writes on page 1043
Ron Kaplan, creator of his Baseball Bookshelf website and podcast, posed the question in relation to the Gaspar book: “Who else seems like an unlikely candidate to either author a book or have one written about him?”
Before we even finished that sentence, we imagined “Met” Silverman cutting the line on Donnelly and Madden to make up the tell-all story of Chico Escuela. Today, especially, since any DEI sensitivity appears to be all but eradicated. Steve Cohen can do the forward.
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