Tag: yankees

Embrace the disgraced general concept of enshittification as it pertains specifically to the New York Mets and, by geographic circumstances, also to the New York Yankees.

As pent-up anger and frustration ruins the way we wade through an existing world of A.I. slop, we learn that the Enshittocene — a noun coined by author Cory Doctorow and then fleshed out in his 2025 book about “Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to do About it” — expanding the definition beyond soul-crushing Big Tech stalwarts can be a healthy exercise for those who need a way to explain their grief and lack of relief.

If the Amazin’ Mets are an Amazon-Meta mashup, and the Yankees, way more than Waymo or Yahoo in their Oracle world, continue to reflect as the IBM of baseball, you Reddit right that it all happens under what locals call the Big Apple, but really it’s acting on algorithms engineered by the gigabytes of  Tim Cook’s Apple Inc.

No wonder the Mets and Yankees start this new week having each lost on five consecutive days for the first time in history, according to Sportradar.

An AI query about how any of this might Venn diagram itself on the circles of despair looks like this:

Plenty of other sources that explain how Steven Cohen, who in 2020 bought the Mets for $2.4 billion from his hedge-fund stash that wasn’t penalized for insider trading, has granted the team a MLB-top $352 million payroll for the 2026. The Mets have under contract the highest-paid player in outfielder Juan Soto, averaging $61.9 million in salary. He is currently injured.

The Dodgers circumvent much of this by deferring payments that otherwise would boost their ’26 payroll to $395 million. They also are on tap to pay the highest tax rate on the Competitive Balance Tax payroll for exceeding MLB’s $244 million threshold. The Mets and Yankees are second and third on that list.

For all the lamentations that the Dodgers are ruining baseball with their ownership spending … why is it every July 1 that we’re all reminded that it is the Mets who continue to give 1999 retiree Bobby Bonilla a $1.193,240.20 paycheck and will do so through 2035 for its example of how defer payments continue to haunt a fanbase looking for excuses to be even more disheveled?

ESPN already has already crunched the numbers to deduct that this Mets-Dodgers matchup is on the hook for more than $1 billion in salary liability. Last year’s meeting between the Mets and Dodgers was the previous most expensive series at $764 million in combined payroll — $36 million in total payroll behind this year’s matchup. When you add in their tax bills, the total jumps to over $1.07 billion, surpassing last year’s record of $1.025 billion. The Dodgers and Mets have ranked first and second (in some order) in total payroll four times since 2022. 2023, when the Mets ranked first and the Dodgers fourth, is the only exception during that stretch.

Aside from cash flow, there’s the Zeitgeist/ethos comparison that can also provide more entertainment.

When the New York Times ran an essay in its opinion pages recently with the headline — “Help! My Favorite Athlete is an Idiot” — it was no coincidence that the author was Devin Gordon, who in 2021 produced the most intriguing and pointed book “So Many Ways to Lose: The Amazin’ True Story of the New York Mets — the Best Worst Team in Sports” (our review here).

His riff was about how the franchise that continues to provide him with comedic fodder had to be somewhat dismantled over the last offseason because of political ideology that was contaminating the clubhouse vibe. Note: That was Brandon Nimmo batting leadoff for the Texas Rangers during last Dodgers’ homestand instead of what we’ve been used to seeing the Mets as they come into town this week.

As with most NYT stories, some of the best material is buried in the reader responses. Such as:

Redirecting to the topic here on the table: Books about New York and baseball in 2026.

Sigh.

We’re viewing this as more enshittification, or the idea that a publisher can run out a few more titles in hopes NYC baseball readers buy it up at the $30-plus stick price (wait two weeks and Amazon will discount it tremendously), and in the end, the author, the consumer and the industry isn’t satisfied with what was churned out to fill the latest doom scrolling.

Here are several N.Y.-baseball titles to review, lumped together, as none jump out as separate works of art to admire with any lengthy dialogue. (A personal ask: If Devin Gordon has the gumption to create more Mets-related dialogue, we’ll buy it).

Let the record show that we have been witness to:

“Metropolitans: New York Baseball, Class Struggle, and the People’s Team”

The author: A.M. Gittlitz
The details: Astra House, 496 pages, $30, released March 31, ’26
The links: The publisher, Bookshop.org
The quick sizing up: Disappointed we didn’t receive a review copy per request, but these might suffice:
From the New Yorker: “Gittlitz’s book is long, loving, and pained. A Marxist in love with the Mets occupies a difficult position. By the end, the requisite contortions lead him to a fate almost worse than capitalism: he must confront the thesis … that it’s the Yankees who represent ‘an authentic working class’ … Yet Gittlitz’s book, despite its occasional absurdities, arrives at a propitious moment.”
Timothy Farrigan writes in the Wall Street Journal: “For me, the Mets were a badge of crude contrarianism: Everyone else liked the Phillies, but I was a freethinker. (Gittlitz’s book) offers a more ambitious ideological brief. The Mets, he argues, embody a ‘populist character,’ with fans making the team a symbol of progressive hopes, and players marching in ‘the vanguard of the labor struggles within baseball, and social justice struggles . . . outside it.’ “
This might be way beyond what the Plato-adjacent area of my brain cares to store at this point, but for someone like Gittlitz, a Brooklyn-based writer who focuses on countercultural history, radical politics, and the paranormal, we may have to break down and find it at the local socialist library.
Meanwhile, check out this author chat from the New York Mets SBNation contributor. And enjoy this post on Gittlitz’ X feed from Christmas, 2022:

“Willie, Duke, and Mickey: New York City Baseball’s Golden Age Amid Integration”

The author: Robert Cottrell
The details: Bloomsbury Academic, 344 pages, $38; released Feb. 5, ’26
The links: The publisher, Bookshop.org
The quick sizing up: Anticipated at least some some warm-and-fuzziness based on the title that perhaps allows us to re-remember the Terry Cashman “Talkin’ Baseball” song from 1981. The best part of this experience is the cover designed by Devin Watson. Cottrell then plows into a far more a belabored, academic pound-it-out research effort with perhaps some interesting new photos curated by the Baseball Hall of Fame. The Mays-Snider-Mantle promise is just a sporadic, and necessary, reference interjected as mere narrative fence posts. Chapter 2 says it as much: “Baseball in America’s Greatest City.” We’re fascinated more by the career of the author who once ran The Browser and was referred to as “The Man Who Reads 1,000 Articles A Day” after a time as a history professor at Cal State Chico and Moscow bureau chief for both The Economist and the Financial Times.

“Mickey & Billy: The Glory and Tragedy of a Yankee Friendship”

The author: Tony Castro
The details: Diversion Books/Simon & Shuster, 320 pages, $19.99; released Feb. 24, ’26
The links: The publisher, the author, Bookshop.org
The quick sizing up: Castro’s obsession with Yankee lore in general and Mantle worship specifically has taken him now to crank out at least five titles that include the Commerce Comet — two full-on bios/appreciation titles, and Mantle’s relationships with Roger Maris, Joe DiMaggio and now Billy Martin. At some point it might be worth a rewrite of Joe Durso’s 1977 book about Mantle and Whitey Ford. For our library shelf, we’ll continue to appreciate the 2020 title “Mutt’s Dream: Making the Mick,” about Mantle and his father, helping us recall the time a friend and I landed on the Mantle homestead by accident (from our review).

“The Bosses of the Bronx: The Endless Drama of the Yankees Under the House of Steinbrenner”

The author: Mike Vaccaro
The details: HarperCollins, 384 pages, $32, released March 24, ’26
The links: The publisher, the author, Bookshop.org
The quick sizing up: Check off all the necessary cover optics: The Yankee Stadium white-painted frieze, a sour-puss Steinbrenner face, and the large defiant title font. The lead sports columnist for the New York Post since 2002 hasn’t had a book since he churned out the 2006 “Emperors and Idiots: The Hundred Year Rivalry Between the Yankees and Red Sox, From the Very Beginning to the End of the Curse,” “1941: the Greatest Year in Sports,” from 2008, and “The First Fall Classic: The Red Sox, the Giants, and the Cast of Players, Pugs, and Politicos Who Reinvented the World Series in 1912” in 2010. Vaccaro’s work inspired a 2025 book, “Inside the Byline, Beyond the Game — The Untold Story of New York’s Premier Sports Columnist.” Is this the New York sportswriter Ray Romano was supposed to be when he was in “Everbody Loves Raymond”? Just check out his most recent piece in the Post titled “New York sports’ nadir has created a market for pain” if you want to continue on the enshittification theme without having to do much regurgitation on the Steinbrenner era. Here’s Vaccaro on recently with Dan Patrick explaining the book:

“Hot Foot: My Hijinks and Upside-Down Life with the 1986 World Champion New York Mets”

The author: Roger McDowell with Doug Feldmann
The details: Triumph Books, 256 pages, $32; released March 24, ’26
The links: The publisher, Bookshop.org
The quick sizing up: One of our favorites to watch during his four seasons in Los Angeles from ’91 to ’94, this reminds us he was only with the Mets for his first five seasons (1985 to half of ’89) and never game-changing enough to make an All-Star team with a modest career war of 10.1 in 12 seasons. Enough to become a pitching coach for the Dodgers’ minor-league system, eventually coming to Atlanta and then in the Baltimore organization. Nothing much new here except maybe to redirect any narrative that McDowell was a flake. He just loved to have fun. It’s comforting the lede to his SABR bio will always be: “Roger McDowell kept his locker stocked with comedy props, costumes, and fireworks, blew bubbles while he pitched, played the notorious ‘Second Spitter’ on Seinfeld and was known to set teammates’ shoes on fire. But he knew a little about pitching too.”

And coming this fall:

“Touching All the Bases: A Story of Power, Purpose, and Surviving the Bronx”

The author: Dave Winfield (with Alan Malmon)
The details: Matt Holt Books/Simon & Shuster, 288 pages, $30, to be released Sept. 15, ’26
The first blush: Winfield also played in San Diego (eight seasons), Anaheim (two seasons), Toronto (one season), Minnesota (two seasons) and Cleveland (one season). But it’s those nine in New York as property of the Yankees that ate him up, especially when team owner George Steinbrenner called him “Mr. May” for his performance in the 1981 World Series against the Dodgers and in 1985, bemoaning how he allowed Reggie “Mr. October” get away to the Angels. His Hall of Fame plaque has him in a Padres’ “SD” cap, the first of that franchise to be honored, so there you go. This is a follow up to his 1988 autobiography “A Player’s Life”, and his 2007 book “Dropping The Ball: Baseball’s Trouble and How We Can and Must Solve Them.”