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The New York Mets: Ethnography, Myth, and Subtext
No baseball team has captured America’s imagination like the Mets. Alternately the “Lovable Losers” and the “Miracle Mets,” New York’s other team offers fascinating fodder for writer Richard Grossinger in this thoughtful collection. The New York Mets is a series of probing essays on the best and most interesting years of the team, particularly 1969, 1973, 1986, and last year’s abbreviated run. A pivotal essay chronicles the lives of a professional athlete and a die-hard fan to create a well-argued, deeply felt meditation on the ways in which franchise baseball has come to fail not only the fans but the players.
This centerpiece presents a poignant narrative of Mets pitcher Terry Leach and author Grossinger’s own experiences playing and tracking the sport. Taken together, these powerful essays alternately take the poet’s, the alchemist’s, and the player’s perspective to paint a composite portrait that brings all the stunning highs and dispiriting lows together to show the ways in which America’s favorite pastime has changed. Grossinger reflects on the salad days when teams were happily homegrown and laments the current money-ball scenario some call baseball today.
This centerpiece presents a poignant narrative of Mets pitcher Terry Leach and author Grossinger’s own experiences playing and tracking the sport. Taken together, these powerful essays alternately take the poet’s, the alchemist’s, and the player’s perspective to paint a composite portrait that brings all the stunning highs and dispiriting lows together to show the ways in which America’s favorite pastime has changed. Grossinger reflects on the salad days when teams were happily homegrown and laments the current money-ball scenario some call baseball today.
320 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2007
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December 30, 2022
I am a Mets fan, and I have about a dozen friends who also are fans of the team. They each have college degrees, and many have advanced degrees. They have been fans since the 1980s and, in most cases, the 70s. They know baseball, they know the Mets, and they are smart, literate people. And I can only think of one of them who would get through more than 5 pages of this book.
This Mets "ethnography" is one of the strangest baseball books I've read. For some volumes, such as "Cardboard Gods," this would be a compliment. For this book, it isn't. I found myself shaking my head at least every other page when I encountered an overblown, pretentious, arrogant phrase. It's the worst of "Village Voice" sports- or music-writing of the 70s and 80s, a smug era full of privileges for White men who went to private school in New York City and launched the New Journalism and New Criticism.
On the other hand ... this book is a treasure trove of memories for anyone who loved the Mets from afar and wants to relive great and torturous moments. It seems like everything is here, from the glories of the World Series runs in 1969, 1973 and 1986, to the charming rowdiness of fans at Shea, to the joys of watching a young player emerge from the majors and realize his potential in the Bigs. Remarkably, author Richard Grossinger not only watched (and listened) from afar for decades, but he often got up-close-and-personal as well, as his family connections and notoriety as an author and publisher obtained for him box seats at games, where he mingled with players' families and wives, team scouts and coaches, and other baseball fanatics.
In short, if you can get past words like "nostrum" and "mnemonic," then you can enjoy this book. But if the following sentence about a great catch by Endy Chavez gives you a frightening college English flashback, then don't buy it: "That way the hieratic aspect of Endy's service wouldn't, couldn't be lost." That's on page 3, when I almost threw the book in the trash.
A few pages later, Grossinger modestly calls his book "a calendar and a sacred alphabet, a chronicle that begins in the mountains of Euriasia and Sinai and ends up counting moons and carving rocks among the Penbscots of the North, Arawaks of Venezuela and Paraguay ..." He uses the word "sacred" a lot.
So, you have to ignore the flights of literary fantasy, as well done as they are, in order to get to the real value of this book. And there's a lot. Grossinger as a kid was at the 1954 World Series game when Willie Mays caught Vic Wertz's fly ball in center (he was too small to see over the jumping fans) and at Yankee Stadium to see Roger Maris hit homer #61 in 1961. And then he went to college and basically abandoned baseball until the early 70s, having decided that as a countercultural guy, baseball had gone fascist and corporate. (Being a Yankee fan will do that to you.) He resurrected his interest by following the Mets at a distance in the late 60s and returning to the ballpark for the first time in a decade a few years later, and this book mostly chronicles the years from about 1972 through 2000, with a heavy dose on those great Mets teams of the mid-80s.
Grossinger's luck, moxie, and connections continued to give him a front seat. He describes a friendship with Terry Leach, a Mets long reliever and occasional starter on those great teams, and does a wonderful job of showing what it's like to be an underappreciated pitcher with an unconventional sidearm delivery. Grossinger is way over the top in criticizing the Mets for not recognizing Leach's skills, claiming, for example that he would have won 200 games in the majors if the team had made him a starter in 1981. Uh, 200 wins is rare territory. And it seems to me that the fact that Leach ran into knee trouble the first time he got a bunch of starts in a row indicates the very firm ceiling on his career. Whatever -- the story of following Leach and then having a transcendent game of catch (both throwing sidearm) when Leach was retired and Grossinger was 55 is a field-of-dreams experience for the rest of us.
Another lovely moment -- though sort of cliched -- is Grossinger recounting an incident when he was throwing a ball with a friend at a field in a Black neighborhood, and several Black kids took the bats, balls, and other gloves they had with them. The men enticed the boys to come back, and they proceeded to try to teach them the rudiments of baseball. The kids were about 8-9 years old and had a nice field in their neighborhood, but it was, as the anecdote explains, used exclusively by White kids for Little League. When parents of White players shooed Grossinger and his friend off the field, showing a permit for their game, the men ignored them and kept playing with the Black kids for a while. And Grossinger remembers when he was a parent watching his son on this same field and other Black kids threw dirt clods and rocks at the players and at the parents' cars. "Nothing changes," he laments, and he's right.
When the book hits right, it's great. There's a mini-sketch of any notable Met who ever played on the team, as well as most of the obscure ones, and these are smart and funny. This guy knows his stuff, and he studied the players on the field, mannerisms as well as performance, and he learned what he could about them as people, too. The guy is an encyclopedia.
But a lot of it is overblown stuff about how baseball was better in the 50s when the game was pure, the players tried hard, and the grass was real. Ugh. Grossinger hates modern technology and its intervention on the game (noisy stadium scoreboards, long commercial breaks), but seems to have no problem with the technology that allowed him and his wife to own homes in Berkeley, California, and Bar Harbor, Maine, and to commute back-and-forth for months at a time, while supervising a West Coast publishing business. Neither does he seem to find it ironic that the wealth he inherited was keeping his publishing firm, which was mostly poetry and obscure cultural anthropology, afloat was the same type of wealth he excoriates baseball players from earning. At one point, he rants that players should give most of their money to solve inner city problems, yet has nary a mention of the far greater wealth of team owners.
The book also is marred by dozens of errors. I'm sure I didn't find all of them, but dates are wrong and players' names are misspelled. Some sentences are missing words or have the word in the wrong tense. For a publisher, he was surprisingly lax in hiring an editor.
And his judgments, while perfectly within his right to make, are questionable at times. He is critical of players who were great for the team (Mike Piazza), while saying the team blew the handling of guys of much lower talent. And he glosses over the failures of players he likes, such as Keith Hernandez, whose drug use isn't mentioned, while other Mets such as Daryl Strawberry and Dwight Gooden are lumped in with the rest of sad or bad guys of the drug-addled baseball of that era. And his claim that the Endy Chavez catch will go down in baseball history -- it's on the cover of this book and the jumping-off point of the first long chapter -- is silly.
Then there's his worship if the mediocre Hubie Brooks. Apparently, because Brooks patted him on the back or butt once in the locker room, Grossinger thinks this guy was a hall-of-famer. So he was angered when Brooks and several nonentities were traded to the Expos for Gary Carter. This deal, of course, was the final piece of the World Series 1986 puzzle. But Grossinger not only goes in mourning over the trade, but he throws in a gratuitous insult of baseball genius Bill James because James had the audacity to point out that Brooks wasn't really all that good. Give me Bill James any day of the week over Grossinger. Nobody has given me more pleasure in baseball than Bill James.
But just when you're ready to throw up your hands at the author's effort to find meaning in baseball that goes beyond the game, he comes up with a beauty. He recounts how his wife (long-suffering wife who didn't care at all about baseball but had this husband who literally set up a satellite receiver in their backyard and had a dozen buddies over each night to watch games) asks why he cares about something that ultimately has no meaning. And Grossinger realizes he is being ridiculous. But he decides that the rules of baseball and the fact that it has a defined outcome (winner and loser and statistics) does bring an illusion of purpose and order to our universe. And he decides that we need it: "How strange. Creatures in a dream invent a tournament with a grand prize to relieve themselves of the terror of the dream itself." That's a pretty good summation of what brings a lot of us to love the game. Congrats, Richard Grossinger: when you're right, you really nail it.
This Mets "ethnography" is one of the strangest baseball books I've read. For some volumes, such as "Cardboard Gods," this would be a compliment. For this book, it isn't. I found myself shaking my head at least every other page when I encountered an overblown, pretentious, arrogant phrase. It's the worst of "Village Voice" sports- or music-writing of the 70s and 80s, a smug era full of privileges for White men who went to private school in New York City and launched the New Journalism and New Criticism.
On the other hand ... this book is a treasure trove of memories for anyone who loved the Mets from afar and wants to relive great and torturous moments. It seems like everything is here, from the glories of the World Series runs in 1969, 1973 and 1986, to the charming rowdiness of fans at Shea, to the joys of watching a young player emerge from the majors and realize his potential in the Bigs. Remarkably, author Richard Grossinger not only watched (and listened) from afar for decades, but he often got up-close-and-personal as well, as his family connections and notoriety as an author and publisher obtained for him box seats at games, where he mingled with players' families and wives, team scouts and coaches, and other baseball fanatics.
In short, if you can get past words like "nostrum" and "mnemonic," then you can enjoy this book. But if the following sentence about a great catch by Endy Chavez gives you a frightening college English flashback, then don't buy it: "That way the hieratic aspect of Endy's service wouldn't, couldn't be lost." That's on page 3, when I almost threw the book in the trash.
A few pages later, Grossinger modestly calls his book "a calendar and a sacred alphabet, a chronicle that begins in the mountains of Euriasia and Sinai and ends up counting moons and carving rocks among the Penbscots of the North, Arawaks of Venezuela and Paraguay ..." He uses the word "sacred" a lot.
So, you have to ignore the flights of literary fantasy, as well done as they are, in order to get to the real value of this book. And there's a lot. Grossinger as a kid was at the 1954 World Series game when Willie Mays caught Vic Wertz's fly ball in center (he was too small to see over the jumping fans) and at Yankee Stadium to see Roger Maris hit homer #61 in 1961. And then he went to college and basically abandoned baseball until the early 70s, having decided that as a countercultural guy, baseball had gone fascist and corporate. (Being a Yankee fan will do that to you.) He resurrected his interest by following the Mets at a distance in the late 60s and returning to the ballpark for the first time in a decade a few years later, and this book mostly chronicles the years from about 1972 through 2000, with a heavy dose on those great Mets teams of the mid-80s.
Grossinger's luck, moxie, and connections continued to give him a front seat. He describes a friendship with Terry Leach, a Mets long reliever and occasional starter on those great teams, and does a wonderful job of showing what it's like to be an underappreciated pitcher with an unconventional sidearm delivery. Grossinger is way over the top in criticizing the Mets for not recognizing Leach's skills, claiming, for example that he would have won 200 games in the majors if the team had made him a starter in 1981. Uh, 200 wins is rare territory. And it seems to me that the fact that Leach ran into knee trouble the first time he got a bunch of starts in a row indicates the very firm ceiling on his career. Whatever -- the story of following Leach and then having a transcendent game of catch (both throwing sidearm) when Leach was retired and Grossinger was 55 is a field-of-dreams experience for the rest of us.
Another lovely moment -- though sort of cliched -- is Grossinger recounting an incident when he was throwing a ball with a friend at a field in a Black neighborhood, and several Black kids took the bats, balls, and other gloves they had with them. The men enticed the boys to come back, and they proceeded to try to teach them the rudiments of baseball. The kids were about 8-9 years old and had a nice field in their neighborhood, but it was, as the anecdote explains, used exclusively by White kids for Little League. When parents of White players shooed Grossinger and his friend off the field, showing a permit for their game, the men ignored them and kept playing with the Black kids for a while. And Grossinger remembers when he was a parent watching his son on this same field and other Black kids threw dirt clods and rocks at the players and at the parents' cars. "Nothing changes," he laments, and he's right.
When the book hits right, it's great. There's a mini-sketch of any notable Met who ever played on the team, as well as most of the obscure ones, and these are smart and funny. This guy knows his stuff, and he studied the players on the field, mannerisms as well as performance, and he learned what he could about them as people, too. The guy is an encyclopedia.
But a lot of it is overblown stuff about how baseball was better in the 50s when the game was pure, the players tried hard, and the grass was real. Ugh. Grossinger hates modern technology and its intervention on the game (noisy stadium scoreboards, long commercial breaks), but seems to have no problem with the technology that allowed him and his wife to own homes in Berkeley, California, and Bar Harbor, Maine, and to commute back-and-forth for months at a time, while supervising a West Coast publishing business. Neither does he seem to find it ironic that the wealth he inherited was keeping his publishing firm, which was mostly poetry and obscure cultural anthropology, afloat was the same type of wealth he excoriates baseball players from earning. At one point, he rants that players should give most of their money to solve inner city problems, yet has nary a mention of the far greater wealth of team owners.
The book also is marred by dozens of errors. I'm sure I didn't find all of them, but dates are wrong and players' names are misspelled. Some sentences are missing words or have the word in the wrong tense. For a publisher, he was surprisingly lax in hiring an editor.
And his judgments, while perfectly within his right to make, are questionable at times. He is critical of players who were great for the team (Mike Piazza), while saying the team blew the handling of guys of much lower talent. And he glosses over the failures of players he likes, such as Keith Hernandez, whose drug use isn't mentioned, while other Mets such as Daryl Strawberry and Dwight Gooden are lumped in with the rest of sad or bad guys of the drug-addled baseball of that era. And his claim that the Endy Chavez catch will go down in baseball history -- it's on the cover of this book and the jumping-off point of the first long chapter -- is silly.
Then there's his worship if the mediocre Hubie Brooks. Apparently, because Brooks patted him on the back or butt once in the locker room, Grossinger thinks this guy was a hall-of-famer. So he was angered when Brooks and several nonentities were traded to the Expos for Gary Carter. This deal, of course, was the final piece of the World Series 1986 puzzle. But Grossinger not only goes in mourning over the trade, but he throws in a gratuitous insult of baseball genius Bill James because James had the audacity to point out that Brooks wasn't really all that good. Give me Bill James any day of the week over Grossinger. Nobody has given me more pleasure in baseball than Bill James.
But just when you're ready to throw up your hands at the author's effort to find meaning in baseball that goes beyond the game, he comes up with a beauty. He recounts how his wife (long-suffering wife who didn't care at all about baseball but had this husband who literally set up a satellite receiver in their backyard and had a dozen buddies over each night to watch games) asks why he cares about something that ultimately has no meaning. And Grossinger realizes he is being ridiculous. But he decides that the rules of baseball and the fact that it has a defined outcome (winner and loser and statistics) does bring an illusion of purpose and order to our universe. And he decides that we need it: "How strange. Creatures in a dream invent a tournament with a grand prize to relieve themselves of the terror of the dream itself." That's a pretty good summation of what brings a lot of us to love the game. Congrats, Richard Grossinger: when you're right, you really nail it.
June 20, 2011
Written after the 2006 season, I found this book to be enjoyable for the most part. It was all over the place, as was expected after I learned that it was a compilation of chapters he had written for other books, some of which were published and some of which were not. I learned about players I had never heard of (and learned new things about players I was familiar with), but it was a bit too heavy on references I didn’t understand and poem-like excerpts that went on for too long.
March 13, 2008
OK, I guess. He's a little too esoteric for my taste, and IMO, a somewhat fair weather fan.
April 1, 2017
A caveat going into this one: the author is also his own editor and publisher, so there's a lot of repetition and self-indulgence here.
It's a collection of four long essays with a bunch of smaller pieces from the author's writing career thrown in. Heavy focus is on being a Mets fan from afar (eg. following games via radio and satellite from the other side of the country) and from very near (eg. scoring a press pass and finding himself on the field with players and staff during a batting practice in the 80s).
Each chapter is about the Mets to be sure, and I liked how it opened with a focus on the present era (which at the time of publication was the club that reached the 2006 NLCS) and moved backwards in time, recounting his Met fanhood from its beginning in the sixties. In that first chapter, the author literally catalogues dozens of Mets players from the sixties to the present, often waxing lyrical about his favourites and hurling brickbats at the ones he obviously dislikes. There are some hilariously nasty comments.
The book took some patience to wade through because the author often goes on some "new agey" tangents for pages at a time. He veers from Tai Chi to Tarot with a lot of esoteric stuff in between. A sample:
I am Mickey Mantle and Gil McDougald, Don Hahn and Teddy Martinez. I want scar tissue to open, fear and desire to mesh, where autumn is more brilliant than left field, and the only spectator is fire in my blood, imaginary applause of iron running in my ears. Did I think I was playing some kind of adult game all those years, when I was dancing openly, making baseball liturgy and myth? In a few hours this gravity well will be night-blazed with history, strung out in eternity with the faces of those who would be our gods, as at twilight Mars sings, and a hundred stars appear sultry, subtly, plus the billion that do not, like the suffusion in liquid/life once was, coacervate warm on the dilute robes of the missing dakini.
Hello Moonbeam! Seriously though, that's about as bad as it gets, and fortunately it's on p. 286 of 292. If you make it to that mind-blower, you're almost finished anyway.
Overall, this book contains some good material about being a Mets fan and Grossinger casts the spotlight on obscure players worth learning about, but be prepared for a lot of that other stuff too.
It's a collection of four long essays with a bunch of smaller pieces from the author's writing career thrown in. Heavy focus is on being a Mets fan from afar (eg. following games via radio and satellite from the other side of the country) and from very near (eg. scoring a press pass and finding himself on the field with players and staff during a batting practice in the 80s).
Each chapter is about the Mets to be sure, and I liked how it opened with a focus on the present era (which at the time of publication was the club that reached the 2006 NLCS) and moved backwards in time, recounting his Met fanhood from its beginning in the sixties. In that first chapter, the author literally catalogues dozens of Mets players from the sixties to the present, often waxing lyrical about his favourites and hurling brickbats at the ones he obviously dislikes. There are some hilariously nasty comments.
The book took some patience to wade through because the author often goes on some "new agey" tangents for pages at a time. He veers from Tai Chi to Tarot with a lot of esoteric stuff in between. A sample:
I am Mickey Mantle and Gil McDougald, Don Hahn and Teddy Martinez. I want scar tissue to open, fear and desire to mesh, where autumn is more brilliant than left field, and the only spectator is fire in my blood, imaginary applause of iron running in my ears. Did I think I was playing some kind of adult game all those years, when I was dancing openly, making baseball liturgy and myth? In a few hours this gravity well will be night-blazed with history, strung out in eternity with the faces of those who would be our gods, as at twilight Mars sings, and a hundred stars appear sultry, subtly, plus the billion that do not, like the suffusion in liquid/life once was, coacervate warm on the dilute robes of the missing dakini.
Hello Moonbeam! Seriously though, that's about as bad as it gets, and fortunately it's on p. 286 of 292. If you make it to that mind-blower, you're almost finished anyway.
Overall, this book contains some good material about being a Mets fan and Grossinger casts the spotlight on obscure players worth learning about, but be prepared for a lot of that other stuff too.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews