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Baseball and Men's Lives: The True Confessions of a Skinny-Marink
In his look at the role baseball plays in the lives of American men, the author recounts his own role as shortstop and discusses Bobby Thompson's home run, the 1979 Mets, and other events
288 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 1994
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June 6, 2025
honestly it feels like such a miracle that i somehow found this book buried in a used book store years ago and that i, on a whim, bought it as a present for my dearest friend who upon reading lent it back to me because she knew i would love it. i did. i pity all the people in my life who do not even like baseball who i forced to listen to snippets of this book as i have slowly made my way through it over the past month and a half.
this is the sort of book that did not have to be written, no one asked for it. it is a self important baseball memoir of a man you’ve never heard of who’s main tie to the game is his fandom. and yet i fear i loved it. it’s bonkers. truly what is he talking about? why did he write this? thank god he did. i made me laugh more than pretty much anything i have read in recent memory. some of the craziest sentences, chapters, and little turns of phrase ever written. (i loved when he called a slow racehorse a “walking glue factory” and hoped it would “outrun the other clunkers”. what does that have to do with baseball? who cares!)
this book is about “baseball and men’s lives” but really it is sort of about baseball and mostly about one man’s life. (is it not the macho philosophical tradition to universalize one man’s experience onto all?) and yet, despite knowing deep in my bones that robert mayer certainly would have had no way to conceptualize gender beyond the binary (me), and the way he kept coming back to flawed and (truly hilarious) ideas of gender, this book spoke directly about and to baseball and my life. he and i came to baseball and the mets in very different ways and yet i saw so much of myself in this. mayer was a great writer who got to truth and expressed himself with humor and poetry even when being a bit self important and a bit ridiculous.
i want to give this book to every baseball fan i know and also baseball fans i don’t know. mets fans especially.
putting SOME of my favorite quotes below:
“Maybe, I thought, I would enjoy the accordion more if the songs were not so dumb.” (pg 43)
“No God is worthy of the name Who does not stay the full nine innings.” (pg 46)
“It is a quiet evening in June, the Mets are stalled at the .500 mark, 28 and 28, three games behind the Pirates, and they are playing a not particularly significant game at Montreal…
Unfortunately, as is my lifetime compulsion, I watch the game till the end. Gooden relinquishes most of the lead in the bottom of the eight, and when John Franco is brought in to relieve, he blows a save for the first time this season. At the end of eight the score is tied, 5-5. My cheerful evening has slipped, with the suddenness of a spring shower, into vague uneasiness…
The Mets take a 6-5 lead into the bottom of the ninth. Exasperation tilts its face toward a watchful wariness.
Bottom of the ninth. With one out Bonilla in right breaks in for a line drive. Then he slams on the breaks and watches the ball sail over his head for a double that should have been caught. The ghost of Metsies past watches and grind. Can’t anybody here play this game? Franco uncharacteristically walks the next batter on four pitches. The tying and winning runs are on base. Wariness slumps, sunken cheated, into resignation.
Earlier in the game I had eaten dinner in front of the set: roast skinless chicken breast, roasted potatoes, carrots, onions. Tasty and heart-wise. The empty plate has long since been removed to the kitchen sink, but a napkin and a toothpick are on the small table in front of me. I move the napkin, the toothpick, from the table to the desk beside me.
With the Mets about to blow another, John Franco stretches, pitches. The batter slams a sharp grounded up the middle. Franco spears it on one hop. He turns are fires toward second. The throw is high and to the right, is headed toward right-center, but Schofield (again!) leaps high, somehow manages to flag the ball while keeping his foot on the base, evades another set of incoming spike, and completes the double play. The game is over. The Mets. undeserving, have staggered to a victory.
I slump in my chair. The dinner churning in my stomach. The Mets are now 29 and 28. Would it really have mattered, in the universal scheme of things, if they had ended this night at 28 and 29? What’s Torborg to me, or me to Torborg, that I should churn for him?
Idly, I glance toward my telephone. He won’t even call, I’m sure of it. He won’t even call to thank me for moving the napkin, the toothpick.” (pg 58-60)
“On the day that color and truth returned to the universe, the New York Mets lost their first baseball game. They would lose their next eight as well, and a total of 120 out of 160 that year, constructing a pyramid of ineptitude that has not been equaled before or since. We pilgrims, we aberrant souls, hovered beside their blue and orange NY caps like hummingbirds and suffered their losses gladly.” (pg 110)
“If God no longer keeps an apartment in New York, must I?
In the ensuing days I ponder the concept of loyalty. If I am disloyal to my wife and she discovers this, she will be badly hurt; I do not want to hurt her. It might put my marriage in jeopardy, and then I, too, might suffer. Not to mention the inner turmoil; the guilt. But what of disloyalty to the Mets? In the past two decades, living so far away, I have purchased tickets to Shea Stadium just twice. So they will not be harmed at the box office, even if that were my concern. Though I root for them from afar, I root as desperately as any fan in Queens or Brooklyn or Hampstead. But do the Mets know this, any more than my dog knows it, or the sun? Do the distant Mets care? They have never heard of me. If my loyalty flickers and dies in Santa Fe, it will be like the dying of a dim star in an unseen universe. They could hardly care—they would not even know.
I imagine a computer at Shea lighting up the message board with the awful news: Bobby Mayer, out in New Mexico, has abandoned us! And the Mets officials falling to the floor in prostration, in grief. And one of them staggering to the telephone and calling me long distance, like a credit card company, to beg me to return; to beg me for another chance.
It will not happen that way. My credit card companies care more.
And what if that is the case, to whom would I be disloyal?
To myself?
Rooting for a team, I suddenly understand, is rather like believing in God. Our belief does not comfort Him; He doesn’t care, He doesn’t know we exist. But it sorely comforts us.” (pg 139)
“There are not many people in the stands on this cold night in New York, not many more than a few thousand, but they are screaming now: “Let’s go Mets! Let’s go Mets!” I am reassured to discover my breed, tyrannosaurus Mets, is not extinct.” (pg 178)
this is the sort of book that did not have to be written, no one asked for it. it is a self important baseball memoir of a man you’ve never heard of who’s main tie to the game is his fandom. and yet i fear i loved it. it’s bonkers. truly what is he talking about? why did he write this? thank god he did. i made me laugh more than pretty much anything i have read in recent memory. some of the craziest sentences, chapters, and little turns of phrase ever written. (i loved when he called a slow racehorse a “walking glue factory” and hoped it would “outrun the other clunkers”. what does that have to do with baseball? who cares!)
this book is about “baseball and men’s lives” but really it is sort of about baseball and mostly about one man’s life. (is it not the macho philosophical tradition to universalize one man’s experience onto all?) and yet, despite knowing deep in my bones that robert mayer certainly would have had no way to conceptualize gender beyond the binary (me), and the way he kept coming back to flawed and (truly hilarious) ideas of gender, this book spoke directly about and to baseball and my life. he and i came to baseball and the mets in very different ways and yet i saw so much of myself in this. mayer was a great writer who got to truth and expressed himself with humor and poetry even when being a bit self important and a bit ridiculous.
i want to give this book to every baseball fan i know and also baseball fans i don’t know. mets fans especially.
putting SOME of my favorite quotes below:
“Maybe, I thought, I would enjoy the accordion more if the songs were not so dumb.” (pg 43)
“No God is worthy of the name Who does not stay the full nine innings.” (pg 46)
“It is a quiet evening in June, the Mets are stalled at the .500 mark, 28 and 28, three games behind the Pirates, and they are playing a not particularly significant game at Montreal…
Unfortunately, as is my lifetime compulsion, I watch the game till the end. Gooden relinquishes most of the lead in the bottom of the eight, and when John Franco is brought in to relieve, he blows a save for the first time this season. At the end of eight the score is tied, 5-5. My cheerful evening has slipped, with the suddenness of a spring shower, into vague uneasiness…
The Mets take a 6-5 lead into the bottom of the ninth. Exasperation tilts its face toward a watchful wariness.
Bottom of the ninth. With one out Bonilla in right breaks in for a line drive. Then he slams on the breaks and watches the ball sail over his head for a double that should have been caught. The ghost of Metsies past watches and grind. Can’t anybody here play this game? Franco uncharacteristically walks the next batter on four pitches. The tying and winning runs are on base. Wariness slumps, sunken cheated, into resignation.
Earlier in the game I had eaten dinner in front of the set: roast skinless chicken breast, roasted potatoes, carrots, onions. Tasty and heart-wise. The empty plate has long since been removed to the kitchen sink, but a napkin and a toothpick are on the small table in front of me. I move the napkin, the toothpick, from the table to the desk beside me.
With the Mets about to blow another, John Franco stretches, pitches. The batter slams a sharp grounded up the middle. Franco spears it on one hop. He turns are fires toward second. The throw is high and to the right, is headed toward right-center, but Schofield (again!) leaps high, somehow manages to flag the ball while keeping his foot on the base, evades another set of incoming spike, and completes the double play. The game is over. The Mets. undeserving, have staggered to a victory.
I slump in my chair. The dinner churning in my stomach. The Mets are now 29 and 28. Would it really have mattered, in the universal scheme of things, if they had ended this night at 28 and 29? What’s Torborg to me, or me to Torborg, that I should churn for him?
Idly, I glance toward my telephone. He won’t even call, I’m sure of it. He won’t even call to thank me for moving the napkin, the toothpick.” (pg 58-60)
“On the day that color and truth returned to the universe, the New York Mets lost their first baseball game. They would lose their next eight as well, and a total of 120 out of 160 that year, constructing a pyramid of ineptitude that has not been equaled before or since. We pilgrims, we aberrant souls, hovered beside their blue and orange NY caps like hummingbirds and suffered their losses gladly.” (pg 110)
“If God no longer keeps an apartment in New York, must I?
In the ensuing days I ponder the concept of loyalty. If I am disloyal to my wife and she discovers this, she will be badly hurt; I do not want to hurt her. It might put my marriage in jeopardy, and then I, too, might suffer. Not to mention the inner turmoil; the guilt. But what of disloyalty to the Mets? In the past two decades, living so far away, I have purchased tickets to Shea Stadium just twice. So they will not be harmed at the box office, even if that were my concern. Though I root for them from afar, I root as desperately as any fan in Queens or Brooklyn or Hampstead. But do the Mets know this, any more than my dog knows it, or the sun? Do the distant Mets care? They have never heard of me. If my loyalty flickers and dies in Santa Fe, it will be like the dying of a dim star in an unseen universe. They could hardly care—they would not even know.
I imagine a computer at Shea lighting up the message board with the awful news: Bobby Mayer, out in New Mexico, has abandoned us! And the Mets officials falling to the floor in prostration, in grief. And one of them staggering to the telephone and calling me long distance, like a credit card company, to beg me to return; to beg me for another chance.
It will not happen that way. My credit card companies care more.
And what if that is the case, to whom would I be disloyal?
To myself?
Rooting for a team, I suddenly understand, is rather like believing in God. Our belief does not comfort Him; He doesn’t care, He doesn’t know we exist. But it sorely comforts us.” (pg 139)
“There are not many people in the stands on this cold night in New York, not many more than a few thousand, but they are screaming now: “Let’s go Mets! Let’s go Mets!” I am reassured to discover my breed, tyrannosaurus Mets, is not extinct.” (pg 178)
March 16, 2024
Robert Mayer (d. 2019) wrote this book in 1993 and it is both pretentious and sublime. It begins with his reminiscences of his childhood rooting for the Brooklyn Dodgers, and his plan to replace Pee Wee Reese at shortstop. About half-way through, Mayer begins to wander through the lives of his pals, his marriages, his career. Along the way, he reflexively flashes his politically liberal credentials like they were his press press, and far too often he reminds the reader that he's a writer guy. "Look over here! I dumped a sack of metaphors in this paragraph! Look over there! I started referring to myself in third person for no discernible reason!" And, of course, there is the obligatory genuflecting before the altar of Brooklyn Dodger-hood, as though the entire team was an incarnation of Moses.
But. When Mayer allows that inner 11-year old to speak, to reminisce, the prose becomes sublime. At that point, he is talking to the inner boy in all of us--certainly in me, for I was going to replace Brooks Robinson at third base for the Orioles. Our conversation is one of a brotherhood; of the bond among those of us who dreamed the dream, but didn't have the talent to fulfill it. As Mayer wrote, "Whether I was good enough or not had nothing to do with it." In this voice, the Dodgers are the childhood gods who revealed themselves on the radio, not the idols of adulthood. Even so, when the adult Mayer reflects upon that 11-year old, wanna-be Pee Wee, he is gentle and sympathetic because his 11-year old self still doesn't quite get it. Neither does mine.
I could not give this book five stars for the reasons mentioned, but I highly recommend it to all the inner kids who "miss being great" and who couldn't let go of the dream until well into adulthood; if they ever can or ever will.
But. When Mayer allows that inner 11-year old to speak, to reminisce, the prose becomes sublime. At that point, he is talking to the inner boy in all of us--certainly in me, for I was going to replace Brooks Robinson at third base for the Orioles. Our conversation is one of a brotherhood; of the bond among those of us who dreamed the dream, but didn't have the talent to fulfill it. As Mayer wrote, "Whether I was good enough or not had nothing to do with it." In this voice, the Dodgers are the childhood gods who revealed themselves on the radio, not the idols of adulthood. Even so, when the adult Mayer reflects upon that 11-year old, wanna-be Pee Wee, he is gentle and sympathetic because his 11-year old self still doesn't quite get it. Neither does mine.
I could not give this book five stars for the reasons mentioned, but I highly recommend it to all the inner kids who "miss being great" and who couldn't let go of the dream until well into adulthood; if they ever can or ever will.
November 21, 2023
unhinged. What is he talking about. I loved this
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews