Thank you Triumph Books for providing this book for review consideration. All opinions are my own.
Mr. Book just finished My Mets Bible: 30 Years Of Baseball Fandom, by Evan Roberts.
Roberts is a WFAN radio host and this is a book in which he picked out his 81 favorite Mets games that he kept score from, dating back to his childhood.
Among the highlights were the chapters on Jackie Robinson Day at Shea in 1997, the first regular season Subway Series (and the book was good enough that even this life-long Yankees fan could enjoy much of what he wrote about their first ever game—the infamous (from Yankees viewpoint) Dave Mlicki game), Robin Ventura’s walk-off “grand slam single” followed by Andruw Jones’s pennant-winning walk-off walk the next day.
The 2000’s have brought us chapter highlights like Dwight Gooden’s return to Shea in a Yankees uniform, the 2000 World Series (that would be a valid use of infamous, for a Mets fan, but not from me), the Clemens-Piazza incidents in 2000, the Mets’ collapse in 2007, a 20-inning game against the Cardinals, Johan Santana’s no hitter (and the author of course admits the umpire blew the call), Jacob deGrom’s MLB debut (a 1-0 loss to the Yankees), the Mets sweeping the Cubs in the 2015 NLCS before losing the World Series to the Royals and Chris Heston no-hitting the Mets.
I do give the author a lot of credit for not just picking out Mets’ victories. I didn’t keep track of their record in games he wrote about, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be a losing record.
You definitely do not have to be a Mets fan to enjoy this book. As I’ve made clear in this review, I am a life-long Yankees fan. But, I am also a life-long Mets hater. However, when it comes to my reading and my work, I take pride in my ability to put aside those biases. I give this book an A. Goodreads requires grades on a 1-5 star system. In my personal conversion system, an A equates to 5 stars. (A or A+: 5 stars, B+: 4 stars, B: 3 stars, C: 2 stars, D or F: 1 star).
I do have to object to one thing, in Roberts’ writeup about the Mets’ 10 run 8th inning against the Braves in 2000 that won a game in which they were losing 8-1 right before the rally. He refers to it as “infamous”. Infamous means notable for only bad reasons. From a Braves’ point of view, that comeback was infamous. From a Mets’ point of view, that comeback was famous. Big difference. If I objected at work when a Yankees fan misused infamous to describe Bucky Dent’s home run, then I must do the same here.
And this is a very minor point, but I have to bring it up too. The author did misspell Zack Wheeler’s name, spelling it with an “h”. I have long been advocating that all of the Zach’s and Zack’s, and we’ll even invite Zac Gallen, need to get together and agree on one standard spelling of the name.
But neither of these things reduced my enjoyment of the book in any way.
This review has been posted at my blog, Mr. Book’s Book Reviews, and Goodreads.
Mr. Book originally finished reading this on June 18, 2024.
