Friend of FAFIF Caryn Rose has not one but two baseball books out that you should know about. There’s the e-book anthology, One Girl, One Team, One City: The Best of Metsgrrl.com, collecting a series of evocative blog posts from her site’s 2006-2012 heyday. And there’s the novel, A Whole New Ballgame, which is available in print as well as electronically. The fiction involves a protagonist who falls in love with baseball c. 2006, which is not wholly dissimilar to Caryn’s real-life story.
I’ve always enjoyed Caryn copping to midlife regret that she didn’t come to our game (and our team) sooner, but when she got here, she made the most of it, stoking her readers’ baseball appreciation along the way. She added a valuable perspective to Metsopotamia when she was blogging regularly and her sense of what you might call jaded wonder as the Mets rise, fall and periodically resuscitate is fun to revisit.
Just as Caryn proved regarding the Mets, it’s never too late to dive into something you didn’t really know about until recently. Dip a toe into the anthology here and the novel here. Next thing you know, you might very well be immersed.
I can confirm that A Whole New Ballgame is great summer reading, especially for baseball fans. It’s worth it just for her descriptions of watching games in so many different ballparks, and beyond that it’s a well crafted story with compelling characters.