Coming Around Again

“Someday there will be nostalgia for the seventies, as hard as that may be to realize now.”
—Brendan C. Boyd and Fred Harris, The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book, originally published in 1973

Willie Nelson was right: it is funny how time slips away. It couldn’t be more than four or five months ago that we were rooting the Mets through their first postseason in nine years, and it couldn’t be more than three or four months ago that I was putting all of those autumnal Metsian moments and the ones that preceded them into a book intended to preserve just what a thoroughly unexpected and surprisingly fulfilling ride it had been.

A book for you and for posterity.

It really wasn’t that long ago, yet here it is, coming around again, in the pages of Amazin’ Again: How the 2015 New York Mets Brought the Magic Back to Queens, which is on the cusp of release as we speak. Get a copy and find your 2015 New York Mets — prosecutors of arguably the most satisfying Met season since 1986 — emerging from the first base dugout to take that curtain call your heart has been calling for since they went gentle into that not so good November night.

I couldn’t do anything about the ending, but the rest of the story was as uplifting as it gets, and it’s all there in a volume I wrote for two audiences:

1) You

2) Posterity

You are a Mets fan. You know what 2015 was. You’ll always retain the gist of things. The book gets between the gist and fastens the details that might otherwise tumble down the memory hole, which is a terrible place for a pennant-winning ballclub to disappear. 2015 was too good a Met year to not experience repeatedly on demand. Amazin’ Again is your permanent season ticket to a year for the ages.

Posterity isn’t necessarily a Mets fan, which is why it requires a historical document lavishly layered with the moments and personalities that made 2015 a winner worth talking about into perpetuity, sort of the way we still talk about 1969. The 1969 Mets came alive for me once, in fleeting fashion, because I had the good sense at a tender age to sit up and take notice of them in real time…and then they stayed alive for me for all time because a group of writers saw fit to commit some journalism in their name as soon as that season was over.

The foundation of my baseball library is formed by books with titles like Amazin’ and Joy In Mudville and The Year The Mets Lost Last Place and The New York Mets: The Whole Story and The Perfect Game, books I encountered in the years directly following 1969, books that filled in my blanks and gave me a box seat to everything I missed on account of my mistakenly being born a tad too late to fully comprehend the depth and beauty of 1969 while it was still in progress. It was my goal, while writing Amazin’ Again, to tell a story about last year’s Mets that will hold up in the latter 2010s and into the 2020s and beyond the way the aforementioned books hold up to this very day.

So ideally you’ll grab one copy of my book for yourself and purchase and put aside another for a fan to be named later, a kid who will someday wonder what was so great about 2015 and begin to answer that question by reading what I wrote.

Though I guess you can just share that first copy.

Amazin’ Again: How the 2015 New York Mets Brought the Magic Back to Queens will be officially released on March 15. Amazon, I’m told, is already fulfilling orders, so you can click there for more information. And in the weeks ahead, I hope you’ll join me at one of several events planned in the Greater New York Metropolitan Area.

• On Thursday night March 17, starting at 7:00 PM, I will be at Bergino Baseball Clubhouse (67 E. 11th St. in Manhattan) where I look forward to joining you and proprietor Jay Goldberg in a discussion of the Mets’ first pennant-winning season in fifteen years. Jay, who stocks some of the most glorious baseball items you’ve ever seen, will have copies of Amazin’ Again on hand and I’ll be happy to sign them if you like.

• On Saturday March 26, from Noon to 3:00 PM, ace photographer Sharon Chapman and I welcome you to Foley’s NY (18 W. 33rd St. in Manhattan) for an informal book party and general preseason warmup, appropriate to an establishment that is the most baseball bar in the city. I plan to have books available for purchase and inscription that day.

• On Thursday evening March 31, beginning at 6:00 PM, Amazin’ Again comes to its borough of origin, alighting at the Central Branch of the Queens Library in Jamaica (89-11 Merrick Blvd.). I’ll be talking about the book, about writing, about being a Mets fan. Copies will be on sale here, too.

Two great podcasts — Gary McDonald’s Mets Musings and I’d Rather Kiss A Mookiee (hosted by the dynamic duo of Shannon Shark and Jason Fry) — have been kind enough to have me on already for book talk, and I invite you to listen in.

There should be more announcements to come, and I thank you in advance for your indulgence of this wave of self-promotion.