What I Learned Writing My Book

By Dana Brand
Posted Thursday, July 26, 2007

Last Friday, my book, Mets Fan was published. For this week’s column, I want to share some of the things I think I have learned while writing it, and pitching it to publishers.

One of the things I learned while writing the book proposal is that there are hardly any books written about the Mets, compared to what has been written about, say, the Yankees or the Red Sox. In a survey I had to do of books available on Amazon, I found that in the fall of 2006, excluding calendars, yearbooks, media guides, childrens’ books, and collections of dates and quotations, there were 90 books about the New York Yankees, of which 50 had been printed or reprinted since 2000. There were 77 books about the Red Sox, of which 57 have been printed or reprinted since 2000. There were only 24 books about the Mets, of which 13 have been printed or reprinted since 2000. The lack of Mets books is evident in the fact that when the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown offers a “New York Baseball in Books Day,” on August 20, 2007 with six authors giving presentations and signing books, four of the authors will have written books about the Yankees, one will have written a book about the Brooklyn Dodgers, and one will have written a book about a game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants. Please don’t write a letter of protest to the Hall of Fame about this. I already wrote to them and they were very nice. They did see that there was an important issue here and they asked me to write them in the fall to help them put together a “New York in Baseball Books, II” program for next year that will have some Mets books. But you see the problem. The Mets are ignored. The Mets don’t get any respect. Why?

It’s not because there aren’t a lot of Mets fans who want to read a well-written book about some aspect of their team. There are. Just spend an afternoon exploring Mets blogs and forums. Everywhere you look, on sites like this one, and on sites like the ones we link to and are partnered with, you will find loads of people who read well, write well, argue well, analyze well, etc. When someone I encountered while pitching my book said that sports books don’t sell because sports fans aren’t readers, I wanted to scream. It isn’t true. The audience is there. It’s the books that are missing.

There are some good books for baseball fans and Mets fans. All of us admire the baseball writing of Roger Angell. Books like Moneyball and Ball Four are very illuminating. Jimmy Breslin’s book about the 1962 Mets, Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? is hilarious and well-written. Books like Adam Rubin’s Pedro, Carlos, and Omar are well-researched pieces of sports journalism. But face it. I know it may sound arrogant of me to say this as a recently published baseball writer, but I’m going to tell the truth right here: most baseball books, and most sports books, are crap. This is the main reason why people don’t read them. There are too many books “by” athletes that don’t sound anything like the athletes. There are too many books with lots of pictures and not many words, with none of the words arranged in compound sentences. There is too much cynically marketed hackwork designed to be thumbed through appreciatively on Father’s Day or at the holidays, and never looked at again.

I want this to change and I want to do what I can to help change it. Baseball deserves more respect and baseball fandom in particular deserves more attention. A lot of smart and interesting people of all kinds care deeply about baseball and the intellectual and emotional pleasures it provides. Baseball is fun, but it is fun in the way that music is fun, or great writing or film. It’s uplifting. It enriches life and adds dimension to it. It’s a mindful, not a mindless amusement.

In my book, I tried to show how this works for me, how baseball is one of the most interesting and meaningful things in my life. The book was tremendous fun to write. Who wouldn’t enjoy writing about what Cow-Bell Man, Doris from Rego Park, the Home Run Apple, Mr. Met, and forty-five seasons of Mets history are doing in their head? I loved it. I felt as if I had taken a slide down into the depths of my brain and I had to come back with an account of what was down there that other people might have in their heads as well. The thing is that you have to be very careful. There were things I found in my memory that weren’t real. I remember Koosman beating Seaver in Seaver’s first game as a Red in Shea stadium. It was the other way around. I remember approaching the Polo Grounds and seeing a batting practice ball fly out of the stadium and bounce in the street. That couldn’t have happened. I have vivid emotional memories of the most important games in Mets history, but do you think I can recall the details of every at-bat? Are you kidding? Can you? You have to be up-front about this. Baseball is experienced by human beings and human beings are not computers.

Computers can’t explain why millions of people will cry when Shea stadium is torn down. No database contains the memories of millions of family birthday celebrations, millions of missed and dearly loved parents and grandparents, millions of long lost childhoods. All of these memories cling to the few silly things that are permanent in the world of the Mets fan: the song, the logo, the stadium rituals and characters, the games and players remembered by all “true” fans.

We’re all different, but we’re all in this together. What we need now are ways to preserve and celebrate what we share. Books can be part of this. A really good Mets museum in Citi Field would also help. Let’s hope that the Mets organization finally recognizes the importance of this kind of thing. They haven’t in the past. They don’t always seem to recognize that they are custodians of something very precious. We’re not just attendance statistics and TV ratings points. We are people living our lives, partly through Mets baseball. We deserve more than what we now have.

You can contact Dana Brand at danaabrand@yahoo.com. Dana is the author of Mets Fan, which has just been published by McFarland. Please check out his book site at http://metsfanbook.com and his blog at http://metsfanbook.com/blog/.