The New York Mets: Ethnography, Myth, and Subtext (review)

In our postmodern era, the subject matter of baseball books has become far more diverse than ever before. Many are aimed at fans of high intellectual caliber, people like NINE readers who are easily bored by the most recent player bio or compendium of the game's greatest stars. Richard Grossinger's latest effort is one such book, a volume that certainly could not have evinced the slightest interest from a publisher until at least the 1970s. The New York Mets: Ethnography, Myth, and Subtext intersperses baseball with anthropological insights, an unusual combination that renders assessment, and to some extent even description, problematic.

First and foremost, the book is about the Mets. Grossinger describes himself as having been "a faithful, even fundamentalist, baseball fan as a child," and his initial chapter makes that abundantly clear (42). Entitled "Endy's Catch: Retrospective from the 2006 Playoffs," it traces the Mets back to their inception and the author's fanship back almost as far. It's the longest chapter in the book, and arguably the best. Following that chapter are a dozen articles penned between 1969 and 2006. All have something to do with the Mets, although any attempt to state the range of that "something" would take at least as many words as this entire review. Some of them feature specific players and clubs, others depict dreams about 1960s-70s Met infielder Wayne Garrett, one is (sort of) a meditation on the relation between T'ai Chi and baseball, and so on.

Any true Mets fan must lovingly embrace the dreadful teams and players of the early years. Although Grossinger writes about them at length only in "Endy's Catch," he leaves no doubt as to the depth of his commitment. Any Mets fan from the wonder years saw, and sees, those teams and players as wonderfully unique, possessed of a certain something that made them the Mets and nothing but the Mets. As Grossinger puts it, "The early teams were the purest, the ones that made losing a redemptive proposition" (51). Something about the 1969 champions simultaneously validated that proposition and brought it to, or at least toward, its transformation into the next phase, during which the Mets became just another major league club. For me, that transformation was sealed when Tom Seaver was dispatched to the Big Red Machine. For others, it took place at different times. There is nothing objective about such perspectives, but they form the basis of both psychology and mythology, and Grossinger knows it.

Grossinger's thorough knowledge of Mets history is complemented by his understanding of the ethnographer's art. Witness, for example, Grossinger's description of the contents of his tome:

This book is a glimpse of . . . not baseball as such, but a calendar and sacred alphabet, a chronicle that begins in the mountains of Eurasia and Sinai and ends up counting moons and carving rocks among the Penobscots of the north, Arawaks of Venezuela and Paraguay, Huichols of the Sierra Madre, Marquesans in Polynesia, Aranda of the Australian outback, Nachez of the Mississippi Valley. What is at stake are the lost and forever-returning tables of humankind. They appear faintly in box scores, speaking of forgotten clans and events that have made us who we are, events that no longer exist, things that we must but cannot know.

(69)

This approach is less prominent in the book than one might expect. Grossinger's chronicles of his experiences and observations often betoken little more than one semi-insider fan's sojourn, as exemplified by the endless self-references in the text. There are many baseball semi-insiders, but only a great writer-Roger Angell, for example-can make writing of that sort worthwhile.

Grossinger is no Angell, but he's good. He writes with a flair and authenticity that encourages further reading, and I found it easy to cross the finish line. He's an engaging writer, and the depth of his passion for the early Mets is worthy...