Friday, March 27, 2009

FAITH AND FEAR IN FLUSHING: THE BOOK.

One of the things I love most about going to the ballpark is that it’s full of stories. Everyone sitting near you has a story about who they are, and how they came to love baseball, and why they’re Mets fans. The stories are always interesting (at least to me), they are almost never boring. Get someone talking and you will open up a door into another world.

So it would make sense that I would love Faith And Fear In Flushing (the eponymous book written by Greg Prince of that esteemed site). But it was more than that. Once I picked it up, I discovered that I couldn’t put it down.

I read it at lunch, I read it on the way home, I read it so intently I missed my stop once, I read it before going to sleep. And then once I was at the end of it, I didn’t want to finish it—and then I didn’t want to finish it while riding on the subway. It seemed an ignominious fate for such a wonderful book.

In the end, I finished it while riding on the 7 train. Which seemed appropriate.

All of this is me trying to say: if you are enough of a Mets fan that you read web sites about the Mets, you need to read this book. If you suffered through any Mets season, ever, whether it was 1966 or 1976 or 2007, this book was written for you. If you are a baseball fan of any team, you will enjoy reading this book. If you want to try to explain to your best friend who doesn’t like baseball, your parents or your significant other why you love baseball, this would probably be a good book to give them.

That said, this is not your typical baseball book. There are people who are going to hate this book, and who will savage every inch of it. Those people also probably don’t give up their seat on the bus to pregnant women and old people. This book is not about stats (although Greg knows them) or strategy (although he knows that too), nor does it start with Henry Chadwick or even Casey Stengel. It is a book about one Mets fan’s life story about going through life as the biggest Mets fan in the world. (And if you’re going to try to say that you’re a bigger fan, go read the book and then come back and we’ll have a chat.)

What I found so wonderful about the book was how inclusive it was. It wasn’t written from the perspective of, “I know all of this and I saw all of this and if you don’t know this and you don’t remember this or you weren’t there for this, you are unworthy. Begone, unwashed peon.” Now, Faith and Fear The Website isn’t like that, so there was a good chance that the book wasn’t going to do that either. But it is tough for big baseball people, they are so overwhelmed and immersed and don’t know how to talk to people who do not have a brain like theirs. They don’t mean to shut you out, but they do. As Greg puts it in the book, “Ask me how my day was, and I’ll tell you how the Mets did.”

So from that perspective, the book is for everyone.

But the book is full of heart, and full of heartbreak. I could not relate to the earlier seasons, because I was not there, but my reaction to the seasons I was here for was visceral. It was powerful because Prince writes in an engaging, open, lyrical manner. He’s not trying to be Roger Angell but there is something reminiscent, of treating the words being written about baseball with the utmost respect.

The book is subtitled “An Intense Personal History of The New York Mets.” There are moments in the book in which you will likely feel uncomfortable, where Prince discusses his relationship with his parents, and especially his mother. It’s easy to dismiss those moments as overshares, but there’s part of me that likes the discomfort invoked. It’s not strategic because the book is memoir, but there were ways to write around those subjects, or to address them in a fashion that would have made the reader more comfortable. It took a lot of courage to tackle these subjects in this fashion in a sports memoir. A less talented writer would have stumbled all over the place.

I know. There are dozens of baseball memoirs out there. Most of them are poorly written, uninteresting, and inaccessible to anyone else. As a Mets fan, I’m delighted to report that Faith and Fear In Flushing is well written, engaging and accessible even to the non-Mets fan. I cannot recommend it enough as your companion as we open the 2009 year of Mets baseball.

—
Disclaimer: Mr. Prince is a colleague, and I do comment on his blog from time to time, and I certainly read it. I only met Greg in person for the first time on September 28, 2008. In some ways, there were few things more fitting.