Dana Brand’s Mets Fan Blog

I have a lot of things I want to say about the new signings, but I can’t put up my Tuesday posting this week because I am totally swamped grading papers and exams.  I do want to say to regular readers that I will be posting some excellent news soon about my forthcoming book, The Last Days of Shea.  If you liked Mets Fan, you’ll really like The Last Days of Shea, and it appears that it will be out next year and available in bookstores everywhere.  As soon as the actual contract is signed, I’ll give you all the details.  Enjoy the holiday season everyone, and let’s go Mets!

I’m very happy we have him.  But I am really tired of this business of calling players with the name Rodriguez X-Rod and Martinez X-Mart.  Do you realize that if this silliness had been fully in effect when we acquired the once-great strikeout pitcher Pedro Martinez, we would have had to call him K-Mart?

There’s a moment in the movie “War of the Worlds” where some locals drive up to the site where something has landed with a bang from the sky.  They see smoke and the long neck of some sort of machine rising up out of it.  They don’t know if the neck of the thing can see them.  They don’t know what it is doing.  They don’t know if it comes in peace or if it will turn towards them with sudden destructive force.  Actually, I think this moment is in a whole bunch of science fiction films I’ve seen over the years.  I think it’s an archetypal image.
 

I had an experience like this yesterday (12/08/08), when I drove my car to Shea and parked on the street of the chop shops.  I parked right up against Citifield and walked into the parking lot.  It was around 5:45.  It was dark but there was still a lot of activity, in the chop shops, and in the new stadium. There was also some activity in the old stadium which was intact, although only the ramps were, ominously, lit.  The brilliant lights of a Shea evening were gone.  The neon sculptures were gone, or at least they weren’t lit.  Gone too were the smells of the summer parking lot.  It was very cold and the only lights in the old stadium were red ones along the top to let planes know that something large and dark was still there.
 

I got as close as I could to Shea and looked through the metal fence at a spot where the plastic Mets bunting had blown open.  I saw something moving, a yellow steam shovel, lit by a garish construction light that also illuminated the smoky dust that rose from where it was digging.  It moved with that scary grace of machines.  I don’t know what it was digging or what it was doing.  It was in the bullpen, right under the bluish mural commemorating the 1969 Championship.  So there was light and darkness and dust and dim orange clouds and the faces of Seaver, Koosman, and Hodges, and the only thing  moving was the slow neck of a steam shovel.  I also saw a long shaft of a crane beside it but that wasn’t moving and I couldn’t tell what it was there for. 
 

Right in front of me, closer to me, were Palladian windows opening into the Jackie Robinson Rotunda.  I could see the big lit space and the escalators.  I could imagine the crowds entering in the spring.

  
 Nobody bothered me.  I didn’t really see anything.  My camera is just an ordinary camera, so it didn’t capture very much detail.  But it did capture something of what I felt as I watched the neck of the shovel, as I felt a jarring sense of menace and promise, as I wondered if anyone saw me or cared about what I was doing or feeling.
 

[If you’d like to give someone a personally inscribed copy of Mets Fan for the holidays, write to me at “Dana Brand, 5 Bradley Lane, Sandy Hook, CT 06482.”  Include instructions for the inscription, your address, and a check made out to me for $25 per book (this will include shipping and handling costs).  I will get it in the mail to you on the day after I receive it.  Happy holidays everyone and Lets Go Mets!]  

I don’t get into the Hot Stove season as much as some other people.  I get into it during Spring training.  But as far as I’m concerned, this time of year is really boring.  I don’t feel like taking the time to figure out which talented free agent 32-year old ballplayer that I already know so much about is going to have the slowest rate of decline over the next four or five years.  There’s no fun in that.  I have a perverse interest in players like Dontrelle Willis, but everybody would yell at me if I said that.  I like teams and players to surprise me.  I will root for whatever Mets team they put out there.  But I don’t particularly enjoy seeing how the sausage is made. 

So instead of telling you who I think we “should go after,” I’m going to take advantage of the lull to cast a backward glance over all the Mets seasons.  I’m going to do something I last did two years ago. I’m ranking the 20 best Mets seasons, according to the amount of fun they were.  When I last did this, 2007 and 2008 hadn’t been played, so the hard thing is squeezing them in (assuming that they make it into the top 20).  This kind of ranking is obviously difficult, because it’s hard to define a fun season.  For example, 1973 was no fun at all while it was happening, except for the last month and a half which was insanely fun.  And then there’s the issue of what criteria we use to determine that 1988 and 2000, incredibly successful seasons, were not as much fun in the end as 1999 and 2006.  This isn’t scientific, but below please find my list of the 20 most “fun” Mets seasons. 

1969

1986

1973

1999

2006

1988

1984

2000

1985

1997

1998

2008

1987

1989

2005

2007

1970

1972

1976

1971

1975

1990 

As you can see, I thought 2008 was more fun than 2007.  Didn’t you?  Even though we did blow it in the end, blowing it wasn’t as much of a surprise or a disappointment, because it felt as if we were playing over our heads.  And the last two-thirds of the season were better than the first third had promised.  It was the reverse in 2007.  What do you think?

In the town where I grew up, there’s a square white building right off the highway exit, where my parents have kept their money for over 40 years.  It’s a bank.  I have no idea what it’s called.  It has had over 40 names in the past 40 years, or at least it seems that way.  When something keeps changing its name, you forget it even has a name. 

Speaking of banks.  You know, don’t you, that our stadium is not going to end up being called Citifield?  Citibank says that it isn’t reconsidering the naming deal and various people have been saying that they can’t get out of the naming deal (yeah right).  I suspect it’s going to have to.  I can imagine three reasons why we may never see a Citifield.

First of all, Citibank might have to change its name because it will have to merge or be acquired to survive.  If Citibank is no longer Citibank, Citifield can no longer be Citifield.    

And then, even if Citibank continues to be Citibank, if it pays $400 million dollars for twenty years for naming rights to a stadium while it’s laying off tens of thousands of people and receiving tens of billions of taxpayer money in a bailout, isn’t there a possibility that all this might begin to look bad?  Isn’t it some kind of rule of advertizing that if an ad starts to make you look bad, it disappears immediately?   Since when are companies loyal to any public relations expenditure that doesn’t, on balance, get them new business?

And then there’s the Mets.  If Citibank starts looking like some mismanaged, bloated, extravagant company that put too much money into shaky investments, if Citibank crashes and burns even though everyone once thought they were really formidable, are the Mets really going to want to be so publicly associated with them?

I’m just saying.  I don’t see this happening.  And even if it does happen, it may not last.  Look at all the stadiums and civic centers that have gone through a whole bunch of names.  How do you feel about names that don’t even promise to be around for a few years?  Doesn’t it change your whole conception of something if it can’t be fixed with a name?  What if the universe consisted of such things? 

A place that is going to be a repository of memories should at least have a name as fixed and solid and lasting as the place itself.  I accept, with scornful practicality, that the name can be something some board of shareholders pays for.  But something that doesn’t have a lasting name doesn’t have a lasting anchor in our mind.  It becomes something unlike our towns, states, countries, selves, lovers, or friends.   It becomes harder to remember and harder to love or enjoy.

Anthony De Rosa, over at Hotfoot blog, has posted a Mets press release about the “Great Eats in Store at Citifield.” 

I don’t know where to begin.  So the Mets have signed a 30-year deal with ARAMARK to run all the concessions at Shea and ARAMARK has signed up with Danny Meyer’s restaurant group to create an “unprecedented partnership” to provide an “all-star dining experience” for us at Citifield.  Good.  I like food.

What do they have in mind?  Well, for “all ticket holders,” who can schlep to the outfield concourse, there is barbecue and hamburgers and hot dogs.  And, we’re told, a “new concept” called a taqueria that serves some Mexican dish called tacos which Wikipedia says is this shell they put stuff in.  They also have a “new concept” place called “Pop Fries,” which is a “frites” stand, a place where they serve Belgian-style French fries.  “Frites” is apparently Belgian for French fries.   Don’t tell anybody, but they also have frites in France, but people going to the ballpark don’t want to think that they’re eating French food.  A lot of people think that there’s something un-guy like about eating French.  Belgian they can handle. 

Well, that’s all we learn about the outfield concourse.  Then the press release goes on to tell us what they’ll be eating in the Sterling Club, a “premium seating area for 1600 guests directly behind home plate.”  Premium means what?  I’m assuming, from the fact that the outfield concourse is described as “accessible to all ticket holders,” that the Sterling Club is not accessible to all ticket holders.  If my assumption is correct, I won’t be happy.   I particularly like the idea of the Sterling Market in the Sterling Club, which will be a “casual café” serving “classic, artisanal comfort foods.”  They put the word “artisanal” in there to let you know that you won’t be eating the same kind of slobby comfort food they have out in the outfield concourse.  I’m not sure what they have in mind, but I worry that some people are going to find it hard to be comfortable while they’re eating something they’ve been told is “artisanal.”

Inside Sterling Market there will also be the Sterling Beer and Wine Bar, which is described as a “venue” that will have “specialty brews” and “an extensive collection of wines from around the world.”  Wine at the ballpark?  I love wine, but at the ballpark?  What would wine taste like at a ballpark?  What would it cost?  Well at least you’ll have a “venue” at Citifield to drink the wine in.  You don’t have to drink it in the stands.
 
So congratulations to ARAMARK for being designated Citifield’s “exclusive concessionaire.”  In the interest of full disclosure I have to reveal that I am a little bit mad at them for making it clear to me, when I asked, that they wouldn’t sell my book in the Mets stadium store because they didn’t sell anything that didn’t have some kind of stamp of approval from Major League Baseball.  That’s why they don’t sell any of the excellent books about the Mets at the stadium.  Wouldn’t it be nice if you could pick up a book in that store where they sell jerseys for more than any book ever costs?  What do you call a racket inside a racket inside a racket? 

Don’t get me wrong.  I love baseball.  I love the Mets.  I will probably break down and love Citifield.  But I just want to know that if the Mets do to me what they’ve done the last two years, I will at least have the option of coming down from my perch in the Promenade Level to grab a seat in a casual cafe behind home plate, where I can drown my sorrows in a glass of Bordeaux and a plate of artisanal comfort food.

I visited Shea a few weeks ago, on October 22.  The World Series was still on. Shea was exactly where it had always been.  I took the 9E exit going West off the Grand Central Parkway and I pulled up onto the side of the road that we all know that runs along the south side of the parking lot. 

It looked as if there was no one around.  I got out of the car and I was alone with it.  I saw Shea across the parking lot, which was empty except for painted lines and stop signs. It looked like a big blue whale waiting to be cut into pieces.  There were cranes and little sheds and cables along the top layer.  The big letters across the top said “TADIUM,” and you could see where “SHEA S” had always been. You could still see the white sticky ghosts of the letters. 

The sky was ominous and oppressive and it was very windy off the bay and leaves were blowing around.  But it could just as easily have been a clear, still, sunny day.  It made no difference.  What I was seeing didn’t require any special effects.  This was an unsentimental work site.  They had to cut up the blubber and prepare the try-works.

I took some pictures and got back into my car and drove around the stadium as if I was heading to one of the parking lots.  I’ve driven this route a million times but this time there was only me, as in a dream, and I couldn’t get into the parking lots.  I drove along the road with the chop shops.  Here’s where the people were. I saw that the parking lot over by the grand entrance to Citifield had a lot of cars in it.  But people were busy. If I parked my car on the road near the entrance to that lot, no one was going to bother me.  

When I got out of my car and walked into the lot, I saw that Citifield was cheerfully getting ready.  Shea was behind it, hulking and silent.  During the season, Shea was still full of life and Citifield was silent and pretty and looming.  Things were reversed now.  The scoreboard was gone and the seats were ripped out.  This made the passages to the inner concourse look like empty eye sockets.  Shea looked stripped, the concrete was rough and ancient-looking where the seats had been.  And the passages through which we had brought our food back to our seats were now empty eyes staring at Citifield.  Or empty mouths dark and open.  Without the scoreboard, you could stare directly at them.  There was something frightening about the way the stadium looked.  The only remaining signs of life were the giant mural in shades of blue, with Seaver pitching, Koosman leaping, and Hodges looking over at something in the distance.

There were plenty of cars in the lot and there was a long line of black corporate-looking SUVs.  A few of them had license plates that suggested some kind of connection to the Mets.  I walked as close as I could to Shea and took some pictures.  No one stopped me.  No one even acted as if they saw me.  There were a few random helmeted, jacketed people doing stuff to Citifield.  There were ominous rattling sounds somewhere over on the field at Shea.  I couldn’t actually see what was happening because there was this “Almost Home” Citifield bunting draped over the metal fence that kept you from walking too close.    

One thing that was funny is that the chop shops were all open and busy.  Usually they’re closed when you go to a ballgame.  So you heard a lot of random hammering and cutting sounds that went with the rattle somewhere over the fence.  You heard the low-pitched familiar rumble of the subway cars.  You heard the high, sharp caw-caw sounds you always hear from the seagulls.  And there were still the planes. 

It’s Election Day.  It’s the seventh game of the World Series and your team is still alive.

Anyone who follows baseball knows that there are many similarities between following baseball and following a political election.  There is the same immersion in the day-to-day fluctuations of fortune, the same shifting balance of hope and fear, the same sudden resolution on one final day.  There is the same invitation to the infinite pleasures of geekhood:  the romance of numbers, the memories of earlier epic battles, the friendly community of like-minded geeks.  The major difference between a political election and a baseball season is that a baseball season is much, much shorter. 

Well, there’s also the fact that politics is about something real and baseball isn’t.  Just kidding.  Just kidding.

But, well, you know, this is part of it.  I mean really.  The best thing about baseball is that it feels so real, you make it so real, but it isn’t real.  If the Phillies win the World Championships, you can ignore them.  It can even add interest to what will happen next year.  If the Mets have lost again, you can comfort yourself with the thought that rooting for a baseball team is all about hope, love, and loyalty.  The pain of the loss is very real.    But you know that pain is part of the package.  You chose the pain, in order to have the hope of the pleasure.  This makes baseball pain subtly, but significantly different from unhappiness.  As a baseball fan, I’ve lost a lot more than I’ve won.  But I am still happy to be a baseball fan.

As a voter in presidential elections, I’ve also lost more than I’ve won.  But there’s no way I have enjoyed it.  There’s no way I can see it as part of the fun of following political elections.  The pain comes and it stays.  It can’t be sentimentalized.  It is unhappiness.  If you’re a grown-up human being, you can’t be comforted.  Except by triumph. 

[This is a continuation of a sample essay from a draft of my new book, The Last Days of Shea, which I hope to have out by mid-spring.  The first part of the piece can be found in the blog entry of October 21.  If you haven’t read my first book, Mets Fan, please check it out by clicking on the link.  There are links to Amazon and BN.com on my site, but please  remember that I have a holiday special for my blog readers.  If you send me your address, inscription instructions, and a check for $25 per copy ordered (this includes the cost of shipping), I will send you an inscribed copy or copies of Mets Fan.  My address is Dana Brand, 5 Bradley Lane, Sandy Hook, CT 06482]

Baseball is a ride I get on.  It’s like a lot of other things in my life.  No sense of triumph justifies it and no sense of loss discredits it.  It lifts me up.  It drops me down.  It is something I do, one of the things I live for.

Baseball is also something I share with millions of other people.  Friends of mine who were at Shea for the seventh game of the 2006 NLCS tell me that they had never seen anything like the love, kindness, and sympathy that Mets fans shared at the end of that game.    Even though I wasn’t at Shea, I did feel that all of us were together at that moment.  I had that feeling I always have at the great moments of Mets history.  I have this sense that I am flying over New York with its roofs off, past big apartment blocks and brownstones and long rows of small houses and suburbs spreading to the horizon.  I feel as if I can look down into the living rooms and see all the Mets fans in their clusters of family and friends, everyone with snacks and drinks and Mets regalia, everyone feeling the same things at the same moment.   Although the season ended with me in my living room, with just my daughter, my pretzels, and my beer, I felt as if I was with millions of people.  

What sense does this make?  This wasn’t 9/11.  This wasn’t the loss of something truly important, like a war or an election.  It wasn’t even really a loss.  So much had been won.  This was only the end of a winning season that ended one out short of the World Series.  Why value an experience like this.  If something doesn’t really matter, does the fact that millions of people care about it make it matter?

I don’t know.  I love to be with people who have the same memories I have of the New York Mets, who respond as I do to some names and numbers and events in the past, who share new things with me, as they happen.  People who share these things with me are not entirely strangers, even if I have never seen them before, even if I will never meet them.  I sit in the crowd at a Mets game and look around me and think, “I don’t know any of these people!”   Yet they are my paysans, my landsmen, my homies.  This big colorful bowl is our village.  And so are all of these screens on our laps and in our living rooms with their pictures and words.  I love this. 

This is a good village.  It’s better, in lots of ways, than a real village.  There’s just a connection, not a lifelong interdependence.  A village this big and this abstract can never be a prison.  While it’s part of your life, it doesn’t consume or determine it.  You don’t really hate your rivals from other villages.  You know it’s all just a game.  Your triumphs don’t actually cost anyone anything.  Your losses don’t deprive you of happiness, food, freedom, or life.  It’s not a problem that baseball isn’t real.  One of the best things about baseball is that it isn’t real, but it still lets you feel real love and real hope.

Real love and real hope about something that isn’t real?  Yeah.  Why not?  Haven’t you ever enjoyed a movie, a book, a TV show, or an opera?  Baseball is part of this web of unreal things that are so important to all of us.   It’s a story that engages our emotions and our imaginations.  It touches deep things in us.  But no one tells it, no one controls it, no one makes it up ahead of time.  Like life, it just happens, but like a story, it is only as real as we allow it to be.  It has all the indeterminacy of reality and all of the splendour of the imagined. 

And because we share it with so many other people, it can seem more real than real things we enjoy or suffer in private.  No one knows what I have with my wife and my kid and my friends and my family and myself.  All Mets fans know what we have with the Mets.  I know that doesn’t make it real, but to say that baseball isn’t real is like saying that Harry Potter isn’t real, or American Idol.  It may be literally true.  But it’s not true. 
 
 

I drove by Shea to see what was going on.  It was actually quite easy to get close enough to get a sense of what is happening.  I’ll eventually post fuller impressions.  But here are some pictures.

[Below you’ll find the first half of an essay of mine called “The Curveball,” which is one of the opening pieces of my forthcoming book The Last Days of Shea, which I hope will be out this spring.  If you haven’t read my first book, Mets Fan, I urge you to do so.  It’s about my first 45 years as a fan of the New York Mets, and I’ll bet that you’ll find a lot in it with which you can identify.  It makes a great holiday present for Mets fans and baseball fans and you can find Amazon and BN links on my site:  Mets Fan if you want to order it.  If you want to order a signed, inscribed and discounted copy or copies of the book for the holidays, you can order it or these directly from me.  Just write me a personal check or money order made out to “Dana Brand” and send it to me, with your address and any inscription instructions, at Dana Brand, 5 Bradley Lane, Sandy Hook, CT 06482.  The cost is $25 per copy, which includes shipping and handling.  Anyway, here is a sample from my new book.  Samples from Mets Fan can be read on the site.] 

For all that we enjoyed our home opener in 2007, every Mets fan was haunted by the final pitch of the 2006 season.  Adam Wainwright, of the St. Louis Cardinals, had thrown a two-strike curveball to Carlos Beltran.  Beltran did not swing.  He saw that the pitch was high and he waited for it to pass.  He was waiting for the next pitch, the historic pitch, the pennant-bearing pitch.  The high curve, already taken, already in the past, approached the plate at the level of Beltran’s eyes.  Then it fell.  It dropped, like a bomb from a plane.  It fell from the sky.  The 2006 season was over.

In 2006, the Mets won 97 games and their first division title in 19 years.  They swept the Dodgers in the first round of the playoffs.  They came into the NLCS as clear favorites.  But then there were a couple of inexplicable bullpen collapses and a horrific five-run first third of an inning from a veteran pitcher fighting to save his marriage.  The inferior Cardinal team had the superior Mets on the ropes, with two games to play in New York. 

Still, I believed.  And having seen the sixth game at Shea with my own eyes, having felt the Upper Deck of the stadium bounce as I stood on it with tens of thousands of other screaming people, I thought that the Mets would pull it out.  By the time we reached the ninth inning, Endy Chavez’s catch had already saved the game.  Ollie Perez also saved us, giving up only one run.  I trusted Aaron Heilman because I had every reason to.  I felt it in my throat when Yadier Molina of all people hit a two-run home run off Heilman in the top of the ninth.  But I still believed that we were in 1986 and not in 1988.  The Mets loaded the bases in the ninth with one out, and two fine hitters were ready to come to the plate to give us one of those Mets moments you will remember all your life.  Hope was alive until the last fraction of a second, when the curveball dropped and everything suddenly and finally took the form it would always have. 

If the 2006 Mets had played a hundred games against the 2006 Cardinals, they would have won sixty or seventy.  But they only played seven.  And they had lost four.  The 2006 NLCS, so close to having been won, would always be lost, just like the 1988 NLCS or the 1973 and 2000 World Series.

Twenty years minus one week before Wainwright’s pitch, the Mets had won their last World Championship.  I felt those twenty years, as a presence in the room, as soon as I choked off my remote control on October 19, 2006.  I wondered what I would have felt if I had known, at thirty-two, that the Mets would not win a World Championship in the next two decades.  Would I waste twenty years hoping for something that would not happen?  Let’s say I could talk to the thirty-two year old guy who had seen the ball bounce between Bill Buckner’s legs only two nights before.  What would I say to him?  What I’d want to tell him, from my current perspective is that hoping and dreaming justify themselves.  To hope and dream, you need the idea of success.  But you don’t actually need success itself.    

But the kid already knew this.  I remember that he knew this.   He was a Mets fan. And he had already been one for twenty-five years.

As I sat in my living room, at the end of the 2006 season, I asked myself something I ask myself all the time.  How could baseball be worth the attention I have given to it for forty-five years?  How could it be worth the emotions I have felt for it?  Many things in life are worthy of my attention and my emotions.  If I felt nothing for my family, if I paid no attention to my career, my health, and my good fortune, my life would be much worse.  But what difference would it possibly make if I suddenly decided to ignore baseball?   

Look, your life is filled with things you don’t have to pay attention to or care about.  Nobody has to listen to music, or look at art, or read a book, or walk in the woods, or care about someone else’s problem, or taste food.  You don’t even have to love the people you love.  You don’t have to work where you work or live where you live or do what you do.  Some things are more important than other things, but everything is optional.  Everything is a ride you don’t have to go on.  If you wanted to, you could sit and watch everything from a bench.  You could listen to the screams from the roller coaster.  You could watch the kids get sick from spinning around.  Or you can say “to hell with it,” and get on the ride yourself. 

Baseball is a ride I get on.  It’s like a lot of other things in my life.  No sense of triumph justifies it and no sense of loss discredits it.  It lifts me up.  It drops me down.  It is something I do, one of the things I live for. . .

On the eve of the historic Presidential Debate at my home institution, Hofstra University, I would like to announce officially that on November 3, 4, and 5, 2011, Hofstra University will host a conference commemorating the 50th anniversary of the New York Mets.  The conference will be organized and co-chaired by me (Professor Dana Brand of the English Department) and by my colleague Professor Richard Puerzer of the Engineering Department. 

2011, in our judgement, can be considered the 50th anniversary year of the Mets because it was on March 6, 1961 that the New York Metropolitan Baseball Club Inc. received its certificate of membership in the National League.  On October 10, 1961, the first Mets team was drafted, and on October 28, 1961, ground was broken for the construction of Flushing Meadows Park, later Shea stadium.  The team played its first official game on Aprill 11, 1962.  Hofstra is the perfect place to have such a conference because it is a university in the heart of the Mets homeland and because William Shea, the man who brought National League baseball back to New York, was on our Board of Trustees.

The Hofstra Conference on “Fifty Years of the New York Mets” will be organized under the auspices of the Hofstra Cultural Center, which has sponsored over one hundred international conferences on a wide range of topics.   Most of the conference topics have been scholarly, cultural, scientific, social, and political (including the well-known series on each presidential administration since that of Franklin Roosevelt) but the Cultural Center is also known for innovative conferences on topics that are not always represented in academia, even though they are definitely worthy of serious study.  Hofstra’s conference on “Baseball and the Sultan of Swat:  Commemorating the 100th Birthday of Babe Ruth” in April, 1995 was a model of this, and Professor Puerzer and I hope to emulate the success of that conference by bringing together players, journalists, executives, fans, bloggers, cultural figures, and scholars to commemorate and discuss the extraordinary history and phenomenon of the Mets. 

Conference registration will be open to the public.  A call for papers and presentations will be issued in the spring of 2009.  There will also be associated art and memorabilia exhibits, as well as a film festival and perhaps even musical performances. 

We hope that the conference will be a lot of fun for everyone, and we hope that it will contribute to an understanding of why so many people find baseball important.  We will be particularly concerned with understanding why so many people find the Mets important in their lives.  The Mets are an extremely popular franchise.  Yet for a variety of reasons, they have never received the attention they deserve, in the press or in publishing.   Because of their relative youth, and their secondary status with respect to the Yankees, they have also never paid as much attention to their own fascinating history and traditions as they might have.  Now that the Mets are about to become fifty years old and are about to move into a new stadium, it’s time for that to change.  The Mets deserve some attention:  loving, intelligent, appreciative, and critical.  Let’s give them some.  If you have any ideas for what you would like to see at the conference, or if you would like to be involved in some way, please visit my blog at metsfanbook.com and leave a comment on the post announcing the conference, or e-mail me at danaabrand@yahoo.com.  

[A note to my regular (and new) readers:  I will be blogging during the offseason, but I will not blog as often as I did during the regular season.  From now until the end of the year, expect to see a new post at least every Tuesday.  I will also blog if something important happens.  For the next few months I will be busy revising the manuscript of my new book, provisionally entitled The Last Days of Shea.  The book should be out sometime next spring.  I want to thank everyone who reads this blog and I want to thank the people who have left such wonderful, heart-felt, and often brilliant comments.]