The New York Mets Encyclopedia

The New York Mets Encyclopedia provides the full and exciting story of modern-era baseball's most popular expansion-age franchise. From those lovable losers of 1962 and 1963, to the Miracle Mets of 1969 and 1973, and on to year-in and year-out contenders of the 1980s and 1990s, including the exciting 1999 squad, New York's National League Mets have written some of the most exciting and colorful pages in Major League history. This is the team that captured the hearts of New Yorkers and fans everywhere with their often-laughable antics under colorful and celebrated manager Casey Stengel, then only a half-dozen years later climbed to baseball's pinnacle under gifted yet tragic manager Gil Hodges. This colorful volume combines detailed and highly readable narrative history with archive photographs, rich statistical data, and intimate portraits of the teams most memorable personalities.

The New York Mets Encyclopedia provides the full and exciting story of modern-era baseball’s most popular expansion-age franchise. From those lovable losers of 1962 and 1963, to the Miracle Mets of 1969 and 1973, and on to year-in and year-out contenders of the 1980s and 1990s, New York’s National League Mets have written some of the most exciting and colorful pages in Major League history. This is the team that captured the hearts of fans everywhere with its often-laughable antics under colorful and celebrated manager Casey Stengel. Only half a dozen years later, the Mets reached baseball’s pinnacle under gifted manager Gil Hodges. This colorful volume combines detailed narrative history with archival photographs, rich statistical data, and intimate portraits of the team’s most memorable personalities. This is also a franchise that has been home to many of the game’s biggest on-field stars. Among them are such unforgettable diamond characters as reckless slugger Darryl Strawberry; glue-fingered first sacker Keith Hernandez; baseball’s all-world catcher, Mike Piazza; pitching ace Johan Santana; and record-breaking third baseman David Wright. The full scope of the Mets’ fifty-plus-year history is discussed in an expansive chapter that gives the reader a historical detailed overview and features a year-by-year Mets chronology and season-by-season opening-day lineups. This newly revised edition offers insight on everything a Mets fan would want or need to know.

More than any other sport, baseball has developed its own niche in America’s culture and psyche. Some researchers spend years on detailed statistical analyses of minute parts of the game, while others wax poetic about its players and plays. Many trace the beginnings of the civil rights movement in part to the Major Leagues’ decision to integrate, and the words and phrases of the game (for example, pinch-hitter and out in left field) have become common in our everyday language. From AARON, HENRY onward, this book covers all of what might be called the cultural aspects of baseball (as opposed to the number-rich statistical information so widely available elsewhere). Biographical sketches of all Hall of Fame players, owners, executives and umpires, as well as many of the sportswriters and broadcasters who have won the Spink and Frick awards, join entries for teams, owners, commissioners and league presidents. Advertising, agents, drafts, illegal substances, minor leagues, oldest players, perfect games, retired uniform numbers, superstitions, tripleheaders, and youngest players are among the thousands of entries herein. Most entries open with a topical quote and conclude with a brief bibliography of sources for further research. The whole work is exhaustively indexed and includes 119 photographs.

Let’s say you’re the manager of one of the most beloved franchises in Major League Baseball, with every past and current player available on your bench. Game time is approaching and the ump needs your line-up card. Who’s your starting pitcher? Fireballer Dwight Gooden, lights-out Tom Seaver, or run-stingy Jacob de Grom? Is Gary Carter behind the plate or Mike Piazza? Who’ll bat clean-up? Combining statistical analysis, common sense, and a host of intangibles, Brian Wright constructs an all-time All-Star Mets line-up for the ages. Agree with his choices or not, you’ll learn all there is to know about the men who played for and managed New York’s Amazin’ Mets.

The New York Yankees were the strongest team in the majors from 1948 through 1960, capturing the American League Pennant 10 times and winning seven World Championships. The average fan, when asked who made the team so dominant, will mention Joe DiMaggio, Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford or Mickey Mantle. Some will insist manager Casey Stengel was the key. But pundits at the time, and respected historians today, consider the shy, often taciturn George Martin Weiss the real genius behind the Yankees' success. Weiss loved baseball but lacked the ability to play. He made up for it with the savvy to run a team better than his competitors. He spent more than 50 years in the game, including nearly 30 with the Yankees. Before becoming their general manager, he created their superlative farm system that supplied the club with talented players. When the Yankees retired him at 67, the newly franchised New York Mets immediately hired him to build their team. This book is the first definitive biography of Weiss, a Hall of Famer hailed for contributing "as much to baseball as any man the game could ever know."

Published in conjunction with the franchise's 50th anniversary, Total Mets is the definitive historical and statistical compendium for the famed New York ball club. Spanning the team's entire history--from their inception in 1962, through the World Series championships of 1969 and 1986, and right up to the most current star-studded squads--this volume is loaded with fantastic features that include season recaps of every Mets season, statistics and highlights for every game in franchise history, team and individual records in every major statistical category, and biographies for every Mets player. An entertaining guide to one of baseball's most popular organizations, this resource also includes entertaining anecdotes, memorable quotes, and insider insights garnered from interviews with more than 200 current and former players.

In the popular 1977 movie “Oh, God!” George Burns, playing the deity, is asked in a courtroom to prove His divinity by performing a miracle. Burns tells the attorney, "The last miracle I did was the 1969 Mets. Before that, I think you have to go back to the Red Sea." Man has engaged in athletic competition at least since the ancient Greeks. Baseball has been played, according to legend, since Abner Doubleday invented it at Cooperstown, New York in 1839. Through the travail of ages, in the entire history of sports, the 1969 "Amazin' Mets" remains the single most impossible, unbelievable, improbable and wonderful sports story of all times. This book tells the tale of that incredible spring, summer and fall, but it does much more than simply recount how the worst sports franchise ever ascended to the very heights of greatness in a few short months. The Last Miracle is the story of tumultuous times: the 1960s. Amidst the backdrop of the Vietnam War, the Mets remained the last, best hope of a city on the verge of bankruptcy. Through the lens of time we now can view them as a metaphor for a changing America, and in light of the Big Apple's phoenix-like comeback over the years, the catapult for this battered-yet-unbowed Metropolis. Somehow, while the Mets became the mods of baseball, the "new breed" athlete, Tom Seaver and his teammates are viewed herein as the final symbols of an innocent age; an age when the greatest icons in American culture – New York sports heroes – mounted the stage in awesome splendor; before Watergate, before free agency, before the mercenaries took over. Here they are: Seaver and Harrelson; Hodges and Stengel; Grote and Swoboda; Jones and Agee; all the characters of the greatest comedy act ever performed, all the while upstaging a tempestuous Mayoral race, President Nixon's "secret plan," a Moonshot, and Woodstock.

The "Miracle Mets" of 1969 had great hopes and enormous expectations for the coming decade. Unfortunately, they would be forced to watch hopes and dreams slowly fade to despair. From First to Worst details the Mets' climb from last place in August of 1973 to within one game of the world championship, followed by annual struggles and a collapse in 1977. This work chronicles the rise and fall of the Mets in detail, profiling key players and taking the reader to the locker room and ballpark on a day-to-day basis.