Blogging Mets

Much like Michael Jordan’s bitter, angry Hall of Fame induction speech in which the second greatest basketball player of all time (Wilt Chamberlain is still number one in my view) felt the need to lash out at those who said he’d never make it, Mike Piazza’s new book “Long Shot” is further proof that overwhelming success does not erase the early trauma of doubt. Piazza’s thoroughly enjoyable book is nothing like Jordan’s ugly speech, but Piazza does admit “I played with a chip on my shoulder, and admittedly — unapologetically — I’m writing with one, too.”

The book is almost shocking in its brutal honesty; Piazza does not try to sugarcoat his career He admits to sometimes being a selfish ballplayer, not such a great teammate and aloof with the media. He deserves much credit for not writing a self-serving autobiography as many people do.

The chip on his shoulder emerged, of course, from Piazza being drafted by the Dodgers in the 62nd round, hence the title of the book. It was done as a favor to Tommy Lasorda, who was pals with Piazza’s father, and who was not, as is often claimed, Mike Piazza’s godfather. The Dodgers had little faith in Piazza’s talents, but he managed to power his way through the minors and eventually win over his skeptics.

But Mike Piazza writes that he despite his prowess as a hitter, he never felt accepted by the Dodgers; he always felt they looked at him as that 62nd round draft pick and not the All-Star that he became. The theme of acceptance runs throughout the entire book.

There are two other themes throughout — Piazza defending his catching abilities, and steroids.

Ask anyone about Mike Piazza and they will likely say “Great hitter, lousy catcher.” Piazza goes to great lengths to disprove that. Piazza admits his ability to throw out runners was not great, especially late in his career. But he insists that he called a good game and was excellent at blocking the ball on errant pitches, thus helping his team and being a good defensive catcher. He says his catching ERA (whatever that is) was above the league average. I don’t disagree with that assessment. Yes, his throwing was awful during his time with the Mets, but otherwise I always thought he was perfectly serviceable.

Mike Piazza begins addressing the steroid issue early, and in my opinion, quite cleverly. He says he started developing back acne after he made the golf team in high school, caused by the strap of his golf bag. He writes that the straps from his catching gear did the same thing. Back acne is one of the side effects of steroid use, and this revelation helps offset one writer’s “proof” that Piazza used PEDs because he had back acne.

Piazza denies any and all steroid use. He does admit to using androstenedione, the so called steroids precursor made famous when a jar of it was found in Mark McGwire’s locker during his home run chase of 1998. Piazza says andro was part of the “Monster Pak” of supplements he picked up at his local GNC store. Piazza writes that even though andro was not banned by baseball at that time, he decided to stop using it because the media made such a big deal about the McGwire affair.

Piazza also says he was intrigued when he learned about HGH. He thought it was just another drug like Vioxx and cortisone that teams would regularly give to players. He writes that he asked the Mets trainer about it, and when he was he told it was considered a controlled substance, Piazza dropped the idea of using it.

He admits to trying amphetamines, pretty much like every other player in baseball. They were not banned until a couple of seasons ago.

I believe Piazza’s denials of PED use. He is so honest in the rest of the book, going so far as telling us that he never dated in high school and lost his virginity at age 21, for example. Why would he lie about steroids? Taking it further, why would he write this book at all if he was going to lie? It’s not like Piazza needs the money or craves the attention; he makes it clear he never particularly liked talking to the media. I fully believe Mike Piazza did not write this book with the intention of lying about anything.

Mike Piazza seems to be a man of integrity. He talks often about his Catholic upbringing and how it has become a major part of his current life. Maybe I’m being naive, but I just really don’t think he is lying.

Piazza does, however, provide ammunition for those who still think he used steroids. He went to college in Miami, which we now know is basically ground zero for PEDs. He played one winter in the Dominican Republic, where steroids are readily available. Piazza hung around body building gyms, an easy place to score PEDs. He used supplements; it’s not a stretch to make the jump from supplements to steroids. But this is all circumstantial stuff. There has never been a definitive link between Mike Piazza and PEDs.

And, of course, there is the fact that a 62nd round draft choice became the greatest hitting catcher of all time. Piazza says he is not a  creation of steroids; rather, he is the product of hard work — hitting baseballs in a homemade batting cage until his hands were raw, hitting the gym to get strong, and then hitting more baseballs.

Mike Piazza closes his book by calling his life  ”an old-fashioned, American-style success story.” I tend to believe him.

You don’t have to be a Yankees fan to read “Steinbrenner: The Last Lion of Baseball.” Any baseball fan, especially those in New York who lived through George Steinbrenner’s reign of terror in The Bronx, will likely enjoy an inside look into perhaps the most controversial owner in baseball history.

The book, written by longtime Daily News baseball writer Bill Madden, confirms what we’ve known all along — Steinbrenner was a colossal prick. I don’t like to speak ill of the dead or use foul language, but it is the word that best describes him. Many people raised their eyebrows at the glowing obituaries written after Steinbrenner died in 2010, as people seemed to forget what a tyrant he truly was and focused on his few positive attributes.

Yes, it came out later in his life that Steinbrenner was a very generous man, giving millions to charities and to people in need. And yes, he paid his employees very well, often giving managers, players and general managers lucrative, long-term contracts, knowing full well he would be paying them after he would eventually fire them.

But the book clearly shows that Steinbrenner thought his money allowed him to act any way he wanted with his employees. He often yelled things like, “I’m paying you well” while dressing down an employee who dared to cross him, whether real or imagined.

The treatment of his employees was simply abhorrent. He would curse at people and fire them, then the next day wonder why they were not at their desks. One particularly humiliating incident detailed in the book stands out. After a family was kidnapped at knifepoint from a Yankee Stadium garage, Steinbrenner ordered his executives to his office to talk about the incident. Everyone sat around his large round desk, except for stadium security chief Pat Kelly, who was ordered to stand, facing a wall like a five-year-old.

How Kelly and other people did not just slug Steinbrenner in the jaw or simply quit is beyond me. Perhaps the money and glory of working for the Yankees trumped the daily degradation at the hands of George Steinbrenner.

But Steinbrenner was the classic bully — stand up to him, and he will meekly back down. There are several examples of this, one of them involving Don Mattingly. Steinbrenner criticized Mattingly’s performance to the media, so Mattingly answered in kind. They later discussed it over the phone. Steinbrenner said Mattingly cannot talk about him like that, saying, “I’m your boss and I expect and deserve respect.”

Mattingly responded, “Respect is what I’m talking about here… I play every day banged up, and you complain about the team and belittle my performance.”

“I pay you well,” Steinbrenner predictably said. “I have a right to say what I feel.”

“Money is not respect!” Mattingly yelled back. “You think because you pay us a lot, that’s respect. Well, it isn’t.”

Steinbrenner then said, “Well, if you don’t think it is, then good luck to you,” and hung up the phone.

Mattingly was sure he was going to be traded. Instead he said he never had a problem with Steinbrenner again. “You just couldn’t let George beat you up.”

Steinbrenner is right up there with the likes of Pete Rose and Lance Armstrong when it comes to being a class-A liar. From breaking promises to managers such as Yogi Berra that they would not be fired mid-season to lying about statements he made to the media, Steinbrenner lied about everything. It seemed normal to him.

The book was a very quick, interesting read. It followed the standard season-by-season breakdown that many sports biographies use. But Madden was smart in that he didn’t dwell on the on-the-field exploits of the Yankees. Yes, he would briefly discuss season highlights and struggles, but he understood that the book was about George Steinbrenner, not the Yankees. That was one criticism I had about the Gil Hodges book — it spent too much time talking about Dodgers wins and losses that had nothing to do with Hodges.

Regrettably, though, there were several mistakes. One will stand out to any self-respecting Mets fan. While documenting the Mets climb to the 2000 Subway Series, Madden wrote that they beat “both the NL West Champion Diamondbacks in the Division Series and the NL East champion Atlanta Braves in the NLCS…” Of course, the Mets beat the Giants in the NLDS and the Cardinals in the NLCS. Madden was likely thinking of 1999, when the Mets beat the Diamondbacks and lost to the Braves. Still, this in inexcusable.

Overall, I highly recommend this book. Say what you will about George Steinbrenner, but we will never see the likes of him again. That’s probably a good thing.

I have written previously about how Gil Hodges has been an idol of mine since I was a boy growing up in Brooklyn. So imagine how excited I was when a new biography of Hodges was published in August.

I would say “Gil Hodges: The Brooklyn Bums, the Miracle Mets, and the Extraordinary Life of a Baseball Legend” by Tom Clavin and Danny Peary is a “warts and all” biography, except it appears Hodges did not have any warts. We’ve always heard what a great man Hodges was, and it was apparently not a myth.

His teammates, players and friends all speak in glowing terms of Hodges, as a baseball player, a manager and a man. So many of them called him the greatest man they had ever met. Aside from some typical player grumbling, the only person who ever said anything negative about Hodges was Ken “Hawk” Harrelson, who played for Hodges when he managed the Washington Senators. Harrelson trashed Hodges in his autobiography that came out during the Mets run in 1969. Dozens of players jumped to Hodges’s defense. No one came out to defend Harrelson.

Hodges was not perfect, of course. His wife admitted that he could be stubborn. He couldn’t hit the curve ball. He was a chain smoker and he internalized everything, both of which contributed to his untimely death of an apparent heart attack in 1972, two days before he would have turned 48.

The book itself is well-researched and thorough — perhaps a bit too thorough at times. A large chunk of the book is rightly devoted to Hodges’s playing days with the Brooklyn Dodgers, with a chapter dedicated to each season; a common baseball biography structure. But at times the book seemed to be more about the Dodgers than Hodges. I’ve read several books about the Dodgers that had the same format, so it seemed redundant to me. The book really shines when it just tells us about Hodges.

There were several tidbits in the book that I don’t think are widely known. One of them is about one of the most famous plays in Mets history — the notorious “shoe polish” ball. The story goes that during Game 5 of the 1969 World Series, Cleon Jones was hit on the foot by a ball. The umpire ruled the ball hit the dirt. The ball rolled into the dugout and Hodges picked it up, saw shoe polish on it and showed the umpire, who awarded Jones first base. He would later score on a home run.

But is that the way it really went down? Ed Kranepool said Hodges “took a ball out of a discard bucket and gave it to the umpire, who saw scuffmarks.”

Jerry Koosman has a different and more damning story. He claims that he picked up the ball when it rolled into the dugout and that Hodges told him to rub it on his shoe to get polish on it.

Jones, though, insists the ball hit him, and that Hodges would never pull such a stunt.

“You’ve got to know the type of individual Gil Hodges was,” Jones said. “There was no way Gil Hodges would ever do anything dishonest. He wasn’t a cheater.”

The book ends with an impassioned plea for Hodges’s much-deserved enshrinement into the Hall of Fame. There was one year when it looked like the Veterans Committee was on the verge of electing Hodges. Former teammate Roy Campanella was not well enough to cast his deciding vote in person and wanted to do it over the phone. Ted Williams allegedly refused to allow him to do it and Hodges did not get elected. Some say Williams, a key figure on the Veterans Committee, often talked down Hodges’s candidacy while promoting his fellow American Leaguers.

I am hoping this fine book will allow people to get a fresh look at Hodges’s career and his life, leading to him finally getting to Cooperstown where he belongs.

I just finished reading Michael D’Antonio’s love letter to Walter O’Malley called “Forever Blue.” He all but nominates O’Malley for sainthood while claiming that the former Dodgers owner really, really wanted to keep the team in Brooklyn but he was thwarted at every step by the evil Robert Moses, who was the true villain in the devastating move.

This is the same Walter O’Malley whom writers Pete Hamill and Jack Newfield called one of the three most evil people of the 20th century, along with Hitler and Stalin.

But no, everybody has been wrong all these years, according to D’Antonio. O’Malley was a great guy, the salt of the earth. He never did anything wrong. Maybe he had a bit of a temper, but that’s it. No, Moses is the bad man.

Now let me say I have always been a big fan of Moses — his works, not the man. Moses was an arrogant racist, but he was also a genius. I admire the way he got things done in a city where it is nearly impossible to get anything done. He shaped New York City through the sheer force of his will. Many critics say the city is still suffering from his decisions, but I say while some of his actions turned out to be wrong, the city is better off for him having existed.

For the uninitiated, Moses held a dozen or so appointed city and state jobs simultaneously from the 1930s-1960s. He was known mostly as the Parks Commissioner, but he also built most of the bridges, tunnels and highways in the city and Long Island. He amassed so much power that virtually everything that was built in the city went through him.

It was in Moses’s role as the chief of building housing projects that O’Malley paid a call on Moses. Moses was empowered by a federal program called Title I that allowed the city to buy vast tracts of land, level them, and build public housing or other projects that would serve the public good (Lincoln Center was a prime example). The city used eminent domain laws to force people from their homes and take whatever the city offered them in return.

O’Malley wanted to build a new stadium for the Dodgers at Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues (ironically, where the Nets arena is being built today). O’Malley asked Moses to use Title I to get him the land, which the city would either give to him or he would buy back from the city, at cost, of course. O’Malley would pay to build the ballpark himself.

Moses correctly declined, saying acquiring land for a millionaire so he can build a stadium to make even more money does not qualify as public good. Not so, said O’Malley — the public could use the parking garages on non-game days. That was his idea of “public good.”

Moses told O’Malley that he was free to buy the land himself and build his stadium (which D’Antonio conveniently neglects to mention in his book). But O’Malley didn’t want to do that because it would have cost him many, many millions more for the land than what the city would have paid.

Here is the letter to O’Malley from Moses that spells out the city’s position, courtesy of the Walter O’Malley official website:

You see, O’Malley cared about one thing. No, it wasn’t baseball. It wasn’t Brooklyn. It was money — the accumulation of it, specifically. And that’s what it boiled down to. He was going wherever he got the best deal. And the best deal was in Los Angeles.

D’Antonio claims O’Malley would have stayed in Brooklyn had the city “helped” him (D’Antonio used the vague word “help” a lot). But O’Malley saw that Brooklyn was on the decline and knew it was time to get out.

The conventional wisdom was that Brooklyn’s fall began when the Dodgers left town after the  1957 season. No, it began years earlier.

Men returning from World War II were moving with their families to cheap housing on Long Island in search of the American Dream, being replaced with “less desirable” folks. The Brooklyn Eagle, the last of the borough’s newspapers, closed in 1955. Attendance and revenue at Ebbets Field, while still among the highest in the game, were falling. O’Malley knew it was time to go.

Really, you can’t blame him. He had a business, and he knew he could make more money with that business if he moved to Los Angeles. But a baseball team is more than just a business. It is a public treasure. I honestly think O’Malley knew that, but he just didn’t care. It was all about the money.

The reason he is so despised in New York is in part because of the charade he put on during his “negotiations” to stay. O’Malley had one foot out the door the entire time but kept denying it. He even lied to Congress about it.

In June, 1957, only months before the move was officially announced, Congress held hearings to discuss sports monopolies. O’Malley was called to testify. First he said he did not known whether the Dodgers would play in Los Angeles in 1958. Then he was asked, ”What preparations have you made for moving to Los Angeles?” His response: “None whatsoever.”

That was just a bald faced lie. Even D’Antonio admits that his sainted O’Malley had made preparations. However D’Antonio basically forgives this felony (and that’s what lying to C0ngress is) by writing:

There may be some legalistic definition of the word “preparations” that would make this answer accurate.

This is an example of the great lengths D’Antonio went to to defend O’Malley and prove his point that O’Malley was blameless in the team’s move. Yes, had he been given his sweetheart deal early in the process, maybe he might have stayed in Brooklyn. But once Los Angeles made its initial overture, it was a done deal, despite what D’Antonio claims.

Or maybe he was never going to stay. Check out what longtime Dodger VP Fresco Thompson wrote in his 1964 book “Every Diamond Doesn’t Sparkle”:

We needed a new ballpark. Badly. But was it a prudent investment to build one in Brooklyn?

The last thing Walter O’Malley wanted to do was to leave Brooklyn. But a fear haunted him — fear that Brooklyn was becoming a decadent borough…

The loyal and substantial fan, the family man, had moved away…

He was replaced with the undesirables.

I brand no race, color or creed as objectionable. They all have their scum. But, unfortunately, the scum was now thick in Brooklyn.

Perhaps O’Malley could have disavowed these words, but that would have been difficult considering he wrote the forward to the book. They are Thompson’s words, but they reflect O’Malley’s thoughts. Does this sound like a man who was open to staying in Brooklyn?

Robert Moses was not the villain here. He was a difficult man with whom to deal and certainly he could have been more supportive of O’Malley’s alleged quest to remain in the borough (apparently he really didn’t care either way). But ultimately the decision was made by Walter O’Malley and no one else. He took the money and ran. And that is the fact, regardless of how this book tries to distort it.

But hey, without O’Malley’s defection we wouldn’t have the Mets. So it worked out for us, in any case!

Jews have a certain obsession with finding out if other people are Jewish. I once read a good explanation as to why this is so: unlike other minority groups (like blacks or Asians, for example), you can’t tell if someone is Jewish just by looking at them. Hence asking the question: I wonder if he or she is Jewish? As a baseball fan and a Jew, I was no doubt thrilled when I received as a Christmas gift (oh, the irony) the book “The Baseball Talmud,” with the tagline ” The Definitive Position-by-Position Ranking of Baseball’s Chosen Players” by Howard Megdal.

Of course, when it comes to baseball, the answer to that question is virtually always “no.” The  book points out that as of July 25, 2008, of the 16,696 who have played in the major leagues, “fewer than 160 of them were Jewish.” Why Megdal gave us the exactly number of MLB players but couldn’t tell us the exact number of Jews is baffling.

It wasn’t the only thing baffling in this book, which ultimately left me disappointed. For one thing, Megdal relies on sabermetrics, which regular readers of this site know I hate.

As his tagline indicates, Megdal organized the book by position. I have no problem with that. But he listed everyplayer at every position, giving each a short statistical biography. Do I care that some guy named Bill Starr who played in the 1930s was the 15th best Jewish catcher? By the way, he ranked just ahead of Bob Berman, the only fellow with that excellent surname to play in the majors.

What I think he should have done was give a more in-depth biography of just the top five at each position, giving us an idea of who that player was instead of just giving us his numbers. It would have been nice to know how it felt to be a Jew in the big leagues, whether they faced discrimination or the taunts of intolerant players and fans. Then he could have just listed the rest with their stats.

The other problem, which was not Megdal’s fault, is that Jews have not really made much of an impact on the game. At the beginning of the book, Megdal ranked the Top 10 Jewish players of all time. The list slides precipitously downhill after you get past the top two (Hank Greenberg and Sandy Koufax). I mean, former Met Shawn Green is number four, and he was an average ballplayer at best.

Maybe there just wasn’t a book here at all. Given the limited material, I think strong, emotional biographies of the players were needed to make the book interesting. Unfortunately, Megdal did not choose that route.

Willie Mays is a towering figure in baseball — arguably the best player ever. Yet up until recently there was no definitive biography of the man, in part because the very private Mays would never cooperate on one. But now there is James Hirsch’s “Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend.” Hirsch was able to convince Mays, who notoriously distrusts reporters, to open up to him. Well, that is a relative term, because even while Mays is opening up, he never reveals too much of himself. Still, the book paints a vivid picture of Mays that we’ve never seen before.

As a Mets fan, I was most interested in his time with the Mets. The team acquired Mays a month into the 1972 season, but if Joan Payson had had her way, Mays would have been an original Met. Payson was part owner of the New York Giants — the only member of the board to oppose the move to San Francisco in 1958. She loved Mays, and vowed to bring him back to New York somehow.

The opportunity came in 1962 when Payson became the owner of the new Mets franchise. She had to sell her interest in the Giants, so she offered her share of the team (valued at $680,000) to Giants owner Horace Stoneham in exchange for Mays. Stoneham, flush with cash in those early years following the move West, said no.

Ten years later, however, San Francisco was less than enamored with the Giants — attendance was plummeting and Stoneham was going broke.  He could no longer afford Mays’ $165,000 a year salary, so he came crawling to the Mets. Stoneham, who a year early turned down Payson’s offer of $1 million for Mays, now wanted players — specifically infielder Teddy Martinez, and either Jon Matlack or Jim McAndrew.

M. Donald Grant knew Mays was all-but washed-up, and was not about to trade away useful players. In the end, minor league pitcher Charlie Williams and a reported $100,000 were sent to Frisco for Mays. Stoneham later insisted that he never got any money for Mays. Either way, Mays was back in New York.

One other interesting tidbit about the trade — in addition to the two-year deal paying Mays the aforementioned $165,000 per year, the Mets also agreed to pay Mays $50,000 per year for ten years upon his retirement. Stoneham was trying to work out a similar deal with Mays before the trade, and Stoneham, who always looked out for Mays, wanted to make sure he would be taken care of.

The book details Mays’ struggles during his injury-plagued two seasons with the Mets. It also talks about Mays’ troubles with Mets manager Yogi Berra. Mays was used to getting special treatment with the Giants — Berra was not used to giving anyone such treatment. Years later, when talking about his troubles with George Steinbrenner interfering with the Yankees while he was their manager, he acknowledged his problem with Mays. “It was not just one guy like Willie Mays when he came to the Mets in 1973 (sic),” Berra said. “It was four or five guys who (Steinbrenner) wanted and the coaches and I didn’t.”

I didn’t realize Mays sat out the final three weeks of the 1973 season with injury, thus not being part of the great comeback to win the NL East. He played in just one game in the NLCS win over the Reds. He started the first two games of the World Series, in which his age finally caught up with him. He stumbled around the bases, and famously fell down in center field trying to catch a ball.

He would pinch hit once more in the Series, and was sitting on the bench with two outs in the ninth of Game 7 as Wayne Garrett strode to the plate as the tying run. Mays was hoping to get the call to pinch hit — one last chance at glory. But Berra, his confidence in Mays shot after those first two games, never looked his way. Garrett popped out, the Series was over, and so was Mays’ career.

Mays then began his ten-year retirement package. His role was never clearly defined. He was in uniform before games, but he was never really a coach. Had Payson still been alive, she would have found important work for him to do. But she was long gone, and no one seemed to care about Mays anymore.

And that seems to be the case for Mets management today. While they have an entire rotunda dedicated to a man who never played for the team, the Mets make no mention of Mays — a far better player than Jackie Robinson who also played a significant role in baseball history, and one who actually wore a Mets uniform. 

I’ve written about this before, but I’ll do it one last time — the Mets should retire Mays’ number 24. Sure, his actual performance on the field was forgettable, but one of the greatest players ever wore your uniform — that alone makes retirement appropriate. Also, the Mets claim Citi Field is not just a monument to the Brooklyn Dodgers; it is also an homage to the New York Giants. Well, Mays played for those Giants, winning a World Series and an MVP award. He deserves some honor in the city.

There is a precedent for this — Hank Aaron played for the Milwaukee Braves, moved with the team to Atlanta, then came back to the Brewers for the final two years ago his career. One difference is that Aaron played 12 years in Milwaukee before the move while Mays played just half of that in New York. But still, Mays was as beloved in New York as Aaron was in Milwaukee.

But back to the book — a fine read and an important historical piece about a great, misunderstood player.

I just read a book with the unfortunately long title of “Bottom of the Ninth: Branch Rickey, Casey Stengel, and the Daring Scheme to Save Baseball From Itself” by Michael Shaprio that is a must-read for Mets fans. While the book does not talk about the team hardly at all, it does tell the story of what led to the creation of the New York Mets.

The basic story is a familiar one that every self-respecting Mets fan should know: After the Dodgers and Giants left town for greener pastures out West, New York went to work finding another National League team. Some lawyer named Bill Shea was tasked with the job. When he failed to lure an exisiting team to town, Shea dreamed up the idea of a new league — the Continental League — to compete with the NL and AL, which of course would have its flagship franchise in New York, in a new stadium in Flushing Meadows. The leagues got scared, and agreed to expand — two new teams each, with of course one of the NL teams in New York.

End of story, although that’s what I always thought. I thought the Continental League was just an idle threat. Turns out it was much more than that, and that’s what this fine book is all about. The planning for the league went on for years, with former Dodgers GM Branch Rickey joining Shea to spearhead the work. An old, ”reluctant” Rickey was even set to become league president.

The one hitch in the plan was that Rickey didn’t want to go it alone. He didn’t want to be a “renegade” league that would challenge the established leagues. He knew that would be a suicide mission. Instead, Rickey wanted the NL and AL to cooperate, and for the Continental League to be a third major league. There were even vague plans for a three-way round robin World Series.

The leagues strung Rickey and Shea (left, in his namesake stadium) along, but it appears they never had any intention of going along with the plan. But the planners trudged onward, lining up owners in eight cities — New York, Houston, Minnesota, Buffalo, Denver, Toronto, Atlanta and Dallas.

Finally, when push came to shove, the NL and AL agreed to expand to make the threat of the Continental League go away. One problem was that while the leagues said they would try to accomodate half of the prospective Continental owners and cities, it was not written in stone. The NL did the right thing, admitting New York and Houston. But the AL, which was far more adamant against the new league all along, screwed them over. Yes, Minnesota was given a team, but that was a transfer from Washington. The new Washington Senators had an owner picked by the AL. The second expansion team was the Los Angeles Angels, which was never part of the Continental League planning.

The one issue I have with the book is the Casey Stengel part of the title. Mixed in with chapters about the Continental League is the story of Stengel’s final years with the Yankees. It had absolutely nothing to do with the formation of the new league, and just felt out of place. The story of the Continental League is good enough to merit its own book.

But all in all, an excellent read — a story all Mets fan should know.