* Meet the Mets

A joint review of two new books by former Mets graces the pages of the Sunday Times Book Review Section.

Under the general headline “The Boys of Bummer,” Bruce Handy, a writer and deputy editor of Vantiy Fair, critiques Ron Darling’s The Perfect Game: Reflections on Baseball, Pitching, and Life on the Mound, and Darryl Strawberry’s Straw: Finding My Way.

Of the former, Handy says he likes it a lot; of the latter,

Thankfully, perhaps, “Straw: Finding My Way” isn’t much of a baseball book. It’s a recovery memoir, detailing Strawberry’s journey to self-acceptance and Christian sobriety via multiple arrests, trips to rehab, marriages, divorces, cancers and bottomings-out that never quite were, with his Mets career, and subsequent stints with the Dodgers, Giants and championship Yankees of the ’90s, as background music, or maybe bait.

He also believes Darling’s book, described as “a pitcher’s answer to Ted Williams’s classic, The Science of Hitting, will enjoy more popularity and a longer shelf life, than Strawberry’s.

He also calls to attention the new baseball standard quote.

Use to be, it was Jacques Barzun’s “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball,” which I believe should be banned from all further books. It’s a sure sign that the author is either a) a newcomer to the game, or b) writing to an audience for whom baseball is not a passion.

But of late, the standard epigraph, which Darling employs in his book, comes from the late A. Bartlett Giamatti, former president of Yale and Commissioner of Baseball:

“It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.”

… this quotation really annoyed me. For one thing, the manly but melancholy, elegiac view of baseball — the unforgiving verities of its geometry, the fleeting beauty of its playing, blah blah blah — is one of our hoariest sports clichés, the default setting whenever anyone who read Hemingway or Robert Stone or Cormac McCarthy in college sits down to write about the game.

The Times‘ website offers first chapters for each book:

Straw

The Perfect Game