Shameless self-promotion: Hofstra event celebrates Mets’ 50th

The Mets are celebrating their 50th anniversary this year. One of the key events marking the occasion is a three-day conference at Hofstra University and it will be my pleasure to moderate a panel of three landsmen at an authors roundtable.

The gentlemen include:

♦ John Thorn, the official historian of Major League Baseball and author/editor of such acclaimed works including — among many others — Baseball in the Garden of Eden, the Total Baseball series, The Armchair Book of Baseball series, and The Hidden Game of Baseball, one of the first to deal with a new metric of statistics now known as sabermetrics.

♦ Stanley Cohen, author of A Magic Summer, originally published in 1989 and revised in 2009, as well as The man in the Crowd, originally published in 1981 and re-released this year as Man in the Crowd: A Fan’s Notes on Four Generations of New York Baseball.

♦ Matthew Silverman, author of several Mets-centric titles including New York Mets: The Complete Illustrated History, Mets by the Numbers: A Complete Team History of the Amazin’ Mets by Uniform Number (with Jon springer, who will also speak at the conference)), 100 Things Mets Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die, and The Miracle Has Landed: The Amazin’ Story of How the 1969 Mets Shocked the World.

I will also be presenting my own paper “Making Book on the Mets,” an overview of the titles about the team, although there was a glitch and it was inadvertently left off the program, so I’m not quite sure when that will be.

Other authors, sportseriters, and bloggers who will represent at the event include:

Michael Shapiro (Bottom of the Ninth: Branch Rickey, Casey Stengel, and the Daring Scheme to Save Baseball from Itself and The Last Good Season: Brooklyn, the Dodgers and Their Final Pennant Race Together)
Ron Briley (Class at Bat, Gender on Deck and Race in the Hole: A Line-Up of Essays on Twentieth Century Culture and America’s Game and The Baseball Film in Postwar America: A Critical Study, 1948-1962);
Lee Lowenfish (Branch Rickey: Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman andThe Imperfect Diamond: A History of Baseball’s Labor Wars)
Rob Edelman (Great Baseball Films: From Right Off the Bat to a League of Their Own)
Greg Prince (Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets)
Sportswriters Hal Bock, Stan Isaacs, Steve Jacobson
Blogger Judy V.S. Johnson (Watching the Game)

Needless to say, it should be an interesting and eclectic program. Several former Mets are scheduled to be on hand, including Bud Harrelson, Rusty Staub, Skip Lockwood, Ed Kranepool, Ed Charles, Joe Pignatano, and Art Shamsky. For more information about the conference, go here.