Author Profile: Richard Grossinger

Beyond the Sports Page

The 2007 season ended not with a bang, but with a whimper as the New York Mets frittered away a seven-game National League Eastern Division lead with 17 games to play.
Years from now, how will fans recall the events of this major disappointment?
If they are as thoughtful as author Richard Grossinger, the bad melds with the good to form a complete picture.
In his latest release, The New York Mets: Ethnography, Myth and Subtext, Grossinger goes beyond the team deconstruction that has become the standard in recentyears.
“It’s sort of a baseball book on the surface, but underneath it’s really a different book,” he said in a telephone interview from his summer home in Maine.
Grossinger, who has a PhD in anthropology and has written extensively on what would generally be considered more serious subjects, has edited several eclectic anthologies about the national pastime, including Baseball, I Gave You All the Best Years of My Life; The Temple of Baseball; Baseball Diamonds: Tales, Traces & and Voodoo from a Native American Life; and The Dreamlife of Johnny Baseball. He has learned that trying to market such esoteric books for the average fan didn’t work — “They didn’t sell worth a damn,” he said — so he decided to go in the opposite direction, starting up his own publishing company.
The 63-year-old Grossinger explained the meaning of his subtitle.

Ethnography comes from his work as an anthropologist: “I considered a lot of the stuff I did on the Mets field work, especially some of the stuff in the 1980s when I interviewed players and went on the field.”
Myth: “I’m writing about the mythic Mets, the Mets of my imagination rather than writing about the actual Mets.”
Subtext: “That may be the trickiest. I may have used it because it’s a fashionable word, and it keys to the fact that it’s not really looking for what lies underneath the day-to-day coverage of the team.”

The son of Paul Grossinger — whose hotel in the Catskills was a staple of Jewish culture for generations — the writer grew up a Yankees fan. “They had a tremendous influence over the hotel. So many of the players came there….[Y]ou’d have to say the Yankees always had that edge in New York. They’re deeper in [the city’s] history and consciousness, and in some ways they represent the New York that New York wants to see itself as.”
But when the Mets made their debut in 1962, he was hooked. “I went through my own personal transformation in college, when the culture was changing in the late ’60s and early ’70s and baseball came to seem sort of tawdry and uninteresting for a few years, and when I came back to it, it just looked different. Only the Mets seemed to relate to who I had become; the Yankees tended to relate to who I had been. [They] represented the New York in which I had grown up, which had been completely lost to me, and the Mets represented a kind of unknown future which I was looking at in my 20s.”
Jewish immigrant parents in the early 20th century disdained baseball for distracting their sons from more productive pursuits. So why would such an obviously thoughtful and learned man waste his time on such inconsequential matters? “Writing is writing. It’s what you make of the subject, the art of the subject that is interesting,” he said.
“It’s not the subject that’s trivial; it’s the way you relate to it. “What is ultimately important?”he asked. “The Zen monk sitting in the monetary getting to the bottom of the mind? The scientist trying to find the cure for cancer? The politician trying to end the war? All these things are very important but if you take a step back from any of them, you have to wonder whether they, too, are in some sense artifacts of existence and simply masks through which people find themselves. “I think baseball is one of those. It’s always better to dig into it and try and figure out the nature of the connection than to have this kind of ambivalence that says, ‘I’m not supposed to be involved in something so stupid and irrelevant [as baseball] but somehow I am.’”
The Mets’ collapse has one potential benefit for the author: Now that the team is done for the year, those more thoughtful fans will have plenty of time to read Grossinger’s books.