Bookshelf Review: The Last Miracle

The Last Miracle: My 18-Year Journey with the Amazin’ New York Mets, by Ed Kranepool with Gary Kaschak (Triumph, 2023)

I have been a fan of Ed Kranepool since I first became interested in baseball and the Mets. Can’t explain it. Maybe it was because he made his debut at the tender age of 17. Maybe I was channeling my inner Charlie Brown, whose hero was an itinerant Joe Shlabotnik, although Kranepool was never that bad. (According to peanutsfandom.com, “Shlabotnik was demoted to the minor leagues after hitting .004 over an entire season; his one hit was a bloop single with his team comfortably ahead.” That milestone was commemorated by the artist Gary Cieradkowski, who specializes in drawing “outsider” ballplayers.)

But I digress…

Kranepool spent his entire 18-year career with the Mets and experienced the worst and best that team had to offer. Who knows where he and his teammates would have been if not for the 1969 Miracle season, which allowed them to maintain a certain celebrity status most of them would probably not have enjoyed.

One might say — including Kranepool himself — that he did not live up to expectations. He rarely played full time, instead being used in platoons under the management of Casey Stengel, Wes Westrum, Gil Hodges (a teammate of Krane’s in 1962-63), and those who followed. His real claim to fame came later on when he morphed into an excellent pinch-hitter. The fact that he’s still in the top ten offensive categories for a team that’s more than 60 years old says something about the rest of the Mets’ personnel.

Was the first “miracle” making it to the pros? Kranepool was a very good but perhaps not great player in high school. He did break Hank Greenberg’s home run record at Monroe High School which had to have earned him some attention. And being a New York product probably earned him extra, if perhaps unwarranted, attention from the press and goaded the Mets to promote him ahead of his experience.

One miracle was undoubtedly that 1969 season, which has allowed alumni of that team to enjoy fame far beyond their personal careers. One sweet section of the book deals with the reunion of those players for a Mets Old-Timers event. It’s hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that this took place over 50 years ago. In my mind, baseball cards are like the picture of Dorian Gray, except the players remain young in the photos while they age in real time.

The “last miracle” came when Kranepool — who had been in poor health for several years — received a kidney donation in 2019. His wife, Barbara, also needed — and received — the life-saving medical intervention.

There’s an old saying that pretty apt here: You should never meet your heroes. I was really looking forward to his memoir, hoping for an insightful examination of a perennially failing team. But, alas, I have to say I found it disappointing. My eyebrows raised early on when Ron Swoboda, in the book’s foreword, wrote that he and Kranepool had “known one another for almost 70 years.” Considering that Swoboda and Kranepool are, as of this writing, 79 and 78 respectively, that would mean they had met around the age of 10, which, frankly, seems unlikely since Swoboda grew up in Baltimore and Kranepool New York. I don’t know how this didn’t raise the editor’s eyebrows as well. So if we’re questioning things while the pages are still in roman numerals, we’re not starting off on a good foundation.

I am not familiar with the work of Kranepool’s co-writer, Gary Kaschak, who also worked on Cleon Jones’ book, Coming Home: My Amazin’ Life with the New York Mets (2022, also published by Triumph) but the style does not seem fully vetted. Kranepool often repeats his thoughts in The Last Miracle; even word and phrase choices are somewhat repetitious in spots. So I’m not sure exactly what Kaschak was doing insofar as fine tuning such options. In some respects it just appears that Kranepool spoke and Kaschak transcribed without asking too many questions.

Much of the book has the author complaining about missed opportunities for both him and the team that came out of poor decision-making by the Mets front office and field managers. Look, no athlete wants to lose; it must have been incredibly frustrating for Kranepool, at least once he got over the shock of being in the majors at an age when most of his contemporaries weren’t even out of high school. Year after year of finishing in the basement, a laughing stock of pro sports, can’t be fun when you’ve been known as a great player on the sandlots. Plus there’s the guilt-by-association concept: playing on a loser makes you one. It amazes me that he remained on team as long as he did (no one wanted to trade for him?). So it might be understandable that he comes across as bitter. I’m not saying this is necessarily a bad thing. To borrow from a Leslie Gore classic, “it’s my story and I’ll cry if I want to.” But it doesn’t make for fun reading.