Thoughts on “Meet the Mets: An Annual Guide to New York Mets Baseball

April 4, 2008   ·   Patrick Hickey, Jr.   ·   Jump to comments

I promise a nice update this weekend or Monday guys, but for the time being I thought it would be cool to check this out. The guys at Maple Street Press were nice enough to send me a free copy of this, so I figured I’d review it.

With the plethora of information available online about Major League Baseball nowadays, the old school baseball annuals that flooded the newsstands and stadiums have little or barely any use to the average fan anymore. However, every once in a while, a guide comes out that, despite having plenty of commonplace information in it, manages to set it self apart from the crowd.

“Meet the Mets 2008: An Annual Guide to New York Mets Baseball,” published by the Maple Street Press, is one of them. From cover to cover, this annual has stories Mets fans will love to read that are far more than just a simple precursor to the 2008 season. Most books of this type can easily get away with slapping a few mediocre articles together with some decent pictures and calling it a day. While this book isn’t exactly “The most in-depth coverage of you can get on the Mets,” (there should have been some more coverage on the minor league teams, especially the Brooklyn Cyclones, who are almost completely absent from the book), as it claims to be, it does do a great job in its coverage of the team. By the end, it really shows.

Looking at the Mets historic collapse last season as well as their complete history and even a look into 2009 and the birth of CitiField, this annual is something that fans of this team have been in dire need of for quite some time. As a matter of fact, some of the stories [The interview with Ralph Kiner featured in the book immediately comes to mind] are so interesting that you may even find yourself reading them a few times over.

While the stories themselves are all good reads, written by some of the most prolific and prominent Mets bloggers and a few fresh faces, the layout is filled with great pictures that bring the stories alive. A few of them, mainly the ones chronicling the Mets and Brooklyn Dodgers, haven’t been seen in quite some time and absolutely light up the pages they’re on. For those stories and pictures alone, this book is a must own for any hardcore Mets fan.

However, despite the easily read stories and lush layout, there are a few hiccups in the annual that dim its star a tad. For instance, there are a few typos in the book and any accomplished reader will feel at times that the book could have been edited a bit better. However, unless you’re a serious student of the English language, these small problems won’t ruin your reading experience.

Aside from that however, “Meet the Mets 2008: An Annual Guide to New York Mets Baseball” is a fun read that offers the complete smorgasbord of hardcore Mets goodness.