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Amazin' Revisited

Johnny Dickshot Dec 23 2005 07:11 PM

Now that I finally have the book, can anyone find the ezb thread where it's shredded, mostly by Edgy & Scrapple, IIRC? I was aware of that thread but don't recall particpating, possibly because I wanted to read it myself. I bring this up because, now that I'm finally reading it, I see where it suffers factually and definitively, and I'm not through it yet, but felt I oughta say that parts of the book I've enjoyed very much -- the Craig Swan chapter, which I just read, is dynamite: Funny, sad and insightful. So it's got that going for it.

cooby Dec 23 2005 07:21 PM

Widey, I don't know if there was more than one thread there about that book, but I remember starting one entitled "Hey, you guys...." because I had gotten the book for my birthday and was talking about it.

mlbaseballtalk Dec 23 2005 07:39 PM

I wasn't there for that, but I'll give you a few thoughts -Golenbock is a very "player friendly" and "anti-owner" guy so all throughout the book M Donald Grant and other owners get murdered and certain players are put on a high pedestal By the way a great representation of Golenbock's pro-player/anti-owner stance is the "Postscript" he wrote for the 1985 paperback edition of Graig Nettles' "Balls" where he pretty much intimates that the reason the Yankees blew in 1984 was trading Nettles, and Nettles was the sole reason the Padres won the NL championship that season. -Even though its Golenbock's intention to make Keith Hernandez the greatest Met ever or something, Mex doesn't come out real good. What he did to get Kirk Gibson the 1988 MVP ranks as one of the most "Un Captain-y" of all time -Makes alot of points with the interwining "histories" of the Mets and Cards, almost like Golenbock wants to continue the rivalry. Yes Bing Devine was a Cardinal and jumped back and helped build the 67-68 squads, yes Whitey was a former Met employee, yes Joe McDonald joined him in St Louis, yes we got Mex for Neil Allen, but at some point the rivalry is just between the fans, not between the actual organizations -Granted its an oral history, and taken from quotes (alot from player autos , magazine/newspaper articles, ect) and is more story telling rather than HISTORY telling, but alot of mistaken facts that went un checked. Almost like Golenbock admitted that he was more interested in the stories than the actual history. Steve

Edgy DC Dec 23 2005 08:47 PM

Scrapple's main problem was that so much material came from other books, that there were entire chapters that were pointless reads if you've already read Amazin' or If at First. Broad passages are quoted as it's inteview material but it's clipped from the book without explicit references. The good stuff --- the prehistory, and certain guys like Swan (big figures whose tales aren't told well elsewhere) --- is good. 'Bock just comes across as a lazy shortcutter sometimes. In the end, if this isn't the definitive history --- and it's not --- then good, I'll write it. Or you will.

mlbaseballtalk Dec 23 2005 09:15 PM

="Edgy DC"]The good stuff --- the prehistory, and certain guys like Swan (big figures whose tales aren't told well elsewhere) --- is good. 'Bock just comes across as a lazy shortcutter sometimes. In the end, if this isn't the definitive history --- and it's not --- then good, I'll write it. Or you will. I forgot about that, but yeah. The first chunck of the book, detailing the history of baseball in New York (sans New York's AL entrant) is a good primer on how New York came to be a baseball capital, and how the Mets would come into existance By the way, only because it seems Al Leiter is the only "contributor" the tales of the last ten years of the book is a bit rushed. Nothing really on Gen K, Dallas, the infamous Joe Mac, Steve Phillips "Skill Sets" thing, Piazza trade, Wharton-gate, the first Subway Series since 1955. Just blanket jist of what happened By the way the same can be said of Golenbock's Sprit Of St Louis about the Browns and Cardinals where alot is taken soley from other books (again liberal useage of If At First) and the last few years (I think just after 98) are given a brief and rushed treatment By the way, the 88 MVP story. I forget who actually tells this in the book, but because Keith was so pissed at Straw for whatever reason, Hernandez actually sold Kevin McReynolds to writers with MVP votes. Acting like Big Mac was the real big contributor to the Met offensive sucess that season, but basically Hernandez wanted to ensure that someone OTHER than Darryl Strawberry got the award. Straw and Mac split the votes, and Kirk Gibson winds up with one of the weaker MVP seasons in history.

Edgy DC Dec 23 2005 09:36 PM

Straw, for what it's worth, endorsed K-Mac's candidacy that year also. Much hay was made of the Whitey and Devine connections, I expect, because (1) they both have memoirs out there, and (2) he would have already been through them for the St. Louis book.

Scrapple8 Jan 03 2006 07:53 PM

I didn't like the book because many of its quotes were selections from ghost-written autobiographies. Plus, these were scores of misspellings. It was a lazy and sloppy piece of work. I also didn't like the errors. They recalled a big rally in a game in 1997, and they got the play-by-play wrong. They recalled the Seaver trade on Black Monday and it didn't happen the way they say it did. Seaver asked to renegotiate his contract.. which Golenbock didn't point out... and Seaver's complaints about Dick Young's article were off-base. We had a thread in this forum that contained the exact article, and it just mentioned Nancy in passing to make a story. The history of new york baseball has a lot of errors. I seem to recall there being multiple errors about Dave Orr. I also recall there was some categorization of this team being weak-hitting, when their 262 BA was second in the league and their 308 OBP was first, and they were second in the league in runs scored. Much of his stuff about the early Mets were actually from Vecsey's book, released in 1970, about the history of the Mets. Same old Mets. That's Vecsey's line. I didin't realize this when I first read Amazins, because I had not read Vecsey's book, but that is another book that Golenbock plagiarized. Vecsey's book is ok, and I think he is the brother of the basketball writer. I found the book at a flea market. Maybe you saw the tv show on flea markets. They mention one along a road in Kentucky, and one in Texas, and a big one at the Coliseum, plus one in Seattle. The one in Seattle is in Fremont, near the Lenin statue and the troll. They also mentioned one at 23rd street in New York. I didn't get the Vecsey book at that flea market, but another one near Hell's Kitchen. It's between the Garden and Port Authoriy, in fact, the closest landmark is Maganaro's. They used to have a picture of some mets holding a sub in manganaro's, but not since they renovated years ago. The unique and interesting part of Amazins could have been condensed into a newspaper article.

Edgy DC Jan 03 2006 08:04 PM

And that.

G-Fafif Jan 03 2006 08:10 PM

Many things killed me about this book but perhaps the most odious was Golenbock mixing and matching new quotes from Gary Carter, presumably obtained in an actual interview, with quotes from his book "A Dream Season". They practically followed one another! As JD pointed out, the ramblings of Craig Swan did sparkle, but on the whole it was so relentlessly sloppy that the only thing Amazin' about it was that it was published. Incidentally, in the book Golenbock ghosted with Davey Johnson, "Bats," there is a reference to a relief pitcher the manager wishes he could bring up right away, a fella named Mars. You know: Randy Mars. So it's not like Golenbock was just having a bad week when he threw up "Amazin'".

Johnny Dickshot Jan 03 2006 08:15 PM

You know, the "Swannie" chapter in that book may be the shark it jumps, since just about everything past that point sucks bhmc, for exactly the reasons I'd heard -- it seemed rushed, barely researched, and slapped together.