Saturday, May 18, 2019

Review of "Yells for Ourselves"

While this book is not extremely long at 368 pages, it nonetheless is a heavy read because it is jam packed with details of the 1999 and 2000 New York Mets, a team that never deprived its fans of controversy, drama and exciting baseball.  Here is my review of "Yells for Ourselves"


Title/Author:
“Yells for Ourselves: A Story of New York City and the New York Mets at the Dawn of the Millennium” by Matthew Callan

Tags:
Baseball, professional, history, Mets

Publish date:
March 12, 2019

Length:
368 pages

Rating: 
4 of 5 stars (very good)

Review:
For most of their history, the New York Mets have been playing the part of second fiddle to New York City’s other baseball team, the New York Yankees.  At the start of 1999, as a new millennium was about to begin, this was still the case, especially since the Yankees had just come off one of the most successful seasons in baseball history and won their second World Series title in three years.  The Mets, meanwhile, were also starting to make waves and capture the attention of New York baseball fans and media.  The Mets’ adventures in 1999, as well as 2000 when they got to face the Yankees in the Subway Series.  This book, mainly a collection of writings by the author, Matthew Callen, from blog posts is a very good account of those two seasons.

The most impressive aspect of this book is the minute detail in which Callen writes about the Mets for those two seasons. Not only does he capture the highlights of the best of the team those years, he writes about the agony of some of the losses, all of the controversy and all of the front office maneuvers.  While many of the more controversial statements and actions involve manager Bobby Valentine, there isn’t a person involved with the Mets those two seasons that escapes being noticed by Callen. 

While the detail of so many games and so many press conferences with the New York media can get tedious to read (at least if the reader is not a serious Met fan), it gets very entertaining without Callen needing to insert his own brand of humor or opinions. There is very little that the reader will learn about Callen’s views because he lets the players, manager, general manager and reporters tell the story themselves and he simply reports it.  That proved to be a winning formula for this book.

Every great Mets memory from those two seasons is captured here – the thrilling come-from-behind victory at Shea in the 1999 series against the Yankees, the tie-breaking game against Cincinnati to give the Mets the wild card spot in that same season.  Then in those playoffs, the epic National League Championship Series against the Atlanta Braves is covered in its full glory.  The Braves winning the first three games fairly easily, then the Mets storming back in games 4 and 5, capped off in that latter game by Robin Ventura’s “Grand Slam Single”, and finally the heartbreak of the loss to the Braves in game 6. 

Then when the new millennium starts, Callen writes about 2000 with just as much gusto as 1999, although this time, he adds some Yankees text as well since the two teams met in the World Series to give the World Series a complete New York flavor for the first time in 44 years.  This is also where the book finally gives a more thorough picture to the reader of the pulse of New York City and how they feel about their baseball teams and the Subway Series.  This aspect of that time is what drew me to the book and while this was very good, it left me slightly disappointed that there wasn’t more of this material written throughout the book.  Keeping in mind that this was most a collection of blog posts that were weaved together to make the book, I felt the author did a very good job of putting them together in a fluid story instead of simply throwing them together because they spoke on a similar topic – the Mets.

Die-hard Mets fans will really enjoy this book, and fans of other teams, even the Yankees, would be wise to take a look at this as well for a complete picture of the Mets for those two seasons when New York truly did capture the lions’ share of attention from the baseball media.  

I wish to thank Quill for providing a copy of the book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Book Format Read:
E-book (Kindle)

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