Reading is Fundamental

I developed a newspaper habit when I was 6, right in sync with the other habit we begin feeding in earnest 8:05 a week from Sunday night. I know I can read much of the content from the same machine where I type, but I love the actual sensation of buying and opening a newspaper. I love sorting through the Sunday papers, going right to the sports, finding all the columnists who I can’t stand and the few I can. I don’t even mind the ink on the hands. It’s a smudge of honor.

A new book is a gift. So is an old book. I almost never open a book and read it from page one to page last. I skip around, sometimes for weeks, before I settle in. Skipping around is the highest compliment I can give a book. It means the author has sent me into flights of contemplation and silent debate. There are three recent releases that should be not skipped by Mets fans in the broader sense, and I keep meaning to recommend them. Recommending a book is another thing I love to do, so I urge you to look into these three and, if so intrigued (you will be), purchase them:

• The 100 Greatest Days in New York Sports by Stuart Miller is a touchstone reference work for anybody who grew up in this area rooting for the Mets or other teams that have called one or more of the five boroughs home. You will get lost in the history of the city’s magnificent sporting tradition every bit as much as you’ll wonder how Mookie-Buckner only rated 11th place (or Bobby Thomson a mere 6th). You’ll also discover yourself overwhelmed by the research, thoughtfulness and scholarship Miller put into creating something so definitive. My Long Island upbringing forces me to quibble with the decision to shunt the feats of the ’86 Giants, the Islander dynasty, the ABA Nets and even Secretariat into “The ‘Burbs,” as if they are unworthy of association with “New York,” but the author remains true to his standards and I admire that. I admire everything about this book. So will you.

• The Best New York Sports Arguments by Peter Handrinos is a lighthearted yet mature and detailed examination of a hundred questions we’ve all probably thought about at any given moment watching games in these parts. What I love about this extraordinarily logical book is it takes every issue seriously because we as sports fans do. Handrinos doesn’t level cheap shots or seek easy ways out and is marvelously even-handed. There’s plenty of Mets in here, but it’s not necessarily pro-Met or anti-Met (or pro- or anti-anybody). It’s in favor of free thinking. That’s always appreciated by the sports fan who loves to read.

• Mets Essential by Matthew Silverman lives up to its title and then some. Silverman is no dispassionate factory-approved, all-purpose author (in other words, put your Golenbock fear away), but, at the same time, this is no hagiography. This is an informed and experienced Mets fan who writes an honest history of his and our favorite team. He pilots us on a breezy flyover of everything that’s happened to this franchise since the Giants and Dodgers made that bizarre decision to abandon the nation’s largest market. If you look out the window to your left, there’s Casey Stengel…You can see on your right Gil Hodges…We are now approaching 1973… So the journey winds, stopping along the route at every year, the uplifting and the dreadful, right through the high, puffy, cumulus clouds of 2006. Silverman doesn’t use the first-person plural, but you can feel the “we” all over this thing and that feels very good indeed.

Each of the above will make, to borrow one of the most brilliant handles in all of blogdom, a beautiful addition to your baseball library.

Oh yes. Blogs. They’ve been a most beautiful addition to my baseball library, the one up here (I’m pointing to my head), since I became aware of them the moment I began writing one. I no longer remember how I followed baseball without them. I hope more fans who haven’t ever clicked beyond espn.com or mlb.com get curious and find the lot of us. If they care about baseball, they won’t be able to put us down.

The point of this virtual media tour is to get me to magazines. I love magazines. I don’t know that I love magazines more than newspapers, books or blogs, but I feel a jolt of excitement every time I come across one I want to read.

I shop for magazines like Carrie Bradshaw shops for shoes. They pick me up whenever I’m down. I have more than I need but I can always use more. They’re piled up all over the house. Some I read on special occasions, others anytime.

Having worked off and mostly on as a writer and editor for magazines, almost none of which you’d recognize unless you’re an aficionado of the likes of Truckstop World (in which case, ten-four good buddies), for the past quarter-century probably informs my love of them, too. I can look at them and discern what they were thinking when they put that box there or this sentence here. But my professional interest in magazines doesn’t nearly account in full for why they give me such a big kick.

Newspapers come out daily. Books come out when they come out. Blogs are constant. And magazines? Their individuality is their beauty. Weekly, biweekly, monthly, bimonthly, quarterly, annually. If you’re a schedule-hugger, magazines, as a rule, don’t fit easily. But I’ve never been much on schedules that don’t come with little orange and white squares.

Also, magazines are shiny. Those to which I don’t already subscribe (I have internal rules about that, too) beckon to me from the newsstand. One of the things I miss about commuting in and out of Penn Station — the only thing, actually — is that I could always find new magazines the day they were released. Out here in my stretch of Stuart Miller’s suburban sports wasteland, there are no newsstands to speak of. Very small selections locally. I find most of what I’m looking for by accident in the CVS or supermarket. The magazines are the same magazines as they are in the city, but tossing them in a shopping cart alongside the bagged salad and fabric softener dulls the sensation.

Glossiness is an attraction but content is truly king. I’ll buy almost any magazine I’ve never heard of if the cover lures me to pluck it off the rack and the TOC (sorry…table of contents) has the headline or blurb to get me to turn to Page 109 or wherever. If there are two stories I want, that’s it, I’m buying it. I might look at the price, but I usually don’t. It’s $3.50 or $4.95 or $6.99 well spent, I figure. Look at all the writing this thing has! And it’s mine! I’ll probably discard it after thoroughly depleting the information I came for, but I might love it so much that I’ll keep it forever.

I mean forever. I have magazines I bought when I was 13. Yes, they’re baseball magazines, but they don’t have to be. But it always helps if a non-baseball, non-sports magazine finds a reason to discuss baseball…and discuss the Mets.

For example, even though I’m not particularly manly or all that healthy, I’ve been keeping an eye out for the April issue of Men’s Health because David Wright is on the cover. I’ve already looked at the online version of the article and I’m pretty sure I won’t be all that interested in what David has to say about applying his “4-day-a-week practice formula” to my own non-baseball endeavors, but that’s not the point. The point is a fairly major magazine has put a Met on the cover.

A Met making the cover’s a plum, but it’s not a must to make me pony up. I bought GQ twice last fall because of the Met content inside despite there being none on the outside. One was the ill-conceived David & Jose fashion show, the less recalled the better (though “Newcomers of the Year” was a pretty flattering appellation); the other was a sports-themed issue which included a gallery of athletic legends. One of them was Willie Mays. That was all I needed to see to plunk down my George Washingtons. What made it even better was this latter-day description of the Say Hey Kid’s prime:

Nobody’s as complete on the field; there’s no point of reference. The closest thing would be this: a big-league freak with Ichiro’s average, Torii Hunter’s glove, Vlad Guerrero’s arm, Albert Pujols’s power and Jose Reyes’s speed.

Did you see that? Jose Reyes is big enough to be a reference point in a definitely major magazine! Jose Reyes’s speed is state-of-the-art! You need to mention speed to someone? That’s something Jose Reyes has! Say nothing of the gratifying fact that he has been compared, even if it’s just in one facet of the game, to WILLIE MAYS. You know I’m keeping that page forever.

I hadn’t read Esquire in quite some time when I was alerted through various sources that there were two reasons to take a look at the April issue. I stumbled across it the other night at King Kullen (sigh) and was immediately lifted. Two Met mentions in a magazine that needs no introduction — an honest-to-goodness, long-established, quasi-general-interest, literate monthly magazine. The Mets are that big now.

One was a baseball article, a feature on Barry Zito. Zito’s gigantic contract is that big now, too. Zito stayed professional in his description of meeting the Mets — “I’ll just say that the Giants meeting was more positive” — but the writer, Chris Jones, inferred an allusion to San Francisco management lacking “a lot of ego” was really a shot at Jeff Wilpon. Don’t know if that’s so, but Zito’s quote that “you don’t want to go into a situation feeling like you’re having to prove to them how good you are” was a little revealing.

At the Mets offered rate of $75 mil over five years, you should feel you’ve been viewed as pretty worthwhile by your suitor (at the final number of $126 mil over seven, your left arm should be deposited in the Cayman Islands until absolutely needed). Zito said he was curious about playing in New York, but not $51 million curious. At that kind of price differential, curiosity is entitled to dwindle, but still, when somebody starts negotiations at $15 million a year, I find it hard to believe you’d say anything but “they were very nice to me”.

Either way, the best part of the Mets section of the Zito article was learning it was “interrupted at one point by Tom Hanks and Ron Howard, just saying hello”. Don’t know if they were greeting Jeff and Omar or Zito and Scott Boras, but those guys did come out to see us in Cincinnati last summer. Funny how they weren’t unnerved by the presence of Metness.

And if you like movie stars who pay homage to the Mets, this issue of Esquire hits it out of the park with its cover story on Hilary Swank. I knew who she was and that she’d won a couple of Oscars but I had formed no definitive Hilary Swank opinion until I picked up the magazine. Her pictorial has it all over that Wright & Reyes spread by any objective and slinky standard, but I actually do read magazines for the articles, so here’s what makes Mike Sager’s article blue and orange gold:

As Chris [her hairstylist] works, Swank will simultaneously try to give an interview, telling a story about her reaction to Mets outfielder Carlos Beltran’s now infamous strikeout to decide the National League Championship, which she attended in person and which she will talk about for nearly seven minutes, a rather incisive discourse by a rabid fan (forgetting for a moment the fact that she calls them points instead of runs) on matters of fame and talent and opportunities lost, on the value of the long run and the big picture, meanwhile carefully keeping close the ranks of celebrity, never once even suggesting that the great man might have choked.

Ohimigosh, Hilary Swank uses the Mets as a metaphor for practically everything. Now that’s my idea of a $126-million baby.

Ironically, I was planning to mention most of this stuff even before the words “Faith,” “Fear,” “In” and “Flushing” appeared strung together in Sports Illustrated this week. SI‘s decision to include us in a “best Mets info” poll with our friends and blolleagues at Mike’s Mets, MetsGeek and MetsBlog (Matt’s minions are running away with this thing, but vote anyway, just as you would have or possibly did for John Milner over Steve Garvey) and to “feature” each of our sites on their Mets page this season was enough of a thrill to kind of get me really going about how much I love magazines.

Who knows? Maybe someday some magazine dude will be excited about scoring a mention in a blog.