Call Up Jess Singer

Adequacy thy names are Quintana, Manaea, Severino, Blackburn, and Peterson. We’ve had some really good games from the starting pitchers who compose our rotation this season. Some not so good games, too. Some days you wish we had the Christian Scott who looked so promising in his debut or the Kodai Senga who was on point for five-plus innings before an injury subtracted him from our plans.

For about a week, the starting pitcher I wanted to see on our mound more than any other was Jess Singer, coinciding with the week or so I was wrapped up in reading Curveball, the new Metcentric novel by Eric Goodman. I imagine it’s a book more about the human condition than baseball, the way I’m always being told that baseball movies aren’t baseball movies so much as they’re this genre or that. But we’re Mets fans. Make two of the three main characters Mets and build the story around a Mets season, it’s a book about the Metsian condition.

I’m gonna guess Goodman wouldn’t mind that assessment, for he, too, is a Mets fan. Takes one to write one like this. The author, in a note introducing his work, let me know he’s been rooting for this team since 1962. He also first wrote about a Singer pitching for the Mets in 1991’s In Days of Awe. The pitcher at that juncture in Mets history was the great Joe Singer. We could have used a great pitcher right around then. Goodman decided some three decades hence that we needed a sequel. Thus, Jess, son of Joe. Two Singers. Two pitchers. Two Mets. Loads of talent…including Eric Goodman in bringing this pair to us.

A couple of grabbers to get your attention.

1) Joe Singer was known in his heyday as Jewish Joe Singer. The nickname for Jess is Two-J’s, because Jack Singer — the irrepressible zayde or grandfather in this mishpacha and our third main character — proudly declared the boy was as “big as two fucking Jews”. The aura of Sandy Koufax exists in the world of Curveball, and the Singers are the closest thing we’ve seen to the, uh, sainted Jewish lefty since the Dodger southpaw took off Yom Kippur. As an homage, Joe and Jess were and are No. 32 on your overpriced scorecard.

2) The existence of Koufax (not to mention Ken Holtzman) within Baseball-Reference means a star Jewish pitcher, while unusual, isn’t unprecedented. But an openly gay pitcher in the major leagues is a different story. As of the present reality, we haven’t had any MLB players go to work making no secret of their non-heterosexual orientation. When Curveball begins, that’s the situation as well. The percolating question as one gets into the book is, will this be the situation by the last page? Let’s just say Jess Singer is harboring a secret and much of the tension revolves around his deciding if he’ll make it common knowledge.

Other issues, including literal life and death, permeate Curveball, and they deserve the reader’s consideration, but let’s not stray from the Metsiness of all this. The Mets of Jess Singer are a recognizable contemporary replica of what we’ve rooted for these past few years. There’s an owner you might mistake for Steve Cohen; a club president who seems to resemble Sandy Alderson; and players referred to as Pete, Squirrel, Nimms and the superstar shortstop. Goodman didn’t exactly drop Jess Singer onto the early-2020s Mets, but he knows his way around Citi Field physically and spiritually.

Each of the three Singer men presents his own emotional handful to those who care for them, which as the novel went on, included me. I raised my arms at least twice in triumph as I devoured their tale, and only once directly relating to the baseball action Goodman created. In the parlance of sports talk radio, I’m not a fiction guy, but my affection for this book was very real. In case you can’t make me out over PitchCom, I’ll put the signal in plain sight where any Astro can interpret it: don’t leave Goodman’s Curveball off the plate.