New Book Released to Mark Demise of Shea Stadium

"The Boys of Shea" Celebrates One of the Most Memorable Seasons Played at Old Stadium

In case you hadn't heard, the Mets did not make the post season in 08, (deja vu all over again) and Shea Stadium is going the way of the Dodo. It would have been nice to make the last game at Charlie Shea a championship game, but it was not to be. There was too much water, and too many Marlins in the way the last week of the season. The 2008 season ended in a heart-wrenching hankie-honker of a game that was followed by a macabre funeral for the old edifice involving over-the-hill players from former years and former sad seasons, as well as a few World Series games as well.

There is alot to lament about, and there is no Joy in Metville these days, but at least there have not been any taxi cab wrecks involving expensive players for over two years. So instead of dwelling on the last two years of pennantless baseball, readers can buy my new book and read my joyous and rhapsodic account of one of the happiest seasons (until that last pitch of course!) in baseball history, 2006, a year that must be considered "the last great golden age" of Shea Stadium. Alot of records were broken and alot of exciting games marked that season, but perhaps the most inspiring thing was how excited and ebullient the players themselves were. We had never seen such "handshakes" (dances, boogaloos, cha chas, etc) in the major leagues before, or so many smiles, so many impossible comebacks. The atmosphere was giddy, and this book will insure that those smiles--and the stadium that gave those young faces a national stage-- will never be forgotten.

Like the Brooklyn Dodgers, whom some consider their rightful predecessors, (Robert Moses wanted the Dodgers to move to Queens) the 2006 Mets were America's most beloved bums. The title of the book pays homage to Roger Kahn's great book 'The Boys of Summer" about those same Dodgers of 50 some years earlier, and backs it up by digging up some remarkably similar statistics between the two teams. In hindsight, it is interesting that Ebbets Field was destroyed (albeit 3 years) after a similarly inconclusive season by the Dodgers. In their final season in New York, 1957, the Dodgers went 84 and 70 for a .545 average; the 2008 Mets went 89-73 for a .549 winning average. The Dodgers finished third that last year, the Mets finished second in thier last year. Part of Ebbets field is now a parking lot, as most of Shea Stadium will soon be.

Ebbets Field will be remembered as the "temple of summer" thanks in part to Kahn's book, but Shea Stadium may also some day be added to that heavenly roster of stadiums that exist no more but which increase in glory and mythological stature as time goes by. If so, it may be in some small part because of this new book The Boys of Shea.

To help fight against the erasure of this great stadium from the memory of baseball, and to become part of the literary immortalization of  the boys of Shea, you owe it to yourself to read this poetic and evocative book. See previous entries or go to amazon.com and purchase your copy today. The past will never be the same.

EP