INTERVIEW WITH JEFF GROSE: PART 1 Back in November of 2014, Card of the Week's Mystery Met episode 9 featured a fresh-faced '70s prospect named Jeff Grose. The internet being the strange and magical thing that it is, the piece made its way back to Grose, who left a quick note in the comments section. [...]
1971 TOPPS DEAN CHANCE Wait, no one told me that Dean Chance had died. It happened back on October 11 apparently, and granted, we've all been pretty busy around here, what with the playoffs and World Series and heartbreak and stuff. But Chance deserves a moment of recognition, and not just for the fact that [...]
1986 TIM CORCORAN POSTCARD The 1986 Mets scored 783 runs, and if you're over 40, there's a good chance that you have fond memories of at least 700 of them. Perhaps you recall game 26 of that magical season, a matchup between Sid Fernandez and Rick Mahler. Fernandez was dominant for seven innings, striking out [...]
1970 TOPPS WORLD CHAMPIONS This here is a totem. I was five-years old back in 1970, and flush with a new enthusiasm for baseball in general, and the Mets in particular. Every Sunday after church my family would drive to the local stationery store, and assuming that I hadn't tested anyone's patience too greatly during [...]
https://youtu.be/dfuycpuSkmI
2015 TOPPS HERITAGE DANNY MUNO It's October 7, and normally this is when I'd be killing time thinking about Danny Muno. “Danny Muno?” I'd say, “Wasn't he the main character in Grease?” Or I might note how my anagrammatic brain and my former-physics-copy-editor brain conspire to make me see his name as “Danny Muon” at [...]
1973 DAILY NEWS YOGI BERRA I am late to the wake. The pundits and pontificators have all had their summary say about the man's life. The many rings and awards, the eponymous -isms, the service to his country... And now the only one left to speak is the 8-year-old boy with a dog-eared stack of [...]
Pennant-race baseball is a perverse, enervating affair. You can spend four innings on top of the world, grinning inside while your announcers blow sunshine straight up the verrett of an overperforming young pitcher, who then promptly folds like Superman on laundry day and turns a 1-0 lead into a 4-1 deficit that evolves into a [...]
1985 TOPPS TRADED PROTOTYPE ROGER McDOWELL I've pretty much always been a collector. There were the animal figurines that occupied an entire bookshelf in my childhood bedroom-- brass horses, polished marble elephants, blue glass monkeys, and the like. Monthly trips to the Gregory Museum in Hicksville netted me countless small rocks, nestled in square cardboard [...]
1985 TOPPS KEITH HERNANDEZ La Bonne Vie, they called it. The good life. That was the name of the apartment complex in East Patchogue where I spent my 1985. I discovered panic attacks, the Pogues, and the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins that summer. I also had a brief existential crisis regarding my love of [...]
https://youtu.be/xzYahOj6-2I
The ghost of my older brother is usually pretty silent. Sure, it makes some noise around the holidays, slipping into the credenza to rattle the commemorative Norman Rockwell dishes that he bought for our mother inexplicably each Christmas. And sadly I hear it now making sounds of distressing assent while Donald Trump cheapens the democratic [...]