Total Mets: The definitive encyclopedia of the team’s first half century

As part of the 50^th anniversary celebration, earlier this month Total Mets: The Definitive Encyclopedia Of The New York Mets First Half-Century was released by Triumph books, and written by Associated Press reporter David Ferry.  This is not to be confused with a couple of publications titled Total Mets from the now defunct Total Sports Publishing, whom in official cooperation with MLB at the time produced specific team offshoots of their Total Baseball encyclopedia in 1997, and in pocketbook sized form in 2000.

This latest addition to the Mets reference bookshelf is a hefty tome, clocking in at over 730 pages, and features all the usual suspects of a sports reference book.  First up, is a year by year chronicle with full basic hitting and pitching stats for the seasons.  Naturally as this book was in production, it had to end at 2011, so Johan Santana pitching the first no-hitter in team history, as well as R.A. Dickey’s amazing season are not mentioned.  Santana, pitching at Citi this past year, is however featured prominently on the back cover.  As well as a shot of David Wright sporting this year’s pinstripes in the front cover banner.  Wright is among Nolan Ryan, Tom Seaver, Mike Piazza and Gil Hodges, while a nice dramatic shot of Keith Hernandez provides the main image.

This is followed by a section featuring thumbnail sketches of varying lengths of 50 of the most important players in Met history.  All the usual suspects are featured from all the various eras of the franchise and the bio are filled with interesting stories and from the players themselves or others.  According to the introduction, Ferry had such bios prepared for all 917 Mets to have played a regular season game from 1962-2011, the book project started in the summer of 2007, but had to trim it down significantly for the word count in the tome.  Ferry also states in the introduction the intent to publish the rest of the bios in a book down the road.  This is followed up by the same approach to all of the Met Managers and General Managers through the years.

The next section delves into a recap of every one of the Mets postseason games from 1969, 1973, 1986, 1988, 1999, 2000 and 2006 as well as a Met postseason record book and stats for every player to play at least one postseason game as a Met.

And finally a nice comprehensive records and leaders section which is complete with year by year rankings and a good 20 or so deep listing of the Mets All-Time Leaders in the categories.

It is clear that the project was a labor of love for Ferry who grew up a Met fan, as part of his Acknowledgements list being able to get in touch with many former Mets to be interviewed for the project.  It is also a very well researched book as well.  It is also nice to see in the acknowledgements two long time Met research sites get a nod for help along the way; Ultimatemets.com which is pretty much what it says the Ultimate Mets Database, as well as a treasure trove of getting fan memories about specific players, games and non-playing personnel, and also MBTN.net which lists all the Met uniform numbers, along with other amusing tidbits and fun things on the site.  It’s good to see these two “Mom & Pop” style Met fan sites get recognition alongside the fully staffed monolith Baseball-Reference.com.

In all this is a great reference tool, for those still clinging onto wanting a hard and printed copy of data you can find at the above referenced websites.  As well as some good quick reading on the players, moments and more that have made up the first half-century of New York Mets Baseball.