Yells for Ourselves

A Story of New York City and the New York Mets at the Dawn of the Millennium

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Pub Date 12 Mar 2019 | Archive Date 31 Aug 2019

Description

During the 1990s, as New York was transformed from a crumbling city into a vibrant metropolis, the New York Mets were anything but vibrant. Beginning in 1999, the team waged a battle to recapture the hearts of New York baseball fans from their crosstown rivals, and they came closer to succeeding than anyone dared dream. At the same time, mayor Rudy Giuliani—architect of this new New York and those rivals’ biggest cheerleader—was engaged in his own battles to win a Senate seat and to save his sagging legacy as savior of the city.

Yells For Ourselves chronicles the 1999 and 2000 seasons of the New York Mets, and explores how local and national politics were interwoven with the obsessions of a baseball-mad city. It paints a picture of this forgotten time in the history of baseball and New York, when new ballparks, rapid expansion, and “enhanced training methods” caused a home run explosion; when rising free agent salaries separated teams into the Haves and Have Nots; and when a politico’s answer to the question Mets or Yankees? could make global headlines. Above all, Yells For Ourselves captures what happened when an underdog struggled to find an identity in a city with no room left for lovable losers.

During the 1990s, as New York was transformed from a crumbling city into a vibrant metropolis, the New York Mets were anything but vibrant. Beginning in 1999, the team waged a battle to recapture the...


Available Editions

EDITION Other Format
ISBN 9781947848801
PRICE US$24.99 (USD)
PAGES 374

Average rating from 8 members


Featured Reviews

A real out-of-nowhere great read. As a lifetime Yankee fan whose prime fandom was the Torre years, it was genuinely fascinating to hear such familiar history told from the other side's perspective. Any baseball fan would love this though. I've been a lapsed sports fan for close to a decade, and this book for whatever reason really made me interested in at least trying to follow baseball again.

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For most of their history, the New York Mets have been playing the part of second fiddle to New York City’s other baseball team, the New York Yankees. At the start of 1999, as a new millennium was about to begin, this was still the case, especially since the Yankees had just come off one of the most successful seasons in baseball history and won their second World Series title in three years. The Mets, meanwhile, were also starting to make waves and capture the attention of New York baseball fans and media. The Mets’ adventures in 1999, as well as 2000 when they got to face the Yankees in the Subway Series. This book, mainly a collection of writings by the author, Matthew Callen, from blog posts is a very good account of those two seasons.

The most impressive aspect of this book is the minute detail in which Callen writes about the Mets for those two seasons. Not only does he capture the highlights of the best of the team those years, he writes about the agony of some of the losses, all of the controversy and all of the front office maneuvers. While many of the more controversial statements and actions involve manager Bobby Valentine, there isn’t a person involved with the Mets those two seasons that escapes being noticed by Callen.

While the detail of so many games and so many press conferences with the New York media can get tedious to read (at least if the reader is not a serious Met fan), it gets very entertaining without Callen needing to insert his own brand of humor or opinions. There is very little that the reader will learn about Callen’s views because he lets the players, manager, general manager and reporters tell the story themselves and he simply reports it. That proved to be a winning formula for this book.

Every great Mets memory from those two seasons is captured here – the thrilling come-from-behind victory at Shea in the 1999 series against the Yankees, the tie-breaking game against Cincinnati to give the Mets the wild card spot in that same season. Then in those playoffs, the epic National League Championship Series against the Atlanta Braves is covered in its full glory. The Braves winning the first three games fairly easily, then the Mets storming back in games 4 and 5, capped off in that latter game by Robin Ventura’s “Grand Slam Single”, and finally the heartbreak of the loss to the Braves in game 6.

Then when the new millennium starts, Callen writes about 2000 with just as much gusto as 1999, although this time, he adds some Yankees text as well since the two teams met in the World Series to give the World Series a complete New York flavor for the first time in 44 years. This is also where the book finally gives a more thorough picture to the reader of the pulse of New York City and how they feel about their baseball teams and the Subway Series. This aspect of that time is what drew me to the book and while this was very good, it left me slightly disappointed that there wasn’t more of this material written throughout the book. Keeping in mind that this was most a collection of blog posts that were weaved together to make the book, I felt the author did a very good job of putting them together in a fluid story instead of simply throwing them together because they spoke on a similar topic – the Mets.

Die-hard Mets fans will really enjoy this book, and fans of other teams, even the Yankees, would be wise to take a look at this as well for a complete picture of the Mets for those two seasons when New York truly did capture the lions’ share of attention from the baseball media.

I wish to thank Quill for providing a copy of the book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

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This is a must read for any Mets fan! My husband and I both loved this book, as it was interesting to read about the environment in New York during the 1999 and 2000 seasons. Highly recommend!

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Okay, so for some reason, I thought this was going to focus more on the rivalry between the Mets and the Yankees than the relationship between the Mets and New York City, but that was on me. I, a die-hard Yankees fan, willingly read a book about the greatness of the New York Mets, so that's really the best review I can give this book.

This is a highly specific microhistory, but I think that anyone with a love of baseball will enjoy this one.

8/10 would recommend to all baseball fans.

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