This is a great record of one man's score recording of the New York Mets. With personal anecdotes and tales related to the specific games that were scored, the author tells the history of the franchise.

Note: Thank you to NetGalley, Triumph Books, and Evan Roberts for the advanced reader copy of the book. What follows is my unbiased review of the book.

I can commiserate with author and WFAN radio personality Evan Roberts. About 20 years prior to the beginning of his run scoring Mets baseball, I was pretty much the same. I’d gone to the sporting department of our local TSS Department Store and bought books used to score baseball games. Unfortunately, unlike Roberts, my father didn’t have season tickets to the Mets, and we attended only about once a month or so. Add into that a time when there was usually only one television in the house, and my days (and nights) of scoring baseball were sporadic. All of those books were tossed by my parents years ago as well.

However, Roberts’ weren’t, and here he has assembled a narrative of Mets baseball over the last 30 years. It’s an era when I was still a fan, not living far from him, but was interrupted by working and raising a family. Soccer games and dance recitals took precedent over attending baseball games. However, reading this book brought a lot of that time back to me, particularly in the late 1990s and early 2000s when I quite enjoyed watching Mike Piazza as a Mets player.

<i>Of course, the freakin’ Yankees would take advantage of it, led by the Captain of being a pain in my ass, Derek Jeter…</i>

Roberts chose 81 games from his scorebook collection to highlight. Some of them are personal favorites of his, that have no real bearing on fans’ memories of the game but are a narrative to his life. Others are memorable games for Mets fans, particularly once they began getting to the post-season with a bit of regularity during the Piazza era.

He’s reprinted the pages from those scorebooks for each of the games he chose, along with a narrative of what he remembers from the game. The early pages are a child’s scrawl, while he gets more sophisticated and neater as time goes on. One complaint I have is that his print is quite small, and it’s difficult to make out even the players’ names, even reading the book on my computer where the reproduced pages are pretty large. I do like the style of his scorebook over the one I used to use way back in the 1970s when I used to score the games off of radio and television. It lends itself to more detail about the game itself and once you understand how to score a game, you’d have no problem reading these, except for his tiny print.

However, because he has kept the scorebooks, he can go back to the games themselves and recreate what happened. This means some games have an incredibly detailed narrative you can’t get without rewatching the games in question. Some games sounded familiar and when reading his synopsis, something would click and I’d remember the game in question. There’s the Johann Santana no-hitter (the first Mets no-hitter ever), the game that’s the reason Mets fans despise Chase Utley, the first game after 9/11 when Mike Piazza hit a homerun, the last game of the World Series in 2015 that I just couldn’t watch, the last game ever played at Shea Stadium, the first game played at CitiField, and many, many more.

I enjoyed this trip down memory lane, albeit one that didn’t resonate for me the same way it did for the author. Still reading about the Mets in the Piazza era and the individual games that I could remember was a joy. It brought back a lot of great memories of watching the games with my kids when we lived in the area.

<i>When you sit down at a baseball stadium, whether it’s for a regular season contest or a postseason game, you have no idea how long you are going to be there. When I go to basketball games, I joke with my wife that I usually can guess and be correct within 15 minutes of when I’ll get home and walk through the door. Baseball is a completely different animal. You could sit in your seat and be done with a neat and tightly played game in less than two and a half hours, or your ass may get very sore from sitting in the same position for nearly five.</i>

That is the joy of baseball, which you either get or you don’t, and it’s apparent the current Baseball Commissioner (among others) doesn’t get it. Time doesn’t matter when you’re playing baseball. There’s no limit to how long a game can go. It’s part of the magic of the game. The author of the book gets it. I’m only sorry I no longer live close to NYC to hear his radio shows. Mets fans are a unique breed, and if you are one, you will appreciate Roberts’ book.