Greg Prince’s Faith and Fear in Flushing is a wonderful book. This will come as no surprise to regular readers of the blog “Faith and Fear in Flushing,” which Greg writes, along with Jason Fry. Everyone who inhabits the Mets blogosphere has “Faith and Fear in Flushing” bookmarked on their browser. They should now also have Faith and Fear in Flushing, the book, on their bookshelves.
Subtitled “An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets,” Faith and Fear is an intense personal history of the author’s involvement with his team. It begins with a chapter on the importance of endings, in which Greg thinks about why he always likes to make it to the final home game of the season. In this chapter, he considers the way in which baseball appeals to us, providing us with stories with all kinds of endings, and with numbers that acquire a mystical finality on the last day of the season. In his next chapter, “Taking It Personally,” he considers how this thing made up of stories and numbers finds its way into our lives. Then, as if to illustrate what he’s talking about, he sets off on a journey. He travels deep within himself and backwards in time. He finds the beginnings of his Mets fandom in his fascination, at the age of six, with a cartoon duck, on the back of the New York Post, who marked off the progress of the 1969 Mets towards their miracle. Moving forward from the miracle season, Greg visits all of the most memorable moments of Mets history. He allows us to relive them and he shows us the significance of these moments by describing, with flair, humor, and accuracy, the emotional landscape of each individual Mets era. As he does this, he is never just writing about baseball. He is always also writing about himself. Greg grows up and goes off to college. After college, he moves back in with his parents and tries to establish himself as a free-lance writer. He gets married, loses his mother to cancer, and finds his niche in the world of freelance writing. He starts going to Shea more often, he starts his blog, he becomes part of a community of Mets fans, he loses Shea stadium.
In Faith and Fear in Flushing, the life of the Mets and the life of Greg Prince are parallel. They become intertwined. Reading Greg’s direct, playful, conversational prose, we come to feel as if we are experiencing the history of the New York Mets in the company of someone who has become our friend. This is a sweet guy, someone we want to know, someone who isn’t afraid to be a little goofy and sentimental. This is someone who is completely attuned to the generosity and pathos of Mets fandom. This is someone who knows more and cares more about the Mets than anyone else we’ve ever met.
Why does he care so much? This is the question the book poses again and again. And it is not a question that can be answered easily, given the acute disappointments and miseries Greg recounts, which are relieved by relatively few moments of unambiguous triumph. The trick of writing about being a fan of the New York Mets, as I myself know, is figuring out a way to write about the experience so that the reader can sort of understand why you don’t regret being a Mets fan, so the reader can understand that it has actually made you happy. Greg pulls this off masterfully. Throughout his book, he shows us how much fun it is to be so intimate with a continuing story that means so much to millions. He shows how rich a baseball moment can be when you can place it in a context with all that you know about the long history of a team. He shows you that baseball fandom is something deeply serious, even spiritual. When you’re done with “Faith and Fear in Flushing,” you come away with the sense that being a fan of the New York Mets has been worth it to Greg because it has given him his richest and most continuous experience of loyalty, identity, and community.
There are a lot of treasures in this book. All of the accounts of the major Mets moments are beautifully paced, lively, and emotionally convincing. Greg is also reliably surprising. Having missed the 1973 World Series because his parents take him and his sister on a brief vacation to the Catskills, Greg presents the Series in the form of a hilarious imaginary conversation with a therapist. This inventiveness will remind readers of Greg’s blog of the way in which he loves to use unusual techniques and genres to present the experience of the Mets: lists, dialogues, fantasies, glossaries, etc. There’s a funny and awkward account of an encounter with Lee Mazilli and Ron Swoboda at a sports weekend at an upstate hotel. There’s a moving account of the way baseball brought him closer to his mother in the last year of her life. There’s a fine consideration of the impression Shea created by being open rather than enclosed.
Another thing that’s impressive about the book is the way in which Greg shows how the individual experience of baseball is filled with idiosyncrasies. It is never predictable or clichéd. A big fan from the time he’s six, Greg doesn’t get to go to Shea until he’s ten. After having missed what was supposed to be his first game because he got sick, his first actual visit is anti-climactic. Greg’s parents don’t bring him up to be a Mets fan. They’re completely indifferent, until they inexplicably become fans after Greg leaves the house and then that becomes the basis for a new and puzzling connection with them. All through his life, Greg’s experiences are just what they are. They are completely unique. Each of us is unlike any other Mets fan. Yet when Greg offers us one of his beautifully paced accounts of the great moments of Mets history, and describes with care what he was feeling at each and every step, we realize that we Mets fans are all different and all the same. Here too is one of the features that make Faith and Fear in Flushing such a valuable book. It shows us that there is no such thing as a typical Mets fan. There’s certainly nothing terribly typical about Greg Prince. But as Greg shows, this is one of the reasons to be a baseball fan. Baseball makes us less unique and therefore less alone. Someone as untypical as Greg can actually speak for so many people who are not at all like him. One of the best things about Faith and Fear in Flushing is the way Greg Prince shows us how baseball fandom can bring people closer to their common humanity.
Are there any flaws in this fine book? All books have flaws, but there aren’t many in this one. Greg says at one point that physical description is not his thing. He’s actually very good at it (there are some excellent, brief descriptions of Shea). I think that the book would have been even better if it had had more physical description, so that we might have had a bit more of a sense of the look, feel, and smell of the emotional moments of Mets history Greg describes so well. There are also a few points in the book where Greg seems to be saying essentially, well, now I have to move on to this next point and I have to have something in here so that the transition is not too abrupt, or, well, by the way, did I tell you about this person with whom I went to a lot of games? These moments of slight awkwardness, however, don’t detract from the experience of the book. They contribute to the sense of the book’s authenticity. Greg is writing about his own experiences. He’s not inventing a perfectly smooth narrative. And so at a few points, we see him having to improvise a little to get in everything he wants to put in here.
Faith and Fear in Flushing is a fine book, a gift, from one of us to all of us. It invites us to explore our own understanding of what the New York Mets are in our lives. It’s an affirmation of something that is deeply serious but is nevertheless still just a game. Greg doesn’t discover the meaning of life as he explores the role the Mets have played in his life, but he does discover how much he loves to be a Mets fan. He shows us that it is an indispensable part of his existence. He makes sure that we understand that, like all truly deep love, Mets love can’t entirely be explained. But it doesn’t have to be. As Greg observes at several points, it justifies itself. It just is. And it is like nothing else.
