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  • So Many Ways to Lose

  • The Amazin’ True Story of the New York Mets—the Best Worst Team in Sports
  • Written by: Devin Gordon
  • Narrated by: Jeremy Arthur
  • Length: 12 hrs and 44 mins
  • 5.0 out of 5 stars (3 ratings)

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So Many Ways to Lose cover art

So Many Ways to Lose

Written by: Devin Gordon
Narrated by: Jeremy Arthur
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Publisher's Summary

“This is a weird, wonderful, and essential book about both America and its pastime. It’s about a place as vast as New York City and as intimate as the human heart. Fred Exley meets Richard Ben Cramer—a funny, wild, heartfelt, and keenly observed portrait of yearning itself.”—Wright Thompson, New York Times bestselling author of The Cost of These Dreams

“Mr. Gordon’s ability to explain the Sisyphean plight of all Mets fans is truly remarkable. Bravo!”—Ron Darling, New York Times bestselling author of Game 7, 1986

The Mets lose when they should win. They win when they should lose. And when it comes to being the worst, no team in sports has ever done it better than the Mets. 

In So Many Ways to Lose, author and lifelong Mets fan Devin Gordon sifts through the detritus of Queens for a baseball history like no other. Remember the time the Mets lost an All-Star after he got charged by a wild boar? Or the time they blew a six-run ninth-inning lead at the peak of a pennant race? Or the time they fired their manager before he ever managed a game? Sure you do. It was only two years ago, and it was all in the same season. The Mets have an unrivaled gift for getting it backward, doing the impossible, snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, and then snatching defeat right back again. 

And yet, just ask any Mets fan: amazing and/or miraculous postseason runs are as much a part of our team's identity as losing 120 games in 1962. The DNA of seasons like 1969, the original Miracle Mets, and the 1973 “Ya Gotta Believe” Mets, who went from last place to Game 7 of the World Series in two months, and the powerhouse 1986 Mets, has encoded in us this hapless instinct that a reversal of fortune is always possible. It’s happened before. It’s kind of our thing. And now we've got Steve Cohen's hedge-fund billions to play with! What could go wrong?

In this hilarious history of the Mets and love letter to the art of disaster, Devin Gordon presents baseball the way it really is, not in the wistful sepia tones we've come to expect from other sportswriters. Along the way, he explains the difference between being bad and being gifted at losing, and why this distinction holds the key to understanding the true amazin’ magic of the New York Mets.

©2020 Devin Gordon (P)2020 HarperCollins Publishers

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Best Team History Book

This book, alongside Rich Cohen's book on the Chicago Cubs, may be the best team history book I've ever stumbled on. Even if you have no personal connection to the Mets (like me, for example) it's hard not to become completely entangled in the story.

The book gets into more or less anything you might want to know about the Mets. The highs and lows of their history on the field and the story of teams from all over their history are described almost like a sports podcast, I learned it as if it's happening and relatable even though most of it happened decades before I was born.

It's a great way of understanding not only the Mets history but what the Mets mean to the city of New York, why some people choose the Mets over the Yankees. It also gives a great history lesson over what happened to New York in the period after the Dodgers and Giants left town and before the Mets came to be.

The humour is my personal favourite aspect. It gives the book a real personality, and makes it easier to understand Gordon's take on what the Mets are and what Mets fans are like. The narration by Jeremy Arthur does not fail this aspect of the book.

Overall I cannot recommend this enough. I can see myself relistening to this full book many times over, it's that well made.

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