The Mets Suck, but A.M. Gittlitz’s Book About the Mets Does Not
Can we please just be good at baseball? Or at least not embarrassing?
Of all the things that make the New York Mets the New York Mets, I can think of few shenanigans more apropos than spending an outrageous sum of money to be extremely bad. A.M. Gittlitz’s book on the history of the team, Metropolitans: New York Baseball, Class Struggle, and the People’s Team, arrived at the end of March, just in time for what was supposed to be an extremely exciting Mets season. Manhattan-born prodigal son turned most hated man in Queens David Stearns had assembled a roster both expensive and seemingly extremely talented, thanks to the infinite pursestrings over owner Steve Cohen. Metropolitans was supposed to help usher in this new Mets season and help explain where they came from, why they’re the squad of New York’s working class, and the redeemable qualities of rooting for the lovable losers. Then the 2026 season came around, and there’s not a lovable thing about this group of losers.
Fortunately for me, the Knicks championship has allowed me to entirely tune out the on-field product at Citi Field. Others aren’t quite so lucky. While Metropolitans perhaps was meant to serve as a historical primer for this iteration of the Mets, it is now a very willing and able distractor for the heinous misdeeds of this 2026 New York Mets roster. I caught up with Gittlitz to discuss the making of the book, the historical lefty politics of the organization, and rooting for a team that always subverts expectations.
How has book promotion been outside of having written a book about the most disappointing team in baseball?
Obviously as a Mets fan, I don’t want them to be bad. I want them to play, as Wilpon said, meaningful games in September. That’s the modest Mets goal: to be in it in September. That said, if they’re going to be bad, it’s kind of good for them to be this bad. They’re not just mediocre. They’re not merely heartbreaking. They can’t win, which is kind of interesting. For the book, it would be better if they were good and winning and reminding the city of how much people love them. They could be continuing to earn new fans that need a guidebook to how to be a Mets fan or the Mets history, which is sort of what I’ve done. I also think that if we can get the team to read the book, it might help them find their mission, find a reason to keep fighting through all of this and to turn it around like they did in 2024. They’re baseball players, they have busy schedules, there might not be enough time for that if they keep losing like this.
One of my favorite concepts within the book is how they retain this scrappy identity when they’re owned by one of the richest men in the world. Talk to me a little bit about that tension and how your relationship with the team has changed—if it has—once Steve Cohen bought the team.
On one hand, I don’t think it’s a huge change. The Mets have always had rich owners. Joan Payson, the Mets’ first owner, was one of the richest women in the world. Obviously, Wilpon and Doubleday were very rich people and they spent a lot of money on the team. There’s the famous 1992 team being the worst team money could buy, right? I was too young to remember that season, but Evan Roberts is saying, ‘Wow, this kind of reminds me of ’92. This is really, really bad.’ In that sense, it’s not a huge change.
The real difference is that Cohen bought the team and he has this attitude of, ‘I’m philanthropically going to make this team into the next Dodgers, into a team that’s always in the playoffs, always fighting for the pennant and winning many World Series’. Interestingly, he didn’t say the Yankees, he said the Dodgers. I’ll take Cohen at his word that he wants to do that. I’m skeptical that he is the lifelong Mets fan that he says he is, but I think he does sincerely want to make the Mets into champions.
He said he would do it in five years. His first shot at that was 2021. Now we’re in year five. This is the year he’s supposed to do it. But if we look at the track record, every year that they were expected to be a really good team, to make a World Series run, they failed spectacularly; like 2022 and 2023. But 2024 was a really fun year. That was the year they were rebuilding and they were expected to eke out a winning record at best. They made it to the NLCS. Even with an even richer, spendier owner, the team subverts expectations in really funny ways. Steve Cohen has done some good things, he’s done some bad things, but he hasn’t changed who the Mets are yet. I’m kind of—in a way—glad for that.
Do you think it’s possible for the Mets to spiritually change?
