Author Details Decades As A Mets Fan In New Book

A book entitled “Mets Fan” illustrates what following the team has meant for author Dana Brand, who spoke about the book at North Shore Towers on Monday, June 2.
An English professor at Hofstra University, Brand said that he became a Mets fan before the team actually existed. In 1961, when he was seven years old, he recalled when Roger Maris broke the single-season homerun record of Babe Ruth.
“I went screaming through the house about how happy I was that Maris had broken Babe Ruth’s record and I didn’t even know what it meant,” Brand said. “My mother sat me down and said, ‘We don’t do that in this family. You can’t be happy about something a Yankee has done.’ ”
Both Brand’s mother and father had grown up in Brooklyn and were Dodgers fans. After he had been told he could not celebrate a Yankee achievement, Brand’s mother went on to say that there would be a team for him to root for next year when the New York Mets began.
During his lecture at North Shore Towers, Brand read several essays from “Mets Fan,” beginning with one entitled “Yankee Hatred.” He said that for a person to be a true Mets fan, they must have a “hostile feeling” towards the Yankees and also said that it is essential and “intensifies the pleasure of Mets love.”
In the essay, Brand spoke about how Mets fans view themselves as rooting for the underdog and that, although the Yankees do not hate the Mets, the Yankees are always a part of the Mets’ story.
“They are the top dogs that allow us to see the Mets as underdogs,” Brand read from his book. “The Yankees are not defined by the fact that they are not the Mets, but the Mets are defined by the fact that they are the New York baseball team that is not the Yankees.”
Another essay in Brand’s book focused on the Mets’ home turf, Shea Stadium. A separate essay, “The Mets in Queens,” looked specifically at the home borough of the stadium.
“Although it’s not the most beautiful stadium in the world, it’s a place that is going to deserve some tears when it’s torn down at the end of this baseball season,” Brand said before reading the essay. “It’s been standing for 44 years. I remember going to my first game there.”
Brand also spoke about how baseball can bring families together.
“I really do feel that a lot of the reasons we are drawn to baseball is that it’s part of family life, it’s part of friendship,” he said. “Baseball is one of the things that tie a family together. It certainly has tied my family together in all different ways.”
To illustrate this thought, Brand read the essay “Going to a Game With My Daughter,” which detailed the bond that the two share when it comes to Mets games. In “Marrying the Red Sox,” Brand wrote about watching the 1986 World Series between the Mets and Red Sox with his wife, who grew up in Boston and was a Red Sox fan.
“Not every husband and wife is united in their baseball loyalty any more than every husband and wife is united by their politics or religion or anything else. I happened to fall in love with a Red Sox fan,” Brand said. “I had to console my wife for her deep sadness at the happiest moment in the history of the New York Mets. It
really does try your capacities as a human being or as a husband to be able to do this.”