Piazza: Catcher, Slugger, Icon, Star

A franchise and fan base in perpetual search of validation finally had its ticket punched as 2016 dawned. Mike Piazza, who held records in one hand and a city’s rapt attention in the other, gained election to the Hall of Fame. Within weeks of this long-awaited announcement, the ballclub with whom he chose to cast his eternal lot, the New York Mets, made a date to retire his number.

In Piazza: Catcher, Slugger, Icon, Star, Greg W. Prince—cocreator of Faith and Fear in Flushing, “the blog for Mets fans who like to read,” and author of Amazin’ Again, the story of the 2015 National League champions—explores the parallel paths Piazza and the Mets set out on in the early 1990s and how their individual journeys merged into a mutual quest for transcendence. From marriage of convenience to lifetime bond to a state of baseball grace reached only once before in team history, Piazza examines how the stranger from Los Angeles became New York’s favorite son and why Mets fans continued to rally to Piazza’s cause years after he took his final swing for them.

Greg W. Prince is cocreator of the blog Faith and Fear in Flushing, the daily destination for “Mets fans who like to read” since 2005. His memoir of the same name—“an intense personal history of the New York Mets”—was published in 2009 and was followed in 2016 by Amazin’ Again: How the 2015 New York Mets Brought the Magic Back to Queens. He has written about baseball for the New York Times, Huffington Post, Yahoo! Sports, and ESPN.com; served as a consultant to the film The Last Play at Shea; and helped organize the New York Mets 50th Anniversary conference at Hofstra University. He lives in Baldwin, New York.