Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read.

Start by marking “So Many Ways to Lose: The Amazin' True Story of the New York Mets--The Best Worst Team in Sports” as Want to Read:

Other editions

Enlarge cover

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

Open Preview

So Many Ways to Lose: The Amazin' True Story of the New York Mets--The Best Worst Team in Sports

Devin Gordon

4.63 · Rating details · 54 ratings · 13 reviews

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 w ...more

Get A Copy

Audio CD

Published March 16th 2021 by HarperCollins

More Details... Edit Details

Friend Reviews

To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

Reader Q&A

To ask other readers questions about So Many Ways to Lose, please sign up.

Be the first to ask a question about So Many Ways to Lose

Lists with This Book

This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Add this book to your favorite list »

Community Reviews

Showing 1-57

Average rating 4.63 ·

Rating details

· 54 ratings · 13 reviews

More filters

Sort order

Start your review of So Many Ways to Lose: The Amazin' True Story of the New York Mets--The Best Worst Team in Sports

Mar 21, 2021 Bookreporter.com Biography & Memoir rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

New York is unique in that it has two Major League teams. Back in the day when there were just 16 teams, this was not uncommon, with dual clubs in Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia and St. Louis. In fact, prior to 1957, New York supported three teams. The Mets were only born out of necessity after the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants departed for the west coast, leaving the National League without representation in the country’s most populous area. Not to mention the fans of those two rivals who New York is unique in that it has two Major League teams. Back in the day when there were just 16 teams, this was not uncommon, with dual clubs in Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia and St. Louis. In fact, prior to 1957, New York supported three teams. The Mets were only born out of necessity after the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants departed for the west coast, leaving the National League without representation in the country’s most populous area. Not to mention the fans of those two rivals who were bereft and for the most part had no intention of rooting for the hated Bronx Bombers. Thus begins Devin Gordon’s wonderfully entertaining history, SO MANY WAYS TO LOSE.

At first, no one had any expectations that the Mets would actually be decent, let alone good. There were slim pickings among the players from which they and their fellow newbies, the Houston Astros, were allowed to choose. The Mets decided to go with name recognition rather than building for the future. The results were historically bad, and the Mets became the punchline for jokes about well-meaning shortcomings.

I’m sure that other teams with long histories of lousy performances managed to yank defeat from the jaws of victory in similar fashion, but there was just something about the Mets that added the adjective “lovable” to their “loser” tag. Maybe it was their skipper, Casey Stengel, who, along with general manager George Weiss, was fired by the Yankees for the sin of being too old despite a boatload of championships. Stengel charmed the media with his gift of gab, soothing the anxiety that would become the hallmark of future generations of fans once they got a taste of success thanks to the Miracle Mets of 1969.

Why weren’t they able to continue on that high level following that championship season, or in the mid-to-late ’80s when the roster featured surefire Hall of Famers like Darryl Strawberry and Doc Gooden? Mostly it came down to bad decisions by the front office with disastrous trades and signings (bye-bye, Nolan Ryan; hello, Joe Foy, Jim Fregosi and Vince Coleman).

Sometimes it was as simple as a player hitting his peak and unable to repeat, whether because of age or bizarre injury. As Gordon writes about a recent spring training, “They celebrate Groundhog Day a little differently around here: Every year at about this time, the Mets emerge from hibernation to see which player will be the first to need an MRI.”

SO MANY WAYS TO LOSE is not all fun and games. Gordon gets serious when he describes the decline and fall of some heralded players like Strawberry and Gooden (who, the author points out, were resurrected briefly by the damnable Yankees of George Steinbrenner) or Mackey Sasser, a promising catcher who developed a case of the yips that made it virtually impossible for him to throw the ball back to the pitcher, the underlying cause of which was truly heartbreaking. There are also instances when racism played a role in dealing with some of the Mets’ players of color. This included how some of those issues were reported by members of the press, who Gordon describes accurately as mostly middle-aged white men who might not be as sensitive as they could be.

This is not a complete history, lest anyone get the wrong idea. Gordon --- a veteran journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic and Newsweek, among others --- picks a few key eras as indicative of the franchise’s failings. For me these were the mid-’70s, when fortunately I was working as a counselor in a sleepaway camp near Montreal and was unable to follow the mundane events, and most of the ’90s, when they were, as per Bob Klapisch and John Harper’s book, THE WORST TEAM MONEY COULD BUY.

Even when they did approach some level of greatness, there was always a dark cloud looming around the corner, ready to rain down disappointment. A great example is “The Catch” made by Endy Chavez in the 2006 National League Championship Series against the St. Louis Cardinals, judged by many (including Gordon) as one of the greatest defensive plays of all time. It would have been more satisfying if Carlos Beltran, perhaps the Mets’ best hitter that season, hadn’t taken a called third strike with the bases loaded to lose the game. Oh well, that’s what you get for plighting your baseball trough with this crew.

At one point late in the book, Gordon recalls talking with Gary Cohen and Ron Darling, two-thirds of one of the best broadcasting teams in all of baseball: “When I told [them], separately, that I was a lifelong Mets fan, they each said the same thing, ‘I’m sorry.’” Well, I have been a Mets fan since the early days, God help me. I have probably read 99 percent of the books written about the team. SO MANY WAYS TO LOSE is the funniest, saddest, most infuriating and most honest of the bunch.

Reviewed by Ron Kaplan ...more

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Jan 10, 2021 Rosann rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Where do I begin? Mr. Met is on the cover. The title, so apt. The Mets have been a big part of my life since I met my husband in the early eighties. A history of the team, the unlikely, crazy, heartbreaking, exhausting, jubilant history of the Mets needed to be well documented, well organized, well written, honestly and still sympathetically explored. Devin Gordon has accomplished all of this and more. Keeping in mind that I have spent the last 30 years or so as an interested bystander to the ri ...more

flag Like · see review

Apr 12, 2021 Sheila rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

A dedicated Mets fan who is also a journalist recalls their history from their formation to the present day.

I enjoyed this book. I learned something new. I remembered some of the scandals he writes of during the '80's. I liked his remembrance of players and how he portrayed them. I laughed at times. Shook my head other times. Wondered what were they thinking many times. It was fun reading about it all. I'm not a Mets fan, just a baseball fan but this is a book worth reading just for the fun of ...more

flag Like · see review

Apr 03, 2021 EVAN rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I'm a Yankee fan. I say that this first to annoy the author who, I'm sure, would rather I hadn't read the book. :-)

More importantly, this book is truly hilarious as in my wife asked me repeatedly to stop laughing. It's also well researched and filled with great interviews. It's up there with Nick Hornby's "Fever Pitch," for books about the frustration of sports fandom.

Highly recommended for any baseball fans (or anyone who likes good writing). ...more

flag Like · see review

Apr 03, 2021 Jeff Hookey rated it it was ok · review of another edition

I found the book to be less funny than it is petty. The history of the Mets is well known amongst those that know the history of baseball. The author spends more time degrading his “enemies” and finding fault with ownership and giving former Mets lots of free passes than providing what I hoped for, more inside “stuff.”

flag Like · see review