Believeniks!: 2005: The Year We Wrote a Book About the Mets

by Ivan Felt, Harris Conklin

Critic Ivan Felt and poet Harris Conklin are the Don Quixote and Sancho Panza of baseball fandom. Or, perhaps, the Felix and Oscar of baseball fandom. Or the Pollock and de Kooning. Or the Bugs and Daffy.

The New York Mets are, of course, the New York Mets of baseball.

In 2005, Felt and Conklin, lifelong friends and lifelong fans, determined to change the course of their own careers and of baseball history by doing what had never been writing their beloved team to a World Championship. The 2005 Mets, with a new manager and some of the spiffiest free agents on the market, seemed ready to take the world by storm. Felt and Conklin believed themselves up to the task. It is, after all, Belief (and free agents) that makes such dreams come true.

Believeniks! is the record of a journey. Felt and Conklin would, alas, fail to see their team attain that golden pinnacle in the clouds of baseball glory. As Believeniks! reveals, however, the season’s unfolding drama would leave two of baseball’s most erudite and excitable fans forever changed.

288 pages, Hardcover

First published April 4, 2006

Reviews

[Osvaldo]

Let’s imagine, for the sake of argument, that there are two kinds of Mets fans, the Keith Hernandez type and the Ron Darling type. If this were true—and I know it isn’t—then Believeniks would be a book for the latter: the Mets fan with a literary bent, with a taste for the academic. It is a book for a Mets fan who, like Darling, might be a Yale man, or just a man (or woman) of letters, since letters (or rather emails) is exactly what this epistolary novel is about.

Reading this novel, I was brought back to 2005—a perfect year to write about. A “rebuilding year,” a year of hope with the arrival of Pedro and Beltran and the blossoming of Reyes and Wright—the last year of Piazza—but still a year of disappointments and plenty of losses. Every time a letter mentions Looper coming in to close a game, I remembered the anxiety of that season. I only wish they had covered more games in their exchange of letters. Every game! There were terrible games I recall that were not mentioned.

Believeniks is also a book about friendship and loyalty, and in a way the obsessive overview of so many games is a metaphor for the relationship of the two authors. The letters are well written, funny, and poignant. They are filled with re-telling of the history of the affect of a Mets fan, and with a specificity that I can only imagine would not appeal to anyone who was not a Mets fan, or at least such an obsessive fan of baseball and fan of the literary that it doesn’t really matter what team is being written about. In other words, this book is not for everyone. I mean, damn since one of the two writers is ostensibly a poet, there is even a poem for every time the Mets fell or climbed to the .500 mark that season, which is quite a few times.

I kind of love this book. There is a personal development in the relationship of the authors of these letters that I think distracts from the pure enjoyment of baseball and that quite honestly strikes me as a bit skeevy and unnecessary, but it does provide for some interesting letters that fold the love of baseball into that situation in a way that makes for some lovely prose.

The not so well-kept secret of this book is that its authors, Ivan Felt and Harris Conklin are really Jonathan Lethem and Christopher Sorrentino (which is which?), there is even a reference made to characters from Motherless Brooklyn (Ivan Felt’s ex-wife’s brother is Frank who thinks of himself the king of Smith street and runs a crew of orphans). No wonder this book by nobodies is so well written, but the fact that it is by "nobodies" also means that nobody read it.

Anyway, if you love baseball, the Mets, reading… I think you’ll love Believeniks. I certainly tore through it and in another 10 years will read it again to relive the 2005 once again. Anybody else, however? Anybody else will probably find it boring.

[Brian]

This book is about two Mets fans who also happen to be poets. The book is a series of letters, written during the 2005 season. When Willie Randolph, Carlos Beltran, Pedro Martinez, and Omar Minaya were new to the Amazin's.

If you're not a Mets' fan, this book isn't for you. But if you are a fan of the game, you'll enjoy the emotional ups and downs these two fans endure.

[Scott Breslove]

I read every book I can about the Mets, but this one left me totally disappointed. Actually, I couldn't even get through the whole thing. It was a series of letters from one fan to another talking about people we don't know and/or don't care about, using nicknames we don't understand. Maybe one day I'll pick it back up and try reading again, but I kinda doubt it.

[Michael]

If the authors used their real names, this book would be considered a vanity project. Instead we're left with a disappointing book on the do-nothing, forgettable 2005 New York Mets. You'll find some humour in these pages, but more likely you'll prefer to just tear them to pieces.

[Ron Kaplan]

Mets