The Last Days of Shea: Delight and Despair in the Life of a Mets Fan

Written in a personal, moving, and humorous style, The Last Days of Shea chronicles the New York Mets from October 2006, when the team lost the National League Championship Series, to October 2008, when the team began to dismantle its antiquated, inadequate, and dearly loved Shea Stadium. The book is about following a baseball team with one’s heart, mind, and soul. It represents the experience of being in a crowd at a ballpark, following a pennant race, enduring an offseason, experiencing streaks, slumps, triumph and heartbreak. All of this is represented against the imminent destruction of a stadium ＂that is not likely to be represented as well in the perfect and profitable little park that will replace it.＂

Dana Brand is a professor of English at Hofstra University in New York and author of the highly acclaimed Mets Fan. While working for his Ph.D. at Yale in the 1970s, he studied under A. Bartlett Giamatti, the Yale English professor who would eventually become Commissioner of Baseball until his death in 1989. He lives in Sandy Hook, Connecticut.