Double Blackjack: The Best and Worst Deals made by the New York Mets in their years of existence Summary and Reviews

Double Blackjack: The Best and Worst Deals made by the New York Mets in their years of existence
by Larry Liebenthal

Double Blackjack: The Best and Worst Deals made by the New York Mets in their years of existence
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Book Summary Information

Author: Larry Liebenthal
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2004-05-18
ISBN: 0595312764
Number of pages: 118
Publisher: iUniverse, Inc.

Book Reviews of Double Blackjack: The Best and Worst Deals made by the New York Mets in their years of existence

Book Review: Too little info
Summary: 2 Stars

I was highly anticipating reading this book, but found that it fell flat at only 94 pages. The author, in his introduction, states that he's going to write about the 21 best and worst deals the Mets had made. In his conclusion, he said he took poetic license and limited it to 18. Well, if you took each chapter by themselves and totaled them up, there are 32 total deals. The author says 18 because the chapters are essentially broken up. Chapter #1 is a high quality move, and what would be chapter #2 is really called low quality move #1.
Now, I just mentioned high quality and low quality. This is the authors way of denoting if the deal was good (high) or bad (low). The author has a total of (if you count each chapter by itself) 14 good, 14 bad, and 4 that were in-between. Sometimes the author will talk about the player and how he fared before he played for the Mets, and then talk little about that players days as a Met. I found myself feeling that not much effort was put into making this book. The author states that has been a Mets fan since 1969. If that's the case, he would know how to spell their names! He spells manager Davey Johnson's first name D-A-V-Y, and spells Gregg Jefferies name with only one G instead of two.
To save you time and money, here are the deals mentioned in the book, in order:

High: acquire Tom Seaver through draft lottery
Low: trade Tom Seaver
High: acquire Tom Seaver (again)
Low: Tom Seaver signs as free agent elsewhere
High: bring in Casey Stengel as manager
Low: bring in Jeff Torborg as manager
High: acquire Donn Clendenon
Low: trade Amos Otis
High: bring in Gil Hodges as manager
Low: trade Nolan Ryan
High & Low: acquire Willie Mays
High & Low: acquire Rusty Staub
High & Low: M. Donald Grant is fired and replaced by Linda DeRoulet
High: Team sold to Nelson Doubleday and Fred Wilpon
High: Rusty Staub signs as a free agent
Low: Frank Cashen retains Joe Torre as manager
Low: Claudell Washington and Dave Kingman sign as free agents elsewhere
Low: acquire Ellis Valentine
High: acquire Keith Hernandez
High: acquire Ron Darling
High: draft Dwight Gooden
Low: acquire George Foster
High: acquire Howard Johnson, Gary Carter, and Sid Fernandez
Low: Ray Knight signs as a free agent elsewhere; trade Kevin Mitchell
Low: trade Lenny Dykstra, Roger McDowell, and Mookie Wilson
High & Low: acquire Bob Ojeda (bad only because of hedge trimmer finger incident and future boating accident with Cleveland)
Low: Darryl Strawberry signs as free agent elsewhere
Low: acquire Vince Coleman
Low: acquire Bobby Bonilla
High: bring in Bobby Valentine as manager
High: acquire John Olerud
High: acquire Mike Piazza

The author states on the back cover that "I know I have only scrached the surface of the Mets' transactions." I'm sure Mets fans out there will agree that there are a lot more deals that should have made this book.

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