By Julia Gardiner

The University a reading today from University professor of English Dana Brand’s new book, “Mets Fan,” in Monroe Lecture Hall. A popular sports podcast will broadcast from the reading and the NY Mets contributed “blinkypins” to the event.

Brand said the book, which was released in Aug. 2007, began with an essay about being a fan he wrote in a series of personal essays about his life. The Mets essay ran in the Sunday sports edition of Newsday on August 28, 2005. It garnered a large response, particularly among Internet bloggers, even gaining Brand a marriage proposal from one confused reader who mistook his gender.

“At one point you could find [the essay] in 20 places on the Internet,” Brand said. “A lot of people know it mainly from online sources. A lot of the best things being written about baseball are online in blogs.”

Brand expects many in attendance at the reading were bloggers and Internet readers who did not know him as a professor.

The book is the first of its kind in recent years and comes after a disappointing season for the team, who did not make the playoffs, despite holding first place in its division for most of the season. “Why is it that something like baseball means anything to me? Why is it fun when it’s so consistently unpleasant?” Brand said. “I see myself almost as a kind of grief counselor for Mets fans.”

Addressing Mets baseball as “this beautiful, wonderful thing that lets people make it part of their life,” the book is intended to go beyond the merchandising and consumerism rampant in the sport. “If you go to the Mets store you can buy these $100 jerseys but you can’t buy a book about the Mets,” Brand said. “There hasn’t been much written in the last three or four decades.” Brand hopes the Mets, to which he has sent several copies of the book and received positive feedback, will support his publication and help publicize it.

Apart from the expected visits to games at the stadium, University classrooms served as an unusual venue for development of the book. “In my 20 years at Hofstra I have been developing a voice that can talk to people about things that are important to them without intimidating them or, I hope, condescending to them” Brand said. “I try to explain to my students why I’m enthusiastic about something. I think that gave me a certain kind of voice to explain to people why I’m enthusiastic about this.”

Brand credits former Commissioner of Baseball Bart Giamatti as an inspiration for his treatment of baseball in a personal and literary fashion. Brand studied under Giamatti at Yale, where he taught literature before being appointed commissioner of baseball. “He wrote about baseball in a very poetic way,” Brand said, and added that, although his writing is different from his former professor’s, he attempted to capture the same poetry in the sport. “I like that I can get all lyrical about it,” said Brand.

The conclusion that kept cropping up for the professor was that no matter the emotional distress of constant excitement and disappointment, being a baseball fan is worth it. “Baseball fascinates me, but what really fascinates me is why I am so interested in it,” said Brand. “There are million of other people that are doing the same thing. I wanted to speak for them.”

Professor Dana Brand (right) pictured with Mr. Met. (danabrand.com)