Review: Put It in the Book! (2026)

By Howie Rose with Phil Pepe

Here's a good tip about buying books: Take a look at the copyright date of the publication in question before making a decision about purchasing.

Exhibit A is "Put It in the Book," by veteran Mets' play-by-play radio announcer Howie Rose.   

He's been part of the Mets' broadcasts for the past 40 seasons, starting in 1987. Howie did some television work with the team until Bob Murphy retired in 2003. From there Rose slid over a couple of spots in the press box to the radio broadcasts, and he had a long run describing the Mets' fortunes. 

However, it hasn't been easy at times. Rose was diagnosed with bladder cancer in 2021, and he's been dealing with the effects of that illness since then. Howie announced before the 2026 season that it would be his last as "the voice of the Mets." That seemed like a good time for him to have a book out about his experiences in broadcasting, and one was issued late in the season. 

What people might not know (guilty) is that Rose already wrote a book about his broadcasting career back in 2013. This is just a reissue of that publication, done as a paperback. It gets really odd with the blurbs on the cover, which contains testimonials from David Wright, Tom Seaver and Davey Johnson. Seaver died in 2020, while Johnson died in 2025. The back cover also boldly announces, "50 Years of Mets Memories," without saying it is referring to the first 50 years of Mets memories. 

More to the point, nothing has been added to the new version. Rose watched a lot of baseball from 2013 to 2026 and went through those medical problems, so it seems like it would have been nice to have at the least a recap of those years in a reasonably short new epilogue. Without it, we have to see what we have in the reissued version to judge this book.

Since a book like this recaps the people and events from the past that Rose encountered along the way, it doesn't feel particularly dated. There are only a couple of references to what was going on in 2013. Therefore, it still has its pleasures years later. 

Rose grew up as a sports-mad kid in New York City, who decided as an eight-year-old to follow the Mets when they were born in 1962. His father was a Yankee fan at that time, which was an easy decision considering how good those teams were in that era. But father and son could at least bond over the sport, which they did. Eventually Rose turned his passion into an interest in sportscasting. There's a funny story about how he started a fan club for Marv Albert, who couldn't have been nicer to the youngster and became something of a mentor to Rose in his attempt to become a broadcaster. 

Rose took a variety of jobs once he entered college, with the hopes of eventually landing a play-by-play spot in the major leagues. One of his stops was at SportsPhone, the score service that was popular in the pre-Internet days of the early 1980s. I'm also a graduate of the SportsPhone school of broadcasting. Howie never did leave the New York City area, choosing to gain experience where he could in New York. It was something of a coin flip as to whether he'd end up as a baseball or hockey announcer. Circumstances eventually pushed him into the baseball spot full-time. 

Rose's timing was good in following the Mets. As a fan and then as an announcer, he has first-hand knowledge of the entire history of the team. That's a valuable skill for a radio broadcaster, who often has time to fill during a game. Rose can call on all of those years of experience in bringing up relevant subjects. The best years for the team are the ones that come up frequently here: the 1969 Miracle Mets, the 1986 World Champions, and the pennants in 1973 and 2000. But Rose also throws in some personal anecdotes of some of the memorable personalities that he has encountered over the years. 

Maybe Rose will find himself with too much free time in retirement, and come up with a sequel to "Put It in the Book!" But the original can serve as a keepsake for those who either remember those great teams from the past or want to learn about them. 

Three stars

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Review: Game Day (2026)

By Doug MacLean and Greg Oliver

Many sports fans have tried and failed to become top athletes at some point in their lives, mostly because of a lack of talent. No doubt some wouldn't mind would jump at the chance to play in the majors - at least until the reality of facing NFL linemen or MLB pitchers comes to mind. 

When that happens, it's time to downsize those dreams. If a fan can't be transformed into a player, maybe serving as a team's general manager would be the next best thing. After all, most teams don't win a championship, so the idea that someone like our dreamer could get the home-town favorites over the top is a fun one.

As the book "Game Day" points out, be careful what you wish for. 

Doug MacLean knows what it is like to be the general manager of a big league team. He served that role with the Columbus Blue Jackets from 1998 to 2007. MacLean even wore more hats than simply the GM's version. He was the team president during those years, and once had to serve as a head coach. That's a lot of hats.

Years after leaving Columbus, MacLean has written a book about what the NHL general manager's job is really like. The short version of the tale goes something like this: the pay is good, the hours are long, the rewards can be large ... and the chances of ultimate success in a given year are quite small (slightly more three percent of all teams win titles in a given year).  

This is nicely grouped into various departments. As you might have guessed, it's not a matter of simply making the odd trade during the course of the season. Task number one upon arrival, and one to keep in mind for the duration, is a simple one: Keep the owner (or owners) happy. If he/she is not content, chances are he'll try to find someone who can succeed in that task. The good GMs keep constant contact with the owner, no doubt talking the boss down from the bridge after three losses in a row. 

But communication also counts when it comes to working down the organizational chart. A general manager has a large staff of people working for him, and he has to know what's going on. It sounds like MacLean was on the phone with those people a lot.  The coach matters the most, but those who work in the minor leagues, scouting, and analytics also matter too. Everyone has to be rowing in the same direction. The relationship with the players has changed over the years, as they have certain rights - and a powerful union is right there to defend them. It's a good idea for a general manager to keep those players happy - it cuts down on explosions and trade demands down the road.  

The longest chapter in the book is probably of the most interest to hockey fans; it's called "Player Acquisition." Trades are the most fun from a distance, but there are a variety of other avenues to acquire talent. The draft and free agent signings are the obvious ones, but waivers and offer sheets also can be used to pick up someone for the roster. As you might guess, knowledge is power in such situations, and MacLean liked to have as many people play a role in decisions. It was particularly true shortly before the trading deadline, when a team may have only minutes to make a decision about completing a particular deal. 

Tucked near the back are a couple of chapters on two areas that don't take up too much of a general manager's time: media and fans. More specifically, a GM has a few major events on the calendar in which he needs to be available to the media. That includes the beginning and ending of a particular season, big trades (or sometimes in the case of Deadline Day, no trades), and draft day. The coach now provides almost all of the daily updates about the state of the team.  

And don't forget the personal toll. The hours are very long, and families sometimes get moved back down the ladder a step. GMs are encouraged to find time for family events, but it's still difficult. If the Blue Jackets weren't winning, every MacLean family member heard about it after they walked out the front door. 

Considering that MacLean has been out of the GM's chair for about 20 years, he deserves credit for keeping himself with a finger on the pulse of the game. MacLean checked his contacts around the league to see how the business has changed in recent years. No. 1 is that the salary cap is fully implemented these days. That's a little complicated, but it's part of the story too. MacLean still does some TV work in Canada, so he does need to stay on top of developments in order to keep current on the air. There are some good stories about MacLean's own experiences along the way as well as others' tales from the hockey world. That helps keep things moving along with some needed smiles.  

Probably the best book of this type that I've read about pro sports is Ned Colletti's "The Big Chair." It was about his time with the Los Angeles Dodgers; and it sounds as if running a baseball team was even more complicated than doing running a hockey team. "Game Day" isn't quite as good as that, partly because it's not quite as current. But it still works quite well. You'll probably come away with the idea that serving as a fan of a team is much more fun and relaxing than running it. 

Four stars

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Review: Althea (2023)

By Sally H. Jacobs

There aren't many well-known people who go by the name Althea. Althea Gibson - the first Black person (male or female) to win a Grand Slam tournament title in tennis - probably tops the list. 

Althea is a Greek name, said to mean "healer" or "wholesome." If her parents had been able to forecast the future, they would have come up with something that translated to "trailblazer" or "champion." That was Gibson, who is certainly underrated on the list of racial pioneers in the United States - even among athletes. 

She certainly deserves a full biography, and Sally H. Jacobs comes through with an excellent effort with her 2023 book, "Althea." 

Let's start with three quick points about what makes her such an interesting subject even close to 70 years after her prime years as a tennis player:

1. It's difficult to imagine how tough Gibson's road to athletic success was. Tennis was one of the two main "country club" sports in her era, which meant most of the good players came out of relatively wealthy backgrounds. The club was where they learned and played the game. In the 1950s and before, that certainly meant that major championships in America were almost always reserved for white players. (There were some separate events for Blacks, and Gibson became a frequent winner on that circuit.) That was particularly true for tournaments in the South. And keep in mind that the top level of competition in that era was for amateurs only. In other words, you needed outside money to be able to practice your skills and go to tournaments ... because winning didn't carry any financial benefits. Gibson had to rely on help from relative strangers to receive lessons on the game and opportunities to even play in tournaments.

2. Tennis is a sport where the competitor is all alone. Care to travel around the country for events,  knowing that a designated hotel for competitors might not let you stay there because of skin color? Right - no thank you. As the only Black on the circuit in the mid-1950s, Althea didn't have many close friends who could listen to her experiences and fully understand her emotions. At least when Jackie Robinson broke into major league baseball in 1947, he had teammates who were rooting for him to succeed.

3. Gibson integrated not one, but two major women's sports. She was the first Black woman to join the LPGA Tour in 1964. Althea wasn't particularly good by professional standards, taking up the game in her 30s. Althea only came close to winning a few tournaments and usually ranked well down the leaderboard. But she was there with the other pros ... and the reception to her presence in the golf world was relatively close to her experiences in tennis. It's as if Robinson could skate and joined the National Hockey League for a while. 

That's all a heck of a start of a biography, and the story has plenty of surrounding drama. It starts in South Carolina, where Gibson was born in 1927 to sharecroppers. You might expect that there wouldn't be much time for tennis there. The family moved to Harlem in New York City after her birth. That figured to be a step up in terms of quality of life, and maybe it was. But around the time of their arrival, the Gibsons had to deal with the fact that a Depression was about to start - hitting the Black community hard. Mix an economic downtown with overcrowding, and you have a recipe for serious urban problems. Althea, at least, was quite a physical specimen - on her way to growing to a height of 5-foot-11. She was New York City's paddle tennis champion at age 12. She could compete with boys in almost everything athletic; you might have called her a "tomboy" back then. 

Eventually Althea found opportunities to play tennis in New York, and her skills demanded attention. Gibson's talent caught the eye of a North Carolina doctor who took her in as a teen and sponsored her play. She went on to qualify for the U.S. championships at Forest Hills in 1950 - knocking down that racial barrier. Gibson continued to improve in the next few years, climbing up the rankings. In hindsight, it's interesting to read about how women's tennis worked in those days at its highest level. Players would take the usual steps forward and reach the top (or at least fulfill their potential). But remember, there was no prize money and no endorsement money available. The champions sometimes peeled off to get married or make a living. The idea of playing for 20 years would have been preposterous.  

That movement left some space for Gibson to reach the top of her sport. She won the French Open in 1956, and took the U.S. Open and All-England titles in 1957 and 1958. And then she was gone, taking a needed long break and having an on-again, off-again relationship with tennis. Althea tried turning professional, which was in the barnstorming stage and didn't really work at all for women. The pro golf idea came up a few years later. It's easy to speculate how she might have done if she had taken up the game earlier. 

Around the age of 40, Gibson - a woman who once received a ticker-tape parade down the middle of New York City - was at the point where she had no idea what she'd do with the rest of her life. A couple of marriages failed, some business ventures flopped, and some civic and government jobs more or less had little staying power. And it's not as if most country clubs of the era were willing to hire a Black to be their tennis pro. Old habits die hard. She comes across as rather lost and a little forgotten, although some of her isolation certainly was self-inflicted. 

Yes, quite a story - even without a happy ending. Jacobs certainly put a ton of effort into the book, and does a very good job of a balanced portrait of Gibson's good times and bad times. The author seems to have talked to almost everyone who ever met her, or so it seems. 

Gibson's death did spark a burst of appreciation for her life on the tennis court. There is a good-sized monument for her in Flushing Meadow, New York - the current home of the U.S. Open. But the question lingers in the background: What if she had been in her prime right now? Could she have become a player like Serena Williams? Since we'll never know, we'll have to appreciate what she did do. "Althea" helps us do exactly that.  

Five stars

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Review: The Year's Best Sports Writing 2026

Edited by Mirin Fader

It didn't take long for the latest issue of "The Year's Best Sports Writing" - an annual series that dates back a few decades in different forms and publishers - to be impressive. 

As in, the introduction. 

Guest editor Mirin Fader puts some early points by recounting her reaction to the news that the Washington Post was dropping its sports section: horror. You didn't have to live in Washington to be angry about that. A lot of experience and institutional knowledge about the Washington area, the country, and the sports world in general walked out the door when the Post gave up on sports. 

On the other hand, though, it's not as if we shouldn't have seen something like this coming. You only needed to reach each year's choices in this series of books to realize the landscape of sports journalism has been changing over the years. Go back 40 years to when the Sporting News was handling this assignment, and most of the stories were from newspapers and magazines. Now their appearances have become somewhat few and far between, replaced by outlets that are relatively unknown to mainstream readers.

Fader writes in her introduction, "I wanted this edition of The Year's Best Sports Writing to be a love letter. I want people to fall back in love. I wanted reading this to feel like we used to feel when our favorite sports writer put out a piece, and everyone would comment on Twitter, 'Appointment reading,' or 'Blind retweet.'" There is some good writing out there; it's just getting difficult to find it. 

There are 25 stories for the reader's consideration. The good news is that most of them are worthwhile. Last year's selections had a high percentage of efforts from out of the mainstream and was more hit-or-miss than most of the books in this series; that number dropped this time around. 

It's worth saying right at the start that there are a couple of patterns in the selections here that are interesting. The first is that Fader is a senior writer for the Athletic. Out of those 25 stories, seven are from the Athletic. That seems like a high percentage from a distance, although I have few complaints about the selections from that outlet. The second is that Fader is best known for her biographies of a couple of basketball players who grew up in the Eastern Hemisphere - Giannis and Hakeem. Therefore, some of the picks are not surprisingly international in tone. 

My usual standard for determining the possibility of interest in a particular story comes from the answer to a question: Would this be in the sports section of a newspaper? Admittedly, some of the ones here wouldn't be. There's a story about a skier who ended up as a crime boss, a tale of a woman who took her motorcycle and criss-crossed Africa with it, a report on women who essentially hiked across the top of the Canadian Rockies. A restaurant review by a noted critic caught me by surprise, but the review could have used a little whimsy when in this company. I struggled with these quite a bit. 

But there were plenty of other stories that carried me along. An old-fashioned profile of Cal Raleigh - "Big Dumper" - was nicely done. The dark side of sports betting as it affects the athletes themselves is eye-opening. Who knew that Robert Caro was the guiding unseen hand behind the rise of the Oklahoma City Thunder of the NBA?  It was fascinating to see what happened to former Dolphins' lineman Jonathan Martin. The story about the after-effects of the deaths of hockey's Gaudreau is sometimes haunting. 

Three of the stories stood out, and one was a natural for me. A 50-year anniversary story of Ali-Frazier III is as good as could be hoped - a moment that probably stands close to the peak of history of boxing interest. (Things haven't been the same since then.) It was a hanging curve ball that was slugged out of the park. A profile of Dale Earnhardt Jr., still trying to cope with the loss of his famous father, has tons of new information - at least to a non-NASCAR follower. But Tom Junod gets the "Best in Show" Award with a story about two high school quarterbacks who have much in common even though their tragic stories are 50 years apart. Junod asks all the right questions in this one, even if we'll never be really comfortable with the answers.  

You'll speed through the good stories and skim through the less interesting ones, which makes the 350-page length a little less intimidating. "The Year's Best Sports Writing 2026" has a very good batting average this time, and it's worth your time. 

Four stars

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Review: The Cruelest Game (2026)

By Matthew Futterman

This has been something of an unstable decade in the world of professional tennis - particularly compared to what happened before it.

For about 20 years starting in 2003 or so, it was easy to figure out what would happen in the major tournaments. Roger Federer was just about to start his run of greatness, taking Grand Slam #1 in 2003 at Wimbledon. Rafael Nadal became his biggest rival when he joined the Majors Club with a victory at the French Open in 2005. For a while there it seemed as if it wasn't a big tournament if Federer and Nadal didn't play each other - ideally for a championship. 

Then came Novak Djokovic in 2008, who captured the Australian Open then. He became a regular threat in the majors starting around 2011. Suddenly the Dynamic Duo became the Terrific Trio. All three have an argument as the greatest men's player of all time, and Djokovic is still trying to add to his reputation right now.  

The women's players also had a couple of all-time greats on the scene, and they were even sisters. Venus Williams won the first of seven Slams in 2000 - a year behind sister Serena's first big trophy. We didn't know that the win by Venus at Wimbledon in 2008 would be her seventh and last major title. But Serena was just getting warmed up then. She picked up her 21st and last Slam win in 2017. 

Once those eras ended, we've had some scrambling at the top. Matthew Futterman, a reporter for the Athletic who clearly knows the game and its people, takes a good-sized look at the participants who have been top players in recent years, and - in some cases, their struggles for consistency - in "The Cruelest Game."  The resulting book is one part tennis and one part psychology. Matches, it seems, are often won above the neck instead of below it. 

At least on the men's side, a big rivalry has developed. Carlos Alcaraz has seven Slams to his credit, and Jannik Sinner has six. They have won 10 of the last 12 titles, taking over the spotlight once Djokovic won three of four championships in 2023. It's a lot to ask for them to have the staying power of Federer and Nadal. On the women's side, no one has won more than six Grand Slam titles in a career since Serena Williams retired. The leader is Iga Świątek, who has four French Open crowns to go with a win at Wimbledon and Flushing Meadows.  

As Futterman discovers as he checks out the top players, their problems are unique in sports. Start with childhood, when the best players are usually identified and fast-tracked toward professional status. Care to move to a warm-weather academy and have your entire life ruled by a ball and racquet while leaving friends behind? Throw in the fact that families sometimes dedicate huge portions of their financial resources toward the goal of making tennis a nice livelihood for everyone involved. That's a lot of pressure on a kid. It's tough to make friends along the way, particularly if you aren't in the same country for more than a couple of weeks at a time. This is a sport where the various mental demands can become too much, forcing sabbaticals if not early retirements. This last part goes back at least as far as Bjorn Borg, who left the stage shortly after it seemed he was just starting to fall off the peak of the mountain. 

And speaking of pressure, Futterman makes a terrific point when he talks about personal finances. Yes, there's big money to be made in the sport, but only at the top. Players can get by if they crack the top 100 consistently, but the drain caused by travel, coaching, etc. doesn't let up through injuries and slumps. If you don't play, you don't cash checks. Do it enough and outside income drops off. The odds aren't too good. At least the men playing in pro basketball, football, baseball or hockey all can do fine simply by reaching the major leagues. Women don't have the same options available, and that merely adds to the pressure involved. 

Maybe that's why the last American male to win a Grand Slam title was Andy Roddick in 2003. The replacements for Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi, who were fading away at that point, never quite arrived. The women have done a little better, but only Coco Gauff has two majors to her credit since the Williams sisters faded out of the title picture. From an American standpoint, the tennis scene is at least a little more interesting if some U.S. players are at least contenders. 

It doesn't take much for a tennis player's state of mind to change, as Futterman discovers. It can happen in a snap - an injury, a fight with a relative, a search for a new coach. Sometimes when a player thinks he or she has an answer, the question changes. 

The author has some opinions about what's going on here, and sometimes this reads a bit like a psychology book with tennis serving as a case study. It's a side of the game that might not be as popular with audiences who simply want to see good athletic competition. But "The Cruelest Game" should work nicely for those who want to take the next step into understanding it all, but need a smart guide to get there. 

Four stars

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