New York is unique in that it has two Major League teams. Back in the day when there were just 16 teams, this was not uncommon, with dual clubs in Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia and St. Louis. In fact, prior to 1957, New York supported three teams. The Mets were only born out of necessity after the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants departed for the west coast, leaving the National League without representation in the country’s most populous area. Not to mention the fans of those two rivals who were bereft and for the most part had no intention of rooting for the hated Bronx Bombers. Thus begins Devin Gordon’s wonderfully entertaining history, SO MANY WAYS TO LOSE.

At first, no one had any expectations that the Mets would actually be decent, let alone good. There were slim pickings among the players from which they and their fellow newbies, the Houston Astros, were allowed to choose. The Mets decided to go with name recognition rather than building for the future. The results were historically bad, and the Mets became the punchline for jokes about well-meaning shortcomings.

"I have probably read 99 percent of the books written about the team. SO MANY WAYS TO LOSE is the funniest, saddest, most infuriating and most honest of the bunch."

I’m sure that other teams with long histories of lousy performances managed to yank defeat from the jaws of victory in similar fashion, but there was just something about the Mets that added the adjective “lovable” to their “loser” tag. Maybe it was their skipper, Casey Stengel, who, along with general manager George Weiss, was fired by the Yankees for the sin of being too old despite a boatload of championships. Stengel charmed the media with his gift of gab, soothing the anxiety that would become the hallmark of future generations of fans once they got a taste of success thanks to the Miracle Mets of 1969.

Why weren’t they able to continue on that high level following that championship season, or in the mid-to-late ’80s when the roster featured surefire Hall of Famers like Darryl Strawberry and Doc Gooden? Mostly it came down to bad decisions by the front office with disastrous trades and signings (bye-bye, Nolan Ryan; hello, Joe Foy, Jim Fregosi and Vince Coleman).

Sometimes it was as simple as a player hitting his peak and unable to repeat, whether because of age or bizarre injury. As Gordon writes about a recent spring training, “They celebrate Groundhog Day a little differently around here: Every year at about this time, the Mets emerge from hibernation to see which player will be the first to need an MRI.”

SO MANY WAYS TO LOSE is not all fun and games. Gordon gets serious when he describes the decline and fall of some heralded players like Strawberry and Gooden (who, the author points out, were resurrected briefly by the damnable Yankees of George Steinbrenner) or Mackey Sasser, a promising catcher who developed a case of the yips that made it virtually impossible for him to throw the ball back to the pitcher, the underlying cause of which was truly heartbreaking. There are also instances when racism played a role in dealing with some of the Mets’ players of color. This included how some of those issues were reported by members of the press, who Gordon describes accurately as mostly middle-aged white men who might not be as sensitive as they could be.

This is not a complete history, lest anyone get the wrong idea. Gordon --- a veteran journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic and Newsweek, among others --- picks a few key eras as indicative of the franchise’s failings. For me these were the mid-’70s, when fortunately I was working as a counselor in a sleepaway camp near Montreal and was unable to follow the mundane events, and most of the ’90s, when they were, as per Bob Klapisch and John Harper’s book, THE WORST TEAM MONEY COULD BUY.

Even when they did approach some level of greatness, there was always a dark cloud looming around the corner, ready to rain down disappointment. A great example is “The Catch” made by Endy Chavez in the 2006 National League Championship Series against the St. Louis Cardinals, judged by many (including Gordon) as one of the greatest defensive plays of all time. It would have been more satisfying if Carlos Beltran, perhaps the Mets’ best hitter that season, hadn’t taken a called third strike with the bases loaded to lose the game. Oh well, that’s what you get for plighting your baseball trough with this crew.

At one point late in the book, Gordon recalls talking with Gary Cohen and Ron Darling, two-thirds of one of the best broadcasting teams in all of baseball: “When I told [them], separately, that I was a lifelong Mets fan, they each said the same thing, ‘I’m sorry.’” Well, I have been a Mets fan since the early days, God help me. I have probably read 99 percent of the books written about the team. SO MANY WAYS TO LOSE is the funniest, saddest, most infuriating and most honest of the bunch.