The Brooklyn Cyclones: Hardball Dreams and the New Coney Island

THE BROOKLYN CYCLONES: HARDBALL DREAMS AND THE NEW CONEY ISLAND BY BEN OSBORNE NYU PRESS, 208 PAGES, $24.95

TAKE A WRITER and contributing editor for Slam magazine, a nostalgia-crazed borough still suffering from an intense baseball jones and a romanticized-yet-seedy setting that's overused by filmmakers, novelists and fashion photographers alike.

Sounds like a disastrous house-tree-person combination that even the most drunken art therapist could stick a Nathan's french-fry fork into and call "done." But Ben Osborne pulls off a workmanlike effort that tells the full story of the Brooklyn Cyclones' initial campaign as a local short-season Class-A minor league franchise in the New York Mets organization.

Most books about the minor leagues drip with underdog, against-all-odds predictability. Though the 2001 season for the Cyclones now seems a decade away, under the watchful eye of Osborne, readers grasp it from several angles. What is life like for a California-born Mets prospect toiling in the New York-Penn League? How about a local kid who lives in the projects just a few blocks away from the sparkling new KeySpan Park? What about the political hot potato of construction? The red herrings thrown at the taxpayers stuck with the tab?

The book doesn't burst with the colorful descriptions or schmaltzy humor often associated with minor league ball, but it's not a bad tradeoff when the author nails details about shadowy background players like former Brooklyn borough president Howard Golden, who had bigger baseball dreams for Brooklyn. Osborne also does a fine job capturing the differences between the Staten Island Yankees and the roguish Cyclones and their rowdy fans.

Though this depiction of the Brooklyn political landscape is savvy for a 2001 setting, much has changed in Kings County. Osborne's thunder has been stolen by the imminent arrival of the New Jersey Nets in downtown Brooklyn and the epic battle between developer Bruce Ratner and residents of Prospect Heights.

The Brooklyn Cyclones is right on the money in spelling out baseball's decline among urban youth. Osborne's repeated visits to the Coney Island Houses to check on the progress of the baseball-loving kid Anthony Otero finds the usual youthful ambivalence not only directed at the local minor league team, but at a notebook-toting member of the media. In the shadow of the very court that spawned Stephon Marbury, Otero and his pals rig a playground baseball diamond for daily use during the summer. If it's not baseball, then they are playing handball. Oddly enough, they aren't that interested in Slam magazine's bread-and-butter sport, the one all kids from the projects are supposedly obsessed with. Another pleasant surprise in Osborne's book.