University holds 3-day conference on NY Mets

HEMPSTEAD, N.Y. (AP) — As their first manager, Casey Stengel, might have said: Simply Amazin’.

The New York Mets are the subject of a three-day academic conference taking place at Hofstra University.

The conference takes a look at the team’s 50-year history in New York. The Mets were created just four years after the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants fled to California in 1958.

The conference features former players from Rusty Staub to Ed Kranepool. There will be panel discussions by sports journalists and baseball historians, bloggers, biographers.

Topics include: “Where were you in ’62?”

Another is titled: “Mets-merized: The Mets, Media and Cultural Literacy.”

Ed Charles is discussing his poetry. He was a third baseman on the Mets 1969 championship team.

The three-day conference runs through Saturday in Hempstead (HEM’-sted), on Long Island.