Magazine Cover Derby Round 1.01

[Benjamin Grimm]

http://leaptoad.com/mets/covers/images/magazines/MCD.png>



Vote for the cover that you like the best. Voting will run for seven days.



Casey of the Mets

Sports Illustrated, March 5, 1962.

http://leaptoad.com/mets/covers/magazines/19620305_SI.jpg>





How the A's Tamed the Mets

Baseball Digest, January 1974.

http://leaptoad.com/mets/covers/magazines/19740100_BD.jpg>





New York New York

Sports Illustrated, July 13, 1987.

http://leaptoad.com/mets/covers/magazines/19870713_SI.jpg>





Double Take

The New Yorker, April 2, 2007.

http://leaptoad.com/mets/covers/magazines/20070402_TNY.jpg>

[Edgy MD]

The New Yorker cover is compelling, but it's hard to figure out what it's trying to say absent further context. The players seem to intersect on a non Euclidian plane, and the Navy blue wall suggests that this is a Yankees cover that a Met is guesting in.



Casey is hard to beat. The best part is that his hands appear to be in his back pockets. He's on a photo-shoot in front of dozens of sophisticated artistic lighting and layout people and he's just feeling the hell out of his ancient Casey buttocks.

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

SI Casey cover is dynamite and easily wins this group.



The "stacked logo" Sports Illustrated era was not their greatest, and that NY/NY cover in particular was a stinker.



Baseball Digest obviously isn't trying.



I think the NYer cover says something about how we live in the city, one man's ceiling is another man's floor and all. I'm giving it the silver medal in this group.

[whippoorwill]

New Norker for me

[batmagadanleadoff]

Johnny Lunchbucket wrote: The "stacked logo" Sports Illustrated era was not their greatest, and that NY/NY cover in particular was a stinker. .

I just loathed that new SI logo from 1987. And the fonts SI used to accompany the cover story, beginning in 1987. I was saddened every time I got my issue in the mail during this era. For me, it marked the beginning of the end of SI's run as the sports mag that put out the best covers in the business. And split covers suck. (Wait till we get to that crappy SI split cover featuring Seaver and Palmer, Seaver's only regular season SI cover during his prime years as a Met) So I can't say anything good about this Straw/Mattingly cover. Looks like it's gonna be Casey '62 in a landslide in this bracket.

[seawolf17]

I kind of love that New Yorker cover, but Casey is tough to beat.



I agree with batmags on the 1987. It did all start to seem very "same" around that point.

[kcmets]

I'd be shocked if Casey didn't go far in this tourney. Great photo.

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

Johnny Lunchbucket wrote: The "stacked logo" Sports Illustrated era was not their greatest, and that NY/NY cover in particular was a stinker. . I just loathed that new SI logo from 1987. And the fonts SI used to accompany the cover story, beginning in 1987. I was saddened every time I got my issue in the mail during this era. For me, it marked the beginning of the end of SI's run as the sports mag that put out the best covers in the business. And split covers suck. (Wait till we get to that crappy SI split cover featuring Seaver and Palmer, Seaver's only regular season SI cover during his prime years as a Met) So I can't say anything good about this Straw/Mattingly cover. Looks like it's gonna be Casey '62 in a landslide in this bracket.

Also about then the SI swimsuit issue went from 96 pages to 400 and they gave away football phones with a subscription.

[batmagadanleadoff]

Johnny Lunchbucket wrote: Also about then the SI swimsuit issue went from 96 pages to 400....

That's what also ended up happening with the Mets yearbooks. But with the Mets, every single one of those extra pages is an ad -- a local ad.

[Centerfield]

I remember that '87 SI cover. It was one of the first times I realized that Mets/Yankees were a rivalry.



I grew up upstate, and the Yankees/Mets thing isn't nearly as big as it is here. My dad is a Yankee fan, so I used to watch Yankee games too. I just liked the Mets better. He sat and watched the '86 World Series with me and he rooted for the Mets to beat the Red Sox like any Yankee fan would.



That cover was when I first started to realize that Yankees and Mets fans had a competition going, and slowly I learned I'm not supposed to like the Yankees.



That being said, the cover sucks. Casey laps the field here.

[G-Fafif]

I distinctly remember that Baseball Digest being thinner than most issues, with an explanation from the publisher that the national paper shortage was the reason. That was a real thing in late 1973.



Remember waiting more than two months for a review of the World Series? Sometimes I miss baseball winters the way they used to be, morsels parceled out here and there and being immensely grateful for every bite.



That issue might have helped cement my view of the 1973 World Series as not a terrible thing despite the loss. "We still get to be in this great magazine -- more or less on the cover -- despite having lost in seven games."



I didn't subscribe to SI until 1991, so it took a compelling angle to get me to buy an issue. I bought that one in 1987. I think I allowed myself a half-hour of "well, if the Mets can't be in it, maybe a World Series in New York would be OK..." and then I got over that nonsense ASAP.



I missed that New Yorker cover somehow in first run. I say somehow because I had http://www.faithandfearinflushing.com/2007/03/22/reading-is-fundamental/written a piece around that time about how big it was to me, even now in 2007, that the Mets get magazine coverage. I don't feel I was missing much.



Casey carries the day here. I hesitate to throw the i-word around too much (it was a theme in the yearbook derby), but that's an iconic cover at the outset of a franchise. I bet we don't get that kind of coverage (cover-age?) if anybody else was hired to manage.

[batmagadanleadoff]

=G-Fafif post_id=4499 time=1552942027 user_id=55]


Casey carries the day here. I hesitate to throw the i-word around too much (it was a theme in the yearbook derby), but that's an iconic cover at the outset of a franchise. I bet we don't get that kind of coverage (cover-age?) if anybody else was hired to manage.

[Edgy MD]

A year later, Yogi would be able to, but point well taken.

[Benjamin Grimm]

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Rankings so far:

1. Casey of the Mets (Sports Illustrated)