If it is indeed true that opera is baseball for gay men (and many gay women, too) then New York City is doubly blessed, boasting two major league ballparks (and teams) and two "major league" opera houses. The "games" of opera and baseball are not entirely alien to one another, both being strenuous displays requiring equal parts strength, skill, elegance, and, yes, even artistry.

The fan psychology is nearly identical. Legions of guys come out to cheer on their heroes vociferously, but often turn on them, if the unfortunate "athletes" are having a bad day.

All this is leading up to the point where I shall introduce an absolute grand slam of an opera-related book, Start Up at the New Met, by Paul Jackson (Amadeus Press, 640 pages, $49.95). I think this book will not only send us operameisters around the bases in no time flat, but with its marvelous blend of statistics and lore it will please even those who don’t know Renee Fleming from Rhonda Fleming.

Paul Jackson has been monitoring Metropolitan Opera history by channeling the company’s glorious output of radio broadcasts for years—beginning in 1931 with the first broadcast and ending with the last broadcast from the company’s pre-Lincoln Center home in 1966. Mr. Jackson’s second volume is superceded here by Start Up at the New Met which chronicles the more than 200 broadcasts given by the Met at Lincoln Center between 1966 and 1976.

The Metropolitan Opera Association was certainly the most peripatetic, glamorous and exciting company of is kind, at least through the 1960s. It was very much, in fact, like the MGM Studio in the 1930s and 40s. Hundreds of wildly creative people—and not a few crackpots—hurtled through its portals. At its best, the product was almost perfect in every way—at its worst, things were just glitzy. If MGM’s Mayer had more stars than there were in heaven, Met General Manager Rudolf Bing had more divas (of both genders) than could be pushed, screaming, into the Lincoln Center fountain.

The intrigues were endless, the casting couch, (it has been alleged) well used. If one handsome, headstrong tenor garnered a new production for the next season, then you can bet that the company’s other handsome headstrong tenor would stop at nothing until he had wrung a similar perk from Bing. It’s a good bet that six other plain, aging tenors had also tried and failed with this strategy.

And the ladies—whether you are gay, lesbian, straight or from Mars, you had to agree to the fabulousness of the Met "stable" of voluptuous, incredibly gifted ladies—Tebaldi, Leontyne Price, Joan Sutherland, Grace Bumbry, Dorothy Kirsten, and many more. Ah, what a time it was to be an opera fan.

Every night, we standees slipped into our places, from which we observed much about operatic life, and, incidentally, a fair amount about gay life, too. Every Saturday afternoon, however, most of us stayed home to listen to—and record—the broadcasts.

In his book, Mr. Jackson patiently relates the human dramas beyond the merely musical ones that transpired each week. Opera critics are notoriously subjective in their appraisals of singers. Mr. Jackson certainly has his favorites—just try convincing him that Zinka Milanov or Licia Albanese ever had a bad night.

He also has angered me in his previous book by doing the one thing that can make me furious—making insulting comments about Renata Tebaldi. Of her, he said "Perfection is boring," or the really hurtful "being a Tebaldi fan must be like having a heroine addiction." We all know that in actuality she enchanted audiences in a manner that few ever did before or since and owned the most beautiful operatic sound of her day and then some.

There, now that I have that out of my system, I must say that Jackson also chronicled the exciting debut of Kiri te Kanawa (years away from damehood) as Desdemona in Otello, on less than half a day’s notice. I was actually in the house for that one, and reading Jackson’s account, my own excitement is rekindled.

The author relates in honorable fashion, some of the less happy broadcast events. On February 1, 1969, Anna Moffo almost brought proceedings to a halt with a performance of Lucia Di Lammermoor, marked by some of the most horrid vocalism ever to be broadcast—anywhere.

Moffo, the young, beautiful, and glamorous soprano, who had been hailed around the world since before she was thirty, was suffering from an early onset of "vocal problems" that would effectively end her career before her 40th birthday.

Faced with the poor woman’s disaster, Mr. Bing wanted to terminate the broadcast early, before the soprano’s famous "mad scene" but couldn’t bring himself to do so. That was the first broadcast I had ever deliberately turned off in my life.

In the book, famous names: Tucker Coreli, Merrill, Siepi, Nilsson are there, and the often brilliant work is discussed honestly and sympathetically by Jackson. I own 200 CDs of broadcasts, and as I read this fine chronicle, I long to listen and experience—almost first hand—this wonderful musical legacy.

Such non-singing personnel as Milton Cross, the radio pioneer who was the "Voice of the Met" for 34 years is charmingly remembered, too.

The book is filled with dozens of full page photos of the most beloved singers—in costume and as themselves" Nothing has beenneglected in Start Up at the New Met. You’ll want to cry, "Encore!"