The New York Game

Starred review from December 15, 2023
A brilliant writer makes a convincing case that New York City is, and always has been, the center of the baseball universe. The concept of this book--the intertwined history of baseball in New York City from its origins to the mid-1940s--seems overly ambitious. Yet Harper's contributing editor Baker, author of The Fall of a Great American City and America the Ingenious, is more than equal to the task, delivering a remarkably entertaining mixture of sports and social history. "For the last two centuries," he writes in the first chapter, "the game's trajectory has followed the city's many rises and declines, its booms and its busts, its follies and its tragedies." Baker, who co-authored the Reggie Jackson memoir Becoming Mr. October, lays waste to several origin myths about baseball and provides a wealth of well-researched material. He chronicles the evolution of the layout of the field and rules of the game, traces the organization of New York's baseball clubs, and provides fascinating detail about the professionalization of the game by a host of characters both admirable and detestable. (His history of the formation of the National League is excellent.) From Babe Ruth in the buff to the Miracle of Coogan's Bluff, Baker combines top-shelf historical scholarship with the literary panache that marks the best sports writing, yielding a narrative gem that's fast-paced, intricate, and consistently engaging. As implausible as it might seem, given the length and breadth of the book, readers will be left hoping that Baker is hard at work on a sequel to guide them through the upheaval of the Giants and Dodgers leaving New York, George Steinbrenner's Yankees, and the story of the Mets. Until then, savor this massively impressive book by a talented author who is clearly in love with his subject. An exemplary sports book.

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February 5, 2024
Bestseller Baker (Paradise Alley) returns with a comprehensive and evocative account of America’s national pastime in the country’s largest city. Squaring off against later associations of baseball with the rural and pastoral, Baker demonstrates how the sport was shaped in particular by the spaces and people of New York. Tracing the evolution of the game’s rules, tactics (including the development of the curveball), and professional standards, Baker introduces readers to the motley crew of New York hustlers, scalawags, and dreamers who made baseball such a popular and compelling game. Well-known figures including rough and tumble New York Giants manager John McGraw appear alongside lesser-known but still fascinating characters like Beansy Rosenthal, a New York gambler associated with World Series fixer Arnold Rothstein. In textured and painterly prose, Baker tells the parallel stories of how the game and the city developed across more than a century, from the 1820s through the 1940s—to that end, the fantastic concluding bibliographical essay demonstrates the degree to which Baker’s work is built on the shoulders of the giants of New York City history writing. This doorstopper is a great way for baseball fans to kick-start the 2024 season.

Starred review from February 15, 2024
Baseball fans beyond Gotham's gravitational pull might bristle at the notion that New York was the epicenter of the creation and growth of the game. But Baker's raucous, revelatory, lovingly detailed account will win them over from the first pitch. Baker lays out the early history of the game in the city, then seamlessly weaves together the vibrant origin stories of the New York Yankees, New York Giants, Brooklyn Dodgers, and the city's Cuban and African American teams, right up to the eve of Jackie Robinson's 1945 signing with the Dodgers. He vividly recreates the recklessly ambitious, breathtakingly corrupt, alcohol-fueled world of Tammany Hall politics--which were followed by the reforms of Fiorello La Guardia--that steered, and were sometimes even steered by, the game. Dozens of near-mythic and also too-human figures parade through the pages, from John McGraw, Christy Mathewson, Fred Merkle, Carl Hubbell, Mel Ott, Leo Durocher, Casey Stengel, Red Barber, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, and Branch Rickey, to an array of crime bosses, team owners, and mayors. Then there was Babe Ruth, whose gaudy statistics, irrepressible personality, and seismic impact on the game, the city, and the entire nation outshone even his legend, as Baker convincingly argues here. A spellbinding history of a game and the city where it found itself.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.