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Top of the pile
93
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
92/100Critics
94/100Scholars
Author:
Kevin Baker
Publisher:
Knopf
Date:
March 5, 2024
A history of baseball in New York City, spanning the game's founding to the early 1940s.
What The Reviewers Say
Insightful, beautifully crafted.
Wonderfully readable, both erudite and streetwise.
Mr. Baker’s thesis is open to debate, but that’s a feature, not a bug, as contentiousness is the very life force of baseball. Suffice it to say that he makes a solid case. More importantly, the book is a masterly narrative that will leave readers impatient for the second installment. Mr. Baker’s foreshadowing signals that Volume II will commence with the arrival of Jackie Robinson in Brooklyn, and that the book is certain to include stories of perfection, migration and a miracle in Queens. Mr. Baker has published works of fiction and history and brings skills from both genres to The New York Game. He has absorbed the vast historiography of baseball and added to it by using newspaper archives, recently digitized, that weren’t available to earlier chroniclers. He knows both the broad themes and the nuances of the city’s history, and is equally attuned to baseball’s social context and implications..
...as with earlier baseball bards, the narratives come complete with morals. But his have a harder, more disabused edge than the familiar sporting sort. The gentle haze that lay over the legendary history book The Glory of Their Times (1966), which was edited by Lawrence Ritter and which covered much of the same territory, here evaporates under the brighter sun of candor and confession. We get sharper engravings of brutal exploitation and raw appetite, with the team owners mostly favoring the first and the players mostly favoring the second.
