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Baseball and the Rise of a New City
by Kevin Baker
A hugely entertaining history of baseball and New York City, bursting with larger-than-life figures and fascinating stories from the game's beginnings to the end of World War II.
Baseball is "the New York game" because New York is where the diamond was first laid out, where the bunt and the curveball were invented, and where the home run was hit. It's where the game's first stars were born, and where everyone came to play or watch the game. With nuance and depth, historian Kevin Baker brings this all vividly back to life: the still-controversial, indelible moments—Did the Babe call his shot? Was Merkle out? Did they fix the 1919 World Series? Here are all the legendary players, managers, and owners, in all their vivid, complicated humanity, on and off the field.
In Baker's hands the city and the game emerge from the murk of nineteenth-century American life—driven by visionaries and fixers, heroes and gangsters. He details how New York and its favorite sport came to mirror one another, expanding, bumbling through catastrophe and corruption, and rising out of these trials stronger than ever.
From the first innings played in vacant lots and tavern yards in the 1820s; to the canny innovations that created the very first sports league; to the superb Hispanic and Black players who invented their own version of the game when white baseball sought to exclude them. And all amidst New York's own, incredible evolution from a raw, riotous town to a new world city. The New York Game is a riveting, rollicking, brilliant ode to America's beloved pastime and to its indomitable city of origin.
"A brilliant writer makes a convincing case that New York City is, and always has been, the center of the baseball universe... Harper's contributing editor Baker...is more than equal to [his] task, delivering a remarkably entertaining mixture of sports and social history...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...Until then, savor this massively impressive book by a talented author who is clearly in love with his subject. An exemplary sports book." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"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...A spellbinding history of a game and the city where it found itself." —Booklist (starred review)
"Bestseller [Kevin] Baker (Paradise Alley) returns with a comprehensive and evocative account of America's national pastime in the country's largest city...In textured and painterly prose, Baker tells the parallel stories of how the game and the city developed across more than a century...This doorstopper is a great way for baseball fans to kick-start the 2024 season." —Publisher's Weekly
"No one knows New York City better than Kevin Baker, so it's only natural that he would breathe such spectacular life into the stories of the National Pastime in the Capital of Baseball. A remarkable, complicated doubleheader of a book." —Ken Burns, filmmaker
"This big boy may be the greatest-ever baseball book. If 'greatest' means most comprehensive, lively, erudite, and fun. It's also the consummate New York book. Imagine Robert Caro and Roger Angell joining forces, and turning to Doctorow for a spit polish. I read The New York Game in a state of protracted awe." —Darin Strauss, National Book Award winning author of Half a Life
This information about The New York Game was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Kevin Baker is a novelist, historian, and journalist. He has been a professional writer since the age of 13, working originally for the Gloucester Daily Times as a stringer covering school-boy sports. He is the coauthor of Reggie Jackson's Becoming Mr. October. His work as appeared in Harper's, where he is also a contributing editor, New York Observer, The New York Times, and The New Republic. He lives in New York City.
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