The New York Game
Baseball and the Rise of a New City
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4.7 • 25 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • Sports Illustrated #1 Book of 2024 • 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.
"You’re going to beg for extra innings. Without missing a scandal or a sensation, with an eye on how assimilation transforms the picture, Kevin Baker has written a buoyant, double coming-of-age story. "—Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize-winning author
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
