THE NEW YORK GAME

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.