At the risk of generalizing, New Yorkers have a superiority complex and a sense of entitlement found nowhere else in the United States. They expect everything to be top-notch, bigger and better than anywhere else in the country, if not on the planet.

That was not always the case.

The title of Kevin Baker’s excellent new book, THE NEW YORK GAME: Baseball and the Rise of a New City, has a double meaning. The rules for baseball as we know it today were codified in New York; other regions of the country played with variations. The second use of the phrase easily could refer to playing by rules to get along in the city itself --- rules that were continually flaunted by politicos and citizens looking to put more money in their own pockets.

By now, serious students of the sport have come to accept that it was not invented by Abner Doubleday in the bucolic environs of Cooperstown, New York, the location of the Baseball Hall of Fame. Instead, the nascent toddler grew up in the open areas around the city before it began to attract hundreds of thousands from around the States and around the world. Those green spaces shrank as houses and businesses were erected throughout Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx, where the Yankees, Dodgers and Giants would grow as well.

At first, baseball was a game for “gentlemen” since they were the ones who had the wherewithal in terms of time and funds for such leisure activities. But few things remain pure, and soon the competitive spirit led to hiring better athletes to improve the chances of winning. According to Baker, these were often rough men of lower repute. Baseball soon became a game full of drinking (“hard-drinking” is a phrase that appears in many cases throughout the book), cursing, fighting and, perhaps most insidious of all, gambling. Comedian Greg Proops offered a fascinating but thoroughly vulgar example of their behavior in this podcast from 2010.

Maybe I’m just too naive, but I found it amazing how much greed, graft, corruption, xenophobia and racism are ingrained in New York’s history. As long as we can remember, it has always been a “melting pot,” where people from all nations, religions and races blend, making “the Big Apple” so wonderful.

Alas, Baker lifts the curtain to show us the seamier side, aka reality.

About two-thirds of the book deals with the three major league teams that vied for the affections of fans. But aside from the Yankees, Dodgers and Giants, Baker also recalls the 19th-century rivalries where games were played on roughly hewn fields, with primitive equipment and rules that changed over time to accommodate heretofore unknown situations.

THE NEW YORK GAME is divided into five eras. “Origins” examines baseball before the Major Leagues as we know it came into existence. “The Inside Game, 1901-1919” looks at the early days with a shocking number of gamblers --- most of whom seemed to be based in New York --- seeking to influence players and, subsequently, outcomes. “The Babe in Nighttown, 1920-1929” focuses on a post-World War I NYC and country when people began to cut loose, led in no small part by Babe Ruth once he was traded from the Boston Red Sox to the Yankees. Things got bigger, broader and louder, for better or worse.

“The Virtuous City: New York in the Great Depression, 1929-1939” is perhaps the most, well, depressing portion. With all that was going on due to the Market crash, it’s amazing that baseball survived. While the Yankees, Dodgers and Giants did well --- relatively speaking --- smaller markets barely had enough patrons passing through the turnstiles to keep the lights on.

The Yankees were, of course, the most successful of the three teams, dominating the American League for years thanks to Ruth, and Baker depicts the Giants as more “old school” thanks to John McGraw, who managed the team for more than 30 years. The Dodgers, for the most part, were the “lovable losers,” full of colorful characters with nicknames like Dazzy and Daffy.

“Singing in the Dark: The City in Time of War, 1939-1945” has baseball slowly coming out of one crisis and heading into another. The book ends somewhat abruptly with the end of WWII and doesn’t adequately cover how baseball was affected as players went off to serve.

Two themes run throughout the book. One is the political machines and individuals who tried to control huge swaths of everything going on in the city, including the location and construction of new ballparks and the impact it had on the surrounding neighborhoods. The other is the pernicious racism that kept African Americans out of “organized baseball.” There was no shortage of abhorrent behavior on the parts of those (white men) who made, without exaggeration, life-and-death decisions.

New York is a particular area of expertise for Baker --- his work includes PARADISE ALLEY and DREAMLAND, novels about the city in the 19th and early 20th centuries, as well as a nonfiction work, THE FALL OF A GREAT AMERICAN CITY: New York and the Urban Crisis of Affluence --- so he is in an excellent position to tell this tale. He also has published a baseball novel, SOMETIMES YOU SEE IT COMING, set in more contemporary times.

Reviewed by Ron Kaplan (www.RonKaplansBaseballBookshelf.com) on April 20, 2024

The old cliché of how art can imitate real life can be applied here in this book of the history of New York baseball and the rise of the city by Kevin Baker. Of course, one would have to consider baseball to be a form of “art”, but even so, this is a great illustration of the rise of baseball from a game scattered across the five boroughs of the city and how it compares to the rise of New York City as a major world metropolis.

The book starts off with an emphasis that is one did not already know this (most do), baseball was not invented by Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, New York. Instead, the earliest origins can be traced to various fields and street of the city in the mid 19th century. From there, the book tells the story of baseball in the city up to World War II with great detail and with emphasis on the three teams in New York during this portion of the 20th century – the Yankees, Dodgers and Giants. Each team has excellent very good, detailed descriptions of their star players (most notably Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig for the Yankees, as one might expect) and of the managers. For the latter, this is especially true for Giants manager John McGraw.

Intertwined with the history of the ballclubs is the history of the city and how it rose in stature to what it was at the time of the end of the book. Just like the excellent description of 19th century baseball of which many do not know about the New York experience such as the New York Knickerbockers – no, not to be confused with the basketball team. What is also very interesting about including the history of city politics is how they were tied in with the baseball teams. The best writing about this connection is Baker’s telling of how Tammany Hall politics were involved in the founding of the Yankees. The story of how they were also squeezed out of the Polo Grounds and ended up building a nice little park called Yankee Stadium also made for good reading.

If there is a problem with any part of the book, it comes near the end, where the stories about the teams, players, and city in the 1940’s doesn’t seem to cover all aspects as well as the rest of the book as well as an ending that seemed abrupt. But by then, I was so enamored with the rest of the book that it didn’t matter – this was an excellent, albeit lengthy, read on baseball and New York City.

I wish to thank the publisher for providing a review copy of the book. The opinions expressed are strictly my own.

Thank you Thank you Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor | Knopf for allowing me to read and review The New York Game Baseball and the Rise of a New City on NetGalley.

Published: 03/05/24

Stars: 4

Imagine a trip to the Baseball Hall of Fame with a well-versed storytelling personal guide and locked in the New York Section. The best part -- you never leave your home.

This is filled with facts, trivia and opinions.

Probably not for everyone, however, it is a nice gift for a New York fan and possibly a historian, etc.

I’ve read dozens upon dozens of baseball histories and biographies, but Kevin Baker’s The New York Game takes an approach that is somehow both unique and painfully obvious in hindsight. Baker frames the history of baseball through its modern origins in the Elysian Fields of Hoboken right up to the end of the Second World War. Only, Baker never leaves New York.

Baker’s main contention, from the beginning of the novel, is that despite what “big baseball” wants you to think, baseball did not start as a rural pastime. It was played in cities and cities evolved in tune with the “national game.”

While telling about the rise of baseball (and New York’s central role), he also discusses the rise of New York City itself into a world city. Part of that rise, per Baker, is from baseball, and part of baseball’s rise is because the city.

Baker does not shy away from the bad. He discusses racial tensions both in the city and in the game and deftly lays out the facts. All the time, he presents in a very personable style.

Again, it’s a very unique and specific topic, but it works. Of course New York made baseball. I’m hoping for a second volume soon.

A well-written book for all baseball fans,I am sure I will re-read this as I travel to New York again this summer to attend games in person. There's just something extra special about baseball in New York and the book captures the competitive spirit of today's teams and gives you a foundation of where the game has been.

A rich and detailed history of one of America's favorite sports. As a fact lover, I enjoyed the bits and pieces past times the early exclusivity of the game, the various ball clubs and leagues and the progressions and improvements made to the game throughout the decades and centuries. Seasoned baseball lovers and those new to the sport will both gain from a delightful stroll through a much celebrated hobby deep in the heart of New York.

**Thank you NetGalley for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.**

Note: Thank you to NetGalley, Knopf Publishing, and Kevin Baker for the advanced reader copy of the book.  What follows is my unbiased review of the book.

Baseball is intrinsic with New York. Not just professional baseball, but the baseball that was once-upon-a-time “town ball” that was played by kids anywhere they could find room to hit a ball and run. Although we treat baseball like a sport of rural areas, it was actually played where people could gather together and have enough players to form these teams, mostly in cities and towns. There was no city where this was truer than New York City.

Kevin Baker wrote a book that intertwines the politics of New York City with the history of baseball, showing readers how they influenced each other. He traces it back before baseball was a professional sport to the numerous clubs that were associated with different groups in the city. In particular, it was New York City’s Tammany Hall that controlled the City for much of the early days of professional baseball, and controlled what teams were allowed to play there. This book runs from the mid-19th century until just before Jackie Robinson’s debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Baker has researched some incredible detail about those early years of baseball and put together a history like no other. It was a new experience for me, reading about how the political machine in New York City helped shape professional baseball as we know it today. It helped shut out many of the other leagues that tried to rival the American League and National League that we know of today. It also controlled what teams were allowed to play in the city, keeping the (then) New York Giants in quite a privileged position. It’s also what eventually pushed the team that would be known as the Yankees out of Manhattan to playing in the outer borough of the Bronx.

I grew up just outside New York City and lived there for the first 39 years of my life, and Baker has come up with a history that even I did not know. While following the rise of the Yankees, he talks about how the Bronx was developed into a middle-class living space with the grand design of the Grand Concourse. I knew about the Civil War draft riots, but not that the government ordered the clubs in Harlem shut down during World War II because they were so concerned about the white soldiers fraternizing with African Americans.

Yes, the history of the Negro Leagues as it related to New York and how it was shut out of the City for the most part. Baker goes over the great players who never had a chance to play, and how some of the owners attempted to get around it from time to time, but were forced to fire any black players they attempted to field.

Of course, there would be no New York baseball story without Babe Ruth. Baker puts many of the stories about Ruth in context. The Yankees actually forbid him from working out in the off-season, which is why he became the larger-than-life figure we have been presented over the ages. He also hits on a new reason I hadn’t heard of for the breakdown in the relationship between Ruth and teammate Lou Gehrig.

I learned a lot from The New York Game, both about the City I grew up near and the sport I love. If anything, it was information overload at times, and I had to step away from the book more frequently than other history or baseball books I’ve read. Still, is that a bad thing in the long run? I think not. I really enjoyed the unique perspective presented here and recommend it for baseball fans and city historians.

I couldn't have enjoyed this book more. As a big baseball and history fan this was really enjoyable. I may not be a Yankees fan at all but the detailed historical information here was fascinating how professional baseball got its start as well as how baseball seemed to have big issues kicking off in the NY area which seems unbelievable today.

The New York Game is a great read for baseball super-fans. I learned so much about the sport and its history. I also loved the historical context Baker provided — he really brought the backdrop of New York to life. My only critique would be that sometimes there were too many anecdotes or fun facts to keep track of!

Kevin Baker gave us an excellent book on the history of baseball in New York and the city itself. From the foundation of the baseball clubs to the rise of New York as the major American city, Mr. Baker takes the reader on through the history of each in a way that delves deeply into what made New York what is became from the early days to the 1940s. As an avid reader of baseball history, I was intrigued by the depth of the information provided. There were stories that were new to me and much information that kept the reader fully engaged. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who loves not only baseball history, but history in general.

I really enjoyed getting to know about the history of baseball and the use of New York. Kevin Baker does a great job writing this and was really well researched and written.

Really really enjoyed this one(as I have all of Baker’s books). So intelligent and knowledgable about New York and its baseball history. But more important Baker takes a multitude of facts and perspectives and melds them seamlessly into a warm, funny, well written and fascinating narrative. Even if you don’t live in NY or are not a fan of baseball you will be entertained and educated by this book. And I can’t wait for volume two of this chronicle which picks up where this one leaves off. Highly recommended.