Publishers Weekly
02/05/2024
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. (Apr.)
From the Publisher
"Let me put it this way: 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. He leaves plenty of myths — and Abner Doubleday — by the wayside. He carries us on a high-octane tour from baseball’s early, pre-league days to the first box scores, past Giants, Bridegrooms, and Highlanders, to stadium singalongs and brawling, betting, and umpire-flattening. A naked Babe Ruth is the least of the wonders in this exuberant, deliriously readable, glorious grand slam of a book."—Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams
"[This] book is a masterly narrative that will leave readers impatient for the second installment.... Mr. Baker....has absorbed the vast historiography of baseball and added to it.... He knows both the broad themes and the nuances of the city’s history....[And the] novelist in Mr. Baker is responsible for all the tasty details...First page to last, 'The New York Game' is a pleasure to read. Today, a high energy basketball player is said to have a good 'motor.' The same is true of Mr. Baker’s paragraphs. Each one reflects his verve, and precision, and scholarship, and has enough juice to power a Tesla across the country."—Ben Yagoda, The Wall Street Journal
"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
"An insightful, beautifully crafted narrative...One hopes for a second volume from Kevin Baker, every bit as good as [The New York Game]."—David Oshinsky, The New York Times
"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*
"Deeply researched, playfully raucous... wonderfully readable, both erudite and streetwise... Baker’s approach is romantic but clear-eyed, idiosyncratic and veracious...You’ll be sad to see the final outs of The New York Game." —Chris Vognar, The Boston Globe
"The rise of the sport [baseball] as we know it was centered in Gotham, where big stadiums, heroic characters, and epic sportswriting once produced a pastime that bound a city together...[In] The New York Game... we get sharper engravings of brutal exploitation and raw appetite... [in] the one place where the necessary density of big money, large stadiums, and assorted crooks could remake the game from 'base ball'... the ninteenth-century country (and soldier camp) sport it had been, to 'baseball,' the big business it became."—Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker
"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...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." — Alan Moores, 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 ...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." —Publisher's Weekly
"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
"In The New York Game...Kevin Baker makes the case that America’s financial, media and cultural capital and its national pastime grew not in parallel, but were inextricably intertwined...the book ultimately succeeds... [weaving] together class, race, fame and rivalry to create a survey of the city and the sport’s overlapping interests."—Jason Kelly, Bloomberg
"Kevin Baker has effortlessly braided a century of baseball and New York history into a single, glorious narrative that is as witty and rollicking as it is surprising and enlightening. His command of both of his subjects is awe-inspiring, and yet he unspools it all with the grace and ease of a perfect swing. The New York Game will have you reading passages out loud to anyone within earshot. It's the most exhilarating book I've encountered in years."—Jonathan Mahler, author of Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning
"A triumph. This book stands among the finest of all baseball histories, with scholarly muscle and breathtaking literary grace. The New York Game will help readers see our national pastime—and our nation—through clear new eyes. I loved this book."—Jonathan Eig, author of King
“Kevin Baker’s The New York Game, which chronicles the story, characters and madcap happenings of baseball in New York, with its Robins and Highlanders and Superbras and Giants, will be a joy for any fan of baseball or Americana. It’s as colorful as it is strange, and is in fact the story of America told in another way.” —Rich Cohen, author of When the Game Was War: The NBA’s Best Season
APRIL 2024 - AudioFile
L.J. Ganser narrates this wonderful historical look at the rise of baseball in New York City with his usual interested style. You can tell when Ganser is reading a quotation, but he never imposes a campy tone or a vocal imitation. He sounds involved without being overly animated as he delivers the narrative, which starts in the nineteenth century and moves through well-researched colorful anecdotes of players and managers of the day. Ganser helps carry the material through the turn of the century, aptly delivering the author's fascinating stories about John J. McGraw, Christy Mathewson, Hal Chase, and others. When the book ends in the late 1940s, both Baker's writing and Ganser's narration leave listeners wanting more. M.B. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2023-11-11
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.
