The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City

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.)