Mr. Baker’s thesis is open to debate, but that’s a feature, not a bug, as contentiousness is the very life force of baseball. Suffice it to say that he makes a solid case. More importantly, the book is a masterly narrative that will leave readers impatient for the second installment. Mr. Baker’s foreshadowing signals that Volume II will commence with the arrival of Jackie Robinson in Brooklyn, and that the book is certain to include stories of perfection, migration and a miracle in Queens. Mr. Baker has published works of fiction and history and brings skills from both genres to The New York Game. He has absorbed the vast historiography of baseball and added to it by using newspaper archives, recently digitized, that weren’t available to earlier chroniclers. He knows both the broad themes and the nuances of the city’s history, and is equally attuned to baseball’s social context and implications.
...as with earlier baseball bards, the narratives come complete with morals. But his have a harder, more disabused edge than the familiar sporting sort. The gentle haze that lay over the legendary history book The Glory of Their Times (1966), which was edited by Lawrence Ritter and which covered much of the same territory, here evaporates under the brighter sun of candor and confession. We get sharper engravings of brutal exploitation and raw appetite, with the team owners mostly favoring the first and the players mostly favoring the second ... Yet Baker, an iconoclast by temperament, is a mythologist by vocation. Someone writing about sports has to have a taste for myth, or else it all dissolves into numbers. So Babe Ruth gets the same Rabelaisian introduction that he has received since the nineteen-twenties, except that the stories are franker and the words ruder.
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.
Comprehensive and evocative ... In textured and painterly prose, Baker tells the parallel stories of how the game and the city developed across more than a century.
