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.
