“The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City”
The author:
Kevin Baker
Publishing info:
Knopf/
Random House
528 pages, $35
Released March 5,2024
The links:
The publishers website
the authors website
at Bookshop.org; at Powells.com;
at Vromans.com
at {pages a bookstore};
at BarnesAndNoble.com;
at Amazon.com
The review in 90 feet or less
The other night, my wife fell into a deep New York state of mind.
It had nothing to do with New York’s Mets (and hotshot Pete Alonzo) coming into L.A. to face the Dodgers. Or anticipating New York’s Yankees (and hotshot Alex Verdugo) coming to Orange County in about a month and trying to arrange for tickets behind the dugout.
It was all because of that Billy Joel TV concert special, and he started playing “New York State of Mind.”
Mind you, tears actually welled in her eyes as she sang along, all those sappy lyrics. She couldn’t help herself. While California born and reared, she lived for a time as a working adult on Long Island, and felt a real connection to the New York lifestyle — high energy, fast moving, get the hell out of my way if you’re not ready to order your bagel.
Everything this ballad isn’t by the way.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the queen-sized bed — if it matters, I’m more a “King of Queens” guy — this was all a distraction. I was trying to cry my way through “The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City.”
All those people in Madison Square Garden singing along to the song made me want to hop a flight to Hollywood. And I wasn’t even there.
It did also think of two quick stories.
First: I’d rather be a Yankee.
Sorry, I meant to write it this way: “I’d Rather Be A Yankee,” which is the title a paperback book that mysteriously fell off a shelf in my office the other day, startling neither cat sleeping nearby. I didn’t even know it was there.
In 1968, someone named John Tullius pulled this thing together for Jove Books/Berkley Publishing. The startling subtitle: “For The First Time, The Men Behind the Legend Tell The Complete Story of Baseball’s Greatest Team In Their Own Words.”
These words were culled, as Tullius writes, in “a tedious painstaking search through old baseball books, magazines and newspaper clippings.” And the Cooperstown Hall of Fame library, which has a trove of audio recordings.
In essence, it’s a mishmash of stuff already done. Even more than 50 years ago.
Because it sells. Or sold, long ago. And manages, like a sewer rat, to keep coming back.
“You may find many exaggerations, inconsistencies, stretched truths and yes, downright lies in this book,” Tullius added in the preface. “Such is human memory.”
Such is a Yankees book.
He then manages to write in the first paragraph of the first chapter: “The greatest team in the history of American sport, a team that has won half the American League pennants and one-third of all the World Championships in the last sixty-five years, started like many other legends, from very humble beginnings.”
How humbling to know that.
A second story: Watching TVLand the other day and an episode of “Everyone Loves Raymond” pops up. I look it up, and it’s from Season Five, Episode Six called “The Author,” which first aired in October of 2000 — as the Yankees and Mets are playing each other in the World Series.
The synopsis: “Ray tries to write a book but the publisher rejects it.” Ray was trying to fulfill a “dream” by writing a book about … wait for it … the Yankees.
So what happened? It didn’t happen.
“I dunno, mom, I guess they didn’t think it was good,” says Ray.
“Were there spelling errors?” she asks. Audience laughs. (Maybe they shouldn’t. That’s a fair question).
Ray’s dad pipes up: “It’s the Yankees! How can you screw that up?”
“I dun… NO,” Ray mumbles.
Let’s try to tie this all together: Why “I’d Rather Be a Yankee” even sat on one of my shelves is a greater mystery than it was another attempt at Yankee mystique-ing. If that’s not a word, it is now.
Why fictional character Ray Barone, who for some reason wrote himself into this series as a somewhat reputable New York sportswriter, would think he could put a new spin on the franchise’s already well-worn history is another doomed leap of faith. No wonder the publisher rejected it. Even if there were spelling errors, it would just be another “Yankee title” they would have to start trying to market somehow amidst everything else.
Both of this could be mulched into a book idea the title: “Death by Pinstripes: Why the Yankees Keep Yanking Our Chain.”
The Yankees are country’s most eco-friendly team. The Mets aren’t far behind. They may play their games on New York City-adjacent landfills, but telling and retelling their history is on a constant recycling program.
Proclamation through regurgitation.
So in Kevin Baker’s 500-plus ode to how baseball made New York, and New York made baseball, we find it relevant to start with the fact that when Amazon posted this for presale many months back, the original title was “The New York Game: Baseball and the Making of the World’s Greatest City.”
They recrafted that narrative because … the first one felt a bit self-serving and over puffy? That’s N.Y., N.Y.
If the new subtitle is now in tune with “Baseball and the Rise of a New City,” it maybe shows that marketing the word “New” as many times perhaps implies “Improved” through our dopamine.
We aren’t that big a dopes.
Baker’s previous New York-based non-fiction has included helping Reggie Jackson formulate “Becoming Mr. October” in 2013, before “The Fall of a Great American City: New York and the Urban Crisis of Affluence” in 2019, and wrapped around a more all-incompasing “America the Ingenious: How a Nation of Dreamers, Immigrants, and Tinkerers Changed the World” in 2016.
There also fiction, with “The Big Crowd” in 2013 that has a New York bent.
Baker is also the “New York” guy to review other New York books, like in 2021 when he wrote about “New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation” for the New York Times.
This, of course, is quite an impressive subject to tackle, and, for what it’s worth, Baker heats it up with some witticism and wicked phrase turning. It captures the tone of the city as well as trying to incorporate more attention to the Negro Leagues and the Cuban influence as well.
But where he gets really wordy is in the intro.
We note from a deeper dive into this, we see how Baker also covers the way the journalism of the game really took off New York — because of course it did. Bakers then focuses on how New York newspapers jazzed it up, from Hemingway to Damon Runyon to Thomas Wolfe. Pretty dazzling.
At this point, we divert to a better journalist — we default to a review Adam Gopnik for The New Yorker has previously posted in the April 1 edition, which completely nails it (along with some beautiful illustrating):
“Baker’s point, doubtless annoying to fans elsewhere, is that the rise of baseball as we know it was centered in Gotham, the one place where the necessary density of big money, large stadiums, daily tabloids, and assorted crooks could remake the game from ‘base ball,’ the nineteenth-century country (and soldier-camp) sport it has been, to ‘baseball,’ the big business it became. Baker therefore takes on the familiar role of the hardboiled Gotham reporter, maintaining a knowing ‘Let me dry you out behind the ears, kid’ tone throughout … Baker, an iconoclast by temperament, is a mythologist by vocation.”
And we feel he’s trying to work us over in an alley outside of a California Pizza Kitchen mistakenly renting a spot in the Manhattan neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen.
And we’ll have none of that.
How it goes in the scorebook
It’s big. It’s thick. It has attitude. It can be used as a murder weapon.
No one’s confusing Murderers’ Row to “Only Murders in the Building,” but suffocation of this subject through author ego doesn’t wear well on us as we want to just sit back, enjoy another Corona in the left field pavilion, wait for an Ohtani inside-out-swing force Brandon Nimmo into the left field corner to chase down another extra base hit, and wonder if George Lopez cares that at some point the Mets will call on relief pitcher Jorge Lopez for their own comic relief.
And speaking of something to snicker about:
You can look it up: More to ponder
== Among the other New York baseball books circulating this time of year, with plenty of other reviews to read about them:
= “Yankees Stories Untold: An Insider’s Memoir from Ruth to Jeter,” by Rich Mazarri, McFarland publishing, released Feb. 18 2024. A guy who knows a guy who knows that team culture “first-hand as a fan, a writer for the Yankees Magazine, a radio talk show host, a writer for Mel Allen … and currently as a baseball rules consultant hired by general manager Brian Cashman in 2004.”
= “The Yankee Way: The Untold Inside Story of the Brian Cashman Era,” by Andy Marino, Doubleday publishing, due May 28, 2024. Why does the word “Untold” keep coming up, again with Cashman attached to the author?
= “Tales of the Yankee Clipper: Stores and Reflections on Joe DiMaggio,” by Jonathan Weeks, Lyons publishing, released Feb. 2 2024. These must have been told before. Otherwise, they’d be labeled “untold.” And we can’t even verify.
= “My Mets Bible: Scoring 30 Years of Mets Fandom,” by Evan Roberts, Triumph Books, released April 2, 2024. The premise: The WFAN personality goes over all the 30 years of scorebooks from his childhood and connects them to his memories of Mets games. What else could sound more dreadful?
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