Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This bold, immersive study from journalist Gittlitz (I Want to Believe) blends cultural criticism with social and labor history to argue that New York City baseball has long served as a battleground for class struggle, popular power, and control over people's leisure time. Gittlitz shows how the game emerged during the American Revolution among rank-and-file soldiers rather than the cricket-favoring officer class, establishing baseball as a plebeian pastime tied to resistance and class identity. Later, New York's Democratic political machine, Tammany Hall, learned to harness the game, turning it into a managed civic spectacle that generated loyalty without challenging elite power. The sport's professional leagues consolidated as owners tightened control over teams. Through radio broadcasts, media mythmaking, and ballpark ritual, the Yankees, Giants, and Dodgers were successively rotated as the "people's team" until, in the postwar 1960s, the Mets emerged to embrace that role, becoming a vessel for endurance, irony, and shared attachment. Gittlitz's research is comprehensive and his case well argued, and though the prose can be dense and allusive, its lyricism reinforces the book's view of baseball as a cultural language as much as a sport. Ambitious and intellectually invigorating, this will delight baseball devotees, surprise readers unfamiliar with the game's political history, and satisfy those more versed in leftist politics than box scores. (Mar.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Pulling for Gotham's baseball underdogs. Gittlitz's unconventional celebration of the New York Mets is knowledgeable and politically sophisticated, though it staggers as it heads for home. The millennial author begins rather loftily, describing his use of Marx and Engels-derived "materialist methods I picked up during years in the struggle" as "an anti-war protester, Wall Street Occupier and ally of the Movement for Black Lives" to scrutinize the team's history. Fortunately, his inspired dot-connecting and high-low approach to culture--he quotes Jean Baudrillard andFamily Guy--keeps him rooted in real-world particulars. Informative opening chapters cover the short-lived New York Metropolitans team of the 1880s and early labor battles over ballplayer empowerment. Gittlitz then focuses on the "working-class-coded" Mets of recent vintage. "Hipsters, pinkos" and ex-fans of two gone-to-California teams embraced the Mets, frequent losers, as the antithesis of the Yankees, whose success evoked "mighty capitalists." Prominent Mets came out against the Vietnam War and organized a brief "industry-wide strike" after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. Gittlitz is clear-eyed about the recent past. The team's association with "the cultural left" has been tested by reports of racial tension in the clubhouse; links between a team owner and swindler Bernie Madoff; and the purchase of the Mets by Steve Cohen, a hedge-fund billionaire fined $1.8 billion for insider trading. Predictably, Donald Trump emerges as a prominent figure in the book's final third, though Gittlitz adds nothing to what we know of his political rise or relationship to sports. Gittlitz also offers a forgettable 40-plus-page diary-style look at the 2024 season. This section, which begs for ruthless editing, is an outlier in an otherwise bracing book that baseball fans of all stripes, particularly those who lean left, are apt to enjoy. A smart, sprawling history of a team that became a magnet for anti-elitist fans. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
