{"product_id":"the-new-york-game-isbn-9780375421839","title":"The New York Game","description":"\u003cb\u003eA\u003ci\u003e NEW YORK TIMES \u003c\/i\u003eNOTABLE BOOK\u003ci\u003e • Sports Illustrated #\u003c\/i\u003e1 Book of 2024 • A hugely entertaining history of baseball and New York City, bursting with larger-than-life figures and fascinating stories from the game’s beginnings to the end of World War II.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"You’re going to beg for extra innings. Without missing a scandal or a sensation, with an eye on how assimilation transforms the picture, Kevin Baker has written a buoyant, double coming-of-age story. \"—Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize-winning author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBaseball is “the New York game” because New York is where the diamond was first laid out, where the bunt and the curveball were invented, and where the home run was hit. It’s where the game’s first stars were born, and where everyone came to play or watch the game. With nuance and depth, historian Kevin Baker brings this all vividly back to life: the still-controversial, indelible moments—Did the Babe call his shot? Was Merkle out? Did they fix the 1919 World Series? Here are all the legendary players, managers, and owners, in all their vivid, complicated humanity, on and off the field. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn Baker’s hands the city and the game emerge from the murk of nineteenth-century American life—driven by visionaries and fixers, heroes and gangsters. He details how New York and its favorite sport came to mirror one another, expanding, bumbling through catastrophe and corruption, and rising out of these trials stronger than ever. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrom the first innings played in vacant lots and tavern yards in the 1820s; to the canny innovations that created the very first sports league; to the superb Hispanic and Black players who invented their own version of the game when white baseball sought to exclude them. And all amidst New York’s own, incredible evolution from a raw, riotous town to a new world city. The New York Game is a riveting, rollicking, brilliant ode to America’s beloved pastime and to its indomitable city of origin.\u003cb\u003eA\u003ci\u003e NEW YORK TIMES \u003c\/i\u003eNOTABLE BOOK\u003ci\u003e • Sports Illustrated #\u003c\/i\u003e1 Book of 2024 • Winner of the CASEY Award for Best Baseball Book of 2024\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Let me put it this way: You’re going to beg for extra innings. Without missing a scandal or a sensation, with an eye on how assimilation transforms the picture, Kevin Baker has written a buoyant, double coming-of-age story. He leaves plenty of myths — and Abner Doubleday — by the wayside. He carries us on a high-octane tour from baseball’s early, pre-league days to the first box scores, past Giants, Bridegrooms, and Highlanders, to stadium singalongs and brawling, betting, and umpire-flattening. A naked Babe Ruth is the least of the wonders in this exuberant, deliriously readable, glorious grand slam of a book.\"\u003cb\u003e—Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of \u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe Revolutionary: Samuel Adams\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"[This] book is a masterly narrative that will leave readers impatient for the second installment.... Mr. Baker....has absorbed the vast historiography of baseball and added to it.... He knows both the broad themes and the nuances of the city’s history....[And the] novelist in Mr. Baker is responsible for all the tasty details...First page to last, 'The New York Game' is a pleasure to read. Today, a high energy basketball player is said to have a good 'motor.' The same is true of Mr. Baker’s paragraphs. Each one reflects his verve, and precision, and scholarship, and has enough juice to power a Tesla across the country.\"\u003cb\u003e—Ben Yagoda, \u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Wall Street Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cu\u003e\"\u003c\/u\u003eThe New York Game\u003c\/i\u003e impressively chronicles the rise of America’s pastime....Kevin Baker does a riveting job of detailing The Big Apple’s importance in baseball history. From the origins of the game, to Ruth, Mantle, and many others, Baker weaves monumental moments together into an entertaining and informative tale. The title...has reviewers around the country crossing their fingers for a second installment.\"\u003cb\u003e—\"10 Best Sports Books Released in 2024,\" \u003ci\u003eSports Illustrated \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"No one knows New York City better than Kevin Baker, so it's only natural that he would breathe such spectacular life into the stories of the National Pastime in the Capital of Baseball. A remarkable, complicated doubleheader of a book.\"\u003cb\u003e— Ken Burns, filmmaker\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"An insightful, beautifully crafted narrative...One hopes for a second volume from Kevin Baker, every bit as good as [\u003ci\u003eThe New York Game\u003c\/i\u003e].\"\u003cb\u003e—David Oshinsky, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"A brilliant writer makes a convincing case that New York City is, and always has been, the center of the baseball universe... Harper’s contributing editor Baker...is more than equal to [his] task, delivering a remarkably entertaining mixture of sports and social history...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. As implausible as it might seem, given the length and breadth of the book, readers will be left hoping that Baker is hard at work on a sequel...Until then, savor this massively impressive book by a talented author who is clearly in love with his subject. An exemplary sports book.\" —\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eKirkus Reviews, \u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003estarred review*\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Deeply researched, playfully raucous... wonderfully readable, both erudite and streetwise... Baker’s approach is romantic but clear-eyed, idiosyncratic and veracious...You’ll be sad to see the final outs of \u003ci\u003eThe New York Game\u003c\/i\u003e.\" \u003cb\u003e—Chris Vognar, \u003ci\u003eThe Boston Globe\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"The rise of the sport [baseball] as we know it was centered in Gotham, where big stadiums, heroic characters, and epic sportswriting once produced a pastime that bound a city together...[In] \u003ci\u003eThe New York Game\u003c\/i\u003e... we get sharper engravings of brutal exploitation and raw appetite... [in] the one place where the necessary density of big money, large stadiums, and assorted crooks could remake the game from 'base ball'... the ninteenth-century country (and soldier camp) sport it had been, to 'baseball,' the big business it became.\"\u003cb\u003e—Adam Gopnik, \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Baseball fans beyond Gotham’s gravitational pull might bristle at the notion that New York was the epicenter of the creation and growth of the game. But Baker’s raucous, revelatory, lovingly detailed account will win them over from the first pitch.... Baker...seamlessly weaves together the vibrant origin stories of the New York Yankees, New York Giants, Brooklyn Dodgers, and the city’s Cuban and African American teams...A spellbinding history of a game and the city where it found itself.\" —\u003cb\u003e Alan Moores, \u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eBooklist, \u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003estarred review*\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Bestseller [Kevin] Baker (\u003ci\u003eParadise Alley\u003c\/i\u003e) returns with a comprehensive and evocative account of America’s national pastime in the country’s largest city...In textured and painterly prose, Baker tells the parallel stories of how the game and the city developed ...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.\" \u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003ePublisher's Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"This big boy may be the greatest-ever baseball book. If 'greatest' means most comprehensive, lively, erudite, and fun. It's also the consummate New York book. Imagine Robert Caro and Roger Angell joining forces, and turning to Doctorow for a spit polish. I read \u003ci\u003eThe New York Game\u003c\/i\u003e in a state of protracted awe.\"\u003cb\u003e—Darin Strauss, National Book Award winning author of \u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eHalf a Life\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"In \u003ci\u003eThe New York Game...\u003c\/i\u003eKevin Baker makes the case that America’s financial, media and cultural capital and its national pastime grew not in parallel, but were inextricably intertwined...the book ultimately succeeds... [weaving] together class, race, fame and rivalry to create a survey of the city and the sport’s overlapping interests.\"\u003cb\u003e—Jason Kelly, \u003ci\u003eBloomberg\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Kevin Baker has effortlessly braided a century of baseball and New York history into a single, glorious narrative that is as witty and rollicking as it is surprising and enlightening. His command of both of his subjects is awe-inspiring, and yet he unspools it all with the grace and ease of a perfect swing. \u003ci\u003eThe New York Game\u003c\/i\u003e will have you reading passages out loud to anyone within earshot. It's the most exhilarating book I've encountered in years.\"—\u003cb\u003eJonathan Mahler, author of \u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eLadies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"A triumph. This book stands among the finest of all baseball histories, with scholarly muscle and breathtaking literary grace. \u003ci\u003eThe New York Game \u003c\/i\u003ewill help readers see our national pastime—and our nation—through clear new eyes. I loved this book.\"\u003cb\u003e—Jonathan Eig, author of \u003ci\u003eKing\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Kevin Baker’s \u003ci\u003eThe New York Game\u003c\/i\u003e, which chronicles the story, characters and madcap happenings of baseball in New York, with its Robins and Highlanders and Superbras and Giants, will be a joy for any fan of baseball or Americana. It’s as colorful as it is strange, and is in fact the story of America told in another way.” —\u003cb\u003eRich Cohen, author of \u003ci\u003eWhen the Game Was War: The NBA’s Best Season\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eKEVIN BAKER is a novelist, historian, and journalist. He has been a professional writer since the age of 13, working originally for the \u003ci\u003eGloucester Daily Times\u003c\/i\u003e as a stringer covering school-boy sports. He is the coauthor of Reggie Jackson's \u003ci\u003eBecoming Mr. October\u003c\/i\u003e. His work as appeared in \u003ci\u003eHarper’s\u003c\/i\u003e, where he is also a contributing editor,\u003ci\u003e New York Observer, The New York Times, \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eThe New Republic\u003c\/i\u003e. He lives in New York City.","brand":"Knopf","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300262826213,"sku":"NP9780375421839","price":35.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780375421839.jpg?v=1767740693","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-new-york-game-isbn-9780375421839","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}