The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City with Kevin Baker

Baseball 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.

In 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.

From 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.'

A Personal Note from Kevin Baker:

The New York Game is the work of a lifetime—my lifetime.  I have been a baseball fan since I was eight years old.  Soon after, my father took me to see Mickey Mantle play in the original, real Yankee Stadium, and my uncle took me to see Willie Mays play in the original Shea.  I was hooked.  Many of the best times I had with my father were at the ballgame.  My family moved up to Massachusetts—but there, too, going to gorgeous old Fenway Park was a real treat (even if I was always rooting against the Red Sox).  My first job was writing accounts of our high school's baseball games for The Gloucester Daily Times.  I was just 13 and had to learn how to type to keep the job; my mom taught me.  Coming back down to New York in the 1970s, many of the best times I have had with friends and family in New York have been at the ballpark.  I have always returned to writing about sports—and almost always, baseball—even as I forged a career as a novelist, historian, and journalist.  I learned a great deal in writing an "as-told-to" memoir with Reggie Jackson (quite an adventure!), and learned so much more researching and writing The New York Game.  The Cornell Club has been good enough to host me for presentations about different chapters of this book along the way; I hope you find this one as enjoyable.

6:00pm reception; 6:30pm lecture, gratis. Advance registrations required.

We are pleased to invite our fellow Metro NY Alumni!  For non-member reservations, contact Justine at [email protected].