Metropolitans: New York Baseball, Class Struggle, and the People’s Team

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.)