Note: Thank you to NetGalley, Knopf Publishing, and Kevin Baker for the advanced reader copy of the book. This review will also be posted on NetGalley. What follows is my unbiased review of the book.

Baseball is intrinsic with New York. Not just professional baseball, but the baseball that was once-upon-a-time “town ball” that was played by kids anywhere they could find room to hit a ball and run. Although we treat baseball like a sport of rural areas, it was actually played where people could gather together and have enough players to form these teams, mostly in cities and towns. There was no city where this was truer than New York City.

Kevin Baker wrote a book that intertwines the politics of New York City with the history of baseball, showing readers how they influenced each other. He traces it back before baseball was a professional sport to the numerous clubs that were associated with different groups in the city. In particular, it was New York City’s Tammany Hall that controlled the City for much of the early days of professional baseball, and controlled what teams were allowed to play there. This book runs from the mid-19th century until just before Jackie Robinson’s debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Baker has researched some incredible detail about those early years of baseball and put together a history like no other. It was a new experience for me, reading about how the political machine in New York City helped shape professional baseball as we know it today. It helped shut out many of the other leagues that tried to rival the American League and National League that we know of today. It also controlled what teams were allowed to play in the city, keeping the (then) New York Giants in quite a privileged position. It’s also what eventually pushed the team that would be known as the Yankees out of Manhattan to playing in the outer borough of the Bronx.

I grew up just outside New York City and lived there for the first 39 years of my life, and Baker has come up with a history that even I did not know. While following the rise of the Yankees, he talks about how the Bronx was developed into a middle-class living space with the grand design of the Grand Concourse. I knew about the Civil War draft riots, but not that the government ordered the clubs in Harlem shut down during World War II because they were so concerned about the white soldiers fraternizing with African Americans.

Yes, the history of the Negro Leagues as it related to New York and how it was shut out of the City for the most part. Baker goes over the great players who never had a chance to play, and how some of the owners attempted to get around it from time to time, but were forced to fire any black players they attempted to field.

Of course, there would be no New York baseball story without Babe Ruth. Baker puts many of the stories about Ruth in context. The Yankees actually forbid him from working out in the off-season, which is why he became the larger-than-life figure we have been presented over the ages. He also hits on a new reason I hadn’t heard of for the breakdown in the relationship between Ruth and teammate Lou Gehrig.

I learned a lot from The New York Game, both about the City I grew up near and the sport I love. If anything, it was information overload at times, and I had to step away from the book more frequently than other history or baseball books I’ve read. Still, is that a bad thing in the long run? I think not. I really enjoyed the unique perspective presented here and recommend it for baseball fans and city historians.