Note: Thank you to NetGalley, Astra Publishing House, and author A.M. Gittlitz for the advanced reader copy of this book. This review will also be posted on NetGalley. What follows is my unbiased review of the book.

Anyone who’s known me for more than a day knows that I am a Mets fan. A huge Mets fan. Even in times like these, I can’t tear myself away from the games. They’re just the type of team that can come along and make something special happen even in the midst of a down year. Their fans are used to suffering. As Gittlitz describes in the book, we are all Charlie Browns believing that this time Lucy will not pull the football away. Actually, we know Lucy will probably pull the football away, but we try anyway.

Metropolitans: New York Baseball, Class Struggle, and The People’s Team seemed like the perfect book for me, and in many ways it was. If I put my own biases aside, though, there were things I took issue with.

Gittlitz goes back to the very first Metropolitans team, back in the 19th century when baseball was a fledgling organization. It seems like they evolved into the team that became known as the New York Giants. This was a time when New York City had three baseball teams: the Giants, Dodgers, and Yankees. Hard to believe that the city could support three teams, but this began at a time when entertainment wasn’t on a screen. You had to go somewhere to experience entertainment. If not the theatre, then maybe one of these new movie things that were springing up everywhere, or take in a sports event.

Even then, the teams were largely supported by different social classes. The Yankees were considered the moneyed elite, and not much has changed in over 100 years. Both the Giants and Dodgers attracted a more working-class crowd, particularly the Dodgers out in Brooklyn. When the teams left New York for the West Coast, they left behind fans who could not embrace the Yankees. Indeed, during the time between when the Dodgers and Giants left and the Mets came to be, attendance at Yankee Stadium actually went down. New York had some hard-core National League fans who wanted their own team.

Gittlitz does a great job detailing all of this history and presenting it as a backdrop to why fans of the two New York teams now seem so divided by class. As he begins detailing the development of the new New York National League team, I found it more interesting. There were a lot of machinations behind the scenes that led to New York getting one of the first expansion teams in the league.

In detailing the baseball history of the Mets, Gittlitz is a bit uneven. He goes into radical detail over some seasons and basically ignores others. Yes, there were times when there wasn’t much to cheer about out there at old Shea Stadium, but fans like me were there. I started cheering around 1975, just in time for nearly ten years of teams that let me down. Yet, there were good times to be had. Other than the 1977 trade that sent away Tom Seaver and Dave Kingman, Gittlitz hardly talks about these seasons.

Gittlitz also seems to make an argument that most Mets fans are left-leaning. I can tell you from the fan groups I participate in on social media that that’s not really the case. There’s a wide mixture of people who root for the Mets. When he goes off on tangents like this, though, fans like me will nod along while he’ll lose a chunk of his audience. I can look at the teams in New York and agree that, in general, the Yankees attract a more conservative crowd while the Mets seem to attract those with a more progressive outlook, but it’s hardly written in stone the way he seems to think it is.

I do like the way Gittlitz paced the book to build the rivalry between the Mets and Yankees until the 2000 World Series, when they played each other. There’s a good history of the different ownerships as well, including the disaster of the Wilpons being involved with Madoff. I also liked that he added commentary on the 2024 season after the book was finished. The Mets had a wild season that year, and it’s one I will always remember because it was fun and they came so darn close. I couldn’t get angry when they were eliminated, just thanked the team for giving us a season that was fun. Even that, though, Gittlitz equates with the differing classes.

The audiobook was a bit of a letdown for me. If you’re reading the book, I’d round it up to 4 stars. If you’re listening to the audio, I’d round it down to 3. Patrick Harrison narrates, and he does a decent job in general, but there are times when he butchers names, and it’s distracting. I could excuse it with some of the players who are only talked about once, but there are some where he mispronounces them over and over. In particular, he does this when Gittlitz brings Colin Kaepernick into the discussion. When you have such a prominent figure as Kaepernick, who is important to bring up in a discussion about an entirely different sport, I would think the narrator should be able to get his name pronounced correctly.

While I enjoyed Metropolitans: New York Baseball, Class Struggle, and The People’s Team, it’s not for everyone. If you don’t lean to the left, I think you’ll dismiss a lot of what Gittlitz has to say. Even for me, some of the conclusions he comes to as to the popularity of the team with certain socio-economic groups seem to be a stretch. Yet, it’s food for thought as to why someone like me is so devoted to a team that lets me down again and again.

Hey, there’s always next year….