Harper's Contributing Editor and novelist/historian extraordinaire Kevin Baker ("The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City") brings his blended affection for (and evocative portrayals of) both "The Big Apple" and the "National Pastime" — to make a compelling case for New York City as the rightful center of the baseball universe.

From Alan Moores' review in Booklist:

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 lays out the early history of the game in the city, then 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, right up to the eve of Jackie Robinson’s 1945 signing with the Dodgers.

He vividly recreates the recklessly ambitious, breathtakingly corrupt, alcohol-fueled world of Tammany Hall politics—which were followed by the reforms of Fiorello La Guardia—that steered, and were sometimes even steered by, the game. Dozens of near-mythic and also too-human figures parade through the pages, from John McGraw, Christy Mathewson, Fred Merkle, Carl Hubbell, Mel Ott, Leo Durocher, Casey Stengel, Red Barber, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, and Branch Rickey, to an array of crime bosses, team owners, and mayors. 

Then there was Babe Ruth, whose gaudy statistics, irrepressible personality, and seismic impact on the game, the city, and the entire nation outshone even his legend, as Baker convincingly argues here. A spellbinding history of a game and the city where it found itself.

The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City - buy book here