The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City is a new book from Kevin Baker that explores the early impact of New York and New Yorkers on the game we know today. It’s a fascinating look at the hustle of post-Civil War America and the Gilded Age, full of familiar names and men lost to history, plus the establishment of leagues, the rise of broadcasting, the minor leagues, and the eventual integration of Black and Latino players. Kevin is a contributing editor for Harper’s, and has published in The New York Times, The New Republic and New York Observer. He is also the co-author of Reggie Jackson’s Becoming Mr. October. Part 2 of our discussion will appear next week.
So why is it “the New York Game”?
Baseball as we know it was invented in New York City. The sport has always gone to great lengths to deny these origins, even concocting the lie that Abner Doubleday invented it in one afternoon in 1839, along the banks of the Glimmerglass, in Cooperstown, New York.
This is disputed?
Not really. It’s a well-established lie. You know who’s not in the Hall of Fame? Abner Doubleday.
Doubleday had nothing to do with it?
No. Abner Doubleday was the Forrest Gump of the 19th century. He always seemed to be anywhere anything was happening. The first shot of the Civil War, “penetrated the masonry [of Fort Sumter] and burst very near my head,” he later recalled, and in turn he “aimed the first gun on our side in reply to the attack.” He rose to the rank of major general, sustained two serious wounds, helped to hold the Union line on the first day of Gettysburg, and took the train with President Lincoln back to the battlefield a few months later, when the president gave his Gettysburg Address. He read Sanskrit, corresponded with Ralph Waldo Emerson, commanded an all-Black regiment of troops, attended séances at the White House with Mary Todd Lincoln, obtained the first charter for San Francisco’s cable cars, and served as president of Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society. But he did not invent baseball.
No one really thought he did, even when the myth was contrived. The whole idea was to find a quaint, charming American village like Cooperstown to represent all the quaint, charming little towns where it might have started. And thus keep its origin story out of the big, dirty, multiethnic, corrupting city.
But why Doubleday?
Albert Spalding, the pitcher-turned-sporting-goods-magnate who hired the “Origins Committee” in 1905, was a Theosophist, along with Doubleday. It’s as if a bunch of Scientologists had decided to replace James Naismith as the inventor of basketball with L. Ron Hubbard.
So baseball was really urban game?
Yep. And the urb where the modern game was perfected, was New York City. As David Block in Baseball Before We Knew It and the great John Thorn in Baseball in the Garden of Eden make clear, mankind has been playing some form of bat-and-ball game since we swung down from the trees to the savanna (which we probably noticed would make a pretty good ballfield, if someone would just cut the grass…Hmm: could baseball be responsible for human evolution? Does it want to be?).
There were all sorts of variations on the game played in America, most of them brought over from England. There was “wicket” in Connecticut (which George Washington reportedly played in Valley Forge); “the Philadelphia game”; and “the Massachusetts game,” in which there was no distinction between fair and foul ground, you could hit the ball in any direction, and players were put out only by being hit on the basepaths with a thrown ball (which was rubber). John Thorn, I know, favors this as being a more exciting and athletic game. He may be right—but how do you put a stadium around such a thing?
And the New York game wiped them all out?
Yep.
Why?
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