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New York Baseball, Class Struggle, and the People's Team
by A.M. Gittlitz
A love letter to a franchise and a thrilling study of New York City, Metropolitans traces the electric and calamitous history of the New York Mets.
Metropolitans is for Mets fans, New York partisans, and everyone interested in the Mobius strip dynamic of sports and politics, the history of the national game, or the beautiful contradiction of baseball itself: a middle-class game owned by billionaires, in which the players—like the spectators—look to traverse the diamond and ultimately safely escape its many dangers. Along the way, A.M. Gittlitz re-introduces us to an eccentric cast of Metsian characters: Joan Payson, the first woman to buy a Major League Baseball team; a young Tom Seaver with an interest in progressive politics; and the contentious but beloved Mike Piazza.
Gittlitz leads us through baseball's amateur beginnings to the Mets' first heady World Series on the heels of the Civil Rights and anti-war movements that many Mets players participated in. He guides us to the bad boy years, the exploitative development of farm academies in developing nations, and their inglorious purchase by a new breed of capitalist—even after which they remained lovable losers.
Metropolitans brilliantly shows us that sports have long been a site of political struggle, rousing class consciousness, and animating fights for racial equality. From purportedly calming riots in '69 to producing some of the greatest chokes in sporting history, from integration to desperate labor struggle against franchise owners, Metropolitans makes a deeply humane and convincing argument for the fascinating singularity of the New York Mets—and why they are not just the team of the counterculture, the freaks, and the losers, but the beloved team of anyone with a beating heart.
"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." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A smart, sprawling history of a team that became a magnet for anti-elitist fans." —Kirkus Reviews
"Metropolitans expertly unpacks the 'cruel optimism' linking the yearning of a fanbase whose suffering is alleviated by sporadic miracles to the genuine dissident legacies that surrounded the team's creation and which have occasionally, miraculously, come back to life. How appropriate that I write these words while watching the Mets being no-hit through eight innings—precisely the situation of the U.S. left at this moment. How will our heroes survive? Stay tuned!" —Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude
"Metropolitans is a gem, an ode to the countercultural working-class punk side of baseball that gets ignored by corporate ownership and media. Its vehicle: the singularly star-crossed New York Mets, and this is a rich, roaring, necessary text for Mets fans, but it also deserves to be widely read as a socio-political history of America in the last 60-some years. Metropolitans reminds us that beneath its stifling monopolistic business practices, Major League Baseball is a complex civic institution populated by wise-ass humans yearning for good baseball, cheap beer, and a living wage." —John W. Miller, author of New York Times bestseller The Last Manager: How Earl Weaver Tricked, Tormented, and Reinvented Baseball
This information about Metropolitans was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
A.M. Gittlitz is an organizer and writer focusing on counterculture and radical politics. He is the author of I Want to Believe: Posadism, UFOs and Apocalypse Communism and co-host of the podcast This Wreckage. He lives in Ridgewood, Queens, but can be often found Tuesday nights at the Vegan City food stand at Citi Field.
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