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As part of our continuing CASEY Award finalists series, historian, journalist⁠ and novelist extraordinaire Kevin Baker, author of⁠ the 2024 prize winner, ⁠The New York Game, Baseball and the Rise of a New City⁠, joins the show. Enjoy!

Here are some highlights –

6:23-7:28: “I had this contract some years ago. I had to write several other books through it; I kept kind of going away from it and coming back, just trying to keep hearth and home together. But Andrew Miller who came up with the idea…he was very patient through all of this. I really didn’t know how to do this, sort of writing a history of both this incredible city, the leading city in the Western world in many ways for much of the last couple hundred years, and baseball. And in the end, I ended up writing a ludicrously long manuscript. I mean it was close to 2,500 pages altogether, and I finally passed this in and threw myself at the mercy of the good people at Knopf.”

13:30-15:43: “The New York game, though, became baseball, and this was something they did not want to hear about. They did not want to think any of it came from England, so Albert Spalding, of sporting goods fame and early pitcher and early team owner, set up this baseball commission around the turn of the century, into the 20th century there, to determine just where baseball came from. … And Albert Spalding said, ‘Great. Thanks very much. It’s all-American. I told ya. This is wonderful.’ … Pretty much all lies. Abner Doubleday was sort of the Forrest Gump of the 19th century. Fascinating guy. He was everywhere where anything happened. … But he did not invent baseball or indeed have anything to do with the game. He never so much as mentioned it in any of his writings.”

22:02-22:16: “[Tammany Hall] created a New York that was tremendously dynamic, but also oppressive, a place where you could get almost anything as a favor.”

24:30-24:50: “[Babe Ruth] really was just this amazing, Herculean character, hard to believe. And he hit New York at the precisely right time. He hit at this time when New York was becoming the town of hoopla, of wild exaggeration in its own self.”

25:36-26:10: “Suddenly, the Great Depression is upon us, and this is the time when New York really thinks of itself as kinda this virtuous, gritty, hard-working city. And again, the heroes of the era are perfect. People like Carl Hubbell, one of my father’s favorites on the Giants, who looks like he could’ve been an Okie picked up on Route 66 on the way out to California. You know, Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio, quiet, hard-working guys.”

34:08-34:47: “We should realize the bad things that happened and the bad things that our ancestors in America did, but you don’t want to make history just an endless history of calamities, of disasters, of horrible cruelty, even when there is that element. You want to make it also what it really was as well, which is a story of aspiration, of achievement, of accomplishments, of getting past some of these eternal prejudices.”

38:10-38:17: “A book like this, you really stand on the shoulders of giants, both in terms of baseball and history.”

40:50-41:16: “That’s the interesting thing, too, how history works. A lot of these stories about the old Giants, who were my father’s favorite team, I learned from him initially, so I had that. Being born in 1958, growing up in the ‘60s and ‘70s, I had his knowledge going back to the ‘30s, and he had his father’s.”

46:38-46:45: “Cities change. If they don’t change, they’re Venice, just sort of trapped in amber.”

If you like what you’ve heard, be sure to check out The New York Game.

The previous book special in our CASEY Award series, which featured Keith O’Brien, can be found here.

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Music: “Who Likes to Party” by Kevin MacLeod.