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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.” Continue reading