Gopnik / New Yorker on baseball & New York (& community)
{Hoping the attachment works and it’s not paywalled} I’m attaching an article by Adam Gopnik from the New Yorker, “When New York Made Baseball and Baseball Made New York.” It starts as consideration of a new book, Kenny Baker,
What prompts me to link—or alert others to—the article is that Gopnik expands on an issue that we repeatedly tackle on MGoBlog: they’re only games that don’t really matter but still somehow matter a lot. He suggests the obviously arbitrary nature of sports provides live lessons. Gopnik also writes that in life “we pursue disorderly means toward reasonable goals” [college, marriage, raising children] while “in games we “pursue orderly means toward ridiculous goals” [ridiculous because they ARE arbitrary and minor].
TLDR (Too Long, Didn’t Read OR Too Locked, Denied Reading)
• the Polo Grounds were magic;
• New York was central in the growth of baseball;
• Christy Matthews was a hero, in the mold of classical heroes;
• Comiskey was a bum;
• Babe Ruth rented out the whole roster of whorehouses;
• the Negro Leagues WERE major leagues;
• Damon Runyon taught Thomas Wolfe to write;
• baseball’s always been a business venture, and corruption is recurrent, yet it fostered a sense of community—which seems to be fading;
• Gopnik suggests multiplayer video games, like Halo and Assassin’s Creed, may create the community baseball used to.
The book Gopnik starts with, KEVIN Baker's “The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City”
Per Alton below: Christy Mathewson.
I'll pick this up. Thanks for the heads up.
I'll pass. New York congratulates itself for being the center of the baseball universe (and all other universes) Reminds me of Ken Burns "Baseball." Should have been titles "Baseball in the Northeast." If you got up to get a beer at any point you likely missed any reference to baseball being played in places like Cleveland, Detroit, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, St. Louis. Some really great baseball, and great baseball stories, were about the St. Louis Cardinals. You wouldn't know it watching Ken Burns.
St. Louis Browns too!
You referring to number 1/8?
The Browns sent little person Eddie Gaedel to the plate in 1951. A gag thought up by Bill Veeck, who would not be welcome in todays world.
Awesome, thank you very much for this--I will definitely check the book out. It sounds right up my alley (for the Damon Runyon content alone if nothing else). Two corrections--(1) Christy Mathewson, not Christy Matthews; (2) Tom Wolfe, not Thomas Wolfe, who was a completely different writer.
Thanks for the corrections. Fond of both T. Wolfes (T Wolves?), I should have caught the 2nd mistake easily.
Note that Gopnik, as he often does, uses the form of a book review to expand into discussion of other books and larger themes he wants to address.
Ah--got it. For a second when I first clicked on your post, I thought the book had been written BY Gopnik, and I already had the rest of my weekend planned.
Thanks again for the recommendation though! I will definitely check it out.
To your point about NY, baseball, and community, I did some research because my son's name came up in a google search about baseball, but it wasn't him. It was someone with the same name, same spelling (the spelling of his last name, which is my husband's, is unusual) who played in a semi-pro league near Albany (the Slingerland Nine which turned into the Albany Twilight league) in the early 20th century. His contribution and fame was likened to that of Derek Jeter. He was both a player and a coach, and there's a current league named after him. But many of the articles talked about how amateur and semi-pro baseball helped to bring communities together because everyone went to games and there were a lot of teams. And baseball was the premier sport back then. But I thought it was so funny that my son, who played and now coaches baseball, shared a name with someone who seemed to be such a pivotal part of semi-pro baseball in NY.
Cool. One of the many benefits of MGoBlog is getting to know people, at least semi-sorta-kinda know people.
Speaking of Albany and baseball, when my family was moving from the Midwest, coming along the northern route, I found a minor league game near Albany and we stopped to break up our trip.
April 10th, 2024 at 10:02 AM ^
Every little town, all over America, had a baseball team. Factories and businesses all had teams. Barnstorming Negro League teams played most of their games against town teams--the old Negro Leaguers played a lot of games.
I love watching sports, but I think the best games are ones that can be easily played in a disorganized manner. Soccer and basketball and even touch football have that. Baseball's roots are that way, but it's increasingly becoming too organized - restrictions on where you play, all star youth leagues preventing good pitchers from throwing to all the neighborhood kids, and long ago club teams being replaced by minor leagues.
I love stories about sports history and baseball was very much a club and community game that got popular from the ground up. But the club teams became minor leagues became owned by the MLB and then slowly suffocated. It's a beautiful game and I'm excited to read this article, and maybe I'm just old, but it kinda makes me sad that nowadays when you see kids playing baseball they're always wearing little league uniforms instead of just jeans and t shirts. At least beer league softball still exists. May it last forever.
Still playing softball, though no beer.
The article touched on this at the end - games into play, play into games. I guess baseball is now more of a game than just play, and that's ok I guess.
Thanks for this! Gopnik is so good!
I've loved Gopnik's writing since forever. I had this piece on my fridge almost 30 years ago:
Americans long for a closed society in which everything can be bought, where laborers are either hidden away or dressed up as non-humans, so as not to be disconcerting. This place is called Disneyworld. The French dream of a place where everyone can practice his metier in self-enclosed perfection, with the people to be served only on sufferance, as extras, to be knocked down the minute they act up. This place, come to think of it, is called Paris in July.
Not baseball but: in the Polo Grounds: Patterson v Johansson. I was rooting for Patterson - my Dad (a rooftop fighter) introduced me to him and I watched Floyd train, frequently. Very quiet guy, compact and dense as brick. He won, reclaiming his title. Happy times.
Baseball: Old Yankee stadium - yes. Mantle, Maris. And *many* more games there, thereafter.
Ebbetts Field - which I think was my first ever game, my very young brain remarking on how green everything was. I remember sensing the rage in the family when the Giants and Dodgers went west. I still have an original (really small) Dodgers t-shirt given to me by my aunt, a rabid Dodgers' fan. Koufax, Drysdale, Snyder, Hodges, etc.. Koufax was filthy.
Yes, baseball in 3 of the 5 boroughs.
- end stroll down memory lane.
Comments