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Metropolitans: New York Baseball, Class Struggle, and the People's Team
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About This Book
A wide-reaching, revolutionary narrative history of the Team of Destiny (da Mets, for anyone not keeping score), that takes us from their 19th century inception to their 1962 resurrection to the present day.A love letter to a franchise and a thrilling study of New York City history, 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 through the quality of their play to producing some of the greatest chokes in sporting history, from integration to desperate labor struggle against millionaire and billionaire franchise owners, Metropolitans makes a deeply humane and convincing argument for the fascinating singularity of the New York Mets—and why it should be not just the team of the counterculture, the freaks, and the losers, but anyone with a beating heart. 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 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. But this is a book not only for Mets fans, or New York partisans, but anyone interested in the Mobius strip dynamic of sports and politics, the history of the national game, or the beautiful contradiction of baseball 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.
Reviews
"And there are factual lapses ..."
"Gittlitz's research is comprehensive and his case well argued, and though the prose can be dense and allusive, its lyricism reinforces the book's view of baseball as a cultural language as much as a sport."
"Gittlitz's unconventional celebration of the New York Mets is knowledgeable and politically sophisticated, though it staggers as it heads for home."
"Gittlitz details the team's mostly tortured history of losses...while revealing, almost by accident, that more often than not, they've succeeded when they've reverted to being the 'people's team' they've always been."
"A Marxist in love with the Mets occupies a difficult position."
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