When New York Made Baseball and Baseball Made New York

Glory! Romance! We can’t help elevating our experience of games into the epic realm. The cartoonist Randall Munroe, the creator of the comic “xkcd,” once had his stick figures decide that they would use the output of a weighted random-number generator to build narratives; “All Sports Commentary” was the caption. True enough. Kevin Baker, in “The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City” (Knopf), tells stories about the development of baseball, many of them involving the Polo Grounds, and, as with earlier baseball bards, the narratives come complete with morals. But his have a harder, more disabused edge than the familiar sporting sort. The gentle haze that lay over the legendary history book “The Glory of Their Times” (1966), which was edited by Lawrence Ritter and which covered much of the same territory, here evaporates under the brighter sun of candor and confession. We get sharper engravings of brutal exploitation and raw appetite, with the team owners mostly favoring the first and the players mostly favoring the second.The Best Books of 2024