METROPOLITANS: New York Baseball, Class Struggle, and the People's Team, lefties like sports too!

METROPOLITANS: New York Baseball, Class Struggle, and the People's Team
A.M. GITTLITZ
Astra House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Non-Fiction For the week ending April 5, 2026

The Publisher Says: 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.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'm giving this book five stars because the Miracle Mets defeating the Orioles in 1969 was the first time I understood why my grandmother wanted to live to see the Cubs win the Series again (she didn't), and why my dad took me to freezyfrosty cold Candlestick Park to see the Giants play, and lose.

I can't not love anything about baseball, even as I get more and more uneasy with the concept of these gladiatorial games organized to give people some outlet for their desire to hate that is not threatening to "Them"—the capitalist class that very, very badly does not want you to expend that energy in political action.

Carefully entwined into the history of the US, the story of the Metropolitans and of team sports in general is told here with acuity and concision. It's a purpose and a point expressed best in this quote:

From this communal vantage, the abstractions of statistics and standings are confronted by the reality of what we are really seeing—not a game between two opposing teams, but a common human struggle, within and against the economic, legalistic, and mechanical structure of the game itself, and its role as opiate for the physical and existential pain of wage labor.

I can't really add anything to that statement except to say "+1" to it.

I'm old, so I remember when baseball mattered to lots and lots of Americans, held a real place in our cultural conversation. Football and basketball have that centrality now. But for those of us still loving the sound of a snapped bat connecting on a fastball, this book is catnip. Leftist social critique and economic analysis are seldom more appealingly presented than when entwined with a cultural mainstay of generations-long standing.

I hope I live long enough to see my Mets win the Series again.