KEVIN BAKER IS AN HISTORIAN, novelist, political commentator and journalist. The author of six novels, he has authored and co-authored numerous non-fiction books and is a regular contributor at The New York Times. His work has appeared in American Heritage, Harper’s, The Los Angeles Times, New York Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere. A writer of over 200 newspaper and magazine articles, Kevin is the recipient of the 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship for nonfiction. His new book, The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City is just out from Knopf. Listen in and read along as we discuss how to write about American culture, and so much more.
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Marion: I’m delighted to welcome you here, Kevin. Hi, how are you?
Kevin: Hey, Marion, how are you? Great to talk to you.
Marion: Well, I’m delighted and just so glad you’re here and I enjoyed this book enormously. So let’s dig in. This is not your first baseball book, nor is it your first time writing about sports. Your parents bought you your first baseball encyclopedia when you were 10.
Kevin: Yes.
Marion: At age 13, you worked for The Gloucester Daily Times as a stringer covering what we once called schoolboy sports. Boy, I haven’t heard that term in a long time. And you co-authored Reggie Jackson’s Becoming Mr. October. Your first novel published in 1993 was Sometimes You See It Coming in which you have a good hard look at America’s pastime. So how and why does baseball stand up to so much of your scrutiny, Kevin?
Kevin: Oh, it’s something I fell in love with very early when I was about eight years old. I just really loved the sport almost from the beginning. I think in part it was one of the best times I ever had with my father was going out to the ballpark in the summer. We didn’t have a lot of money. We didn’t see more than one or two games a year, but those were really kind of special events in what was a pretty contentious relationship. It was a time when we really got along well. So my father took me before … I was born in New Jersey, although I grew up mostly in Massachusetts and thanks for pronouncing Gloucester right. That’s great. You hear a lot of “Glouchesters” and things like that, but Gloucester is great.
But in our last weeks in New Jersey, my father took me to see Mickey Mantle play at the original Yankee Stadium. So that was great. And my uncle Bruce, my favorite uncle and a wonderful guy, now deceased, but took me to see Willie Mays play when the Giants were visiting Shea Stadium. So it was great. Got to see these old parks, got to see these fantastic players and it always became from the moment just kind of a wonderful time of camaraderie and sharing things with people. Plus I just love the game. It’s really the only game that is an intense individual game with the larger team game. It’s unique in that way and it’s terrific.
Marion: Yes. It is terrific. And you open the book, The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City, with a beautiful line that fixes for us where it is you’re going to go with this book when you write, “It was always a city game, baseball.” And you thereby demolish any lingering beliefs that baseball was created or even perfected in the country. And it was called Town Ball you remind us as well as the New York Game, and it was in New York that it was first played, where its rules were perfected, where the curveball was devised. What a great story. And the bunt and the stolen base where admission was first charged, the game’s color line was broken and where sports’ first superstar emerged.
So, New York, you say, “For its part shaped the game with its inventiveness, ambitions, grandiosity, and corruption.” And I get it, as soon as I read it in those opening pages, but when along the line of your development as a writer and a thinker, did you get it? Talk to us about how this idea came into your head, how long you thought about it or mauled it almost to death or completely loved it, until you pitched it as a book. I mean, a lot of people walk around with book ideas, but talk about the evolution of this one and then how you finally pitched it.
Kevin: As I said, I was always very interested in the game, always followed it closely. Actually though I have to give credit to my editor, Andrew Miller, who first pitched me on the idea shortly after we first became friends around 2000 or so I think. And he was an editor at Knopf, he’s now just become the publisher, become the Head of Henry Holt, which is something absolutely everybody expected. He was really a comer from the start in publishing and he had this idea for me to do this. At the time, I had two other books under contract first and ended up for reasons of keeping hearth and home together, I had to write another three books through it. So it really delayed it a lot. And also I just wasn’t sure at all how to proceed with this thing. It was combining both the history of baseball and New York City over the course of about 200 years was kind of overwhelming.
And so I finally submitted this enormous stack of, well, I wouldn’t say stack of paper, this enormous stack of electrodes or whatever they are, and I think kind of shocked them in 2020. Andrew and John Freeman, who has been a fantastic editor on it, decided finally, “Do this as two books,” which I think was my agent Henry Dunow’s idea first. But anyway, I decided to do this as two books. And this one goes from the start of baseball in New York to 1945, and that’s the dividing line in good part because that’s when Jackie Robinson is first signed by Branch Rickey to break the color line in baseball and transform the sport in many ways. And so the second book, which will be out in the spring of 2026, will go from there, from 1945 on.
Marion: It’s so thrilling to have a two book experience. And yeah, it’s got a lot of pages, but every single one of them has delight.
Kevin: Oh, well thank you.
Marion: Maybe never more so as when you turn your attention to Babe Ruth. It’s as though the city and the game really meet up. And it seems completely appropriate that this happens almost halfway to the page, through the book because you’ve laid in all the pipe for our understanding of New York and its history. And now we see the argument live large in The Babe, and you open the chapter by writing, “It was always Babe Ruth’s town even before he got there. Its blatant exhibitionism, its rampant excesses were ready-made for him.” And you write that he is, “The speed of normal life in the 1920s New York,” and it’s magnificent.
And I have to tell you, the stories of his excess far exceeded the ones I already knew. So talk to me a little bit about how when you come up against somebody who we think we know, we know the saloon in Baltimore, we know the Sultan of Swat, we know the coats and the cars and the women. When you come up against these stories of excess, and you’re welcome to tell us one, but what does that do for you as a writer and a researcher when you think you know something and then it takes it even further like that?
Kevin: Oh yeah. I mean the hard part for me is containing kind of keeping it in a normal sort of thing. Yeah, The Babe was something else. You would’ve had to invent him if he didn’t actually exist. But of course, one of the great things about America is that he did exist. He’s such a larger than life character and really interesting. He gets released from this Baltimore orphanage, the St. Mary’s Home for Wayward Boys and Orphans in 1914. It’s the same year Louis Armstrong if released from an orphanage in New Orleans for having a few years earlier, shot off a gun during a New Year’s Eve celebration, quite innocently, but shot off a gun. So you see there kind of the power of American culture at this point, of this magnificent kind of hybrid multicultural society producing people who are going to transform jazz, who are going to transform sports, like worldwide sports as Ruth did almost effortlessly.
And of course it’s not effortless. Somebody like Louis Armstrong put a huge amount of work and study into doing what he did. Of course, Ruth actually speaks in very detailed terms about how he became a great hitter. But you see just the power of that America. And in the 20s, Ruth coming to New York was really a thing where the man and the time and the city were met. He was perfect for the kind of out-of-control, wild New York there was. You see in old films including one Ruth was in, he did a bunch of short films as well as vaudeville. He was all over the place. You see, it’s something called Speedy with Harold Lloyd. And he’s driving Ruth all around in this taxicab. And you get to see how insane actual life and traffic in New York was. Not exactly calm today, but at the time you had the elevated railroad, you had buses, you had trolley cars, you had cars. It just looks like madness.
And yet somehow it kind of all sticks together, somehow it’s very exciting. And Ruth was a key part of that. And we think of him, we see him as this sort of pot-bellied, spindle-leg character running around looking very old. You see him when he is young and he looked like kind of a wild beast. He’s just running amuck. Great, great athlete, kind of transforms the game and lived every day like it was his last. An average day, he would change his silk underwear several times, changes his suits, crash his car, eat prolifically. He might send a bat boy or clubhouse guy out to get six hot dogs for himself during a game. Just amazing. He was once chased through the team train while stark naked by a woman brandishing a knife. They said it was the only time he had ever run away from a woman. Just a character.
But he was beloved. He loved kids. The Yankees would play all kinds of exhibition games where it was expected that he would usually pitch as well as play the outfield. He would lead the local band, he’d dress up with an Indian headdress, he’d do any number of things like this. And he was just a celebrity in ways we don’t really think of them today.
One of the great things about American culture then was that it was like before the sky gods, having the hill gods live amongst us. Because these people were very accessible, very much there. For instance, the Yankees would go in to play the long-defunct, Philadelphia Athletics in Philadelphia, and they would get out at the North Station in Philly and walk to Shibe Park where the game was. You have a baseball team just walking along the street and the cry would go out, “Babe Ruth is coming, Babe Ruth is coming” and people would run to the windows and look out. And usually by the end of it, there would be about two kids in his arms and three or four walking alongside him, pulling at his jacket and all this. It must’ve just been an amazing thing to see, and I realize we can’t do that anymore, but it’s a shame we can’t.
Marion: It is a shame we can’t. I remember watching that really fine documentary on Toots Shor, the great saloon in New York, where they argue that when baseball players made the same as sports writers, everybody could be friends at the bar.
Kevin: Oh yeah.
Marion: And they just made this very flat-out argument. And I totally agree. I mean now we’ve got players. They live in gated communities and I know we’ve lost a lot. I know we’ve lost a great deal, but let’s talk about the role of self when you write. You’re a best-selling novelist. You have chronicled some of the most vivid as well as turbulent times in neighborhoods of New York in your “City of Fire” trilogy. And you were chief historical researcher on Harold Evans’ illustrated history of the US, The American Century, a columnist for American Heritage, you’ve been on C-SPAN, Washington Journal, Colbert Report to discuss the Obama presidency. These are all predominantly roles of a historian despite the fictionalization of the trilogy. So being a fan is another point of view entirely, and you’re a lifelong fan.
Kevin: Yeah. And I found myself doing more history as I get older, which is too bad in a way. I really do love novel writing and I’d like to continue with it and I will. But I’ve now found myself embarked on this history writing about America between the World Wars, which is just kind of really our renaissance. Just an amazing period. It’s called “The Invention of Paradise,” and kind of somewhat ironic because it was a very hard time, was far from paradise for many people, enormous amounts of racism, terrible economic downturn with the Great Depression, awful how women were treated, people with different sexual proclivities, any kind of thing. But this time where we really made it a better society, where we really invented our version of the welfare state, where American culture really came to the fore and was taken seriously for the first time by the rest of the world. We just amazed people with the things we were doing. Jazz, skyscrapers. And in the course of this ended up then fighting off global fascism.
By the way, I was going to say one thing about Toots Shor, that is a great documentary and a terrific anecdote from that is in the second book where I talk about how one day at Toots Shor’s, Toot walks down the center of the dining room and he’s got Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey on one arm, one side of him, and then I think Ernest Hemingway and somebody like Joe DiMaggio on the other, and people just stand and applaud. You could go to Toots Shor’s. Oftentimes there was a line, but you could go, you could get in, and you could be there and the proprietor to the restaurant would walk down the aisle with the leading icons of American cultures.
Marion: Let me dive back in. So what I wanted to ask you about is writing from the position of a fan. That’s a very different voice than when you write as a historian. So what’s the difference in terms of voice when you write from fandom?
Kevin: Yeah, I hope it’s not total fandom because I hope I also get across the dark side of all these people and the dark side of the game too. “I don’t want to be godding up the players” as this great sports editor, Stanley Woodward used to say. But I am writing about it with enthusiasm, and that’s a different thing from trying to take apart Rudy Giuliani, which I did for Harper’s magazine or these other things. It’s a lot more fun. It’s great fun to get into the weeds on some of these games and some of these players. I’m on the shoulders of giants. There are a ton of great sports writers. People have written just amazingly about the game.
When I did this book with Reggie Jackson, he could be remarkably difficult to kind of get talking at times. So at one point to inspire him, I read these passages about him that Roger Angell had written for the New Yorker. Roger Angell, really the premier baseball writer of our time. So I read these things and he listened rapidly, Reggie did, and nodded his head and said, “Yeah, so write something like that, Kevin.” Oh yeah, and then I’m going to paint like Rembrandt or something. It was just crazy. He went on the Colbert Show and beforehand his people tell me, “Don’t joke with Mr. Colbert.” And I said, “Yeah, and then I’m going to go out and dunk on LeBron. What are you talking about? Of course, I’m not going to try to joke with him.” He was very nice. It was utterly terrifying. But he was very nice.
Marion: I bet. I bet. But you did well. We all watched it.
Kevin: Thank you.
Marion: We all watched it. Yes. So you know a lot about baseball, you know a lot about New York, and yes, you don’t god up the players, by the way.
Kevin: Thank you.
Marion: But I’m interested in how we do it from this subjective point of view. But reading your bibliographical essay at the book’s end, I recognize the vast amount of research you did for this book. One of the essential things I learned is that the very best baseball blog is called “IT IS HIGH! IT IS FAR! IT IS… caught,” and I agree, it’s great, and it was a source of pure delight to read it. But my audience is writers, many of whom are just starting out. So talk to me and therefore to them about the joy of discovery. You make research sound like an adventure tale where you get encouraged and you move on and you get more encouraged and you get more informed. So have you got a favorite research tale you could share perhaps or something about research to just encourage people to go do it instead of sitting home and looking up everything on Wikipedia?
Kevin: Oh, gosh. Yeah, research is great fun. And as I like to tell people, it is something I discovered writing these historical novels. I wrote three big historical novels about New York called Dreamland, Paradise Alley and Strivers’ Row, each about three crucial times in the city’s history, and three groups, Irish, Jews and African-Americans, who were all seen as outsiders and unwanted outsiders when they came to New York, and yet ended up defining our culture more than any other groups. But in the course of doing these books, I would often find that it was the things I had not been looking for that were fantastic. For instance, in 1850s, 60s New York, the sewers were so badly made that you often saw whenever there was the least bit of rain or anything, all the blood would back up from the many slaughterhouses in the city. And you would often see little boys sailing paper sailboats on rivers of blood in the gutters.
And that’s one of these things that tells you so much about what a city is like, what its priorities are, what its nature is. And this was in New York in the 1850s for a while, the death rate exceeded the birth rate. Just kept growing because people kept coming. But that tells you a lot about it. There was this dressmaker who came up with the elevator dress where you pulled this little cord inside. There was so much muck in the streets that you pulled this up a little bit, you got your boots dirty, but not your dress. Little bits like that that you don’t even think to look for come up and I think are just fantastic. There’s different feelings. I know E. L. Doctorow who was really the King of the Historical Novel in the US used to say that, “To do as little research as you can get away with.” I’m sort of the opposite school. I did probably more than I needed to do. But it’s getting those moments that are so great.
And the way to get those is not to simply stay on your computer, but go into the libraries, go into the stacks if you can. In my case, I’m fortunate enough to be very close to Columbia University, and I can go in there, the New York Public Library, fantastic resource, there are great libraries all around. Go and use them. Look up old magazines. The original Amsterdam News back in the 1940s proved a fantastic resource before researching Strivers’ Row, which is a good part about a young Malcolm X in Harlem. And a guy named Dan Burley, who was not only covering sports and covering the Civil Rights Movement, but also writing down every bit of early jive, every bit of slang he heard. Fantastic stuff. And you’re not going to find that on the internet, not even on Wikipedia, great as it is.
Marion: Yeah. You make the point in your notes that, “If we believed Wikipedia, we would believe that Wally Pipp whose headache one day lost him his place in the line-up to Lou Gehrig was a young Jewish immigrant named Pupik.” And so I just love that. It’s like, no.
Kevin: I almost went for this for a moment. Then I realized, no, wait a minute. My brother-in-law used to blow on his young son’s belly button and pretend to look into it and called it Pupik Vision. And pupik is Yiddish for belly button. No, he wasn’t named Wally Belly Button.
Marion: No, no. He really wasn’t much as that would be just delightful. So yeah, you mentioned your wonderful trilogy, the City of Fire trilogy, which I read and loved, and it’s a beautiful series of books. And you also won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for best historical fiction for one of them, and the American Book Award and Paradise Alley, the middle book was named by Frank McCourt, the author of Angela’s Ashes, as the Today show Book Club Selection. So you’ve got this really great history in New York. You also wrote Luna Park, a graphic novel illustrated by Danijel Zezelj. But I think that a lot of people think, yeah, but that’s New York and you can do it. And I live near Albany, New York where the great William Kennedy has sublimely written about the corruption and seduction of Albany.
Kevin: Fantastic writer.
Marion: But I work with writers all day long who say to me, “Yeah, but my place isn’t very interesting.” And I say, “I don’t agree.” I found out recently that my house had been a speakeasy in Prohibition.
Kevin: Fantastic.
Marion: I love that. And there’s history there. So what is it? I think it’s possible that any city, anywhere, any town has stories. What about you? What do you think?
Kevin: Oh, absolutely. And they’re usually good stories. And that’s the thing they used to say about New York from the old movie and TV series, “Eight million stories in the naked city.” And it’s true, at least that many. Americans, including my family, are wonderful fabulists, are great makers of … If they don’t have a good story, they’ll make one up. But yet, I found out a few years ago that a direct ancestor of mine was hanged in Salem for being a witch, a friend who has too much time on his hands for retirement looked this up. Yeah, it was a terrible thing. She was like a 71-year old semi-homeless woman named Susanna Martin, and just so horrible these accusations and killing these people. But I found myself just ridiculously pleased by this. Most of my ancestors were professional ne’er-do-wells. It was nice to pick up on that. Oh, there’s somebody who history has noticed.
Marion: That’s right. Nothing like having a good witch in the family.
Kevin: Yeah, exactly.
Marion: Yeah, yeah. So one of the things that I’m always interested in about with writers is timing and your book, America the Ingenious published by Artisan argued that because we’re a nation of dreamers, immigrants and tinkerers, that we’ve had such an impact on the world, and it argues a lot about immigration leading to innovation. And it was published in 2016. The timing of that publication provides a strong counter narrative to those MAGA Americans who wanted to make America great again. So let’s talk about that. What are writers and historical writers, journalists, novelists, are you like dogs that feel earthquakes years in advance? I mean, what’s the thing? Because the writers I work with marvel at this all the time, how are they supposed to know what we’ll be talking about when this thing is published? Do you just go ahead and write it anyway or do you give it a lot of thought in terms of timing?
Kevin: And here’s where the history, probably been a lifelong reader of history, always been interested in history, here’s where that probably pays off because immigration has been a major issue in America for most of our existence, except for maybe the very first few years even then perhaps. Who should be allowed to come here and why has been a matter of debate constantly. Many of my ancestors who were Irish, they weren’t wanted. All kinds of other people’s. Eastern Europeans were not. The horrible eugenics movement, which really took off in the 1880s and lasted through the closing of the Golden Door in 1924 when we banned immigration from most European countries. Unfortunately, horribly abandoned millions of people probably to their deaths in the Holocaust. We didn’t open the door again until 1965. And I think in doing that, we have again set off this debate about who is going to come here.
And I wanted to make that point in that book particularly that generally immigrants have been great. It’s amazing to have this kind of almost self-selecting group of people who want to come here. They tend to be determined, ambitious, bent on really improving life for themselves and their children. And they do amazing things here. It’s such a shame that a lot of people don’t see that. I understand the concern that people are going to lose their jobs, but I think that’s as much companies moving away from America as people coming to America. I hope we don’t ever close the door again.
Marion: Yeah, me neither. And you make the point in the baseball book about the great Joe DiMaggio, you contextualize him at a time when Italian Americans were being demonized certainly and had been for a good long time. And just there was a quote, I think that, “He likes chicken chow mein more than he likes spaghetti and meatballs.” That made him okay. And then I think you have an italicized line like chicken chow mein.
Kevin: This was Life magazine trying to make him sound normal like he was … “Believe it or not, he doesn’t put all that greasy Italian stuff in his hair. He just combs it with water.” Horrible. There was a player-
Marion: It was horrible.
Kevin: A terrific player in the Yankees, Tony Lazzeri, who newspapers used to regularly refer to as a compliment as the “Mussolini of the Diamond.” That kind of thing was just common. Ethnic insults were very common throughout baseball through much of its time and savage when it came to most people of color. But yeah, there’s always been a lot of resistance.
Marion: Well, we look forward to the next installment. I look forward to everybody reading this installment and then to the next installment. And before we go, I have to tell you that this book was very sentimental for me. My dad was born in 1907, and he’s a great deal older than my mother. And he began his New York sports writing career in the late 1920s in New York. And he went to the New York World and then to The New York Times when they folded. And as I sit here, I do so under a photo of my dad with the great Casey Stengel, so a lifelong New Yorker.
Kevin: That’s fantastic.
Marion: He was a lifelong baseball fan, and there was nothing lovelier, as you said before, than venturing out to a game. His name was James Roach. And I really … Just as reading this along, I think a lot of us will touch back to those people we knew and loved who have talked about baseball as part of the thread of their life and the story of America. So thank you, Kevin. This is a beautiful book. It felt like home to me and I just loved it.
Kevin: Thanks so much, Marion. Thanks for having me on.
Marion: You’re welcome. The author is Kevin Baker. See more on him at kevin baker dot info. His new book is The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City just out from Knopf. Get it wherever books are sold. I’m Marion, and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overit studios com. Our producer is Jacqueline Mignot, our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marion roach dot com, the home of The Memoir Project where writers get their needs met through online classes in how to write memoir. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to follow QWERTY wherever you get your podcasts and listen to it wherever you go. And if you like what you hear, leave us a review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.
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