Metropolitans

“An all-consumed, obsessive Mets fan, Gittlitz truly believes that the Mets are the people’s team and that they have been engaged in genuine, if often contorted, class struggle on our behalf for the past sixty-five years or so. . . . At a time when professional sports seem even more dominated than usual by a narrow right-wing chauvinism . . . a leftist account of the game feels bracing and courageously unorthodox, and raises the right question: How are we to imagine baseball humanely in 2026?”-The New Yorker

“Gittlitz delivers a wide-ranging history of New York baseball’s ‘working-class-coded’ underdogs, whose outsize role in the civil rights, antiwar and labor movements might dwarf its checkered performance on the field.” –The New York Times

A love letter to a franchise and a thrilling study of New York City, Metropolitans traces the electric and calamitous history of the New York Mets.

Metropolitans is for Mets fans, New York partisans, and everyone interested in the Mobius strip dynamic of sports and politics, the history of the national game, or the beautiful contradiction of baseball itself: 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. Along the way, A.M. Gittlitz re-introduces us to an eccentric cast of Metsian characters: Joan Payson, the first woman to buy a Major League Baseball team;a young Tom Seaver with an interest in progressive politics; and the contentious but beloved Mike Piazza.

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. He guides us 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.

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 to producing some of the greatest chokes in sporting history, from integration to desperate labor struggle against franchise owners, Metropolitans makes a deeply humane and convincing argument for the fascinating singularity of the New York Mets-and why they are not just the team of the counterculture, the freaks, and the losers, but the beloved team of anyone with a beating heart.

Story Locale:New York City

About the Author

A.M. Gittlitz is an organizer and writer focusing on counterculture and radical politics. He is the author of I Want to Believe: Posadism, UFOs and Apocalypse Communism and co-host of the podcast This Wreckage. He lives in Ridgewood, Queens, but can be often found Tuesday nights at the Vegan City food stand at Citi Field.

Author Residence: Queens, New York