When New York Made Baseball and Baseball Made New York
The rise of the sport as we know it was centered in Gotham, where big stadiums, heroic characters, and epic sportswriting once produced a pastime that bound a city together. By Adam Gopnik Christy Mathewson, who pitched seventeen seasons for the Giants, starting in 1900, was revered for his imperturbable façade and equable air; he figured out how “to be a magnet to the fans,” Kevin Baker observes, “without provoking the jealousy and suspicion of teammates.”Illustration by Paul Rogers; Source photograph from Bettmann / Getty Of all the arenas gone from New York, there are two that a sports-obsessed New Yorker may regret most never having seen. One is the old Madison Square Garden, with its Saint-Gaudens statue of Diana dancing on the skyline, and its memorable murder, when, in 1906, Evelyn Nesbit’s deranged husband shot and killed the architect Stanford White . The other is the Polo Grounds on 155th Street and Eighth Avenue, with its one-of-a-kind horseshoe shape, its oddly rural p...