Metropolitans

“Come the revolution, the team that represents us will be wearing, [Gittlitz] reassures the reader, the Mets colors: ‘the hard-hat orange of the international working class, and our blue Earth.’ …He makes a much better case than one might have thought possible….We root, root, root for the home team, and if they do not win it is something worse than a shame. Meanwhile, we buy peanuts and Cracker Jacks at whatever price the concession stand can extract.”
—Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker

“For me, the Mets were a badge of crude contrarianism: Everyone else liked the Phillies, but I was a freethinker. In Metropolitans: New York Baseball, Class Struggle, and the People’s Team, A.M. Gittlitz offers a more ambitious ideological brief. The Mets, he argues, embody a ‘populist character,’ with fans making the team a symbol of progressive hopes, and players marching in ‘the vanguard of the labor struggles within baseball, and social justice struggles . . . outside it.’ Metropolitans proves a less quixotic project than that might suggest . . . The book is far less dreary, too. Mr. Gittlitz writes with the lunatic panache of a utopian manifesto or 2000s sports blog.”
—Timothy Farrington, The Wall Street Journal

“An ambitious love letter to the New York Mets.”
—Suzanne van Atten, Atlanta Journal Constitution

“Ambitious and intellectually invigorating, this will delight baseball devotees, surprise readers unfamiliar with the game’s political history, and satisfy those more versed in leftist politics than box scores.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Gittlitz’s writing implies more than it says on paper. By placing all these bits of baseball lore in historical context, he gives the reader the feeling that it is all connected: The working-class struggle is the civil rights struggle, is the anti-war struggle, is the labor struggle, is the Mets struggle.”
—Kevin Christopher Robles, America Magazine: The Jesuit Review

“Metropolitans expertly unpacks the ‘cruel optimism’ linking the yearning of a fanbase whose suffering is alleviated by sporadic miracles to the genuine dissident legacies that surrounded the team’s creation and which have occasionally, miraculously, come back to life. How appropriate that I write these words while watching the Mets being no-hit through eight innings—precisely the situation of the U.S. left at this moment. How will our heroes survive? Stay tuned!”
—Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude

“Shea belongs to the people! Metropolitans unpacks the singular and wondrous history of Mets baseball. From Tom Seaver’s bold stand on Vietnam to the big-dollar glitz of the Piazza years, A.M. Gittlitz has assembled a true people’s history of New York City’s most special franchise.”
—Noah Kulwin, co-host of Blowback podcast

“Metropolitans is a gem, an ode to the countercultural working-class punk side of baseball that gets ignored by corporate ownership and media. Its vehicle: the singularly star-crossed New York Mets, and this is a rich, roaring, necessary text for Mets fans, but it also deserves to be widely read as a socio-political history of America in the last 60-some years. Metropolitans reminds us that beneath its stifling monopolistic business practices, Major League Baseball is a complex civic institution populated by wise-ass humans yearning for good baseball, cheap beer, and a living wage.”
—John W. Miller, author of New York Times bestseller The Last Manager: How Earl Weaver Tricked, Tormented, and Reinvented Baseball

“If Howard Zinn himself had written a people’s history of 20th century baseball in New York City and the rise of the Amazin’ Mets, he would’ve been hard-pressed to approach what A.M. Gittlitz has accomplished in Metropolitans. Filled with captivating detail and historical insight, Gittlitz’s work is a singular account of a period in America when pro sports, mass culture and urban politics collided and became inextricably linked forever.”
—Devin Gordon, author of So Many Ways to Lose: The Amazin’ True Story of the New York Mets―the Best Worst Team in Sports

“The book is unlike any other Mets-related book we’ve seen; Gittlitz has gone deep into not just Mets history, but the societal context of the team’s founding, its early years, and all the subsequent eras of the team’s existence. It is a book that’s not just for baseball fans, but for anyone with an interest in late 20th century New York or American sports culture.”
—Brian Salvatore, Amazin’ Avenue

“[Metropolitans comprises] staggering amounts of backstory, dozens of details that have been lost to time until now, and a blend of perspective and context that feels as relevant in 2025 as it would have in 1969.”
—Greg Prince, Faith and Fear in Flushing