Catharsis: A Guest Post by A.M. Gittlitz

Baseball, politics and heart collide in this exploration of the underdog team that graced Shea Stadium and captured the spirit of New Yorkers. Read on for an exclusive essay from A.M. Gittlitz on writing Metropolitans.

 

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.

 

The inspiration for Metropolitans came from an early project tracing the development of New York City’s radical downtown scene during the sixties. As a lifelong leftist and Mets fan, I had always known the Amazin’s of Stengel and Seaver were a cultural phenomenon then, but it wasn’t until I started finding more references to the team in beatnik monologues, Village Voice rock columns, and radical pamphlets that I realized they were a countercultural happening as well.

Two particularly surprising lines came from Yippie founder Jerry Rubin’s 1970 manifesto Do It!: “Politics should be as exciting as the New York Mets,” and: “People are always asking us, ‘What’s your program?’ I hand them a Mets scorecard.” For most of my life, I had seen baseball as an escape for politics. What did it mean, I wondered, that Rubin provocatively flipped the script?

 I was stunned by another find: Robert Moses’s speech at the groundbreaking of Flushing Municipal Stadium. Heaped with references to literary epics, Roman history, American folklore, and Italian opera, he envisioned the soon-to-be-named Shea Stadium America’s Coliseum—the crowning venue of a new “True Central Park” to the south that would link the Manhattan-centered cosmopolis to the sprawling suburbs in a singular metropolis. The Mets, I realized, were not planned simply as a sports franchise, but the keystone of a totalizing suburbanist utopia.

Once I had drafted a sixties section with generous quotations from Herbert Marcuse, Ellen Willis, and original Mr. Met Dan Reilly, I realized I had framed the “New Breed” Mets phenomenon as baseball’s version of the New Left—the international revolutionary youth movement that answered left-populist and Leninist orthodoxy with antiauthoritarian iconoclasm. To understand the origins of this development, my inquiry expanded over a century back before the Mets’ 1962 debut. In this first section, a historical analysis of the game’s standardization, professionalization, and emergence as commodified entertainment spectacle neatly paralleled to development of American class relations between the Revolution and Gilded Age.

I remarkably found the Mets here as well—the 1880 Metropolitans, funded by Tammany Hall, and branded as a working-class alternative to the elite Gothams. After battling to the first World Series in 1884, the Metropolitans and Gothams were conjoined into the Giants, with a few castaways going to the Brooklyn team soon to be known as the Dodgers. Along with the Yankees, each of these teams would take their turn as “people’s teams”—clubs that merged with the social unrest of the times to push the sport forward.

The remainder of the Mets narrative from the seventies through 2025, with detailed attention paid to the “Gay Grimace Mets” of 2024, is constructed upon on this materialist approach. By its concluding chapter, I hope to have offered the reader a new framework for enjoying baseball—one that recognizes it as a sort of tragicomic political theater which, instead of distracting us from the grim reality of life under capitalism, offers a vision of the type of unifying catharsis necessary to overcome it.