Brian Laird on WNYC. There was once a baseball movie called Angels in the Outfield. Well,

The New Yorker magazine's review of a new book about the Mets is called Engels in the outfield.

That's Engels as in Marx and Engels.

That's because the book isn't purely about baseball, the sport.

Maybe call it a people's history of the game and of the Mets as a progressive working class phenomenon.

It's called Metropolitan's New York baseball, class struggle, and the people's

team. And I'm joined now by its author, Metz fan, AM Andy Gitlitz, who is also an organizer and writer

whose focus is on counterculture and radical politics. Andy Gitlitz, welcome to WNYC.

Hey, Brian, first time, long time, as they say on WFAN. Thanks

so much for having me. Glad you're on. It's not often we see baseball and class struggle paired in a

book title. So we'll unpack that a bit. But to be clear, you mean that on several levels,

like in their players, their fans, also in their place in the sport, right?

Yeah, absolutely. I tried to write really a thorough class history of baseball. That would

appeal not only to Mets fans and baseball fans, but to people who are just interested in the

history of American class struggle in general. And I thought, you know, as a Mets fan, the Mets would be a particularly

fun way to tell that story. Yeah. And we'll get more specifically to the Mets, but I want you to do

a little bit of the prehistory and the bigger, bigger, biggest picture. Because you cite a historian

who saw the origins of professional sports, the origins of professional sports coming from the

same revolutionary forces as the mid-19th century Marx and Engels movement. What?

Yeah. So that was C.L.R. James, who was a communist militant. And a lot of people in his

movement didn't appreciate that he was interested

in sports. But he was a Trinidadian, a cricket player, actually. And he saw in the way that cricket

...