From his upstairs window, my neighbor Craig gestured toward the beige towers that had replaced Ebbets Field. For a moment, the ballpark seemed to rise again, its red-brick façade catching the sunlight as the grandstands filled with jobbers, true believers, and socialist teenagers. Craig’s father had been a National League man—not a Yankee fan, never a Yankee fan—so when the Mets came along, five years after the Brooklyn Dodgers had left town, the void was filled without discussion. Craig was 12. “I was always a Mets fan,” he told me. The only problem, in those early years, was that being a Mets fan meant being a “glutton for punishment.”

This slightly sardonic, masochistic devotion is both the subject and the animating spirit of A.M. Gittlitz’s Metropolitans: New York Baseball, Class Struggle, and the People’s Team. Gittlitz’s capacious history was published at the start of a season shrouded in uncertainty. The league’s current collective-bargaining agreement is set to expire in December, and a lockout in 2027 is seen as a likely outcome. The two-time defending-champion Dodgers have hoovered up enough talent to make their next victory almost inevitable, the logical end point of a free-agency system that was won through decades of labor struggle but has since made the richest teams nearly unbeatable. Meanwhile, it’s hard to imagine today’s players caring about the state of the world like Mets ace Tom Seaver cared about Vietnam or reliever Tug McGraw cared about the Kent State shootings. The sport that Gittlitz celebrates—accessible, working-class, countercultural—has been devoured by oligarchs, and the Mets, now owned by hedge-fund billionaire Steve Cohen, are no exception.

Gittlitz’s book begins well before the Mets existed; he follows mid-19th-century clerks decamping from gloomy Manhattan towers for the sun-drenched Elysian Fields of New Jersey, where they played a folk game that would eventually become what we know as baseball. The game spread through Union Army camps during the Civil War, and by the end of the 19th century could safely be considered America’s pastime. The Marxist historian and cricketer C.L.R. James saw significance in the timing: Organized baseball emerged in 1869, two years before the Paris Commune, because the “same public that wanted sports and games so eagerly wanted popular democracy too.” Not long after, in 1890, the Brotherhood, baseball’s first players’ union, announced its secession from the National League on Bastille Day, built its own ballparks, and lost everything within a season when its backers turned out to want the real estate.

The team that would eventually inherit something of this insurgent spirit earned its name from the act of survival most common among Brooklyn’s workers—dodging trolley cars during their daily commutes—and Ebbets Field became host to a raucous polyglot community whose shared dialect was shouting “Ya bum ya!” at stars like Duke Snider and Roy Campanella. The Dodgers rewarded that loyalty with the signing of Jackie Robinson, several pennants, and a championship in 1955, before leaving for Los Angeles after the 1957 season (as a kid, I always pictured them driving away in the night). A wrecking ball painted white and adorned with blood-red stitches reduced Ebbets Field to rubble, making way for the same beige towers Craig pointed at through his window.

In Gittlitz’s telling, the Mets were the answer to that rubble, a franchise conjured into existence by opportunistic lawyers, real-estate men, and the city’s all-powerful planner, Robert Moses. Moses envisioned Shea Stadium as a final triumph of New Deal civic ambition, rising alongside the 1964 World’s Fair to link the deindustrializing city with the suburbs to which many former Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants fans had fled. (The baseball Giants, it should be noted here, decamped for San Francisco the same year that the Dodgers headed to LA.) The new team even dressed the part, stitching together Dodger blue, Giant orange, and a cartoonish logo that seemed to wink at the Yankees’ imperial self-regard. A new people’s team had arrived in town by 1962, or so it was said. It was owned by Joan Payson, a Whitney heiress who had opposed the Giants’ move west.

Nobody planned for what happened next. The Mets proceeded to lose 120 games in their first season, the worst record in modern baseball history, and were all the more beloved for it. The actively decaying Polo Grounds, their home for two years before Shea was finished, became a cauldron that “stirred old-timers, hipsters, pinkos, drunks, sugar-high kiddies, and newly empowered losers into a singular witches’ brew.” Their cheers were, as Roger Angell put it, “yells for ourselves,” coming from the wry recognition that there is more Met than Yankee in the collective spirit of New York. Among the Mets faithful, who Gittlitz lovingly calls the “New Breed,” a farcical slogan was born: “I’ve been a Mets fan my whole life.” Then again, for some, like Craig, this was literally true.

In April 1968, when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and baseball’s owners declared that Opening Day would proceed as scheduled, the Mets unanimously voted to boycott. When Robert F. Kennedy was shot, they did the same. By 1969, the Mets were ready to become something nobody expected. As Gittlitz puts it, their improbable season offered the left “an off-ramp as it sank into malaise following the election of Nixon and the prosecution of the Yippies and Panthers.” The miracle arrived precisely when it was most needed and most dangerous to need. That summer, Shea Stadium was a perpetual carnival, an amalgam of confetti and pot smoke, and when the Chicago Cubs came to Queens in late August with their pennant lead dwindling, on-deck Cubs hitter Ron Santo heard the crowd roar and told the batboy, “Oh man, we’re fucked now.” And that was when the cat showed up, a black streak moving across foul territory as if it had always been there, heading toward the Cubs’ dugout to glare at manager Leo Durocher, who yelled at his players to remove it, before it turned, crossed home plate, and slipped back into the stadium’s underworld.

Two weeks later, after they’d cursed the Cubs, the Mets clinched their division, and 20,000 fans stormed the field. That night, a hundred of them came back to break into the clubhouse, spray one another with hoses, narrate a fictional World Series from the press box, and chant “Shea belongs to the people!” After the Mets swept Hank Aaron’s Atlanta Braves for the pennant, Tom Seaver told the press, “If the Mets can win the World Series, then we can get out of Vietnam.” A skywriter spelled out “STOP WAR” above Shea during Game 4 while fans held signs reading “BOMB THE ORIOLES—NOT THE PEASANTS” and handed out zines plastered with Seaver’s face. When Cleon Jones caught the final out of Game 5, he crouched on the grass and thought of his ancestors, “enslaved people stolen from their homes by greedy, Godless people…guided only by profit and gain with no regard for humanity.” Fellow outfielder Ron Swoboda dedicated the victory to every loser in America. The Yankees had won the World Series 20 times but had never been honored with a ticker-tape parade.

The hangover came fast. After the 1970 shooting at Kent State, Tug McGraw wrote in his diary, “I really don’t know in which direction to head or what to do…. I’m a people and I’m screwed up.” The movement retreated, and the Mets finished third in 1970 and 1971, despite hopes of a dynasty. Winning had somehow induced an identity crisis. Just two weeks before the start of the 1973 season, on Easter Sunday, manager Gil Hodges—who had quietly yet firmly backed his players’ political convictions—died of a heart attack after a round of golf. Meanwhile, New York itself was coming apart: During the ’70s, the city faced a recession, a fiscal crisis, rising crime rates, and a population decrease of nearly 1 million.

By 1973, McGraw was pitching badly, and the Mets were in last place. A self-help guru told him to envision the result and believe, so McGraw stormed the clubhouse screaming the advice to his teammates. “Ya gotta believe” became, semi-ironically, the team motto, and it briefly did work, carrying the Mets to the World Series on fumes and faith before the Oakland Athletics extinguished both. A decade of misery followed. Marvin Miller, head of the players’ union, helped Catfish Hunter—then a star pitcher for the Athletics—win free agency; Hunter promptly signed with the Yankees for a then-record $3.35 million, ushering in an era that was great for players but also for the richest organizations. The Mets, under the penny-pinching reign of chairman M. Donald Grant, had become “a decisively unlovable team,” Gittlitz writes. When Joan Payson died in 1975 and her heirs sold the team to a group including Nelson Doubleday Jr. and real-estate developer Fred Wilpon, the franchise was in ruins—its attendance numbers dismal and its future uncertain.