Some books, to amend a motto from Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” are born ironic, some achieve irony, and some have irony thrust upon ’em. A. M. Gittlitz’s “Metropolitans: New York Baseball, Class Struggle, and the People’s Team” (Astra) is a shining new example of the rare third kind. Given the realities of modern baseball, one expects Gittlitz, a journalist and an Occupy Wall Street veteran who writes from a hard-left, Marxist perspective, to dissuade his readers from rooting for something as obviously and cynically commercial as a sports franchise, or from imagining that a “people’s team” can exist when all teams are owned by a succession of plutocrats, each more sickening than the last. We assume that he will point out the futility of identifying with something so flimsy and compromised as a professional baseball club. The terms in his subtitle can only be meant mockingly, we think, as we open his pages, expecting to watch hope collapse as he lays bare the usual brutal commodification of pleasure at the highest possible price.

Not a bit of it. An all-consumed, obsessive Mets fan, Gittlitz truly believes that the Mets are the people’s team and that they have been engaged in genuine, if often contorted, class struggle on our behalf for the past sixty-five years or so. Their World Series victories, in 1969 and in 1986, were not moments of capitalist diversion from the workers’ plight but were early glimpses of the civic solidarity that will arrive with the revolution; they were antiwar, anti-racist, anti-capitalist triumphs. So strenuously idealizing is the book that it is hard to read without imposing irony upon it, but the irony is ours. Gittlitz really means it. Come the revolution, the team that represents us will be wearing, he reassures the reader, the Mets’ colors: “the hard-hat orange of the international working class, and our blue Earth.”

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To demonstrate his belief, Gittlitz runs through the history of the Mets—not unappealingly, since genuine obsession is always appealing—and reminds the reader of all the moments when the Mets at least seemed to stand for what was once called the counterculture. He makes a much better case than one might have thought possible. Tom Seaver, the hero of the Mets’ 1969 run, was, however modestly and mildly, an antiwar voice in Nixonian times. Cleon Jones, at the moment he made the catch for the final out of the World Series, thought back to his ancestors, “enslaved people stolen from their homes by greedy, Godless people.” This line, which Gittlitz takes from Jones’s 2022 memoir, sounds suspiciously like a reflection that arrived long after that final out. Still, Gittlitz has no doubt that the Mets are the good guys. If they cannot quite win the class struggle, well, the people generally do not. But come the revolution, they shall. The effort is helped immeasurably, of course, by the constant antithesis of the Yankees, who have long exemplified oligarchic power, whether in their corporate mode of the fifties, when it was said that rooting for the Yankees was like rooting for U.S. Steel, or in their later despotic Steinbrenner years. (Marx said that what first happens as tragedy returns as farce. What began as farce with Steinbrenner returns as tragedy with his disciple Trump.)

To hit home his points, Gittlitz connects what happens on the field with all that happens off it. His cultural history can be a bit out of focus. He insists that baseball was a powerful tool of Cold War propaganda for the United States, which forced the game to be played in alien corn. In truth, as Robert K. Fitts reminds us in his fascinating new book, “In the Japanese Ballpark,” baseball was already popular in Japan in the nineteenth century and became a craze after Babe Ruth toured the country in 1934, remaining just as popular at the height of imperial Japan’s anti-Americanism as it was after defeat. What’s more, baseball never had an impact in Britain or Western Europe. The notion that the spread of a sport simply reflects the values of its inventors is falsified again and again by history. Soccer flourished early in working-class England, but the versions played in Brazil, Hungary, and the Netherlands are more interesting than the original model. Cultural phenomena, including games, tend to be open-ended in adaptation and adoption, and generally feed difference at least as much as they enforce uniformity.

Gittlitz’s book is long, loving, and pained. A Marxist in love with the Mets occupies a difficult position. By the end, the requisite contortions lead him to a fate almost worse than capitalism: he must confront the thesis, offered by Jacobin’s founding editor, Bhaskar Sunkara, that it’s the Yankees who represent “an authentic working class,” even as “squeezed middle-class Mets fans try to carve out their own path in vain.” Could the Yankees really be the people’s team? Gittlitz, all but conceding the struggle session, can only sigh and see the Yankees’ populist strength as a version of Hobbes’s Leviathan, “whose despotic reign is legitimized solely through unbeatable strength.” Steinbrenner couldn’t have put it better. The Yankees are the pseudo-populism of Trump, the Mets the fading, if still illuminating, last light of the left.

Yet Gittlitz’s book, despite its occasional absurdities, arrives at a propitious moment. At a time when professional sports seem even more dominated than usual by a narrow right-wing chauvinism—a Yankee fan had to sue so that fellow Yankee fans could leave their seats to use the restroom when “God Bless America” gets played in the seventh inning—a leftist account of the game feels bracing and courageously unorthodox, and raises the right question: How are we to imagine baseball humanely in 2026? The nonfan can now easily find a reason for the non-caring. “I thought you hated all that Trumpian flag-hugging,” a certain nonfan remarked in the midst of an interminable post-season series, with its regimented regalia.

In one sense, of course, the game has never seemed healthier. Last year’s World Series was the greatest since the Mets-Red Sox in ’86 or maybe the Reds-Red Sox in ’75, as the Blue Jays, representing Canadian nationalism (though by way of a roster stocked with Americans and Latin Americans) came within inches of beating the American Dodgers (and their trio of Japanese superstars). Yet the general corruption of everything inevitably perpetuates itself. The most shocking instance may be the constant superimposition of the Mastercard logo on the pitcher’s mound even at the height of play, shocking precisely because it now passes unremarked. So if the political account of baseball’s pleasures seems inadequate to our experience, we can turn to philosophy—to Alva Noë, for instance, who is, it turns out, as passionate and all-consumed a Mets fan as Gittlitz. And, surprising to a reader of Noë’s earlier, more academic books, he is a child of the Greenwich Village streets who learned baseball in the shadow of Italian gangs. His book “Infinite Baseball” is the best reflective study of the sport since A. Bartlett Giamatti’s “A Great and Glorious Game.”

Noë’s book achieves irony in the familiar intellectual way. Everything that happens in baseball, he wants us to see, can also be taken as a meta-comment on what is happening as it happens, so when a base is stolen, say, we have the basis for an argument about why they call it stealing, and what constitutes a base. As we understand language best by seeing it as a game, we understand games best by seeing them as a language. “Sports, for the player as well as the fan, are always embedded in a setting of talk and reflection,” Noë writes. “Sports aren’t just activities bent on the cultivation of physical skills for their own sake; they are little social worlds in which doing is one thing and reflection on what you’re doing is another. But both are very much required.”

Noë’s essential thesis is that baseball is not merely a game governed by rules but a social practice shaped by context and circumstance. This is true, in some measure, of all sports, but baseball is unusual in making that truth part of its entertainment rather than treating it as an embarrassment. Noë’s exemplary case is the “neighborhood play,” the long-standing convention that a middle infielder can get the out on a double play without actually touching the bag. “You’re going for a double play, and, in order to avoid a collision at second base with the incoming runner, the second baseman or shortstop—whoever is covering—would simply indicate that his foot is in the neighborhood of the base, basically saying: what I’m doing is the moral equivalent of actually touching the base,” he recently observed. “I could touch the base, but touching it would be risky. For both the runner and the fielder.” A whole society and history are implicated here.

A baseball game is the conversation of a community, and certain readers may notice that this view resembles Noë’s account of consciousness itself. Consciousness, he has long insisted, does not take place deep within some mysterious recess of the self. It is “out there,” in our interactions with countless people and forces in the world. Being in the world makes us conscious, and the more fully we are in it—the more we swing the bat and run the bases—the more conscious we become. Just as the last place to look for consciousness is in the neurons, the last place to look for baseball is in the rule book.

This view makes Noë a ferocious critic of recent changes in baseball that aim to speed up the game and to mechanize its decision-making. He hates the arrival of the “robo-ump,” an algorithmic system that can decide balls and strikes and overrule the umpire. “A strike is not a ball in a certain location,” he says. “It’s a ball that the batter ought to be able to hit, and a ball is one that reflects nothing poorly on the batter that he was unable to hit.” The strike zone can shift in the course of an at-bat and even from pitch to pitch, as part of the live contest between pitcher and hitter. Good pitchers persuade the umpire, working the corners and gradually reshaping the zone. And umpires sometimes make calls in light of that ongoing exchange, sensing that a batter would have attacked a truly hittable pitch. In an odd way, there’s a parallel between the superimposition of the automated ball-strike zone on home plate and the superimposition, onto all sports, of gambling apps: both depend on the displacement of slow-paced pleasures, Noë’s ongoing conversation, into accelerated gimmick entertainments. The twentysomething perpetually betting on each aspect of the game is akin to the spectator forced to accept the replacement of human decision-making with a yes-or-no machine.

Noë contrasts the appealing fluidity of properly umpired baseball with the game of tennis, where we are actually grateful for the computer simulation that shows clearly whether the ball was in or out. As another philosopher might point out, the difference here lies less in psychology than in physics. Tennis is played in a fixed environment, the unchanging court, but the strike zone genuinely varies with the size and stance of each batter. A baseball player, after taking a badly called third strike, might cry, “You gotta be blind!” or “Are you crazy?” but not “You cannot be serious!” Seriousness is assumed in the subjectivity of home-plate umpiring. John McEnroe cried out because the call was plainly wrong. In baseball, the call is inevitably, and pleasurably, debatable. That’s part of the game.

A beautiful instance of the way baseball’s inherited language can reshape the action lies in the defining play of last year’s Series, summed up in an image that will haunt Canada for as long as there is a Canada. In the bottom of the ninth, with the bases loaded and a ball chopped to second, the Blue Jay base runner Isiah Kiner-Falefa broke late for home and slid just as the Dodgers’ catcher, Will Smith, got to the plate, a fraction of a second ahead of him. The play was, in living rooms and bedrooms and doubtless barrooms throughout Canada, reduced to a single haunting synecdoche of two fast-colliding feet: one belonging to Kiner-Falefa, barely short of home plate; the other belonging to Smith as he made the out, toe stretched and touching the plate, the ball invisible in his glove above.

The great question remains: Why did Kiner-Falefa slide? The original purpose of sliding was to keep a runner from overrunning the bag and being caught past the base, since stopping on a dime at full speed is nearly impossible. The slide also permits him to evade a tag coming in from above, compelling the fielder to make a sweeping, often mistimed effort. Sliding into home when all the catcher had to do was touch the plate with the ball in his glove was suboptimal strategy. Expert opinion holds that he should have broken sooner and run straight through and maybe past the plate—since he could not be tagged out after scoring—even at the risk of knocking over the catcher.

And yet he slid. The best explanation seems to be that he slid because sliding is what you do in baseball. It was less a considered choice than obedience to custom. Since a force play at the plate is unusual (one expert estimates that it happens at most once a month), the familiar instinct is to slide into home. Had the third-base coach cried out, “Don’t slide!,” he might well have created more confusion in Kiner-Falefa’s mind than clarity of purpose, just as it is usually wiser to continue through a yellow light than to slam on the brakes mid-intersection. The normal thing, even when wrong, is often easier to execute than the unusual thing, even when right. One could call this muscle memory rather than cultural custom. But then cultural custom is simply muscle memory widely shared.

Would he have collided illegally with the catcher? The rules governing collisions at the plate are subjective, too, as Pete Rose demonstrated, in his way, in a once famous play in the 1970 All-Star Game, when he scored for the National League by knocking over Cleveland’s catcher, Ray Fosse, knocking over at least a part of Fosse’s future career as he did. (In an exhibition game! But that was Pete.) Had Kiner-Falefa run full speed and knocked Smith over, it might have been ruled interference by a home-plate umpire unused to seeing such a play. That would have been a kerfuffle to end them all. But it’s more likely that the run would have counted, and the Blue Jays would have won the World Series. Of such tiny, contestable renegotiations—such micro-adjustments to context and circumstance—is the great game of baseball made.

If philosophical accounts of baseball achieve ironic self-consciousness through effort, more purely aesthetic ones tend to be born ironic. Novelists take for granted that what makes baseball interesting is not any single thing that happens but the way one thing after another unfolds. Robert Coover’s great baseball novel of 1968, “The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.,” just reprinted by New York Review Books, imagines a glorified card-and-dice version of Strat-O-Matic baseball, in which the protagonist, an oppressed accountant named Henry Waugh, can oversee, deity-like, the whole of creation: God as the ultimate fan. At length, the madly intricate rules of Waugh’s self-invented game force him—he has built his own league and mythology—to sacrifice his favorite player, in a brilliantly imagined Christian allegory. Yet the success of the novel’s conceit, allegory aside, depends on the fact that baseball is a game of discrete acts, each one isolated enough to be submitted to chance and rule in turn.

I wrote an aesthete’s account of baseball in these pages some forty years ago, my first appearance, and made, in more effortfully efflorescent prose, much the same point. Baseball appeals because it is historical in the first instance: one thing happens, then another, and each thing is reflected in the next, as in the history of art. In this respect, baseball is different from more fluid sports, such as hockey and football, which yield to analysis only with effort. We experience football even after it ends. We analyze baseball even as it takes place. Art history, with its constant return to the old in order to find meaning in the new, is a better model for understanding baseball than is statistical analysis.

Aesthetes distill pure pleasures from what could be seen, from other angles, as compromised messes. We love Botticelli’s mythologies without caring overmuch about the Mafia nature of the Medici who commissioned him. Can our love for our contemporary teams escape our knowledge of their brutal base? Gittlitz and Noë both think it can, by different routes. In truth, the larger story of modernity is always the story of how money-seeking enterprises become heartwarming attachments. Capitalism devours our affections as it creates them. Updike gave the final affront to his modestly American protagonist Harry Angstrom in the discovery that the department-store Christmases of his childhood were wholly mercenary enterprises, designed to draw the suckers in and ending when they could no longer be drawn. Could sports play a higher human role in a socialist utopia? Well, in the socialist utopias so far constructed, the chief desire of the athletes has been to get out, to go West, and to get paid. To say that attachment is unmasked by the sordid motive, or that the sordid motive is redeemed by the depth of attachment, is only to state an obvious truth, one escaped solely by an admittedly irrational faith. You really do gotta believe.

Sports remain a culture that encircles us with habits and shared understandings. Sometimes our fandom may seem, to the nonfan, less an aesthetic inquiry than a simple addiction. We’re hooked on the vicarious thrill of winning, and so long as we get occasional rewards—’69 and ’86—will put up with the long pauses without. All that big talk about “community conversation” and shared social spaces is exactly what you find with drug addicts, too, who, as the sociologist Howard S. Becker showed years ago, are as much addicted to the activity as to the addictant. They talk about their taking all the time, too.

Still, 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. Perhaps what we want at the ballpark is less a community of common values than a casual ideal of citizenship. That is why a far-left dreamer of revolution can sit in a stadium watching a club owned by a voracious financier and still feel part of the town, with a philosopher and an art historian nearby to keep him company.

That, in the end, our motive and cue for passion may be impossible to define makes them no less central to our lives. I have spent an inordinate amount of mine caring about professional sports teams that do not care about my existence, and rooting for the well-being and success of men often a quarter my age who make thousands of times more money than I do. An illusion? Well, what is not? Balls and strikes depend on where you are. If a tree falls in a forest, does anyone hear it? Unanswerable. If you throw a strike that only a machine can see, is it still a strike? That one is easy. No. Balls and strikes and outs and close plays at home take place within strictly human exchanges, and baseball’s whole imaginative force lies in their irreducible sum.

Perhaps the missing, under-celebrated figure in these reflections is the nonfan, the necessary nonparticipant, the invisible planet tugging at the orbit of the rest of us. The long-puzzled partner wanders in as the extra innings of a World Series game drag past midnight and hears you say that you will come to bed when it is finally over. “Well, enjoy it,” the nonfan says cheerily. “You do not enjoy a game like this,” the fan mutters. “Well, then, do . . . whatever you do with it,” she says. And you do. ♦