At the risk of generalizing, New Yorkers have a superiority complex and a sense of entitlement found nowhere else in the United States. They expect everything to be top-notch, bigger and better than anywhere else in the country, if not on the planet.

That was not always the case.

The title of Kevin Baker’s excellent new book, THE NEW YORK GAME: Baseball and the Rise of a New City, has a double meaning. The rules for baseball as we know it today were codified in New York; other regions of the country played with variations. The second use of the phrase easily could refer to playing by rules to get along in the city itself --- rules that were continually flaunted by politicos and citizens looking to put more money in their own pockets.

"Maybe I’m just too naive, but I found it amazing how much greed, graft, corruption, xenophobia and racism are engrained in New York’s history.... Baker lifts the curtain to show us the seamier side, aka reality."

By now, serious students of the sport have come to accept that it was not invented by Abner Doubleday in the bucolic environs of Cooperstown, New York, the location of the Baseball Hall of Fame. Instead, the nascent toddler grew up in the open areas around the city before it began to attract hundreds of thousands from around the States and around the world. Those green spaces shrank as houses and businesses were erected throughout Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx, where the Yankees, Dodgers and Giants would grow as well.

At first, baseball was a game for “gentlemen” since they were the ones who had the wherewithal in terms of time and funds for such leisure activities. But few things remain pure, and soon the competitive spirit led to hiring better athletes to improve the chances of winning. According to Baker, these were often rough men of lower repute. Baseball soon became a game full of drinking (“hard-drinking” is a phrase that appears in many cases throughout the book), cursing, fighting and, perhaps most insidious of all, gambling. Comedian Greg Proops offered a fascinating but thoroughly vulgar example of their behavior in this podcast from 2010.

Maybe I’m just too naive, but I found it amazing how much greed, graft, corruption, xenophobia and racism are ingrained in New York’s history. As long as we can remember, it has always been a “melting pot,” where people from all nations, religions and races blend, making “the Big Apple” so wonderful.

Alas, Baker lifts the curtain to show us the seamier side, aka reality.

About two-thirds of the book deals with the three major league teams that vied for the affections of fans. But aside from the Yankees, Dodgers and Giants, Baker also recalls the 19th-century rivalries where games were played on roughly hewn fields, with primitive equipment and rules that changed over time to accommodate heretofore unknown situations.

THE NEW YORK GAME is divided into five eras. “Origins” examines baseball before the Major Leagues as we know it came into existence. “The Inside Game, 1901-1919” looks at the early days with a shocking number of gamblers --- most of whom seemed to be based in New York --- seeking to influence players and, subsequently, outcomes. “The Babe in Nighttown, 1920-1929” focuses on a post-World War I NYC and country when people began to cut loose, led in no small part by Babe Ruth once he was traded from the Boston Red Sox to the Yankees. Things got bigger, broader and louder, for better or worse.

“The Virtuous City: New York in the Great Depression, 1929-1939” is perhaps the most, well, depressing portion. With all that was going on due to the Market crash, it’s amazing that baseball survived. While the Yankees, Dodgers and Giants did well --- relatively speaking --- smaller markets barely had enough patrons passing through the turnstiles to keep the lights on.

The Yankees were, of course, the most successful of the three teams, dominating the American League for years thanks to Ruth, and Baker depicts the Giants as more “old school” thanks to John McGraw, who managed the team for more than 30 years. The Dodgers, for the most part, were the “lovable losers,” full of colorful characters with nicknames like Dazzy and Daffy.

“Singing in the Dark: The City in Time of War, 1939-1945” has baseball slowly coming out of one crisis and heading into another. The book ends somewhat abruptly with the end of WWII and doesn’t adequately cover how baseball was affected as players went off to serve.

Two themes run throughout the book. One is the political machines and individuals who tried to control huge swaths of everything going on in the city, including the location and construction of new ballparks and the impact it had on the surrounding neighborhoods. The other is the pernicious racism that kept African Americans out of “organized baseball.” There was no shortage of abhorrent behavior on the parts of those (white men) who made, without exaggeration, life-and-death decisions.

New York is a particular area of expertise for Baker --- his work includes PARADISE ALLEY and DREAMLAND, novels about the city in the 19th and early 20th centuries, as well as a nonfiction work, THE FALL OF A GREAT AMERICAN CITY: New York and the Urban Crisis of Affluence --- so he is in an excellent position to tell this tale. He also has published a baseball novel, SOMETIMES YOU SEE IT COMING, set in more contemporary times.