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.)