More and More is Less and Less:  How Our Games Got Away from Us, and What We Can Do to Get Them Back.
Like so much else in American life today, our sports seem hopelessly out of balance.  There are more games, in more sports, than ever before, yet access to them has become more and more limited and expensive.  Sports venues are easily the most spectacular works of architecture to be found on the American urban landscape today, dazzling, immense, and grandiose—and heavily subsidized by enormous public grants and tax breaks.  And yet, they seat fewer people than ever, having evolved into one more, luxury destination for the very rich.  Even as teams build their vertical monopolies with their own viewing channels, they spin off games to endless streaming services, forcing still more fees out of their biggest fans.  Somehow, to take one out to the ballpark is to take one out beyond the law, to a place where your U.S. legal tender is no good, you are bombarded constantly by ads at decibel levels that would be tolerated nowhere else, and where clubs even run their own, private lotteries.  All this, while owners and players alike rake in monies that are beyond our comprehension.
How did we let this happen?  Why do we put up with it?  How do the games we watch reflect the general misery of American life just now, and what can we do about it? 

Kevin Baker, Author and Visiting Lecterur in American Studies 

Kevin Baker is the author, most recently, of The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City, now in its eighth printing, and his third New York Times notable book of the year. He has written six novels, including the Times bestseller, Paradise Alley, and is the author or co-author of five histories and a Reggie Jackson memoir. He was a writer and researcher on the Ken Burns documentary, The U.S. and the Holocaust, and is a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine. He is currently at work on a sequel to The New York Game, which will be out in 2027, and a political and cultural history of the United States between the world wars, for which he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in New York City, with his wife, the playwright, Ellen Abrams, and their cat, Natasha.

Baker is delighted to be a “Visiting Professor of the Practice” at Cornell, for the American Studies course, “Sports and Politics in American History.”