A Legend in the Making: The New York Yankees in 1939 [Hardcover]

Richard J. Totfel (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 26, 2001

The story of perhaps the greatest team in baseball history, narrated against a background of one of the game's most remarkable seasons--an original work of history based on considerable research. Mr. Tofel presents a good many usually overlooked findings and sets the sport in its social and historical context. The best book about a single baseball team in a single year I have ever read. --Donald Honig

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Tofel explains his decision to write about the 1939 Yankees by noting that in that year the team "was not yet the franchise we think of. But they were beginning to get there." It was in 1939 that the Yankees won their fourth straight World Series and eighth overall, firmly cementing their position as the winningest team in baseball history. But 1939 brought more than another championship to the Bronx. It was also the year that Lou Gehrig's consecutive game-playing streak came to an end; by mid-season the star first baseman would be diagnosed with ALS now known as Lou Gehrig's disease. Tofel, assistant to the publisher of the Wall Street Journal, follows the '39 season month by month, charting the hot streaks and slumps of individual players and the team as a whole, while also interweaving new developments regarding Gehrig. Tofel does a splendid job of capturing the different personalities of the '39 Yankees, a team that included such legendary players as a young Joe DiMaggio and catcher Bill Dickey and was coached by Joe McCarthy; all three would be elected to the Hall of Fame. And while Tofel is only partially successful in putting the team in the context of the developments of that eventful year, Yankee fans and baseball historians will undoubtedly enjoy this tale of one year in the building of the Yankee dynasty.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

The Yankees will always remain one of the most popular teams. But the author makes the controversial argument that during the 1930s the Yankees were not thought of as the indisputable dynasty that they ultimately became. They had been repeat winners of World Series titles, but so had other great teams. In 1939, the Yankees, led by the young Joe DiMaggio, really etched a place in the history of baseball. This sweet, heavily anecdotal account will circulate well in library communities populated by Yankee fans. On Deck
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Ivan R Dee (December 26, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1566634113
• ISBN-13: 978-1566634113
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #695,266 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Richard Tofel is general manager of ProPublica, the Pulitzer Prize-winning non-profit investigative journalism newsroom, with responsibility for all of its non-journalism operations, including communications, legal, development, finance and budgeting and human resources. He was formerly the assistant publisher of The Wall Street Journal and, earlier, an assistant managing editor of the paper, vice president, corporate communications for Dow Jones & Company, and an assistant general counsel of Dow Jones. Most recently, he served as vice president, general counsel and secretary of The Rockefeller Foundation, and earlier as president and chief operating officer of The International Freedom Center, a museum and cultural center that was planned for the World Trade Center site. He is the author of Eight Weeks in Washington, 1861: Abraham Lincoln and the Hazards of Transition (St. Martin's, 2011); Restless Genius: Barney Kilgore, The Wall Street Journal, and the Invention of Modern Journalism (St. Martin's, 2009); Sounding the Trumpet: The Making of John F. Kennedy's Inaugural Address (Ivan R. Dee, 2005), Vanishing Point: The Disappearance of Judge Crater, and the New York He Left Behind (Ivan R. Dee, 2004) and A Legend in the Making: The New York Yankees in 1939 (Ivan R. Dee, 2002).

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Enjoyable Baseball History, February 2, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: A Legend in the Making: The New York Yankees in 1939 (Hardcover)

In his introduction the Richard Tofel notes the inspiration he drew from Richard Reeves's work on President Kennedy and David Herbert Donald's biography of Abraham Lincoln. The result of that inspiration is obvious. As you read Tofel's description of the progress of the '39 Yankees you feel as though you are there, living right along as the season winds to its foregone conclusion. In fact, it is only the inevitability of the Yankee victory, a runaway from the start, that occasionally slows the narrative. But that is not Tofel's fault. He more than makes up for the absence of a pennant race with several rich character portaits, partcularly of McCarthy and Gehrig. The sad recounting of the end of Gehrig's career, including a wonderful recreation of the day that Gehrig gave his "luckiest man on the face of the Earth" speech is alone worth the purchase price.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Supremacy with Uncommon Style and Grace, May 13, 2002

By 

Robert Morris (Dallas, Texas) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Legend in the Making: The New York Yankees in 1939 (Hardcover)

Up front, I acknowledge that I have been a lifelong baseball fan. Growing up in South Chicago, I saved every penny I could from paper routes, caddying, setting pins at the local bowling alley (which, yes, dates me), cutting lawns, washing cars, and stocking the shelves of the local grocery inorder to afford going to as many Cubs and White Sox games as my funds allowed. Otherwise, I listened to radio broadcasts of home and away games. Our family was the first in the neighborhood to have a television set; I could then watch the games with my grandmother, another diehard baseball fan. She loved the Cubs, endured the White Sox, and shared my excitement when World Series games were televised. So much for where I have been and still come from. Today, for various reasons, I have much less interest in Major League baseball.

Also up front, I want to say that I thoroughly enjoyed Tofel's account of the Yankees' 1939 season. It is exceptionally well-written. True, thanks to several dozen books I have already read, I already knew much of what he shares in this volume. Even so, he enabled me to return to a very special season in the history of Major League baseball, one during which there were so many transitions occurring. For example, Lou Gehrig was deteriorating (dying, in fact) while Joe DiMaggio was taking his rightful place as one of the greatest Yankees among so many outstanding players. The book follows an obvious but appropriate format: Pre-Game Warm-Up, followed by one chapter per each of nine Innings, then a Post-Game Report. Along the way, Tofel focuses on the key players and on the key games with the Yankees' strongest competitors. Along the way, when not recounting action on the field, Tofel pauses to discuss -- with sensitivity as well as insight -- human relationships which were neither revealed nor acknowledged until many years alter.

Some have challenged Tofel's use of the word" pure" but I do not. I think he means that the quality of play in combination with the professionalism of the players "between the lines" invested that Yankee team with a certain purity of deportment. Of course, at that time, players were literally owned by the teams which employed them. True, the color barrier would not be overcome until eight years later (1947), about the same time the U.S. military services were finally integrated. It was not until 1954 that the U.S. Supreme Court declared school segregation constitutionally illegal. Then and now, our society was not perfect and Tofel nowhere suggests otherwise.

Given all that, the 1939 Yankees handled themselves with uncommon style and grace...with a self-assurance many then viewed as arrogance. Nonetheless, even today, when wearing the pinstripes and playing in Yankee Stadium as a Yankee for the first time, veteran players such as Jason Giambi say that they get goose bumps and feel lightheaded. Until 1939, that was probably not true. After they won the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds, the players' brief celebration in the clubhouse was cut short by manager Joe McCarthy: "Cut that out! What are you, a lot of amateurs? I thought I was managing a professional club. Why, you're worse than college guys." The chastised players then listened silently and intently as McCarthy shared his thoughts about "lost games they might have won during the championship season."

For whatever it may be worth, the only other books on baseball which I enjoyed reading as much as this one are Red Smith on Baseball and Roger Kahn's The Boys of Summer. Now if only the Cubs or the White Sox could win a World Series....

10 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tofel hits a Homer, January 15, 2002

By 

Michael O'Neill (New York, Ny United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Legend in the Making: The New York Yankees in 1939 (Hardcover)

Dick Tofel's new book on the '39 Yankees is a line-drive to gap just left of the monuments, a "rope" like the ones that Joe D. used to devliver, it's going - going -gone, that book is out of here, a home run, a four- bagger, a veritable trip around the bases, and -- if they count the runners on base -- many will come to regard this as a a grand slam. Tofel brings us back to a time when baseball was more than a game. Must reading for anyone who ever wondered how America came to have a National Pastime.