Customer Reviews

The Pride and the Pressure: A Season Inside the New York Yankee Fishbowl

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This whole book is a collection of tabloid-like articles telling us more than we really need or want to know about some of the Yankee players. For example, Hideki has raging acne and a large collection of porn. Jeter isn't very nice to Miguel Cairo (I didn't know that and I'm sorry. I like Miguel).
The writing style is very irritating. Morrissey obviously did a lot of taping and includes many long quotes from the players, verbatim. Often they didn't bother to finish their sentences or spoke disjointedly, and we are expected to read their minds to know what they meant to say. I am a dedicated Yankee fan and still didn't know what was meant a lot of the time.
Publication of the book seems to have been rushed to coincide with the opening of another season of controversy starring the mortal enemies, Derek and Alex. Don't buy it. It's already outdated because, as of this week anyway, A-Rod is doing great - having hit a walkoff HR and being pushed out of the dugout by Jeter for a curtain call. If you must keep up with the Yankees' behind-the-scenes personal stuff, read the NY papers in hard copy or online. There is nothing wrong with some good gossip. But this is just junk

My reaction to this book was almost identical to Forgerelli's. If you're a fan who watches every pitch, reads the papers every day, and discusses the team on blogs, there will not be a single thing in this book you don't already know.

I think this book is flawed in many ways: it rehashes the broad stories that have been told a million times; it never creates a sense of the season's progression; Morrissey is a poor writer (the Humpty-Dumpty line is just one example -- his editor let him make some jaw-droppingly bad analogies); it's irritatingly redundant; and Morrissey too often uses his book to beat up on people he doesn't personally like.

It's a huge disappointment that Morrissey didn't take more time with this book and write an in-depth study of the 2006 season, which was fascinating. There was so much drama -- starting with Matsui and Sheffield getting hurt and being out much of the year; the emergence of Melky Cabrera; A-Rod's struggles; the Boston Massacre Part II, which turned the season around; Bernie William's one last hurrah.

So much happened and the season was such an emotional roller-coaster -- but you never get a sense of this from the book.

Morrissey's insight into the actual game of baseball is limited, and sometimes he simply gets it wrong. He writes: "[Wang] was no can't-miss kid... [T]he Yankees offered him only $1.9 million, reportedly less than the Braves did." 1.9 million dollars is a huge sum of money to pay for an international free agent, and ranks as one of the biggest signing bonuses the Yankees have ever given to one. It was an especially high amount for a 20-year-old Taiwanese kid. Morrissey also reiterates things that are known to be false, such as the Yankees not wanting to draft overrated St. John's closer Craig Hansen because they didn't want to pay him the money he wanted.

Morrissey spends a long time talking about the A-Rod/Jeter relationship (which I guess we should come to expect at this point). He goes out of his way to trash Jeter, essentially calling him a phony who never missteps in front of the cameras but acts like a jerk when they're away. He doesn't let A-Rod off the hook, but he repeats the idea that A-Rod needed Jeter to defend him when times got tough. While bashing Jeter for not doing it, he doesn't state the obvious: what does it say about Alex Rodriguez if he's so fragile that he needs a teammate to stand up for him in the press to stay together mentally?

Carl Pavano is everyone's favorite punching bag, so it's no surprise he's dragged through the mud again. Morrissey is almost gleeful recounting the shots teammates (anonymously) took at Pavano. He questions if Pavano had the mental toughness to play in New York and ridiculously wonders if Pavano was really hurt (as if you can "pretend" to have bone chips and broken ribs). He uses Tanyon Sturtze playing through an injury in 2006 as an example of Pavano not being a good teammate or a real man -- but doesn't point out that Sturtze was so awful while playing that fans were calling for him to be cut, and that when Torre found out about the injury he went berserk. An injured player is a useless player, but Morrissey can't stop himself from calling Pavano a "coward" and "malingerer."

Morrissey reveals a stunning pettiness in the end, as he takes shots at a rival newspaper and trumpets how the "Post" became more popular than the "Daily News." It's childish, to say the least, but holds the pattern of how he takes low-blow shots at the players he doesn't like.

The book comes slightly alive when he chronicles the vastly disappointing playoff series against the Tigers. Because he finally -- finally -- details a series (the only other time he does it is the Boston Massacre). The ALDS was a disaster, and Torre was at his worst. Morrissey gets the tone of chaos and dread correct. It's just too bad he didn't do this for the entire season, giving a better representation of the ups and downs that the Yankees experienced.

In the end, you could get the same effect you get from this book by reading a year worth of blog postings from the 2006 season. It really does nothing more than rehash everything you've already heard. Aside from one nice interview with Jason Giambi, where he opens up more than I've ever seen him open up, there's nothing here a devoted fan doesn't already know, and probably better and more intimately than Morrissey.

I remember when I used to write papers in school and in college -- if I had trouble filling the page demands, I would stretch the material as far as I possibly could, fluff up the quotes, throw in some extra notes I had edited out before, and so on. It seems Michael Morrissey approached "The Pride and the Pressure" the same way, taking what is essentially an extremely long magazine feature piece and padding it until it became a 250+ page book. It's probably my least favorite baseball book of all time.

I'll admit, I didn't have high hopes for this book going in. I'm a die-hard Yankee fan, but there are two things -- I felt -- that worked against this book right from the start. 1) Despite what Morrissey and some reviewers contend, the 2006 Yankees weren't all that interesting. They had some injuries, some clubhouse tension, high hopes that fell short -- but there wasn't much so extraordinary that it was worthy of a book. 2) Only five months separated the end of the '06 season and the day the book hit the stores -- as a result, there is nothing but quotes, quotes, and more quotes. Any anecdotes on the team or players that were new or interesting were very infrequent. There is probably a reason why some of the best books that recap a season or consecutive seasons (Summer of '49, October 1964, October Men, The Last Good Season, Boys of Summer, to name a few) come out years or decades later, giving the material time to grow and the people that were involved time to reflect back and share their thoughts in a different (more interesting and less inhibited) way.

As others have noted, the major flaw in this book is the use of quotes. I don't ever recall seeing a book so heavily padded with unnecessary quotes as this effort by Morrissey. Quotes go on for paragraphs at a time, and often, they make no sense. With the apparent lack of editing, some do nothing but confuse the reader who is forced to read someone's spoken rant verbatim.

To compare, "Birth of a Dynasty," another recent book written by a NY Post sports reporter, had me hooked within the first three chapters, and it was a breeze to finish. "Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty" was very good. "The Pride and the Pressure," unfortunately, does not come close to either one. It simply did nothing for me and was frustrating to read.

Like I said earlier, it basically reads like Morrissey was told to write a 250-page paper on the Yankees as a final project, but he stalled at about 150.

I was disappointed in this book. I felt that it was cut and pasted from every post game newspaper interview that I read last season. I thought that it was put together very quickly and without much thought. Maybe I expected more? Morrissey basically reguritates quotes that were written in the NY newspapers last season. There was little in this book that captivated me to want to read more. He has a chapter about Melky Cabrera and writes about Matsui almost the entire chapter, even though Matsui has his own chapter earlier in the book. I was hoping that he would take us into the inner workings of the New York Yankees and he really does not. If you are a die-hard Yankee fan, you will get nothing from this book that you don't already know. It feels like you are reading old newspaper quotes from the 2006 season. He offers little to no perspective of the 2006 season to the reader. Its just quote after quote after quote...

This was like reading a year's worth of newspapers at once. There is absolutely nothing worthwhile that even the most casual Yankee fan doesn't know. (Jeter and A-Rod don't get along? you're kidding!) This was clearly slapped together and put out to coincide with the start of the baseball season. I read a lot of baseball books and this is waaaayyyyy at the bottom.

For once, we are not talking about the Yankees of days gone by. We are dealing in the current events of their often lopsided universe, and this book presents all of the players and all of the king's men in a very honest, current spotlight(or glare, if necessary). We are treated to a better understanding of some of the people you don't normally hear enough about. Mike Mussina, Godzilla, Robinson Cano and others are given the attention normally reserved for Jeter or Rodriguez. Even George Steinbrenner is updated to the reality of who he is right now, and not the volatile, cartoonish owner of the past. There is still plenty of ink devoted to the superstars but even they are shown to be every bit as human as the rest of us. Fans who live in the Yankee past will probably not enjoy this book as much, since they tend to continually want to compare every year and every line-up with a time that is long gone by. That's too bad. But for those of us who follow the Yankees right now, today - this book is really a terrific find. The Yankees will always be the gold-standard of class, excellence and profitability, but atleast this book will show you just how hard it is to get where they are and even harder to hold on. Forget curses, spells and other mumbo-jumbo. Success and heart - that is the true Yankee credo.

I heard about this book on The Mike and the Mad Dog show and I was very much looking forward to reading it. I've thoroughly enjoyed most of the baseball books they've discussed (The Big Bam comes to mind), but this book was a big disappointment. The book is supposed to be about the trials and tribulations of being a New York Yankee, specifically the 2006 team.

If you're a big Yankee fan and read the papers and/or listen to sports radio there's almost nothing new in this book for you. One notable exception is the "revelation" of a shoving match between Jeter and ARod in 2005. This story comes from a posting on an internet blog. What I would really like to know is why wasn't this story picked up anywhere else? If there was even a hint of truth to this story I'm sure it would've been reported everywhere, but I guess I could be wrong. Another new bit of information I learned was that Matsui has a large porn collection. I'm not sure what that has to do with anything other than the author's attempt to make the book more controversial so it gets more press.

My biggest problem with this book is the author's tendency to try to be cute or funny, which he completely fails to do. Here's a particularly annoying quote from the book: Here he's talking about Steinbrenner's failing health in an incident where The Boss almost falls "Had he missed the barricades, he still could've split his melon open on the concrete plaza outside the stadium. Talk about a real life Humpty-Dumpty--nobody in the Yankee kingdom would've been able to put The Boss back together again." UGH! The book is filled with junk like that.

I completely agree with what fellow reviewer BigFrankie said, this book reads like a compilation of quotes from the back pages of the New York tabloids with the authors own snide and cutesy comments thrown in. I also found this book to be very biased. You can clearly tell the author likes some players and dislikes others. If the player gave him good interviews he was a good guy. If the player didn't he was a jerk. Sheffield is a jerk but he gave interviews so Morrissey makes him a somewhat sympathetic person, Randy Johnson is a jerk that didn't give interviews so Morrissey literally calls him a jerk.

I read a lot of baseball books, I have about 500 of them, and the Yankees are my favorite team so I have quite a few about the Yankees. This book is one of the worst I own. Both about baseball and the Yankees. A better book could have been made by clipping out all the stories in the newspapers last year and pasting them in a scrapbook.

Morrissey's book is a terrific synopsis of this disappointing season. It may be quote- heavy, but that is exactly what makes it interesting. He did not try to go through the season day-by-day or month-by-month simply recapping the box scores. He let the players and key personnel describe in their own words what happened, and gave everyone a chance to get their viewpoint across while adding valuable insight of his own. This makes for a much more enjoyable read. Perhaps fans who have already read every one of the daily newspaper stories during the season will not get as much from this. Readers who love (or even those who hate) the Yankees who do not have access to the daily reporting will really love this book.

Baseball has always been the most literary of pastimes and has without doubt produced more great books than any other sport. Unfortunately, Michael Morrissey's new release, "The Pride and the Pressure" is not an addition to that canon. Subtitled "A Season Inside the New York Yankee Fishbowl," the book chronicles the Yanks' 2006 dramatic season, ending with their abrupt defeat against the Detroit Tigers in the first round of the playoffs.

Billed as an insider's look into the Yankees season, the book lacks a strong narrative and offers virtually no detail on the games themselves. Instead Morrissey focuses a chapter at a time on specific players, ("Jeter," "Giambi," "Mussina") causing the book to feel scattered and lacking focus. He often steps outside of his journalist role and editorializes needlessly, calling players "jerks" and other names. The clichéd analogies and badly structured sentences seem to indicate that Morrissey was a journalist struggling under deadline - never conducive to great literature.

If you want to read a great baseball book this summer you may have to pick up "The Boys of Summer," (Roger Kahn) "Summer of '49," (David Halberstam) or another classic. This one isn't much more than an extra long research paper.

The 2006 Yankees were the big offensive steam engine with a near league average pitching caboose who should have never wondered about whether they "can" make it up the hill - and, yet, in the end, they derailed. So, what happened?

Thanks to The Pride and the Pressure - A Season Inside the New York Yankee Fishbowl, we now have the definitive chronicle of the 2006 New York Yankees - breaking both the team and the season down, part by part.

I found each chapter in "The Pride and the Pressure" to be revealing and therefore entertaining.

In a nutshell, Morrissey's book provides everything that you need to know about the 2006 Yankees - with no holds barred. The Pride and the Pressure - A Season Inside the New York Yankee Fishbowl is a must read for Yankees fans and an excellent source of information for anyone wishing to know more about what it's like to play professional baseball in the Bronx Zoo circa 2006. Therefore, I highly recommend this book.