Customer Reviews

The Yankee Years

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1 star:		(2)

 

 

I am not a Yankee fan. I am not a Red Sox fan. I have no dog in this fight.

Now, with that out of the way, I hope you'll give me a fair shake at this.

My opinion: this is a good read, at times even gripping. Its value lies beyond what gossip it contains about A-Rod or how it gets back at the Steinbrenners. It's an inside look at how baseball has changed, in ways that are often not that good.

I thought The Yankee Years would be a routine behind-the-scenes tell-all, but its ambitions are bigger. It chronicles the end of an era in baseball, a more innocent time before steroid scandals, big money and executive decisions based on advanced statistical analysis.

This is not a Joe Torre memoir. Torre provides his voice and viewpoint throughout the book, but Verducci also quotes dozens and dozens of other key personalities. He weaves it all into a fascinating narrative that covers all the highs and lows of the Yankee's dynasty years.

The book throws a spotlight on many key players from this era. Some shine, others don't. David Cone, Mike Mussina and Derek Jeter shine. Jeter, in particular, impresses throughout with his sunny optimism and quiet leadership. If you weren't a Jeter fan before, you will be after reading it.

There has been a lot of buzz about Torre dissing players in these pages. The "A-Fraud" reference to Alex Rodriguez is a throwaway reference to what guys in the clubhouse -- not Torre -- called A-Rod in 2004, about how the player tried to fit in during his first season as a Yankee. "People in the clubhouse, including teammates and support personnel, were calling him `A-Fraud' behind his back." Instead, Torre offers his clear-eyed assessment of Rodriguez as a player who can't succeed as a team player because of his fear of failure. "There's a certain free-fall you have to go through," he says, "when you commit yourself without a guarantee that it's always going to be good. There's a sort of trust, a trust and commitment thing that has to allow yourself to fail. Allow yourself to be embarrassed. Allow yourself to be vulnerable. And sometimes players aren't willing to do that."

It's almost biblical the way it all ends. A cloud of midges on a hot Cleveland night dooms the Yankees in a key playoff game. Thousands of the irritating insects descend on the mound, thoroughly rattling the pitcher. Bug spray makes the torment worse, not better. This perfect swarm seals Torre's fate. He leaves the Yankees not long after the loss, after a painful 10-minute meeting where he realizes his own personal Judas is his long-time general manager, Brian Cashman. "Cashman had retreated to silence with Torre's job on the line. The allies of Joe Torre had dwindled to zero."

Throughout the arc of this tale, Torre comes across as calm, determined and fair.

I should admit I do have a slight bias. When I was in junior high growing up outside St. Louis, Joe Torre taught me to play infield. He was playing third base for the Cardinals then. He appeared at the community center in my neighborhood outside the city one day and gave a handful of us kids a free lesson. I'll never forget it; he was patient and explained the game in detail, like he actually cared that we understood it. I learned a lot in that hour, from a decent man.

Here's the chapter list:

1. Underdogs
2. A Desperation to Win
3. Getting an Edge
4. The Boss
5. Mystique and Aura
6. Baseball Catches Up
7. The Ghosts Make a Final Appearance
8. The Issues of Alex
9. Marching to Different Drumbeats
10. End of the Curse
11. The Abyss
12. Broken Trust
13. "We Have a Problem"
14. The Last Race
15. Attack of the Midges
16. The End

The Yankee Years by Joe Torre and Tom Verducci has received a large amount of pre-release press especially from the New York media, but also the L. A. Times. I can't remember a book release in the recent past that has garnered so much attention before anyone has had a chance to read it. Even Steinbrenner is curious about the books contents. He should be.

The Yankee Years is a measured and thoughtful look at the years Joe Torre managed the Yankees, 1996-2007. During that time he got to and won four World Series out of five, not an easy task for anyone. Torre also stopped much of the ridicule he received from the New York media upon his appointment. If winning four World Series doesn't prove you're worthy of the job, nothing else will. The fact of the matter is that Joe Torre became the most beloved Yankees managers of all time winning the respect of the fans and his players.....also not an easy task given the list of outstanding players he worked with.

Not being a part of professional sports means that most of us read these kinds of books with a fascination made up of a combination of awe and disgust. Our only window into professional sports is comprised of the media, written and electronic and then watching the games as they come to us, one after another as the season progresses. I say this, because that means books such as the Yankee Years become our "inside" story; our life line and private peek into the insanity of what has become "professional sports."

The Yankee Years has already aggravated several A-list players that are mentioned in the book. A-Rod, reportedly referred to as A-Fraud by his team mates, and David Wells just to name two people who may not be happy with the publication of The Yankee Years.

Well written and very readable, the Yankee Years is above all else interesting and will be a book any baseball fan will want to read regardless of your team affiliation. Let's face it, the Yankees are the most storied of professional baseball teams and reading about them interests us even if we aren't fans.

Joe Torre's The Yankee Years is worth reading. I highly recommend.

Peace

As a lifelong Yankee fan I have to say that this book is absolutely invaluable because of all the information within. I'll be perfectly honest in saying that at the end of the 2007 season I thought it was time for Joe Torre to move on. My reasoning had more to do with maybe the team needing perhaps a new viewpoint from a manager. I know that it came with the price of the Yankees missing the postseason in 2008, and to be honest I was fine with that because it was something that I personally had been waiting for since the 2004 season. Joe just managed to stave off the eventual end of the Yankee postseason runs for a few more years and he did a hell of a job in spite of the parts he was given. After reading this book I will say that I'm very glad Joe didn't come back for the 2008 season with the Yankees because I think the unfair pressure on him would have continued, but it also brings up a complaint about the book which I will address at the end of the review.

The book is a very candid look at the Yankee run under Joe Torre from the 1996 thru 2007 seasons. It reads nicely, I've always been a huge fan of Tom Verducci's writings in Sports Illustrated and he doesn't fail to disappoint here. It's very nice to get a rare glimpse of the Yankee team behind closed doors and all of the problems that individual players brought to the team ranging from the moody Kevin Brown to the high maintenance Alex Rodriguez. In addition as others have mentioned the book does a wonderful job of detailing how MLB as a whole changed over the past 15 years thanks to the Yankee dominance during the Dynasty.

Now the excerpts released to the press prior to the publication of this book were designed to drum up interest, and it worked without a doubt. What I can say is that reading those excerpts within the context of the book as a whole, they really aren't that controversial. I was initially annoyed by what Torre said when I heard about it, but after reading the book, it brought me back to the times when some of the events occurred. To be honest, it wasn't really a big secret that David Wells was lazy, or that Kevin Brown was perpetually pissed off about something (and yes he could make your life miserable due to his attitude and frequent stints on the DL). Alex Rodriguez always was known as a high maintenance kind of guy. Joe Torre wasn't really dishing dirt in my opinion, but he was rather reinforcing what was already public knowledge. It is interesting to read what he had to say about different players, and I don't think any less of him for saying what he said.

Much like Buster Olney's book The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty New Edition: The Game, the Team, and the Cost of Greatness, this book outlines many of the problems/mistakes the Yankees made in trying to continually win the World Series every single year. They missed completely what brought them the 4 World Series in 5 years, and they paid a price that most fans of other teams have not realized. Spending the money they did was not a guarantee of any championship and it was something I realized going back to the 2002 season. As a fan of the team, when they lost Game 7 of the 2001 World Series, I felt the magic of what made those teams slip away, and I never have felt it since that night. Unfortunately the Yankee front office missed that completely and because of the greed they had to win, they haven't won since.

I don't really feel I can do justice to the book with a review, so what I can say is that every baseball fan whether a Yankee fan or Yankee hater or whatever else, should read this book. While about the Yankees, there are plenty of lessons to be learned from it. I also as a Yankee fan can only hope the front office reads this book and can truly understand where they went wrong. But knowing them, it wouldn't matter if they read this book. They probably still have no idea what they lost. In spite of looking forward to the 2009 MLB season, I'm dreading the Yankees aspect of it because the team did themselves no favors by creating even more expectations with the signings of CC Sabathia, AJ Burnett, and Mark Teixeira.

My only complaint with this book is that Joe Torre says he was willing to come back to the Yankees for the 2008 season with a 2nd year added to the contract. He discusses just how uncomfortable he was becoming with the overall situation, yet he would be ok with putting up with it for another year? Supposedly having a 2nd year would have made it easier to deal with managing even though the team could fire him at the end of the 1st year and made him a lame duck for the entire season? Sorry, I just found it to be a bit confusing logic.

Anyhow, that aside, it's a must read as I mentioned for all baseball fans and highly recommended!!!

I got off to a bad start with "The Yankee Years" when I spotted a factual error at the top of page two. Author Tom Verducci describes the 1995 Yankees as having blown a 2-1 lead in games to the Seattle Mariners in the American League Division Series. Well, that's technically accurate... as it is to say later that the Yanks blew a 3-2 lead to the Red Sox in 2004. Technically accurate, but still wrong.

After that, fortunately, it's smooth sailing. Just keep your expectations in check. This is NOT Joe Torre's comprehensive autobiography. This is not a blow-by-blow account of how Torre managed all those playoff games, and there's not a whole lot of actual scoops. This is simply Tom Verducci's biography of baseball in the early 21st century, in which Joe Torre's Yankees played a pivotal part.

Verducci uses Torre largely as on-the-record source material, and Torre's commentary improves a lot of Verducci's stories and relevations. News to me were the Yankees near-signing of Albert Belle in 1999 (thankfully they chose to retain Bernie Williams instead), and Billy Crystal's DVD roast sent to the team on the eve of the 2007 playoffs.

A large portion of this book has very little Torre at all. Verducci is most interested in two things: how steroids affected the game in the late '90s, and how the information revolution (and revenue sharing) helped close the gap between the Yankees and the rest of the American League after the 2000 World Series. The chapter on steroids and the chapter on Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game and its progeny have very little Torre in them. Other more comprehensive books exist on each subject, but Verducci does a good big-picture job of tying them into a larger theme -- how baseball corrected the spending gap caused by the Yankees' enormous wealth.

Other Yankees personnel and Torre admirers have large roles in the book. Mike Mussina, Jason Giambi and Larry Bowa evidently made themselves available for lengthy interviews, and their perspective is quoted throughout. Three rival general managers (Billy Beane, Theo Epstein and Mark Shapiro) show their respect to Torre while at the same time explaining how they lapped Brian Cashman in the intelligence-gathering field.

Even if this is clearly Verducci's pet project, you still can't tell the story of baseball over the last 15 years without Joe Torre's blessing. Even as the 2001 - 2007 Yankees stacked up failure after playoff failure, even as their minor league pool dried up and their free agent picks got worse and worse (David Cone and Jimmy Key yield to Carl Pavano and Kei Igawa), Torre was still good for 100 wins a year.

The most original parts of "The Yankee Years" are the final few chapters, detailing the eclipse of George Steinbrenner's faculties and the Yankees' tumultuous 2007 season. Verducci gets pretty far inside the clubhouse door and gives a very entertaining recounting of the swarm of midges that helped the Indians push past New York in the '07 ALDS.

And as for A-Rod... as much heat as Torre took the week of his book's release, for putting his name on a book where Verducci revealed clubhouse secrets... doesn't Torre look vindicated now? Or, as Jose Canseco would have said... Vindicated: Big Names, Big Liars, and the Battle to Save Baseball?

I still feel that another Joe Torre biography is out there, but without Verducci's research and reporting on broader topics, that book might turn out to be as generic as Chasing the Dream: My Lifelong Journey to the World Series, or as useless as Joe Torre's Ground Rules for Winners: 12 Keys to Managing Team Players, Tough Bosses, Setbacks, and Success.

Of course I heard all the publicity about Joe Torre's new book and expected an insightful and thrilling tell-all. If you are any kind of fan and have read better books such as THE LAST NIGHT OF THE YANKEE DYNASTY by Buster Olney, you will find much of the information in this book repetitive and bland. Many of the pages recount scores and series and at bats which I believe can be a great back-drop to set up personalities integral to a deeper insight into the Yankees and the players Torre managed. That does not seem to be the case with this book and many of the pages were wasted with bland story-telling and things many fans may have already known.

The fact that Torre's name graces the cover of this book as an author is ridiculous. He was used as probably the primary source but the entire book was written by Verducci who just has numerous quotes from Torre with very few revolutionary thoughts on intriguing topics. The chapter on "A-Fraud" was somewhat interesting, but could have been much more-so had Torre written the book many of us thought he was writing. I could say the same for the steriods chapter entailing Roger Clemens friendship with Brian McNamee. Information about Kenny Lofton of all people was fairly intriguing, but overall I was surprised and somewhat shocked at how mundane and boring this book was. Perhaps I am a victim of the fact that I have read 10 baseball books a year with Olney's above mentioned one probably the best in the last several years.

If you are looking for a juicy tell-all like Canseco, this is not it. If you read only one baseball book a year, you might enjoy this and it is probably worth your time, but if you are familiar with the Yankee's and have done some reading, you can read at your own risk.

This is a very quick and entertaining read, particularly for Yankee fans who followed the great teams of the Torre era. The book is written by Sports Illustrated reporter Verducci, not Torre -- though Verducci has access to extensive interviews with Torre. As a result, some of the sources for the book are third persons, sometimes even anonymous ones. Press reports that Torre was ripping A-Rod and others are not quite true. Third persons, not Torre, called A-Rod "A-Fraud." Torre was concerned about perceptions of A-Rod and his concern about A-Rod's fear of failure as undermining his performance is something he told A-Rod directly. One surprise to me is that Damon essentially lost interest in baseball at the beginning of 2007 and almost walked away from the game. He ended up playing catch-up the rest of the season.

Given the extraordinary performance of both Sheffield and Giambi as clutch hitters, I was a bit surprised to hear criticism of those two. Yes, it was stupid for the Yanks to go after Sheffield instead of the younger Guerrero. But I was surprised that Torre was never a fan of the Giambi deal -- the guy was a terrific hitter and clubhouse presence. He is criticized, somewhat unfairly, for telling management that he was too lame to play defense in the 2003 World Series. Yet, this is precisely the kind of honesty Torre wanted from his players. Still, Torre emphasized defense and reliability, which I suppose was his root problem with Giambi.

The real problem of the Yankees from 2004 to 2007 was not Giambi or Sheffield or A-Rod, but their pitching. Their offense was terrific in this period. But all great offenses are prone to being shut down against post-season pitching, and the Yankees lacked the top starters necessary to match up with the pitching of the Red Sox, Angels, Tigers, and Indians in these years. The book makes a very good case that the Yankees went after the wrong pitchers in this period -- Vazquez, Pavano, Contreras, Brown, Johnson, Wright. Vazquez may not belong on this list, but he certainly was not the number 1 or number 2 pitcher the Yanks were looking for.

One of the problems, however, was what was the alternative? As Verducci points out, the rest of the league was on to the Yanks. They were signing their young pitchers to long term deals to keep them away from the Yankees. Still, the Yanks just plain blew the opportunity to get Schilling and should have held on to Pettite and Lilly. This would have made a huge difference and may have produced another championship during the end of the Torre era.

My criticism of the book is threefold. First, it is poorly organized and repetitive. Second, the criticism of Cashman is unfair. Yes, he blew the pitching moves. But he was a big supporter of Torre and put his neck out for him to help save his job. Only when the franchise was irretrievably committed in another direction does Cashman back away from Torre. I think Torre should have seen Cashman's conduct as simple business as opposed to a personal betrayal. Third, and most importantly, if Torre's management is based on trust, doesn't he breach it by doing a tell-all book so soon after his departure? Revealing locker room secrets is a betrayal of trust. I could see writing this book several years after the fact, but writing it now was unfair to A-Rod, Giambi, Damon, Sheffield, Cashman, and some of the others who do not come off well in this book. As an admirer of Torre, this lapse in judgment is very disconcerting.

The book recounts the roller coaster story of Torre's years resurrecting the World Series dominance of the storied Yankees. A good, although poorly written, book, it describes the chemistry in the clubhouse between players like Jeter, Williams, Mussina and Cone that lead to eight World Series appearances and four World Championships in 8 years. Even more interesting was watching the deterioration of the team through loss of key personal by free agency, trades and retirement.

Finally, the book describes Torre's ouster by the front office men who replaced Steinbrenner in his dotage. I'll give Torre credit for being very professional and even handed, even in his description of how Cashman et al screwed him over.

I mentioned that the book was poorly written, and it is. It is kind of wild and all over the place. It will talk about events across multiple seasons at the same page, then go back to one particular season. It also took a lengthy expository break to describe the current state of the art in Baseball statistics which wasn't really necessary. I blame the SI guy who co-wrote it.

All in all, it is a great book for a baseball fan, especially a Yankee fan.

After completing reading The Yankee Years (Kindle Edition), I have to say I was left disappointed. While there are several interesting, fun, or insightful anecdotes about the Yankees organization, the majority of the book is spoiled by an endless stream of statistics, constant reiteration, and overall, juvenile writing.

I picked up this book to read the behind-the-scenes stories and going-ons of the Yankee organization. Instead, I got a fairly reiterative summary of the post-seasons under Joe Torre. Though there were some stories about things going on in the club house, or the front office, much of the book read as post-game summaries.

Overall, I'd say I was disappointed by the book. Frankly, I felt that little, if any, of the book was actually written by Torre; instead he seems to have merely contributed a good portion of the quotes in the book. For those of us who remember "The Yankee Years" under Torre, there is only a handful of interesting additions and insight in this book that we didn't experience first hand, while watching the games. And for those little gems of story telling, that you wouldn't get unless you were in the clubhouse, I wouldn't say it is worth slogging through awkward sentence structure, repetitive statistics, and bland writing in the rest of the book to get to them.

I'd skip this one.

Truly outstanding account of the rise of Joe Torre's Yankee dynasty and the demise of that dynasty. It's about the rise of the Red Sox, too, how the two teams' destinies seem to go hand-in-hand, to be intertwined.

It's all here, the personalities of the game, revenue sharing plans, drug awareness and concerns and the computerization of baseball, the "new age" of the game that the Red Sox used to overtake the Yankees and create their own dynasty. The Yankees, simply put, stayed "old school" too long...

All told in the calm, reasoned, matter-of-fact style and perspective of a good man--and a great baseball man--Joe Torre.

The book gives an innteresting and intriguing look inside the Yankee Club House and the personality politics of the always fascinating NY Yankees, the greatest and most controversial organization in baseball.

Heroes, villans, goats and wannabees, they're all here. Torre's account gives flesh and blood feeling to individuals who are normally treated as characters in sports media.

The book is over-written at times, too many quotes all to prove or illustrate the same point, but in that respect the book is like baseball itself, a stat for everything and everything for a stat.

To the devoted baseball man, "The Yankee Years" is a treasure trove of good stuff; to the more casual baseball fan, it's a bit of overkill,but it's still a greata read, a great baseball book by a great baseball man on baseball's greatest team, the "New York Damn Yankees..." Love'em or hate'em, they're still the Yankees. Now and Forever...

And Tom Verducci...the man can turn a phrase to capture deeper meaning and nuances than words might normally convey. For example:

--Page 227 "A tremendous wall of sound rose up, the kind of roar that comes not just from the throat, but also from the heart..."

--Page 350-51 (on George Steinbrenner) "...it had become obvious by 2007 that the old lion had reached his winter."

And from page 324: "Greatness is the ability to mask the difficulty of a task--to make the difficult appear easy. Those Yankee teams epitomized greatness."

Now thaht's good stuff.

Give us more, Tom...

This is a terrific book for baseball fans. I started following the baseball with the Yankees of 1990 and recall the day in newspapers when Torre was hired and Buck Showalter was let go, and remained a die-hard fan with their eventual rise of to the Dynasty status until the chemistry of the Yankee culture started to change to we-can-buy-any-freeagents around 2001-2002.

This book offers an extremely rare glimpse into the ballplayers' personalities, styles, and power struggles, just like you and I also do in life and corporate, and how Torre was able to maximize his returns with his players. Torre's style is one that is built on trust, and it worked for him throughout the years. You will be able to see how players responded, how some didn't, and also surprising insights into private parts of players life that I was surprised Torre publicized (Rocket crying, Mo crying, Brown crying).

I highly recommend baseball fans buy this book and also Buster Olney's The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty. The combination of both books offers a great perspective on team culture, and how this dynasty engine worked, and why it didn't and probably won't in the near future.

Lastly, this book offers a great view on the changing nature of the game, the young GMs in the business today, the role of numbers and analytics, and how the new-school is beating the old-school, in exploiting market inefficiencies in players.

I couldn't put this book down and finished it in one pass on an international flight 3 days ago. Def worth the bucks spent and something any baseball fan can enjoy reading.