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Book Review: O Captain, my Captain

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There is a book waiting to be written about the life and times of Derek Jeter. This book will explore what motivates him to excel on the field and how he behaves off the field where he was – and maybe still is – a king of New York’s social scene. In other words, it should delve into every aspect of Derek Jeter that makes him Derek Jeter. That book is not, however, Ian O’Connor’s highly anticipated biography The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter.

From the start, I knew that O’Connor’s book, at nearly 380 pages, would be a slog. The first sentence of chapter one read, “Like all good stories about a prince, this one starts in a castle.” That’s the way O’Connor has chosen to frame his biography. It’s not a critical look at Jeter; it’s not one with inside information about his social life; it excuses any short-comings; it is about a player O’Connor views as a prince.

After that, though, the book takes a turn for the better. The first 200 pages focus on Jeter’s background and early years with the Yankees. We learn about his grandfather’s youth in New Jersey as a foster child and how his work ethic shaped Jeter’s devotion to his eventual craft. We hear about the racial challenges Jeter’s parents faced as a mixed marriage at a time of less tolerance even in New Jersey and Michigan. We read about his youth as a start baseball and basketball player. As a scrawny teenager in the late 1980s, even then, Derek Jeter was destined for great things. He told his friends he would both be on the Yankees and date Mariah Carey, and everyone who knew him believed him.

As the tale progresses, O’Connor offers a glimpse back at the fateful draft of 1992. Somehow, Jeter, far and way the most productive player from that draft, fell all the way to the sixth pick. The Astros wanted Phil Nevin’s power while the Indians wanted Paul Shuey’s arm. The Reds’ advanced scouts and a young Jim Bowden urged the club to take Jeter with the fifth pick, but Julian Mock went the cheaper route. They picked Chad Mottola who appeared in just 59 games for the Reds, Blue Jays, Orioles and Marlins.

That draft was, of course, the first major turning point in Jeter’s life. He was expected to become the next great Yankee and had a signing bonus to match. He and Brien Taylor were due to lead the club into another era of greatness, but the game that came so easily to Jeter in Michigan proved challenging. At the age of 18, he hit .210/.311/.314 with 21 errors and would call home in tears every night. At age 19, his hitting improved, but he made 56 errors for Single A Greensboro. Already, Yankee officials were talking about moving Jeter out of short stop.

But as O’Connor notes, intangibles carried the day. Jeter, work ethic intact, turned himself into the sixth best prospect in baseball, and despite pressure from the front office to go with a more experienced short stop, he emerged as the team’s young spark plug in 1996. For his first five seasons, Jeter led a golden life. He won four World Series and dated Mariah Carey. After the 2000 World Series, Jeter was on top of the world, but even then, O’Connor had to position the second half of his book. “Derek Jeter, four-time champ,” he writes, “was the undisputed lord of the rings. He had no idea how much suffering he would endure in pursuit of his one for the thumb.”

The suffering, of course, came in the form of Those Other Guys. Once the synergistic energies of Paul O’Neill and Tino Martinez and Scott Brosius departed, the Yankees, says O’Connor, became a Me-First team. Jason Giambi, for instance, asked out of the 2003 World Series, much to Jeter’s chagrin. And then A-Rod arrives.

If this book has a villain, it is Alex Rodriguez. He’s the guy who kisses himself in the mirror, who slaps at baseballs, who cares too much about his image and manages to put his foot in his mouth. He’s the guy who dissed Jeter in an Esquire interview and who bears the full weight of the Yanks’ post-season failures from 2004-2007. He is the anti-Jeter, and this goes on for nearly 150 pages as O’Connor defines Jeter for what A-Rod isn’t as much as he does what the Yankees’ Captain is.

Using stories from Selena Roberts’ A-Rod expose and the Joe Torre/Tom Verducci memoir, O’Connor paints a familiar picture of A-Rod as a selfish guy. Perhaps that’s not an inaccurate picture of A-Rod, but he’s also a player who hit .303/.403/.573 with 173 home runs over his first four seasons in the Bronx. He certainly wasn’t embraced by Jeter who comes across as vindicative toward those who double-cross him, but he was a big part of the Yanks’ regular season success.

Eventually, Jeter and A-Rod reconcile as the Yanks’ Captain brings Alex “back into the fold.” He is embraced, and the Yankees win the 2009 World Series. It was Jeter’s crowning moment. “Jeter did not just embody the pride of the Yankees as much as any mythic figure before him,” O’Connor writes, returning to his favorite metaphor. “He proved a prince can become a king without lusting after the throne.” Mostly, the book is as saccharine and sterilized as it sounds.

Yet, buried within this tale of the prince of New York is something more interesting, and now and then, it shines through. While Jeter didn’t fully cooperate with O’Connor, he clearly gave his blessing for some of his closest friends — including Tino Martinez, David Cone and one-time Yankee farmhand R.D. Long — to sit with O’Connor. When they talk, Derek becomes more human and less princely. It slams the Mets for allowing the Baha Men to perform “Who Let the Dogs Out” before the 2000 World Series at Shea Stadium. He is absolutely frigid toward those who slight him or friends who do him wrong. He dumps Mariah Carey and kicks her to the curb with a brutal efficiency. He yells at Bernie Williams and Jay Witasick behind closed doors and is a far more vocal captain than many fans think. He parties as a youngster during Spring Training and courts starlets for decades.

To me, that’s what would make a Derek Jeter biography more interesting. It doesn’t have to be all wine and roses. We know about his on-field accomplishments; we have seen them day in and day out. But O’Connor’s book leaves Jeter’s private life well enough alone. The book rehashes the 2003 dispute with George Steinbrenner that eventually lead to an amusing VISA commercial and mentions Jeter’s extreme secrecy concerning the women he has dated. But Minka Kelly, for instance, is mentioned on a whopping six pages, and Joe Torre’s reluctance to push his favorite pupil to improve his defense gets very short shrift.

As an epilogue to the 2009 World Series, O’Connor provides some behind-the-scenes glimpses at Jeter’s contract negotiations, and here, the book does what I want to do. Jeter, painted as proud and not always receptive to criticism, did not take kindly to the Yanks’ suggestion that he wasn’t worth a nine-figure deal or $20 million a year. This is the excerpt that ESPN New York ran a few weeks ago as a teaser for the book. The Yanks pushed hard, and Jeter got upset. Eventually, Randy Levine settled the dispute by offering Jeter more money than he otherwise would have gotten and a player option, and everyone became friends — or at least frenemies — again.

Yet, even here, the book seems incomplete, and that’s because it is. Derek Jeter’s story is far from over. We have yet to see how Jeter, long accustomed to exploiting his natural talents to win World Series titles and not receptive to moving position, will respond to the inevitable and ongoing aging process. We don’t know what’s going to happen when he does have to move from short stop, and we haven’t seen how the Yankees and their fading star will address his anemic bat. That isn’t just an epilogue to the softcover edition of O’Connor’s book; it’s an entirely new section that can’t be written for years. We might know Jeter a little better after reading O’Connor’s biography, but Jeter might not know himself until he faces the adversity on the baseball field that inevitably comes with age.

Book Review: In Tampa, an Extra 2% edge

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The Tampa Bay Rays are one of the least heralded success stories in sports of the past decade. In 2007, it was business as usual for the then-Devil Rays. They went 66-96, good for their ninth last place finish in ten seasons as a Major League club, and just under 1.4 million fans watched Alberto Reyes rack up 26 saves.

Since then, the Rays have won the AL East twice and made the World Series once. They’ve dethroned the league’s two richest teams and still sport a solid young core of players that make them a perennial threat in the American League. They don’t have a new stadium and still draw under 1.8 million fans per season. Yet, the Rays have become the latest small-market success story. How?

The how is the subject of Jonah Keri’s latest book. Entitled The Extra 2 %, Keri’s book explores, as the lofty subtitle says, “how Wall Street strategies took a Major League Baseball team from worst to first.” With a new ownership group in place that was willing to experiment and push the envelope, the Rays took advantage of their position at the bottom of baseball’s economic pecking order to dig for advantages. Luck played no small part in it, but the Rays have something that works, for now.

To set the stage, Keri spends the first few chapters exploring the tortured history of baseball in Tampa Bay. The sprawling metropolitan had always appealed to Major League Baseball more as a threat than as an actual landing place for a team. Whenever a successful franchise needed a new stadium, it would threaten a move to St. Petersburg. The White Sox did so in the early 1990s; the Mariners followed suit a few years later; and the San Francisco Giants were apparently this close to shacking up in the Trop.

Yet, despite the fact that St. Petersburg went so far as to build a stadium — an ugly one at that — without a tenant, Major League Baseball never graced the area with a team. Miami got its franchise first, and it took the threat of a lawsuit that would have rocked baseball from its lofty perch atop an antitrust exemption to see the Devil Rays enter the world.

When they did, it was a spectacular disaster. Vince Naimoli was the wrong man to own the team, and Chuck LaMar was the wrong general manager. The club burned draft picks by signing bad free agents. They wasted other picks by avoiding top talent in the name of “signability.” Sometimes, they landed the right guy; Carl Crawford stuck. But Jason Standridge and Dewon Brazelton are a testament to the disaster.

Keri’s narrative picks up the Extra 2 % when Stuart Sternberg, a baseball fan and Wall Street guy, buys the club from Naimoli. He brought Matthew Silverman and Andrew Friedman with him. Together, these three guys changed the franchise. They changed the way it does business; they spruced up Tropicana Field as best they could; and they began to search for the edge — the Extra 2 % — that would allow the Rays to remain competitive in the rich American League East.

Unfortunately for Keri’s book, the meat of the Extra 2 % is a proprietary one. James Click and Josh Kalk, two former Baseball Prospectus writers, are among the top figures working behind the scenes, but the Rays, who cooperated with Keri only at the end of his reporting, keep these minds away from the press. A certain part of the Extra 2 % is still a secret.

Yet, that doesn’t leave the book lacking, and Keri provides deep insights into the Rays’ process. He talks with Silverman and Friedman about their baseball arbitrage process, and while he doesn’t go inside the Rays’ draft room, he explains how the club is working to identify baseball talent on the cheap while selling high and drafting wisely. The Extra 2 % comes from the organization’s idea that they have to be that much more diligent than their competitors. The Devil Rays might have missed out on Albert Pujols in the early 2000s, but that’s a mistake the current regime will not make again.

Ultimately, the book is a great read, and I can’t recommend it enough for Yankee fans of all stripes. We might envy the Rays their recent success and no longer view them as the pushovers they once were. But that doesn’t make them an unlikeable franchise, and Keri’s book humanizes a franchise long scorned by the baseball cognoscenti.

The end of Keri’s book, on the current stadium, left me wanting the more than isn’t there yet. Tropicana Field is ugly and out of the way. It’s in a town with very high unemployment, and while the Rays have the highest TV ratings in the game, they can’t get fans to come. They also can’t force the area to fork over public funds for a new stadium.

So my question still remains: Can the Rays maintain their success? Keri says they can, but I’m less optimistic. (Perhaps, that’s my inner Yankee fan speaking.) Their payroll this year is much lower than in recent seasons, and their bullpen and lineup approach resembles something of a band aid. They will rise and fall on their arms, but as the young guns grow up, can they keep winning? The cast of The Extra 2 % came of age at a time when the Rays had the right guys making the right Number 1 draft picks. Success comes at a price, and in 2011, we’ll learn if the Rays can sustain success of it small-market wins are merely cyclical.

Editor’s Note: Jonah Keri is a good friend of mine, and his publisher supplied me with a review copy of the book. Joe and I are also mentioned by name in the Acknowledgements. Still, this review is an impartial one.

To be 12 and a Yankee fan as the Mariners won

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When I was 12 years old, the Seattle Mariners broke my heart. A perfectly-placed double by Edgar Martinez in the bottom of the 11th inning on a Sunday night in early October sent the Yankees home after a thrilling ALDS. It was the first Yankee playoff appearance of my life, and while the memories of it would be erased by a half a decade of World Series dominance, it was a crushing, stinging defeat for this young baseball fan.

Now, that series with Ken Griffey’s tremendous display of power, David Cone’s gutsy pitching, the emergence of Mariano Rivera, Don Mattingly’s last hurrah, the Martinezes’ — Edgar and Tino — constant bludgeoning of the Yankees and, of course, Randy Johnson’s relief appearance, has been immortalized by Chris Donnelly in a wonderful new book. Called Baseball’s Greatest Series, Donnelly explores how the 1995 ALDS match-up between the Yankees and the Mariners, in his words, changed history. It brought about key changes in New York that led to a dynasty and saved baseball as we know it in Seattle.

What most Yankee fans sitting 3,000 miles away from Seattle know about that 1995 series concerns the way it changed the Yankees. The Yankees left New York up 2-0 on the Mariners and had to return east losers of three straight, the first of the three great Yankee collapses during their magical dynasty run. That loss — with the shaky John Wetteland in the bullpen, with Mariano Rivera underutilized, with Jack McDowell on the mound, with a tight and tense Yankee clubhouse and a cantankerous owner — led to the ouster of Buck Showalter and the dawn of a new day. Getting to that point, though, was a battle.

Donnelly begins his tale in New York with a history of the Yankees from 1981 to 1995. It is a sad tale and one we’ve told in bits and pieces this winter. George Steinbrenner turned from a crazy win-now owner into a meddlesome and obsessed win-at-all-costs-yesterday owner. The Yanks fell just short of the playoffs in 1985 and couldn’t recover for nearly a decade after Steinbrenner was suspended from baseball and the Yanks’ baseball minds could put together a better team.

Necessarily, the New York part of the story focuses on Don Mattingly. A lynch pin for the Yanks throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, by 1995 he was a shell of his former self, and that 1995 ALDS was his only playoff appearance as a player. Mattingly hit .417/.440/.708 in his last games as a Major Leaguer, but with the likes of Dion James, Randy Velarde, Tony Fernandez and Ruben Sierra all faltering behind him, it wasn’t enough.

In Seattle, meanwhile, the story is more vital for the Mariners. While the Yanks’ loss led to a dynasty, the Mariners’ victory ensured the Pacific Northwest that baseball would survive there. Prior to 1995, the Mariners were a sad franchise that never enjoyed much success. They played in a dreary dome that remained mostly empty for decades, and as 1995 dawned, the team needed a new stadium or they would decamp for Tampa Bay.

As the Mariners climbed back from a late-season 12-game deficit to make the playoffs, Seattle became, in the span of one year, a baseball town. The story ends not with a Mariners’ loss to the Indians in the ALCS, but with a new stadium for the team and a decade-long rivalry with the Yanks. As hard as it is to believe now, but the Mariners were three outs away from leaving Seattle. The Yankees just couldn’t get those three outs.

The Yankees, meanwhile, blew it. As would be the case in the desert in 2001 and in Boston and New York in 2004, the Yankees were on the precipice of playoff victory and couldn’t seal the deal. They headed west triumphant with a two games to none lead in the best-of-five series. They went down against Randy Johnson in Game 3. The Big Unit, a playoff bugaboo both pitching against and for the Yankees through 2006, struck out 10. In Game 4, the team jumped out to a 5-0 lead and was outscored 11-3 over the last six innings. Scott Kamieniecki, Sterling Hitchcock, Bob Wickman, John Wetteland and Steve Howe just couldn’t get it done.

And then there was Game 5. It was a tense affair for the Yankees. George Steinbrenner had grown to hate the popular Buck Showalter, and Showalter’s tense managerial style clearly had an impact on the team. But the Yanks had a lead heading into the late innings. They went up 4-2 when a Don Mattingly double unfortunately bounced over the wall. Much as he could not when a Tony Clark double bounced over the wall in Fenway nine years later, Ruben Sierra was not allowed to score on Mattingly’s ball. It was the first bad bounce to change baseball history.

David Cone stayed in too long, and the Mariners tied it up in the 8th. Mariano Rivera came in to clean up the mess, and the Yankees finally recognized the weapon that would fully emerge in 1996. When the Big Unit came in to pitch in relief, the Yankees were in trouble. They eked out a run in the 11th, but Jack McDowell couldn’t hold it. Joey Cora singled, Ken Griffey singled, and Edgar Martinez roped a double down the line. It was all over.

Donnelly’s storytelling as the games unfold is a pleasure. More than once, I had to put the book down to gather myself when I knew the inning or the game wasn’t going to end for the Yankees. As the team gathered in tears in the visitors’ clubhouse in Seattle, I thought back to my frustrations as a young baseball fan. After the strike-shortened season of 1994, baseball needed a thrilling postseason, but Yankee fans wanted wins. We knew Mattingly would retire; we knew Showalter would be fired. But we didn’t know what glory awaited.

Baseball’s Greatest Series doesn’t dwell much on the game past 1995, and it doesn’t have to. It’s a great complement to Buster Olney’s The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty in that it dissects a transformative moment in baseball — and Yankee history — and shows how it led to a different era for the game. It’s heartbreaking to read about the stunning Yankee losses, and Edgar’s double burns just as badly as Luis Gonzalez’s single. But it’s a more interesting read than a profile of the 1990s dynasty teams.

Donnelly’s story, in the end, is about baseball’s redemption after a pointless strike. It’s about the way George Steinbrenner loomed over the Yankees and how the team’s loss in Seattle turned them into a winner despite the Boss’ crankiest moments. It’s about how the Mariners needed that win and how, with a bounding ball into left field, Seattle erupted, New York cried and we had to wait, without knowing what 1996 would bring, until next year yet again.

Chris Donnelly’s Baseball’s Greatest Series: Yankees, Mariners, and the 1995 Matchup That Changed History is available for sale at Amazon and your local bookstore. If you use the link in this paragraph to buy the book, we earn a few pennies on the sale. It’s a brisk 287 pages, and you’ll find yourself yet again cursing the Mariners by the end of it.

From the AP: Photos from the front row

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What would your photo album look like if you had front-row seats to every Yankee game for decades on end? It would probably be a thing of beauty with vivid photographs of seminal moments in Yankee history.

Well, although you and I do not enjoy this luxury in life, the Associated Press has. Photographers from the AP have been at every Yankee game for countless years. Now, to coincide with the first playoff series at the New Yankee Stadium, the AP is making 365 of these photographs available in a new book. The book, entitled New York Yankees 365, is on sale now, and it truly is a marvelous photo retrospective.

Ostensibly, the book is arranged as a bound page-a-day calendar. Each photo is a full page with a description and a calendar date on the other. That part of the production I don’t understand. The calendar days do not actually correspond to anything portrayed in the pictures, and no one will read and soak in just one photo a day. But that’s a minor quibble about a great addition to anyone’s Yankee coffee table book collection. From the Babe to Derek, this one’s got it all (and you can see some of it in this slideshow).

Tom Curley, president and CEO of the AP, talked about the organization’s goals behind the book. “Baseball and The Associated Press grew up together, and no news organization has covered more of the nearly 400,000 professional games that have been played to date,” he said in a press release. “Over the course of the last century, the Yankees have come to embody the majesty of the game of baseball. They are a part of Americana. This book is a photographic celebration of the history and heroes the team has created.”

Meanwhile, to promote the book, former Yankee pitcher Jim Bouton will be at Borders at 100 Broadway in Lower Manhattan tomorrow afternoon at noon to sign copies. I’m sure he’ll talk about Ball Four as well.

To purchase copies of this book and send a few pennies back to RAB, use this link. And yes, FTC, the AP did send me a review copy. Happy? Meanwhile, here’s your post-playoff game open thread. Play by the rules. Have fun.

Book Review: The world’s essential sporting events

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100SportingEvents Over the years, I’ve seen my fair share of seminal sports events. I’ve seen countless Yankee/Red Sox games, a few World Series affairs, the All Star Game at Yankee Stadium and a pair of historic Hall of Fame Induction ceremonies. I’ve been to a Cubs game at Wrigley Field in 2001 that featured a late-inning Cubs comeback and a few games at Fenway as well.

Beyond baseball, I’ve been to the NBA All Star Game when the Garden hosted it in 1998. Michael Jordan scored 23 points and nabbed MVP honors. I’ve watched the marathoners jog by in the city on many a chilly November mornings. I’ve seen a few U.S. Open matches at Ashe Stadium and even a Harlem Globetrotters performance in the mid-1990s.

“That’s great, Ben,” you might be thinking, “but why are you telling us about this?” These events, you see, are all a part of a new book by Robert Tuchman called The 100 Sporting Events You Must See Live. The author, a New Yorker, is a sports travel guru, and he has produced a thorough accounting of the world’s top sporting events. The book is more than just a list too. It features local details on each event: what to see, where to stay, what to say.

A fair warning though: The ticket listings feature only one ticket broker, and the travel packages for each listing all refer readings back to Tuchman’s Premiere Corporate Events company, of which he is the president. Unfortunately, while any author can use his book for promotional purposes, a more thorough tome would include local travel agents and a variety of ticket sources. It is, though, easy to overlook that short-coming, and the list more than makes up for it.

For the baseball fans among us — or, you know, all of us — Tuchman’s list is chock full of games to check out. The World Series clocks in at seven while a Yankee-Red Sox game at the Stadium is ninth on the list. The Cubs at Wrigley Field are 14, and the Hall of Fame Induction — truly a magical event — is 22. The All Star Game is 40th, and Japan’s Koshien Baseball Tournament is 44. Even Fenway Park gets a mention at 55. It isn’t that bad.

Tuchman’s Top Ten events are an interesting melange of sports. The Masters earn the top spot followed by the World Cup and the Super Bowl (but good luck with that ticket). The Summer Olympics are fourth followed by an Army vs. Navy game, the NYC Marathon, the World Series, the Winter Olympics, a Yanks/Sox game and a UNC/Duke game at Cameron Indoor Stadium.

The full list is right here on Tuchman’s website, and the author is trying to find someone who has seen 40 or more of these events live.

So, then, I ask RABers, as we wait for Sunday to dawn, what your favorite live sporting events are. Nothing beats the electric atmosphere at Yankee Stadium in October as the crisp fall air descends upon another post-season game, but those mid-summer Red Sox/Yankees contests are a close second.

To grab a copy of Tuchman’s book and to support RAB at the same time, you can buy it here. Shortcomings aside, it is as thorough a guide to the world’s sporting events as you could find.

All the best third basemen have daddy issues

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arodcover When Selena Roberts broke the story in February that A-Rod was one of the 104 names on the supposedly anonymous list of steroid users, we quickly learned that she did so while in the process of researching a book about the Yanks’ enigmatic superstar. For months, as the book’s release date moved around to accommodate A-Rod’s stint on the disabled list, we wondered what shocking revelations the book would hold.

In the end, the answer ended up being “not very much.” Short on sources and new information, A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez comes across as a faux-amateur psychologist’s examination of A-Rod’s supposed daddy issues. It features some allegations about pitch-tipping that have been refuted on the record by numerous teammates of Alex’s, and Roberts attempts to portray A-Rod as guilty by association because he lived in Miami at the same time that other, more famous people who used steroids were there as well. As the low sales numbers have shown, a flimsy, anonymously sourced and poorly written book that reveals more about A-Rod’s tendencies to undertip at Hooter’s shouldn’t and won’t receive much attention.

By now, we all know the meat of Roberts’ allegations. Somehow, she was able to uncover the fact that A-Rod’s name was on a list of failed drug tests. The list was supposed to be anonymous, but as she details, players had to sign their names next to their sample number. Generally protective of its interests and members, the Players’ Union dropped the ball big time.

But beyond the steroid revelations, confirmed by A-Rod, nothing else in Roberts’ book holds much water. She alleges pitch tipping but can’t back it up through on-the-record sources or statistical analysis. She notes that when A-Rod was in high school, he may have trained at the same gym as other known steroid users. Well, based on the way some guys at my gym look, so have I. She hints at PED use by noting A-Rod’s growth spurt between 15 and 18 without acknowledging that crazy little thing called puberty.

As the attention moves to A-Rod on the field, we hear the same tales of A-Rod as Joe Torre and Tom Verducci told in The Yankee Years. In fact, Roberts relies on Torre’s book as one of her sources for much of the under-the-table Yankee criticism of A-Rod. She says that A-Rod always felt the need to compete, that he slept around with women, that his teammates regarded him as a phony off the field and a superstar on it. Again, she offers up nothing new.

At times, though, Roberts puts on her reporter’s cap and digs into A-Rod’s past life. She talks to his former wife Cynthia and the dad who walked out when A-Rod was just 10 years old. In fact, it is this dad whom Roberts blames for A-Rod’s downfall. All of A-Rod’s shenanigans — from steroids to the Boras-driven effort to land him two record-setting contracts to the off-field behavior — are the result of A-Rod’s daddy issues. Dr. Freud Roberts is not, and even in the age of pop sociology/psychology, she can’t hold a candle to the Malcolm Gladwells of the world.

In the end, the book is a big zero, and Roberts has been roundly taken to task for it as in this interview on WFAN. If it accomplishes anything, it will rally fans around A-Rod while confirming for others what they already know. It is, in a phrase, a great big nothing.

If you really want to read this thin biography, you can find A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez on Amazon. Using that link nets us a few bucks, but if I were you, I’d just save my money.

Yogi: Tales of a life less ordinary

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yogi For Yankee fans of my generation, Yogi Berra is an icon, a piece of Yankee history reminiscent of the golden age of New York City baseball and, well, a spokesman for AFLAC who manages to confuse even an insurance-savvy duck. While Berra was in a self-imposed exile from George Steinbrenner and the Yankees for 15 years, no Yankee Moment is complete without Yogi there, wearing his trademark number 8 and taking his place behind the plate or throwing out the first pitch.

To others, Yogi is a goofy guy, the man behind some of the more eccentric quotes in sports. “Baseball is 90 percent mental and the other half is physical,” Yogi once said. He was, after all, a catcher and not a mathematician. In fact, Yogi is so identified with his quotes that he once penned a book called I Really Didn’t Say Everything I Said explaining the source of these so-called Yogiisms.

Over the years, though, Yogi and his sayings have taken on a life of their own. Yogi is often viewed as a caricature of himself: he’s this short, funny-looking guy. How could he have been a baseball player, let alone one of the best hitting catchers of all time with 10 World Series rings?

In an effort to rescue Yogi’s image from itself, Allen Barra, respected baseball author and acquaintance of Yogi’s, has spent the last few years working on a biography of the Yankee great. The book — called Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee — hit stores this March, and in the beginning, Barra states his desire to paint a picture of Yogi unobscured by the Yogi-as-a-joke picture that has emerged in popular culture. He succeeded. The book is a real treat and definitely one of the better baseball biographies I’ve read in a while. Barra delves into Yogi’s life and presents a rich picture of one of the all-time greats.

Adhering to the traditional chronological structure of the genre, Barra’s tome traces Berra’s life from his parents’ arrival in the states to their eventual settling in St. Louis, Yogi’s childhood, adolescence, stint in the army and baseball career. It sweeps wide but comes in close and intimate on Berra, and the real meat of the tale — Yogi’s years in pinstripes during the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s — breathes life into a black-and-white era in the minds of many fans.

Time and again, the story is about Yogi’s beating the odds. He’s a little guy with a lot of power and the ability and desire to hit just about anything. In fact, Yogi struck out just 414 times in his career in over 8300 trips to the plate. Those who first saw Yogi doubted his ability. Those who then saw him play knew that the sky was the limit, and the Yankees enjoyed those golden years once Branch Rickey and the Cardinals passed on Berra in the 1940s over a matter of $500. (Of course, by signing Joe Garagiola, a childhood friend and neighbor of Yogi’s, the Cards didn’t do too badly for themselves.)

When Yogi arrives in New York, a lesser writer would be overcome with legends. How do you fit all the characters and greats, the Casey Stengels, the Mickey Mantles and Phil Rizzutos, the Whitey Fords and Elston Howards into the same book? Barra does so with grace and aplomb. Mantle, that other guy in the room during the 1950s, fits seamlessly into the book while Stengel is a true supporting character, a Yogi supporter through and through. As the Yankees defy the odds to win World Series after World Series, Yogi is there for them all, a stalwart behind the plate who learns future generations everything he knows.

After his playing days, Yogi moved into a series of successful coaching and managerial jobs. He never captured a ring as a manager and yet, as Barra notes, he had a stellar career behind a team. What he didn’t have though was the same loose personality as a manager. Always a straight guy off the field, while playing Yogi was closer to the character with which we associate him. He chatted up umpires and opposing hitters to no end. But as a manager, he was a serious and smart leader who managed to coax a few great runs out of the Yankees and Mets clubs he fronted.

The book ends, of course, with Yogi’s triumphant return to the Bronx . After George Steinbrenner fired him by fiat in 1985, Yogi swore never to come back, and for a decade and a half, he did not. But George, as Barra writes and others have noted, needed Yogi more than Yogi needed George, and the Boss came begging, cap in hand. All is right in the Bronx as Yogi the player, the star, the icon, returns home.

Beyond the final page, Barra detours into analysis. Was Yogi the best catcher ever, he asks. It is a question still debated today and his look provides a fitting coda to the tale. If he wasn’t the best, he sure was near the top, and he has the hardware to prove it.

There isn’t really much more to say about Barra’s book. He brings alive a lost era in New York baseball, and with Father’s Day around the corner, this one would make for an excellent gift for the baseball-loving dad. Or else, just buy it for yourself and read it. It’s well worth the investment.

You can find Allen Barra’s Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee on sale at Amazon. Using this link to buy the book will toss a few bucks RAB’s way.