Saturday, February 14, 2009

"The Yankee Years" - A Book Review

Much has been made of the new book by Joe Torre and Tom Verducci. In fact, the book made substantial news before it was even released—always good news for a publisher. The book endured on the front pages of newspapers, blogs, ESPN.com, MLB.com Yahoo Sports and all the rest of sports reporting sites for many days until the story was itself eclipsed by the Alex Rodriguez bombshell. A bombshell oddly linked by coincidence in the book itself.


A lot of the early hype was that Torre had broken some kind of internal code by exposing some things in the clubhouse. After reading the book in its entirety, there does not seem to be a whole lot for the players to squawk about. Certainly, there are some discussions that the book reveals about how Torre dealt with a player and a situation. But there doesn't seem to be any reporting that hasn't been widely known for some time.

The strongest parts of the story dealt with the years following the World Series run. According to the authors, the failure of the Yankees as an organization to be as smart as the Red Sox and the Indians in personnel management, helped along by a power vacuum left by an ailing Steinbrenner, led to Torre's best work just getting to the playoffs each year, but also led to the Yankees coming up empty in those playoffs.


The book really has two main themes. One was the success that Torre had in all situations despite the swirl of New York behind him. The second is an indictment of personnel choices by Brian Cashman and others in Yankee leadership.

Cashman certainly does not come across well in this book. The book paints a picture of Cashman jumping aboard the statistical revolution late in the game and misjudging what that data was telling him and his statistical “experts.” The focal point of the indictment concerns the dismissal of Bernie Williams in favor of players deemed to be statistically more capable but who flopped. Players like Betemit and Igawa (as apposed to Ted Lilly) purported to show the weakness of the statistical readings of Cashman's team.

In some fairness, the book also points out that the revenue sharing measures adopted by MLB helped smaller market teams to lock up players that in the past would have fallen to the Yankees. Through either a lack of proper statistical evaluation or plain bad luck, the lack of home grown talent, especially the years between Pettitte and Joba Chamberlain combined with the lack of younger talent on the market led the Yankees to continue to try to patch teams together with older players past their primes or players that had one good year with hope the success would be repeated.

The book paints vividly these failures from Carl Pavano to Kenny Lofton to Kevin Brown. This latter theme of strange and unsuccessful personnel moves combined with poor drafting reinforces the first theme that Torre succeeded beyond the Yankee talent level for many years and for his troubles was under appreciated and undermined by Cashman and the Yankee hierarchy. The case the authors build is a compelling one and hard to argue against.
The book, despite its reputation seems to deal fairly with most of the players Torre dealt with over the years with the exception (and rightly so) of Pavano and Kevin Brown. Otherwise, Sheffield, Wells, Rodriguez, Damon, Johnson and others seem to be painted fairly, if not always flattering.


The Red Sox and to some degree, the Indians did run smarter operations and made shrewder decisions than the Yankees which is why those teams overtook the New York team and beat them at their own game. The book describes this reasoning accurately. But those decisions have to work out too. Thus is the luck aspect of the game and also what gives these things a cyclical nature. The role of injury and chance to such decisions is not dealt with in this book, to some of its detriment.

There is an important chapter on the evolution of the steroid problem, but the chapter concerning this subject is brought up suddenly and is not tied adequately with its context of the Yankee years in particular. It's an important chapter with important information, but is brought up in a jarring and disjointed way.


Though Torre does in some instances admit he was wrong about certain players, he is absolved somewhat nonchalantly on his hand in those personnel decisions that took place. There were many he had to sign off on (and some he had no control over). Obviously, his opinion as well as the front office opinions are both to blame for some bad decisions.

Overall, Torre comes across as a heroic, yet humble hero who values trust and dealing with people with respect. His success speaks for itself and you can't argue with six World Series appearances, four titles and twelve straight post season appearances. If you had a high opinion of Torre before this book, it won't be changed by this telling. If you had a low opinion of Torre, the well written tome just may change your mind.

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