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Celebrating The Yankees Centennial

Baseball Books

Celebrating The Yankees Centennial

CELEBRATING THE YANKEES CENTENNIAL

Although the American League was founded in 1901, the Yankees "immigrated" to the Big Apple from Baltimore in 1903. Originally known as the Highlanders, the nickname was changed when local Irish-Americans complained that it sounded too "Scottish-centric."

Thus began the story of the most dominant team in professional sports. The all-time roster reads like a "who's who" of baseball legends: Ruth, Gehrig, Gomez, DiMaggio, Ford, Berra, Mantle, Munson, Jackson, Mattingly, Jeter, Williams and scores of others who have contributed to the team's 26 World Series Championships and 37 American League titles.

 

Books about the Yankees are always in vogue, but three titles are especially noteworthy this year, as the team celebrates its centennial.


NEW YORK YANKEES: ONE HUNDRED YEARS - The Official Retrospective is a handsome collaborative work by some of the most prestigious and prolific writers of the game, including Leonard Koppett, Robert Creamer, Peter Golenbock and Donald Honig. ONE HUNDRED YEARS chronicles the great players, managers and moments in the proud Yankee tradition. With Bill James --- the guru of baseball statistics ---analyzing the numbers to help put things in perspective, this coffee table edition boasts the fans' "triple crown": dramatic illustrations, dynamic text and lots of statistics.


 

TOP OF THE HEAP is a line from Frank Sinatra's signature song, New York, New York, which is played at the end of each game at Yankee Stadium. It's a fitting title for this collection, which represents the team's glory throughout the decades. Fans will find nuggets from old-time writers like John Kiernan, Ring Lardner and Heywood Broun, Damon Runyon and Grantland Rice --- a line-up of heavy hitters in their own right.



The stories include game reports, columns and commentaries, broken down into rough time frames, including the early days ("The View from the Heights"); the Ruth-Gehrig Era ("Murderers' Row"); the Bronx Bombers of the 1930s-40s ("A Tale of Two Joes," in this case, DiMaggio and McCarthy, who managed the team to eight league and seven World Series titles); the Casey Stengel years ("The Dynasty"); the George Steinbrenner era ("The Bronx Zoo"); and finally, the latest era, the Joe Torre-led Yankee juggernaut ("New York, New York").

While the majority of Yankee moments have been happy ones, TOP OF THE HEAP includes some touching reminders that there's more to life than games in "Yankee Elegies," which recounts the passing of Gehrig, Ruth, Munson and Mantle.

 


PRIDE OF OCTOBER Bill Madden, who has covered the Yankees for over 25 years, profiles eighteen former Yankees. While most of the players will be quite familiar to Yankee fans, it's the ones who had relatively smaller roles, the ones who --- for the most part --- did not receive the headlines, that are the most interesting.

PRIDE OF OCTOBER refers to the team's regular appearances in postseason play. In fact, this was such a given that Yankee management kept contracts low, claiming that the monies received for playing in the Series should be considered part of the players' salaries.

The subjects of Madden's collection, even the recently retired Paul O'Neill, represent a different type of athlete than one reads about today. Most came from the days before free agency lined everyone's pockets. They had a deeper appreciation for the game and the camaraderie seemed more endemic to an era with fewer teams, a smaller geographic spread, and rail --- rather than air --- travel. No matter what they do to jazz up sports, there's no substitute for that.


This troika of titles gives Yankee fans and baseball history buffs something to savor as the Bombers boldly begin their second hundred years.

   --- Reviewed by Ron Kaplan ([email protected])

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