A Tour of Yankee Literature

This article was originally published in The SABR Review of Books, Vol. 1 (1986).

 

The literature on the New York Yankees is presumably indicative of baseball literature generally, except’ of course, that Yankee literature, like Yankee tradition, Yankee Stadium, Yankee uniforms and Yankee hot dogs, has a pinch or two of special interest, the Yankees being the Yankees. 

It is a literature driven by a robust market, not only in New York and surrounding geography but across the continent and around the world. Yankee fans are everywhere. Ian Smith of Glasgow, Scotland, a SABR member, described himself in correspondence with me as “a Yankee fanatic.” 

But there is another component of the market that is big, too-the Yankee hater component. A book entitled The Bronx Zoo is transparently beamed at Yankeephobes as well as Yankeephiles. A Yankee hater buys The Bronx Zoo to see what the low-life pinstripers may be up to now, for the title appeals to all the attitudes and prejudices that make the Yankee hater what he is. 

By Yankee literature I mean not only books but also newspaper writings, which inNew York can be something special. I don’t happen to know what literature in the narrow sense means exactly, but I know that words blowing in the gutter the day after they’re written are no less for the transience of their medium. However, here, I concentrate on books. 

What has happened to Yankee writings over the decades? They have grown better, much better, more adult, and there’s more of them-much more of them, although, it should be said, there is a down side to the recent literature, too. 

You may have seen one of those old ballpark photos where the crowd looks almost comic in its homogeneity-white men sitting stiffly, side by side, in dark suits, white shirts, dark ties and strawhats. Scissored male figures. The women were home doing what the day called for, washing on Monday, ironing on Tuesday, baking on Wednesday. The kids were reading inspirational sports books, learning how to become fit members of a principled adult society. 

Things have changed. The ballpark crowd is more representative of all elements of society. Kids know the score; sophisticated youth can weed out the fake heroes from the real ones better than their counterparts of yesteryear, who were sheltered by the journalistic mores of the day, which tended to gloss up player images. Fans are more casual-you might not see one man in a suit and tie on a trip to the ballpark-but they demand more honesty. By and large the Yankee literature is more honest and more adult, and that is good. 

My own Yankee collection begins, in terms of age, with a book that quite possibly owes its value to a source of inside information. No doubt about it, Yankee literature, any literature in part involving reportage, leans heavily on those capable of reliable disclosure. It was with the help of wonderful insider Waite Hoyt that Frank Graham wrote a history of the club at the 40.year mark, a book which sketches the beginning of the big Yankees picture. 

I found Graham’s The New York Yankees: An Informal History, first released in 1943, a solid and candid book. Hoyt, the great Yankees pitcher who had become club historian of sorts, doubtless was instrumental in making this book what it is. 

Graham didn’t stir controversy, and neither did he duck it. But what was controversy then and what is controversy now-and remember, we’re talking Yankee-are two different creatures. 

Graham wrote that Earle “Doc” Painter, longtime Yankee trainer, was let go after the Yankees loss in the 1942 World Series because Manager Joe McCarthy never liked him and used the loss, the Yanks Only defeat in eight Series appearances under McCarthy, as a convenient hook on which to hang the firing. 

Good, honest speculation, and why not? Marse Joe wouldn’t give Painter or anyone else an explanation for the firing. However, it wasn’t exactly Thurman-hates-Reggie/Reggie-hates-Billy/Billy-hates-George stuff. It lacked the palpable passion of the ’80s. 

Graham included a special page of appreciation to Hall of Famer Hoyt who was with the rollicking Yankees of 1921-1930. Through Hoyt, Graham probably got more anecdotal material on the Yankees of the ’20s than he could ever hope to get from the lid-clamping, news-managing Yankees of the ’30s. 

The thing about Hoyt was that besides being articulate, intelligent and witty, he was reliable. He liked to tell it the way it was. 

He had helped several authors with their books. I corresponded with him in 1978 about a Yankee book I was attempting. He replied, “l have assisted in so many books I truly am shy of participating in any others.” But being the grand gentleman that he was, he did offer assistance, and on more than one occasion, too. 

Graham did another book, a laudatory biography of John J. McGraw, and still another biography that was issued a year before his informal Yankee history, this one called Lou Gehrig: A Quiet Hero. 

I have heard tell that the Gehrig bio was written for kids and I am not surprised. Anyway, this Graham book, in retrospect, is disappointing. The dialogue is unconvincing— Graham couldn’t possibly have gotten all of that down so perfectly. And too much time is spent with Lou Gehrig, a decent man, in his final days; human empathy is one thing, but an endless dwelling on Lou’s final hours is maudlin. 

But what rankles me is the way Graham either missed or glossed over the Gehrig-John McGraw relationship. Lou had a football scholarship to Columbia. He also played some for the Columbia baseball team, and; in an exhibition game against Hartford, hit a couple of attention-attracting homers. The Hartford papers later announced his signing by the Hartford club. 

However, as Norton W. Chellgren pointed out in the 1975 Baseball Research Journal, the next day the new man was called Lou Lewis. Two weeks later Lewis was gone without explanation; the folks at Columbia got him out of Hartford. Lou sustained a suspension but his amateur status was intact. 

Veteran sportswriter Fred Lieb, one of Gehrig’s best friends, has related that McGraw told Gehrig he could play pro ball and college football, too. “Oh, you can do both,” McGraw is said to have told Lou. “You’ll play in Hartford (preparing for the Giants) under the name of Lewis. Nobody will know that Lewis of Hartford is the same guy as Lou Gehrig of Columbia.” 

Gehrig became a football star at Columbia and later signed with the Yankees. He remained bitter toward McGraw. “In 1921 McGraw was a sophisticated, experienced baseball man and I was a dumb, innocent kid,” Gehrig told Lieb. “Yet he was willing to let me throw away a scholarship as though it was a bundle of trash.” 

Lieb reported this in his 1977 memoirs, Baseball As I Have Known it. The way Graham told the story 35 years earlier, the story that misled SABR member Fred Stein and me in our preparation of a book manuscript on the market competition between the Giants and Yankees, the Hartford manager, one of McGraw’s many birddog scouts, took Lou to the Polo Grounds for a tryout, but McGraw wasn’t interested. The manager, one Arthur Irwin, then signed the strapping youngster to a Hartford contract. McGraw is clean, according to this version. 

Gehrig was partly to blame for his situation. He should have confided in his Columbia coach before signing anything. But he was a kid; McGraw and Irwin were big boys, and Graham exonerated the former by implication and rationalized the latter’s jeopardizing of Lou’s amateur status as the work of “a hearty and pleasant old chap who merely did as any other scout would have done in the circumstances.” 

Graham portrayed Gehrig as a strong silent type — the type that America would have as its hero. Heroes, heroes, heroes. The sports sections of the papers were chock-full of them. Sports journalism for decades was peachy-cream stuff. Veteran reporters covering the Yankees got close to the Yankees so they could write upbeat stories about them. 

Then came the Chipmunks. Born of the ’50s, the ‘Munks didn’t enter the realm of reality until they had a name, and that didn’t happen until the ’60s. One version has it that they got their name when a newsman of the old school saw some of them in animated discussion and grunted scoffingly, “They look like a bunch of chipmunks.” And so the name and the reality. The Chipmunks could indeed get into their work. They were inquiring and, above all, irreverent, and they were headquartered in New York where the Yankees are headquartered. 

Jack Mann explained Chipmunkery in his excellent 1967 book, The Decline and Fall of The New York Yankees. Mann portrayed himself, Stan Isaacs, Phil Pepe, Maury Allen, George Vecsey, Steve Jacobsen, Leonard Koppett and others as ‘Munkers — guys who wanted to have some fun in their day-to-day reporting and to be able to occasionally go beyond day-to-day reportage.

“If they made no attempt to relate the billion-dollar industry of show sport to the society in which it exists, they wouldn’t be doing anything but writing stories about games,” was the way Mann put it. 

Chipmunks covering the Yankees had a friend for a time in Yankee President Mike Burke, who occupied the pinstriped throne for a relatively brief time, but Burke aside, they were faced with a long, deeply instilled Yankee tradition of nondisclosure. 

Nondisclosure stemmed in part from Joe McCarthy’s insistence on a certain demeanor for the Yankees collectively and for Yankees as individuals, a demeanor that signaled a quiet and efficient “class. ” It owed first and foremost, however, to wonderful Edward Grant Barrow who came to the Yankees as business manager in 1920 and left as club president in 1945. 

Barrow ran an iron-fisted show and kept in the background. “The spotlight,” he wrote in his 1951 autobiography, My Fifty Years in Baseball, written with James M. Kahn when Barrow was 83, “should be reserved for the players and the players alone.” Nothing was necessary to promote the game, not even night baseball. (Yankee Stadium didn’t acquire lights until after Barrow’s departure.) The game was enough — “Baseball doesn’t need a carnival or sideshow,” Barrow declared. 

With Barrow as your general manager, if you weren’t lucky enough to count a Babe Ruth among your personnel, you weren’t going to have a helluva lot of color. Wit, maybe — the wit of a Gomez, perhaps — but swashbuckling color, no, not even a whole lot of human interest. 

When Barrow, who himself had a most colorful past that began on a wagon train bound for Nebraska, became teamed with rulebook Joe McCarthy, who joined the club in 1931, there was no limit to the Yankees’ discreet decorum. Rule breakers were unwelcome, especially those Southern boys. 

McCarthy had a prejudice — no, a conviction rather than a prejudice, according to Barrow, “because he had reasoned things out in his own way,” against Southern ballplayers. Barrow wrote that McCarthy “thought they were too hot tempered and defeated themselves.” 

In another Barrow passage, he wrote Joe thought that players who came from the hill country of the South were particularly onerous.

“They’re all moonshiners back there,” Joe once said, “and they’re just naturally against the law. They resent any kind of rules or discipline.” 

Barrow gave a couple of examples of talented, temperamental players traded away by McCarthy for the good of the team. But Barrow didn’t say how McCarthy’s views affected his opinion of Bill Dickey, born in Louisiana and raised in Little Rock, Arkansas. 

Barrow also revealed Tony Lazzeri’s epilepsy in terms decidedly insensitive by today’s standards. Barrow, who believed Lazzeri was “one of the greatest ballplayers I have ever known,” said other clubs passed over the Pacific Coast League star because he “took fits. ” But after an elaborate check into Lazzeri’s background, Barrow decided to take a chance and purchase his contract. “As long as he doesn’t take fits between 3 and 6 in the afternoon, that’s good enough for me,” Barrow said at the time. 

There was a stigma attached to epilepsy. Barrow always feared that Lazzeri would have a seizure on the field, but, to Ed’s relief, Tony’s attacks were confined to the clubhouse or a railroad car. The Lazzeri story could have been a great inspiration to other epileptics, but views on epilepsy were not as enlightened as they are now, and the story was covered up. “l don’t believe the public ever knew this about him (Lazzeri),” wrote Barrow. “Certainly we took every precaution we could to see that the public never did, and in this the sportswriters traveling with the club were likewise as considerate of Tony’s feelings and welfare.” 

So the writers sat on the story. It is doubtful that the same story could ever be covered up today, which is probably the way things should be. But in the ’20s and ’30s, when Lazzeri played, a player’s faults, and, unfortunately, epilepsy was seen as a fault, often went unreported. The clubs and writers scratched each others’ backs. Contrast that with today’s headlines of drug and alcohol problems. If you appreciate an open society, you’ve got to say that today’s situation is healthier. 

The Chipmunks weren’t about to toe the company line. They wouldn’t even use the word “we,” as in “who are we going to pitch tomorrow, Skipper?”, a typical question from the old-school writer. A Chipmunk was a reporter, not a booster. 

The Chipmunks not only changed the press’s day.to-day approach, but they changed the book literature, too. A case in point is Mann’s own The Decline and Fall of the New York Yankees. It not only details why the Yankee Dynasty toppled, but it delves into the chinks in the Yankee armor back in their perfectionist glory days. 

The Yankees were far from being the most accessible baseball team to the press. The traditional pattern was that Yankee management would issue only the information that served its purposes — injuries would be covered up, for one thing — and the old-school writers would settle for what they got. The Chipmunks would not. To Yankee management, Chipmunkery threatened management’s ability to control the news. 

Yankee players resisted the Chipmunks, too. Around the locker room, a Chipmunk was a reporter who asked too many damn questions, including questions about players not as playing but as human beings. A good writer, to a player, was one who didn’t probe, one who stuck to whatever happened on the field. A bad writer was a “ripper.” A ripper sometimes did no more than tell the truth.

The Yankees collapsed in 1965, then fell to the cellar in 1966. Mike Burke took over as Yankee president and pledged a new era of openness around the club. He even went to the New York Baseball Writers annual outing — something Dan Topping, his predecessor, had never done — played for the Chipmunks in the softball game and was awarded a Chipmunk sweatshirt. The Chipmunks liked Burke for his openness, but Burke’s Yankees didn’t win, and it wasn’t long before Burke was gone and George Steinbrenner was the big cheese in the South Bronx. 

The first earthshaking Chipmunk influence in the book literature appeared in 1970, three years after Decline and Fall. It created a sensation. Ball Four, by Jim Bouton (with Leonard Shecter) blew the lid off clubhouse secrecy. 

Bouton wasn’t a Chipmunk — he was a Yankee pitcher of the 1960s who won 21 games in 1963 — but Shecter was. They violated the rule of the clubhouse that says “all that is said here and is seen here stays here.” What Bouton did was expose some Yankee debauchery. 

Shecter had already taken the halo off sports heroes with his 1969 book, The Jock. In this book he rips into the hypocrisy surrounding the sports world, from the magnates to the stars, sparing no one, including his own profession of journalism. It is such a biting book that the numbed reader can’t discern Shecter’s legitimate points from his bitter tirades. 

The Yankees, for example, a club Shecter covered for the New York Post, and the team’s individual players, are a special target for his slings and arrows. To Shecter, Joe DiMaggio had become vain and lonely. Yogi Berra’s 1961 autobiography, Yogi, was “a terrible book, cheap and phony and transparent.” Mickey Mantle had only himself to blame for his leg problems because he didn’t do his offseason exercises. 

Shecter was not well-liked in the Yankee clubhouse. He was seen as a ripper, the No. 1 ripper in the eyes of Roger Maris, whom Shecter portrays as “a griper.” But Shecter says he liked Maris, or rather his accessibility, when Roger joined the Yanks in 1960, and even felt that Roger handled his next, 61-homer season reasonably well. He even wrote a paperback on Maris, Home Run Hero. When Maris encountered all his problems with the fans in 1962, however, Shecter wrote a Post story saying, basically, that Maris was at fault for reactions that were causing the fans to intensify their abuse. According to Shecter, Maris cursed him for the story and they never talked again. 

Shecter argues that ballplayers don’t understand the job reporters have to do. “The last thing a ballplayer cares about are the precepts by which a newspaperman is supposed to live,” wrote Shecter. 

He explains how in 1963 Yankee pitcher Bill Stafford was going bad — Stafford’s career was in jeopardy, in fact — and after another bad performance, Stafford told Shecter he didn’t want to talk. Shecter persisted, in the correct opinion that if a player could talk reams when winning, he should find the grace to talk when losing. But what Shecter failed to understand, or at least acknowledge, was the tremendous pressure building up inside Stafford. My God, this young man was watching his professional career slip away. But Shecter left him alone only after a mouthful of fist became a distinct possibility. Respect is another one of those two-way streets. 

Shecter’s favorite was Casey Stengel — “the only great man I ever knew.” He was especially grateful to Stengel for overlooking a mess Shecter got into in 1958 when he reported a brief cigar-jamming scuffle between pitcher Ryne Duren and coach Ralph Houk that a rewrite man over-amplified. The rest of the Yankees shunned Shecter, but Stengel, recognizing the nature of Lenny’s profession, bought Shecter a drink. 

Stengel won a lot of points like that with reporters, who doted on him. But while Shecter revealed some of the cruel things Casey said about his players — of the slumping Moose Skowron, who played despite serious injuries, Casey said, “The way he’s going I’d be better off if he was hurt” — it didn’t seem to bother him much. Stengel had Shecter’s loyalty, much the way the “house men” writers Shecter so loathed were in the clutches of the club they covered. 

As Bouton and Shecter turned the clubhouse inside out, Geoffrey Stokes in his excellent 1984 book, Pinstripe Pandemonium, explored the Yankee psyche. Perhaps only a book on the scrutinized Yankees could include a chapter on the psychology of the Yankees. 

Stokes examines the 1983 Yankees, maintaining that these Yankees, runners-up to Baltimore in the American League East, were without effective leadership. The team had been leaderless since the death of Thurman Munson in 1979. And the pine-tar fiasco, throwing the team into disarray, was a situation that demanded leadership. No one stepped forward, wrote Stokes. 

Graig Nettles was the senior Yankee and team captain in 1983. He was the unquestioned leader on the field, smart, alert and tough in the clutch, but he wasn’t a dominant presence in the clubhouse. He didn’t understand, or it was never explained to him, what his captaincy meant. For example, when Steve Kemp was benched and his spirits fell, Nettles made no move to pick him up. Don Baylor tried, but like Kemp, he too was a first-year Yankee who was still feeling his way around. 

Dave Winfield certainly possessed a physical presence. But Winfield, too, showed Stokes a limited concept of leadership, calling himself “an influential peer.” He resisted anything rah-rah — good for him — but he also resisted taking command. He felt it enough to lead with bat and glove

Ironically, quiet Willie Randolph, the least likely leader at first glance, a player whose injuries were sometimes questioned, was serving a key function of leadership. The younger Yankees volunteered to Stokes that it was Randolph who made them feel welcome on the team. Randolph revealed that Munson had put him at ease when he joined the club in 1976, and Willie was making a conscious effort to do the same for others. 

The real probers and derobers of the Yankes, however, have been members or former members of the family. Joe Pepitone, the Yankee first baseman of the ’60s, was one of the first of the Yankees to come out with his own book after Ball Four. Pepitone had told Peter Golenbock in Dynasty how upset he was over Bouton’s writing unflattering things about Mickey Mantle in Ball Four, such as how Mantle would duck kids asking for autographs. “Kids grew up with a lot of good images about Mickey Mantle,” Pepitone told Golenbock. “They felt good just thinking about him, and the next thing you know they’re depressed because of what Jim wrote. Why should Jim give a shit? He’s not going to see the kids faces, see the way they feel.” 

So what did Pepitone do? He wrote a book in which he told a couple of stories that could have really hurt Mickey’s image with kids, although to my way of thinking, the stories made Mantle more human and appealing than ever. Joe’s book, Joe, You Coulda Made Us Proud, written with Barry Stainback and published in 1975 by Playboy Press, shouldn’t be read by kids, anyway. Pepi, an original, dared to tell, just as he dared to be different in his playing days. 

One story has All-American-boy Mantle getting stoned smoking marijuana with Joe before a game and not only losing all of his fabulous coordination at the plate but also passively accepting a strikeout when he normally exploded in anger. Pepi stressed that this was Mantle’s first and only experiment with pot. All the same, the Mick would probably have voted not to have the story told. 

The other story, more in keeping with the Mantle legend, had Mantle and Pepitone oversleeping after a night on the town and, having missed the team bus, taking a limousine to West Point for an exhibition game. Loaded on vodka, they made quite a scene when the limo arrived right on the playing field. Mantle, in The Mick, never addressed the marijuana tale but made a point of saying that Pepitone exaggerated the details of the West Point story. 

Pepi was soon joined by a long pinstriped line of authors. 

However great the World Champion 1977-1978 Yankees may have been with bat and glove, they were veritable giants with the pen. No less than eight Yankees of 1977-1978, including manager Billy Martin, joined with collaborators to write books on their days with the Yankees

The books include Thurmon Munson, by Munson with Martin Appel (1978); The Bronx Zoo, by Sparky Lyle and Peter Golenbock (1979); Guidry, by Ron Guidry and Golenbock (1980); Number 1, by Billy Martin and Golenbock (1980); Yankee Stranger, by Ed Figueroa and Dorothy Harshman (1982); Balls, by Graig Nettles and Golenbock (1984); Reggie, by Reggie Jackson with Mike Lupica (1984); and Sweet Lou, by Lou Piniella and Maury Allen (1986). 

All of these Yankees were, or are, big stars, with the exception of Figueroa, who maybe should have been. Figgy was the unsung hero of the 1976-1978 campaigns, winning 19, 16 and 20 games over those three pennant-winning seasons. But he wasn’t great. He wasn’t colorful. He wasn’t even personable. What was he trying to do with his Yankee Stranger? 

He was telling us from the very title that he was an outsider (who happened to be from Puerto Rico) and that we had in store an outsider’s fresh perspective. But Figgy only reveals that he has a thin skin and he supplies no more than overkilled stories and inanity, telling us, for example, that Bill Lee is funny, Nolan Ryan throws hard, and Carl Yastrzemski is always “a tough guy for me to face. “Thanks, Figgy.” 

Figgy is not exactly alone. There is a certain inanity in all of these books. Worse, in at least some, there is a certain grub-for-the-buck “candor.” One wonders and worries. Is it better to get it from a writer type, or an historian type, or to place one’s faith in firsthand accounts from jocks either exorcising past torments or joining in the spirit of squeezing bucks from the printing press, or both? 

Reservations aside, by and large, the player books make for good reading. They’ve got the necessary color and off-color and they’re free of much of the phoniness that used to plague us in baseball literature. My favorite is Munson’s. No big rips, fair treatment for friend and foe alike. 

I became a little upset when, on April 24, L984, the New York Daily News, the paper of sports columnist Mike Lupica, Reggie’s co-author, ran the blaring headline: REGGIE BLASTS RACIST YANKEES. Racism, of course, was just one of several slaps Jackson laid on his former club in this scoop by Paul Needell from Jackson’s yet-to-be released book. 

But that isn’t what made me angry. The Jackson story was old stuff really. What ticked me off, and amused me a little, too, was something on the inside pages of the Daily News, a column by Lupica, whom I consider without peer as a witty sportswriter. (Lupica has, however, allowed his intense dislike for George Steinbrenner and Billy Martin to warp his objectivity when writing about the Yankees.) Lupica was cheering an exciting April of sports in New York. “There had been too many Aprils around here in which the only racy sports news came when Boss Steinbrenner blew his nose or had his hairspray back up, but this time it is different,” he wrote. “For now Boss Steinbrenner and his Yankees have to fight it out in headlineland with fine hockey, and basketball . . . and a vastly interesting young baseball team known as the New York Mets.” 

I thought that Lupica was trying to have it both ways. After all, he was a party to Jackson’s revelations exploiting controversy that on that very day were monopolizing the headlines of his paper. I said so in a letter that the Daily News was kind enough to print. 

There is nothing wrong with controversy. It sells books. The problem is that the public has to be wary; is it honest controversy that sheds light, or trumped-up controversy to sell books? Take former Colt Bubba Smith, who in his book declared that the 1969 Super Bowl, which the Colts lost to the Jets, was fixed. Presumably, the allegation sold a few more books; it did not trigger any investigations to my knowledge. And it didn’t get me to buy the book. (Bubba, who is great in his TV beer commercials with Dick Butkus, stands a better chance of getting me to buy the beer. ) 

Of the greatest Yankee ballplayers — Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle — the Mick has been the most prolific author. Gehrig never got to write a book before his tragic and early death. DiMaggio in 1947 wrote Lucky to be a Yankee, and Ruth a year later wrote The Babe Ruth Story. Mantle, besides his 1964 work, The Quality of Courage, was involved in four books about his life story, playing career, or both. These were The Mickey Mantle Story, by Mantle as told to Ben Epstein (1953); The Education of a Baseball Player, by Mantle with Bob Smith (1967); Whitey and Mickey, by Ford, Mantle and Joseph Durso (1977); and The Mick, by Mantle with Herb Gluck (1985).

The tones of the latter two were drastically different from the gee-and-goshisms of the first two which portrayed Mickey as the All American boy, meaning countryside boy. In The Mickey Mantle Story, Mantle said: “I’m loaded with hayseed and aim to stay that way. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not knocking the city way of life. But those big city apartments and townhouses always struck me as foolishly paying your money to eat and sleep in a jail.” 

Part of Mantle’s charm is that fame never really changed him. But one doesn’t spend 18 baseball seasons in New York without acquiring a certain amount of sophistication. Mantle acquired a great deal. 

The Mick is one of the best baseball books  ever published. Though Mickey is known to clam up rather than cut someone down, he is very honest about his opinions in this book and about his own weaknesses, too. He said of Duke Snider: “I loved the Duke. In fact, I would have loved to have been the Duke. Listen, you could practically fit Ebbets Field right inside Yankee Stadium.” Mickey speculates he might have hit 15 more homers a year playing in Brooklyn. 

I have read that Pete Rose considers himself — wrongly, in my opinion — the greatest switch-hitter of all time. Perhaps Mickey read it, too, because he had a pretty good zinger for Rose. “The world’s greatest singles hitter,” Mantle called him. “He chokes the bat, protects the plate, and concentrates on getting a piece of the ball. It’s his thing. And I have a world of admiration for him. However, if I had played my career hitting singles like Pete, I’d wear a dress.” 

Books on the Yankees have changed in focus over the three decades from Joe DiMaggio’s Lucky to be a Yankee to Sparky Lyle’s The Bronx Zoo in 1977, as their titles imply. 

There have been histories, pictorial histories, anthologies, encyclopedias, date books, diaries, quiz books and individual biographies. There have even been books catering to Yankee haters, like the 1981 book, Diary of a Yankee Hater by Bob Marshall and the 1982 The Official New York Yankees Haters Handbook by William B. Mead. I accepted the latter with a chuckle and even kidded with Bill about it at a SABR meeting, telling him I was offended that none of my books was listed among his sappiest books about the Yankees. (Bill replied that he wasn’t aware of them. Huh?) 

But Bill’s book is troubled with little inaccuracies. Bill blames Yankee General Manager George Weiss for firing broadcasters Mel Allen and Red Barber, when, actually, Weiss himself was canned after the 1960 season, while Allen lasted through 1964 and Barber through 1966. Oh well, I have mistakes in print, too, and Bill would probably say it didn’t matter; they were all fired by some heartless Yankee executive.

On the serious side, Dynasty, the 1975 book by Peter Golenbock that chronicled the great Yankee teams of 1949 through 1964, did a great service for Yankee fans. Golenbock got behind the scenes of those fabulous teams with a series of illuminating interviews. Each interview made a statement about the interviewee. For example, Gil McDougald came across as a tremendously warm human being, something that could have been overlooked when McDougald played for the Yankees and the players were often seen as interchangeable and replaceable parts in a distant, smooth-running machine. 

Golenbock’s interviews also exposed some fabrications, such as Mickey Mantle’s mysterious ailment in 1957, known at the time as “shin splints.” Nobody knew exactly how Mickey came up with this ailment — all the official explanations didn’t ring true — but what was obvious was that Mantle had a huge cut in his shin, keeping him from running well and ruining what might have been an unprecedented second straight Triple Crown season. 

Tom Sturdivant told Golenbock the true story. According to the Yankee pitcher, he and Mantle were coming off the golf course when Mickey, upset over developments in his friendly bet with Tom, but really more annoyed with Sturdivant’s high-pitched giggle, swung his putter at a tree limb overhead. The putter either missed the limb or snapped it in two; whatever, it ended up stuck in Mickey’s leg. Shin splints. Mantle confirmed the basic story in The Mick. 

Dick Lally penned Pinstriped Summers, a great 1985 book that picked up the Yankees where Dynasty left off in 1965. He addresses the problems the press had with the Yankees, and wrote of how the 1967 arrival of the Mets in New York, a National League stronghold, didn’t ease those problems. 

New York reporters like Bob Lipsyte, George Vecsey, and Lenny Shecter made the infant Mets fun. They wrote hip stories about a losing team and hip fans celebrated losing. Vic Ziegel, who started covering the Yankees in 1964, in the days of smug success, told Lally there were a “lot of flatout house men” in those days-writers who toed the company line. These writers overidentified with the Yankees. “You know, when the team started to lose, those guys were much harsher on the club than the younger writers,” Ziegel told Lally. “The reason they came down so hard was because they were bitterly disappointed. They were crushed. They had to cover games all year, and the team wasn’t good anymore. It made them furious.” 

Possibly the best baseball biography ever written was Babe, the 1974 Ruth biography by Robert W. Creamer. Almost incredibly, the field was wide open; Babe was the first objective, adult, full-length biography of America’s greatest sports hero. (Marshall Smelser followed in 1975 with another excellent book on Ruth, The House that Ruth Built, that unfortunately was released on the heels of the Creamer work.)

Creamer set up his book brilliantly. Ruth was bigger than life, everyone’s hero — his here — but Creamer, in his words, wanted “to go beyond the gentle inaccuracies and omissions of the earlier accounts and produce a total biography, one that, hopefully, would present all the facts and myths, the statistical details and personal exuberance, the obvious and subtle things that combined to make the man born George Ruth a unique figure in the social history of the United States.” 

Creamer held true. He told the Ruth story as completely as it can be told. He put the pieces together of Ruth’s life, in part, through an exhaustive series of interviews. Listen to what Waite Hoyt wrote to Creamer: “I am almost convinced that you will never learn the truth on Ruth. I roomed with Joe Dugan. He was a good friend of Babe’s. But he will see Ruth in a different light than I did. Dugan’s own opinion will be one in which Dugan revels in Ruth’s crudities, and so on. While I can easily recognize all of this and admit it freely, yet there was buried in Ruth humanitarianism beyond belief, an intelligence he was never given credit for, a childish desire to be over-virile, living up to credits given his home-run record and yet a need for intimate affection and respect, and a feverish desire to play baseball, perform, act and live a life he didn’t and couldn’t take time to understand.” 

A few years ago I stopped in at the Babe Ruth Museum, birthplace home of the Babe, in Baltimore. The best thing there was Creamer’s Babe manuscript. It was inspiring. Especially considering the disillusionment this Yankee fan felt when he discovered that the Babe Ruth birthplace was an ill-disguised excuse for an Orioles’ shrine. Upstairs, in the Ruth bedroom, where the Creamer manuscript was kept, a few people poked in their heads for a polite look-see. Next door, though, was where the real action was, Baltimoreans milling around various tributes to the local club. Somehow, the whole setup seemed as phony as the Babe was genuine. 

Anyone wanting to gain an historical perspective on the Yankees could achieve his or her purposes nicely by reading just three books. These are The New York Yankees: An Informal History, (the version I have was updated through 1950); Dynasty, covering the years 1949 through 1964; and Pinstriped Summer, covering a period that begins with 1965 and runs up to recent times. 

No doubt there will be a fourth book addressed to the final decade and a half of the 20th century. If this newcomer proves deserving, the Yankees will enter the 21st century well documented. Which is good, because once that century line is crossed, the events of the dislodged century will tend to dim; having them tacked down on paper will serve posterity.