Book Review: Yankee Years by Joe Torre and Tom Verducci

Objectively, this book was…okay. First things first – from the looks of it, I fully expected this to be Joe Torre’s book; even if it was ghost-written by Tom Verducci, I figured it would be written in the first person entirely from Joe’s perspective. However, the only thing that really makes this Joe Torre’s book whatsoever is that Tom Verducci apparently got Joe to agree to extensive interviews; other than that, this is pretty much Tom Verducci’s book about the Joe Torre era of the Yankees.

One of things I really liked about this book was that, as it was covering the late nineties and early two thousands, it included a chapter solely devoted to performance enhancing drugs in baseball. It was a great benefit to the book that it delved deeply into steroid use around the league, including by the championship Yankees as well as soon-to-be Yankees, plus the steroid ring that was specifically serving the team. However, when the chapter ends by bringing it back to Joe, while he mentions how angry the cheating made him feel, he also ends as you would expect him to: he didn’t see anything and he didn’t go looking for anything. C’mon Joe – it’s a little hard to believe.

One further strike the book has against it is that it’s by necessity told in reverse. Think about a biography of, say, Bill Cowher – that book would talk about years and years as coach of the Steelers when they were close to the top but not quite there, followed by heartbreaking seasons and doubts from the fans, followed by a Super Bowl victory and going out on top. Neat, huh? That pretty much follows basic story structure. Now think about Joe Torre’s story – four World Series victories in five years, followed by seven straight years of agonizing defeats, with the teams trending worse and worse, only for management to finally pass on re-signing him. When you look at it from 30,000 feet, it seems more like a story that could be told from the viewpoint of “Here’s what you DON’T KNOW about the REAL Joe Torre!” than from the viewpoint of “This man was a hero”.

So how did they do it? Basically by ripping on all the on- and off-field Yankees that were signed from 2002 and onward. Joe makes clear that Jason Giambi was not his idea – he even wrote a letter to George Steinbrenner stating his reasons for being against his signing so George couldn’t pin it on him later; what makes it funny and a little bit awkward is that Giambi was also a source for the book, with his interviews sprinkled throughout. Johnny Damon was pretty much torched for his mental block in the 2006 season when he wasn’t sure if he wanted to play or retire. George Steinbrenner was brought to heel in the chapters about the championship Yankees; the confusion comes in the chapters about the later years, when George is suddenly described as a great owner while Randy Levine and the Steinbrenner sons are suddenly the villains. As you can expect, Alex Rodriguez is dragged through the mud; it does make sense to some degree, as that’s how most of us Yankee fans felt (more later), but you’d think there’d be some positive things to say about him considering he WON TWO MVP AWARDS WITH JOE AS HIS MANAGER. And let’s end with this…I really hope Carl Pavano’s mom doesn’t read this book.

While Joe Torre’s importance to the Yankees can’t be overstated, the book does tend to overdo it in dramatics. Several times the book mentions things like “This would be the last championship the Yankees would ever win” or “This would be the last time the Yankees would bat in a World Series”. Sometimes you could excuse the language on a technicality – when it would mention the “last <blank> at Yankee Stadium”, since the team moved to the new stadium shortly after Joe’s dismissal; however, the book only barely mentions the upcoming move to the new stadium. And any words directly indicating that it would be the last postseason or last World Series the Yankees would ever have were simply ludicrous; the book was published in 2008, and in 2009 the Yankees WON THE DAMN WORLD SERIES.

So, objectively, if you have no attachment to these Yankees and just want to read a book from a baseball manager’s perspective, this one is take-it-or-leave-it. Five out of ten hot dogs.

Okay, now let’s get subjective.

I don’t consider myself a baseball fan; in fact, I’ve never considered myself a baseball fan. But I did, for some time, consider myself a Yankee fan. It’s a real distinction – I remember going to games at the Stadium, and in between innings they would put up highlights from other games around the league, and I would just be thinking “What the hell do I care?” I couldn’t give a damn about any other teams – I just watched the Yankees.

While I watched portions of games as a kid (shout-outs to Reggie Jackson, Donny Baseball, Dave Winfield, Roy Smalley, and Greg Nettles), and would watch the occasional full game on TV as a teenager (what up Alvaro Espinoza and Mel Hall!), I didn’t really get into them until the Buck Showalter era when they started to be good again. As devastating as that last game in the 1995 Division Series (Mattingly’s last game) was, I never expected Buck to be fired.

From the book, Joe says he didn’t know if it would be permanent – nobody was that invested in Joe (he had little success managing in the National League), and he heard rumblings after he was hired that they would re-hire Showalter and kick Joe upstairs.

Reading about the late 90s Yankees was great, since those were the teams I was most attached to. One of the things I learned from the book was how valuable David Cone was to the team even off the field – unlike most pitchers, he would make himself available to the NY media even when he wasn’t pitching, which helped the Paul O’Neills and Chuck Knoblauchs who weren’t comfortable with the media from feeling overburdened. Reliving the Tino Martinez Yankees era was great (even though that one chapter confirms that Tino was probably on steroids). Regarding Joe Torre, the book confirms what was evident at the time, that even though he was winning championships, George Steinbrenner continued to keep Joe on a short leash, always seemingly one step away from firing him. It was hard to believe at the time, but it was always all over the NY media – there was a real sense at the time that George was trying to torpedo his own championships with things like firing Joe or signing Albert Belle.

The important thing about those championship-era Yankees is that they were a small-ball team. As the book reminds us, nobody was a home run champion or a base stealing champion – they relied on singles, doubles, and great pitching – much to George’s chagrin. According to the book, George is the one who started the 2002 and beyond push to sign “great” hitters like Giambi and A-Rod, which ruined the dynamic of the team. But as the book went on, an unexpected argument rose to the surface.

Fast forward to nearly the end of the book – the middle of the 2007 season, when the Yankees had a losing record and had a meeting to try to rally the troops. After Joe spoke angrily to the team, bench coach Larry Bowa went to the front. He told the group that Joe Torre was one of baseball’s greatest managers, the kind of manager that only comes around every 25 or 30 years, so if they don’t play for him they won’t play for anyone.

Now go a little further out – game two of the 2007 Division Series (the meeting worked, and the Yankees made the playoffs). Joba Chamberlain is on the mound in Cleveland holding a one-run lead, when suddenly he’s attacked by a swarm of midges. Joe can’t see from the dugout how bad it is (and nobody at the game knew that having trainers shower Joba with bug spray just made it worse), but Joba is clearly bothered by the insects and loses the lead (the Yanks would lose the game in extra innings, and the series and Joe Torre’s job a few nights later). After finally making the third out, Cleveland takes the field, and their pitcher, pitching in the same insect swarm, shows no signs at all of being bothered by it.

The book makes a big deal out of this, how the million-dollar Yankees were comprised of rich whiners and crybabies all looking out for stats and contracts and not focused on winning, while smarter teams like Oakland, Boston, and Cleveland played moneyball and found hungry talent. This episode proved that point.

Except for a couple of things. First of all, Joba Chamberlain wasn’t a million dollar crybaby. Unlike many of the Yankees, he didn’t come to them via free agency – he was a draft pick from the University of Nebraska who came up through the farm system. He was the Yankee version of exactly the type of pitcher Oakland, Boston, and Cleveland were looking for – he could easily have played for any one of them. So him being bothered by midges and the Cleveland pitcher ignoring them wasn’t emblematic of the differences in their organizations (my thought: Joba was surprised by them and could never get set afterwards, while the Cleveland pitcher had twenty minutes to prepare for what was going to happen on the mound).

But yes, there were differences in between the two organizations, and those differences would result in the Oaklands, Bostons, and Clevelands of the world pulling ahead of the Yankees (except for 2009, when, again, THE YANKEES WON THE WORLD SERIES). But the Yankees had a secret weapon: Joe Torre. Right? I mean, remember what Larry Bowa said – Joe Torre was the type of manager that only came around once every 25 or 30 years. And yet, after winning championships in his first five years, Joe had another seven years with no rings.

There’s an obvious answer to that: talent. The scrappy Yankees of the late nineties turned into the overvalued free-agent Yankees of the early two thousands. George Steinbrenner was pushing for that kind of team all along, and Brian Cashman as GM, although ostensibly a numbers guy, made stupid signing after stupid signing year after year.

Sure, you could chalk it up to talent. But then, what use is having a generational manager? While it took a lot of motivation to get the 2007 Yankees from a losing record to the wild card, what the Joba Chamerlain episode (as well as all the dunks on the Yankees in the book that preceeded it) was supposed to illustrate is that these Yankees weren’t winners, that their heads weren’t in it. You know, if only they had hired someone who was supposed to manage the players on the team….

What this book – ostensibly Joe’s story – really taught me is that the real hero of the Yankees was most likely Bob Watson, the GM from the early nineties who collected a bunch of hungry small-ball players who had great chemistry with each other and won four championships together. Joe did play a role in that, but to a great extent was also along for the ride.