Been reading a lot of baseball books lately. Mostly about baseball organizations and teams. I teach Organizational Behavior, among other things (academically I am a fourth outfielder/utility infielder/long relief-spot starter, for several university programs). It's my favorite course, and reading about organizations has become a passion in my later years (61 in a couple of months). Reading about baseball organizations is just that much more fun for me.
So let me start with one I did not like, but had high hopes for:
Mike Shropshire, The Last Real Season, which supposedly looks at the 1975 season, the last before free agency really hit, and the one with perhaps the greatest World Series ever (1991 might be better, maybe 1972 too, but it had maybe the greatest single game in game 6...). And it opens suggesting that there are reasons to think that America was a happier place in the 1970s but people did not appreciate or realize it at the time. Very ambitious approach. Great expectations.
Instead, we get a sort of badly and overwroughtedly written "Ball Four" that at most might interest long-time Texas Rangers' fans. Yes, that's right, we follow the Texas Rangers, and the book is written by a local Texas journalist that follows that team, uses obscenity (I am from New Jersey, so it hardly shocks me, but that doesn't mean excessive use of swear words makes for good writing) in every paragraph, overworks to seem funny, and in the end lives up to none of its promises.
Jason Turbow, Dynastic, Bombastic, Fantastic, about the 1970s As, a great team, too often neglected today, that won 3 straight championship despite having the only owner crazier than George Steinbrenner. I liked that team, even as I rooted for the Yankees (and even the Mets in the '73 Series). One of my favorite teams ever really, and having Reggie and Catfish come over to the Yankees later just seemed like a family reunion in a way to me in my teens. A good, interesting, lively book, worth the read.
I read The New York Times Story of the Yankees 1903 to the Present, a collection of the Times' articles on the team over the decades. Reading along chronologically is like watching Game of Thrones, or the Crown or something.
Ron Quartaro, The Blunder Years, about the fall of the Yankees empire in the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. It is written by a fan a little older than myself, so another who mostly remembers those years as I do, when you liked and loved the team for watching Bobby Murcer, Roy White, Mel Stottlemyre, and Thurman Munson even when it sucked. When Yankees fans, in other words, were for a brief decade like all other fans of all other teams. Hoping for the best, living with disappointment, except we had our fathers, older brother and uncles telling us what Yankees teams were supposed to be: Dimag, Mickey, Whitey and Yogi etc. I have never been able to have any emotional attachment to the Bobby Richardson/Tony Kubeck, Elston Howard, even Mickey Mantle era Yankees for that reason. It is as if they played for a different team than I grew up rooting for, and still care about. A few things I wish about this book: that it were just a little longer. He strangely skips over the 1972 season, which was the actual turning point since the Yankees were in the division race up to the last week or so, and the role of Sparky Lyle as THE main signal of the turn for the better are strangely missing, and the 1974 season also gets little treatment, despite the fact that the Yankees were in first place up to the last week of the season, only to be outpitched by Palmer, Cuellar and McNally (may they be refused eternally entry to the Halls of their Ancestors !) in a crucial three-game showdown and then losing on the next-to-last game of the season on George Scott's game-winning single in Milwaukee, to finish two games out being Baltimore. Scott was too likable a player for me to hold it against him, but the three Orioles' aces were bains of my youth.
Luckily, John Bartolick, Yankee Resurrection, provides an in-depth account of the 1974 season. Not a great book, but a good one, one that remembers what it felt like to see a nar-do-well team suddenly play well. The greatest insight is to show that Bill Virdon almost certainly was the reason the team fell short - had we had Billy Martin managing already, we would have been the Os that year. Of course, Billy would have sent undeserving people to the hospital, gotten drunk a lot and done a lot of insulting things only to be fired midway through 1975 in that alternative scenario, but heck this way George would have brought him back in early 1976 so he would have managed us to the AL pennant anyway. Only to be fired midway through 1977, which may have hurt or helped, who knows. Poor Billy.
I am now reading John Feinstein, Living on the Black, about the 2007 seasons of aging greats Tom Glavine and Mike Mussina, the former with the Mets, the latter with the Yankees. An interesting study of how teams organize pitching staffs. Not a page turner exactly, but it is a good book so far, I am about a fourth of the way into it.
On my reading list, on my Kindle actualy, next are Bill White: Uppity, My Untold Story about the Games People Play by the former President of the National League and Cardinals first baseman, who when I was young was a Yankees announcer; and Our team by Luke Epplin about the 1948 Cleveland Indians, a neglected team that had Larry Doby and Satchel Paige, and was the second MLB team to have African American players. They won the Series that year.
I will let you all know how those are when I get to them.