Joe Torre and his Yankee years. Yikes.
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One of those things they tell you in career advice columns is that you shouldn’t complain about your boss. Especially, if they think of it, on a blog. You really shouldn’t complain about him on a blog that he reads. But I have to tell you, there is something about book editor David L. Ulin that’s just not right.
He’s a Yankee fan.
Ulin got an early look at the new Joe Torre book ‘The Yankee Years,’ written with Tom Verducci, and he finds it:
... an unexpectedly thoughtful, even nuanced, history not only of Torre’s 12 years as manager of the Yankees but of Major League Baseball during that time. It’s a period ripe for just this sort of overview: the steroid era, the rise of moneyball.... ‘The Yankee Years’ masterfully interweaves these larger issues into a detailed account of the rise and fall of Torre’s dynasty, a team that won four World Series in the first five years he was managing -- and then did not go all the way again.
Honestly, I can’t think of anything more grating -- and I’m sure it has everything to do with the fact that I spent a couple of decades rooting for the Red Sox and then transferred my affections to the Dodgers. Does the world really need a thoughtful, powerful book by a former Yankee manager about his winning team? Gah! Those hegemonies from the Bronx! Those overpaid robots! Oh, wait, Torre’s book talks about that. Ulin writes:
He’s terrific on the day-to-day dynamics of the Yankees, the way the selfless, win-at-all-costs culture of the championship teams dissipated with the departure of Paul O’Neill, Scott Brosius and Tino Martinez after the 2001 season, leaving a void filled by selfish superstars. Such a trend began with the 2001 signing of Jason Giambi -- a move Torre opposed in writing, so he couldn’t be held responsible if it didn’t work out -- and it’s personified by the contradictory figure of Rodriguez, perhaps the most talented and least endearing superstar in American sports, an insecure stat machine utterly unable to hit when it counts. Much of the media buzz around ‘The Yankee Years’ has involved reports that Yankee players called Rodriguez ‘A-Fraud’ or that the player was so obsessed with shortstop Derek Jeter that it ‘recalled the 1992 film ‘Single White Female.’ ‘
More about name-calling and obsession after the jump.
In the context of the book, however, these lines are throwaways, not even written in Torre’s voice. Far more interesting is the manager’s assessment that Rodriguez could not succeed as a team player because he is unwilling to fail. ‘There’s a certain free fall you have to go through,’ Torre says, ‘when you commit yourself without a guarantee that it’s always going to be good. There’s a sort of trust, a trust and commitment thing that has to allow yourself to fail. Allow yourself to be embarrassed. Allow yourself to be vulnerable. And sometimes players aren’t willing to do that.’
All of which sounds, I have to admit, kind of interesting. But reading 512 pages about the Yankees would be almost unbearable, a real betrayal. But then again, Ulin says...
It was great to be a Yankee fan from 1996 until Game 4 of the 2004 ALCS, when Mariano Rivera walked Kevin Millar leading off the ninth inning and the collapse against Boston began. The Yankees have yet to recover from that loss, but the measure of Torre and Verducci is that they situate this within a larger framework, highlighting the emergence of the Red Sox as a counterpoint to the Yankees’ decline. More than that, they trace the arc of the dynasty as a kind of epic narrative, involving an inevitable rise and fall.
Did he say ‘fall’? Maybe there’s something here for ALL baseball fans to love.
-- Carolyn Kellogg
