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Summary
Summary
Twelve straight playoff appearances. Six American League pennants. Four World Series titles. This is the definitive story of a dynasty: the Yankee years
When Joe Torre took over as manager of the New York Yankees in 1996, the most storied franchise in sports had not won a World Series title in eighteen years. The famously tough and mercurial owner, George Steinbrenner, had fired seventeen managers during that span. Torre's appointment was greeted with Bronx cheers from the notoriously brutal New York media, who cited his record as the player and manager who had been in the most Major League games without appearing in a World Series
Twelve tumultuous and triumphant years later, Torre left the team as the most beloved and successful manager in the game. In an era of multimillionaire free agents, fractured clubhouses, revenue-sharing, and off-the-field scandals, Torre forged a team ethos that united his players and made the Yankees, once again, the greatest team in sports. He won over the media with his honesty and class, and was beloved by the fans.
But it wasn't easy.
Here, for the first time, Joe Torre and Tom Verducci take us inside the dugout, the
clubhouse, and the front office in a revelatory narrative that shows what it really took to keep the Yankees on top of the baseball world. The high-priced ace who broke down in tears and refused to go back to the mound in the middle of a game. Constant meddling from Yankee executives, many of whom were jealous of Torre's popularity. The tension that developed between the old guard and the free agents brought in by management. The impact of revenue-sharing and new scouting techniques, which allowed other teams to challenge the Yankees' dominance. The players who couldn't resist the after-hours temptations of the Big Apple. The joys of managing Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera, and the challenges of managing Alex Rodriguez and Jason Giambi. Torre's last year, when constant ultimatums from the front office, devastating injuries, and a freak cloud of bugs on a warm September night in Cleveland forced him from a job he loved.
Through it all, Torre kept his calm, kept his players' respect, and kept winning.
And, of course, The Yankee Years chronicles the amazing stories on the diamond. The stirring comeback in the 1996 World Series against the heavily favored Braves. The wonder of 1998, when Torre led the Yanks to the most wins in Major League history. The draining and emotional drama of the 2001 World Series. The incredible twists and turns of the epic Game 7 of the 2003 American League Championship Series against the Red Sox, in which two teams who truly despised each other battled pitch by pitch until the stunning extra-inning home run.
Here is a sweeping narrative of Major League Baseball in the Yankee era, a book both grand in its scope and fascinating in its details.
Author Notes
Joe Torre was born in Brooklyn, New York on July 18, 1940. He played professional baseball for the Atlanta Braves, the St. Louis Cardinals, and the New York Mets. In 1965, he won a Gold Glove as a catcher. He later managed all three teams he played for as well as the New York Yankees and the Los Angeles Dodgers. During his tenure as manager of the Yankees, from 1996 to 2007, the Yankees reached the post season each year and won ten American League East Division titles, six American League pennants, and four World Series titles. From 1985 to 1990, he was a television analyst for the California Angels and was a guest analyst for ESPN during the 1989 World Series. He has also written books including Chasing the Dream, Joe Torre's Ground Rules for Winners, and The Yankee Years.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
New York Review of Books Review
If James Lee Burke has the deepest regional voice in the genre - and I do believe that's so - it's because he understands those feelings that keep people connected to the places wher1e they have, or once had, roots. When Hurricane Katrina ripped through New Orleans, it swept all kinds of people, criminals among them, out of their natural element and into the strange foreign land called Texas. RAIN GODS (Simon & Schuster, $25.99) is Burke's version of a range war in Southwest Texas - a pitched battle between gangs of displaced bad guys, fighting among themselves for the new territory against the outmatched locals. Some of these boldly drawn newcomers, like the former owner of a floating casino who relocated to an exclusive community in San Antonio and now runs a sleazy skin club on the highway, are living like "colonials in their own country." Others are stuck in hellholes like Chapala Crossing, a rusty-dusty town on the Mexican border that takes its visual definition from an abandoned filling station and a crumbling church. Hackberry Holland, the tall, taciturn sheriff - and cousin of Billy Bob Holland, the lawyer-lawman in a Western crime series by Burke - finds the decomposing corpses of nine Asian women buried in the field behind the church, collectively mowed down by a World War II machine gun and plowed under by a bulldozer. The women were prostitutes and drug mules in an organized-crime ring run by a shadowy Russian mobster based in Phoenix. Whoever among the crime boss's many competitors ordered the mass murder, it was executed by the legendary hit man Jack Collins, known as Preacher and both feared and respected for being "a mean motor scooter and crazy besides." Crazy he may be, but Preacher is one of Burke's most inspired villains - violent and cruel, but also profoundly moralistic and self-loathing, qualities that he shares with Hackberry Holland, as he informs the guilt-haunted sheriff when they finally meet. Preacher will kill any number of people in imaginative ways, yet spare the foolish men and furious women who are offered to him as sacrificial victims. But while Preacher is a treat, camped out in the desert and howling to nameless ancient gods, you don't want to underestimate the locals, who have their own deities to answer to. Even Preacher gets that. "These are religious people," he says. "Disrespect their totems and feel their wrath." Right now, the native gods are withholding their blessings because of the killers and lowlifes who have brought the blight. But with good guys like Holland on the job, it might yet rain on this parched land. There's always a serpent in an English village mystery because the whole genre is a metaphor for the primordial Garden of Eden, which loses its innocence when something evil slithers through the gate. In her novel AWAKENING (Minotaur, $25.95), S. J. Bolton turns the myth into something more literal when she deposits a venomous adder in the crib of a sleeping infant and challenges a veterinarian named Clara Benning to save the baby, capture the snake and identify the villain who is distributing poisonous reptiles among the populace of her "quiet, half-forgotten village" on the border of Dorset and Devon. That's quite a tall order for this reclusive heroine. But although she passes for a simple country vet, dedicated to the belief that "all lives, even tiny, secretive, short ones, have a value and a purpose," Clara is actually a reptile expert and well qualified to solve the mystery of the snake infestations. For all the Gothic elements that Bolton has wrapped around her story to create suspense, there's more satisfaction in listening to Clara talk about snakes and watching her handle them ... carefully. In "Siren of the Waters," Michael Genelin introduced us to Jana Matinova, a smart, principled police officer who fought crime in her native Czechoslovakia. Now a commander in the Slovak police force and stationed in the capital city of Bratislava, Jana returns in DARK DREAMS (Soho, $24) to help a childhood friend whose crusading political aspirations are dashed when she has an affair with a married member of Parliament and becomes a pawn in an international smuggling ring. Outside of a tendency to speak girl-gush in private moments, the resourceful and prodigiously insightful Jana seems to have no flaws. But it isn't her feats of superheroism that give the story its chilly sense of reality; it's her casual acceptance of the almost universal corruption of everyone who lives in her world. THE CHALK CIRCLE MAN (Penguin, paper, $14) comes along just in time, before we get totally lost in the increasingly convoluted later adventures of Fred Vargas's quirky French sleuth, Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg. Originally published in 1996, but only now available in a very smart translation from the French by Sian Reynolds, this book is the first in Vargas's series and answers certain questions about her eccentric detective and the lost love that haunts him. The mystery also works on its own whimsical terms, confounding us with images of blue chalk circles drawn around innocuous objects - until a corpse turns up in one of them and forces Adamsberg to put some gumption into his vague inquiries. Even here, in the beginning, Vargas writes with the startling imagery and absurdist wit of a latter-day Anouilh, about fey characters who live in a wonderful bohemian world that never was but should have been. James Lee Burke's taciturn Texas sheriff finds the decomposing corpses of nine women buried in a field.
Library Journal Review
To many it must be surprising that the stoic and classy Torre, who managed the Yankees for 12 years, should decide to publish a book about his time in Gotham. Perhaps Torre's sense of rectitude is why the book is in coauthor Verducci's voice, describing Torre in the third person and quoting other parties almost as much as the man himself. Although there are the publicized criticisms of A-Rod, this is a sober study of the full trajectory of the Yankees under Torre and of his role in that story. It will be in demand at all public libraries. [See Major Audio Releases, LJ 1/09.] (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Joe Torre was the fourth choice. The veteran manager was out of work in October of 1995, four months removed from the third firing of his managerial career, when an old friend from his days with the Mets, Arthur Richman, a public relations official and special adviser to Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, called him with a question. "Are you interested in managing the Yankees?" Torre made his interest known without hesitation. "Hell, yeah," he said. Only 10 days earlier, Torre had interviewed for the general manager's job with the Yankees, but he had no interest in such an aggravation-filled job at its $350,000 salary, a $150,000 cut from what he had been earning as manager of the St. Louis Cardinals be-fore they fired him in June. His brother Frank Torre did not think managing the Yankees was worth the hassle, either. After all, Stein-brenner had changed managers 21 times in his 23 seasons of own-ership, adding Buck Showalter to the bloody casualty list by running him out of town after Showalter refused to acquiesce to a shakeup of his coaching staff. It didn't matter to Steinbrenner that the Yankees reached the playoffs for the first time in 14 years, even if it was as the first American League wild card team in a strike-shortened season. Showalter's crimes in Steinbrenner's book were blowing a two games to one lead in the best-of-five Division Series against the Seattle Mariners, and resisting the coaching changes. "Why do you want this job?" Frank Torre asked his brother. "It's a no-lose situation for me," Joe replied. "I need to find out if I can do this or not." Richman also had recommended to Steinbrenner three man-agers with higher profiles and greater success than Torre: Sparky Anderson, Tony LaRussa and Davey Johnson. None of those choices panned out. Anderson retired, LaRussa took the managing job in St. Louis and Johnson, returning to his ballplaying roots, took the job in Baltimore. LaRussa and Johnson received far more lucrative con-tracts than what Steinbrenner wanted to pay his next manager. "I've got to admit, I was the last choice," Torre said. "It didn't hurt my feelings, because it was an opportunity to work and find out if I can really manage. I certainly was going to have the lumber." On Wednesday, November 1, Bob Watson, in his ninth day on the job as general manager after replacing Gene Michael, called Torre while Torre was driving to a golf course in Cincinnati. Watson summoned him to an interview in Tampa, Florida. That evening, Torre met with Steinbrenner, Watson, Michael, assistant general manager Brian Cashman and Joe Molloy, Steinbrenner's son-in-law and a partner with the team. The next morning, Torre was intro-duced as the manager of the Yankees at a news conference in the Stadium Club of Yankee Stadium, standing in the same spot where Showalter had stood twelve months earlier as the 1994 AL Manager of the Year. It was an inauspicious hiring in most every way. Steinbrenner did not bother to attend the introductory event of his new manager. The press grilled Torre. Not only had Torre been fired three times, but also he was 55 years old and brought with him a losing record (894-1,003), not one postseason series victory, and the ignominy of having spent more games over a lifetime of playing and managing without ever getting to the World Series than any other man in his-tory. Torre was a highly accomplished player, even a star player, for 18 seasons with the Braves, Cardinals and Mets. He was named to nine All-Star teams and won one Most Valuable Player Award, with the Cardinals in 1971.When he played his last game in 1977,Torre was one of only 29 players in baseball history to have amassed more than 2,300 hits and an OPS+ of 128 (a measurement of combined on-base and slugging percentages adjusted for league averages and bal Excerpted from The Yankee Years by Joe Torre, Tom Verducci All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
| 1 Underdogs | p. 1 |
| 2 A Desperation to Win | p. 41 |
| 3 Getting an Edge | p. 85 |
| 4 The Boss | p. 118 |
| 5 Mystique and Aura | p. 144 |
| 6 Baseball Catches Up | p. 165 |
| 7 The Ghosts Make a Final Appearance | p. 198 |
| 8 The Issues of Alex | p. 238 |
| 9 Marching to Different Drumbeats | p. 261 |
| 10 End of the Curse | p. 285 |
| 11 The Abyss | p. 314 |
| 12 Broken Trust | p. 341 |
| 13 "We Have a Problem" | p. 365 |
| 14 The Last Race | p. 403 |
| 15 Attack of the Midges | p. 432 |
| 16 The End | p. 466 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 479 |
| Index | p. 483 |
