The Yankee Years by Joe Torre, Tom Verducci
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Book Reviews of The Yankee Years
Book Review: Managing people
Summary: 5 Stars
I liked the book because I like baseball and Yankee gossip and personal tidbits. It also filled in some holes about why they let Pettitte leave; the process leading to casting off Bernie; and the steps leading to Torre's estrangement with Brian. I also remembered much of the things that Joe talked about. The book confirmed my judgment that management does play an essential role - and that Joe needs to be blamed for much of the perceived [they were in the playoffs each year and did have the winningest record in baseball] failures his last 6 years, just as he got credit for much of the successes his first six years.
As a CPA consulting with clients on managing their businesses, I found gems in this book that could be applied to most any organization. Joe talks about the team's desperation to win in 1998. My most successful clients have that desperation - obsession - commitment - to succeed. It is manifested in everything they do and with every contact they have. That single minded focus - ferocious will to win - elevates the entire organization feeding more success upon each success. It is a feeling of entitlement to winning. Teammates so focused with the shared vision serve to compliment managers using peer analysis, advice and pressure to keep straying members in line.
Age plays a role in sports and an aging Yankee team couldn't cut it. I advise on management succession planning. Throughout the book Joe talks about the ages of his players - some of the later teams lacked a succession plan to younger players with the older guys holding on longer than they should - with the one guy they should have kept being discarded in a disrespectable way. Business continuity depends on it as do professional organizations. The Yankees' lack of an effective pipeline from their farm system and the utter failure with their draft picks stunted the internal growth that would have applied the proper training and development into the organization's culture.
The Moneyball technology and information systems brought new ways to assess players and assemble teams. The last to adopt these are usually the [previously] most successful of the group, feeling that they don't need to change their ways; and when they do it is with a catch up mentality with shortcuts and perceived arrogance that they are probably not as good as the old ways. That is the way it seemed with the Yankees and Cashman's use of the new systems. This is one part of the book where Joe blames others for the team's failures and I agree with him. Joe tried to apply a human element to the analysis and it was rejected. It seemed to me that Joe was right - and if he wouldn't have been right, it couldn't have been worse. An example is his analysis of why he wanted to keep Bernie while Cashman's "numbers" showed that a Mientkiewicz and Phelps combination would be far superior. Coincident to the IT systems is the application of new ideas and energy. This was illustrated with the story of how Boston signed Curt Schilling from under the Yankees. Also supporting this is the low days lost to players on the disabled list by the Cleveland Indians in 2007 versus the very high number of days lost by the Yankees. Aggressive new approaches.
A favorite story I tell clients is The Emperor's New Clothes. That is a simple tale of perception and how people can be influenced by others. Joe's discussion of the myth of the benefits of free agency is a perception fallacy. The book tells of the system's inefficiency where a team overpays for a great payer slightly past his prime with talent guaranteed to decline over the life of the contract. Also the teams with overblown payrolls like the Yankees subsidize the lower rung teams who are better able to lock in younger lower paid players with long term contracts removing them from availability until they reach just past their prime.
Joe places a high value on trust following set rules. Without them you can't have discipline and order and an effective organization. I have nothing to add to this - this is the way it is.
When Joe wrote about Cashman's seizing control of the baseball operation he described the methods everyone should follow when they introduce new ideas. Prepare a clearly defined memo stating everything you want and why, and the benefits to the organization. Be thorough and complete. Address every item that might come up and give your considered analysis. Put it in a way where the only response is a "Yes" or a "No." Unless you are living in a dream world, you will get what you want. I personally have been very successful with this technique, and have also used it to help clients innumerably.
Joe says that preparation and training are essential to winning. My successful clients work the hardest, prepare the most and practice to improve their weaknesses. A thought that comes to mind is when Chesley Sullenberger landed his plane safely in the Hudson River and he gave great credit to his training. Without the right amount of preparation, practice and training there cannot be consistent long term success.
The management aspects of the book shouldn't be passed over. Joe Torre took over as manager of an unsuccessful franchise and under him they appeared in the playoffs every one of his twelve years at the helm, winning four World Series. He was given a team to manage that he didn't choose and had to use somewhat unfavorable resources to produce winning results. Management does matter and there is a lot in his book that can be applied to every type of business and organization.
Book Review: Not quite as controversial as the media portrayed it
Summary: 5 Stars
As a lifelong Yankee fan I have to say that this book is absolutely invaluable because of all the information within. I'll be perfectly honest in saying that at the end of the 2007 season I thought it was time for Joe Torre to move on. My reasoning had more to do with maybe the team needing perhaps a new viewpoint from a manager. I know that it came with the price of the Yankees missing the postseason in 2008, and to be honest I was fine with that because it was something that I personally had been waiting for since the 2004 season. Joe just managed to stave off the eventual end of the Yankee postseason runs for a few more years and he did a hell of a job in spite of the parts he was given. After reading this book I will say that I'm very glad Joe didn't come back for the 2008 season with the Yankees because I think the unfair pressure on him would have continued, but it also brings up a complaint about the book which I will address at the end of the review.
The book is a very candid look at the Yankee run under Joe Torre from the 1996 thru 2007 seasons. It reads nicely, I've always been a huge fan of Tom Verducci's writings in Sports Illustrated and he doesn't fail to disappoint here. It's very nice to get a rare glimpse of the Yankee team behind closed doors and all of the problems that individual players brought to the team ranging from the moody Kevin Brown to the high maintenance Alex Rodriguez. In addition as others have mentioned the book does a wonderful job of detailing how MLB as a whole changed over the past 15 years thanks to the Yankee dominance during the Dynasty.
Now the excerpts released to the press prior to the publication of this book were designed to drum up interest, and it worked without a doubt. What I can say is that reading those excerpts within the context of the book as a whole, they really aren't that controversial. I was initially annoyed by what Torre said when I heard about it, but after reading the book, it brought me back to the times when some of the events occurred. To be honest, it wasn't really a big secret that David Wells was lazy, or that Kevin Brown was perpetually pissed off about something (and yes he could make your life miserable due to his attitude and frequent stints on the DL). Alex Rodriguez always was known as a high maintenance kind of guy. Joe Torre wasn't really dishing dirt in my opinion, but he was rather reinforcing what was already public knowledge. It is interesting to read what he had to say about different players, and I don't think any less of him for saying what he said.
Much like Buster Olney's book The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty New Edition: The Game, the Team, and the Cost of Greatness, this book outlines many of the problems/mistakes the Yankees made in trying to continually win the World Series every single year. They missed completely what brought them the 4 World Series in 5 years, and they paid a price that most fans of other teams have not realized. Spending the money they did was not a guarantee of any championship and it was something I realized going back to the 2002 season. As a fan of the team, when they lost Game 7 of the 2001 World Series, I felt the magic of what made those teams slip away, and I never have felt it since that night. Unfortunately the Yankee front office missed that completely and because of the greed they had to win, they haven't won since.
I don't really feel I can do justice to the book with a review, so what I can say is that every baseball fan whether a Yankee fan or Yankee hater or whatever else, should read this book. While about the Yankees, there are plenty of lessons to be learned from it. I also as a Yankee fan can only hope the front office reads this book and can truly understand where they went wrong. But knowing them, it wouldn't matter if they read this book. They probably still have no idea what they lost. In spite of looking forward to the 2009 MLB season, I'm dreading the Yankees aspect of it because the team did themselves no favors by creating even more expectations with the signings of CC Sabathia, AJ Burnett, and Mark Teixeira.
My only complaint with this book is that Joe Torre says he was willing to come back to the Yankees for the 2008 season with a 2nd year added to the contract. He discusses just how uncomfortable he was becoming with the overall situation, yet he would be ok with putting up with it for another year? Supposedly having a 2nd year would have made it easier to deal with managing even though the team could fire him at the end of the 1st year and made him a lame duck for the entire season? Sorry, I just found it to be a bit confusing logic.
Anyhow, that aside, it's a must read as I mentioned for all baseball fans and highly recommended!!!
Book Review: The Verducci Years
Summary: 5 Stars
I got off to a bad start with "The Yankee Years" when I spotted a factual error at the top of page two. Author Tom Verducci describes the 1995 Yankees as having blown a 2-1 lead in games to the Seattle Mariners in the American League Division Series. Well, that's technically accurate... as it is to say later that the Yanks blew a 3-2 lead to the Red Sox in 2004. Technically accurate, but still wrong.
After that, fortunately, it's smooth sailing. Just keep your expectations in check. This is NOT Joe Torre's comprehensive autobiography. This is not a blow-by-blow account of how Torre managed all those playoff games, and there's not a whole lot of actual scoops. This is simply Tom Verducci's biography of baseball in the early 21st century, in which Joe Torre's Yankees played a pivotal part.
Verducci uses Torre largely as on-the-record source material, and Torre's commentary improves a lot of Verducci's stories and relevations. News to me were the Yankees near-signing of Albert Belle in 1999 (thankfully they chose to retain Bernie Williams instead), and Billy Crystal's DVD roast sent to the team on the eve of the 2007 playoffs.
A large portion of this book has very little Torre at all. Verducci is most interested in two things: how steroids affected the game in the late '90s, and how the information revolution (and revenue sharing) helped close the gap between the Yankees and the rest of the American League after the 2000 World Series. The chapter on steroids and the chapter on Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game and its progeny have very little Torre in them. Other more comprehensive books exist on each subject, but Verducci does a good big-picture job of tying them into a larger theme -- how baseball corrected the spending gap caused by the Yankees' enormous wealth.
Other Yankees personnel and Torre admirers have large roles in the book. Mike Mussina, Jason Giambi and Larry Bowa evidently made themselves available for lengthy interviews, and their perspective is quoted throughout. Three rival general managers (Billy Beane, Theo Epstein and Mark Shapiro) show their respect to Torre while at the same time explaining how they lapped Brian Cashman in the intelligence-gathering field.
Even if this is clearly Verducci's pet project, you still can't tell the story of baseball over the last 15 years without Joe Torre's blessing. Even as the 2001 - 2007 Yankees stacked up failure after playoff failure, even as their minor league pool dried up and their free agent picks got worse and worse (David Cone and Jimmy Key yield to Carl Pavano and Kei Igawa), Torre was still good for 100 wins a year.
The most original parts of "The Yankee Years" are the final few chapters, detailing the eclipse of George Steinbrenner's faculties and the Yankees' tumultuous 2007 season. Verducci gets pretty far inside the clubhouse door and gives a very entertaining recounting of the swarm of midges that helped the Indians push past New York in the '07 ALDS.
And as for A-Rod... as much heat as Torre took the week of his book's release, for putting his name on a book where Verducci revealed clubhouse secrets... doesn't Torre look vindicated now? Or, as Jose Canseco would have said... Vindicated: Big Names, Big Liars, and the Battle to Save Baseball?
I still feel that another Joe Torre biography is out there, but without Verducci's research and reporting on broader topics, that book might turn out to be as generic as Chasing the Dream: My Lifelong Journey to the World Series, or as useless as Joe Torre's Ground Rules for Winners: 12 Keys to Managing Team Players, Tough Bosses, Setbacks, and Success.
Book Review: An insightful look at America's game
Summary: 5 Stars
I am not a Yankee fan. I am not a Red Sox fan. I have no dog in this fight.
Now, with that out of the way, I hope you'll give me a fair shake at this.
My opinion: this is a good read, at times even gripping. Its value lies beyond what gossip it contains about A-Rod or how it gets back at the Steinbrenners. It's an inside look at how baseball has changed, in ways that are often not that good.
I thought The Yankee Years would be a routine behind-the-scenes tell-all, but its ambitions are bigger. It chronicles the end of an era in baseball, a more innocent time before steroid scandals, big money and executive decisions based on advanced statistical analysis.
This is not a Joe Torre memoir. Torre provides his voice and viewpoint throughout the book, but Verducci also quotes dozens and dozens of other key personalities. He weaves it all into a fascinating narrative that covers all the highs and lows of the Yankee's dynasty years.
The book throws a spotlight on many key players from this era. Some shine, others don't. David Cone, Mike Mussina and Derek Jeter shine. Jeter, in particular, impresses throughout with his sunny optimism and quiet leadership. If you weren't a Jeter fan before, you will be after reading it.
There has been a lot of buzz about Torre dissing players in these pages. The "A-Fraud" reference to Alex Rodriguez is a throwaway reference to what guys in the clubhouse -- not Torre -- called A-Rod in 2004, about how the player tried to fit in during his first season as a Yankee. "People in the clubhouse, including teammates and support personnel, were calling him `A-Fraud' behind his back." Instead, Torre offers his clear-eyed assessment of Rodriguez as a player who can't succeed as a team player because of his fear of failure. "There's a certain free-fall you have to go through," he 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."
It's almost biblical the way it all ends. A cloud of midges on a hot Cleveland night dooms the Yankees in a key playoff game. Thousands of the irritating insects descend on the mound, thoroughly rattling the pitcher. Bug spray makes the torment worse, not better. This perfect swarm seals Torre's fate. He leaves the Yankees not long after the loss, after a painful 10-minute meeting where he realizes his own personal Judas is his long-time general manager, Brian Cashman. "Cashman had retreated to silence with Torre's job on the line. The allies of Joe Torre had dwindled to zero."
Throughout the arc of this tale, Torre comes across as calm, determined and fair.
I should admit I do have a slight bias. When I was in junior high growing up outside St. Louis, Joe Torre taught me to play infield. He was playing third base for the Cardinals then. He appeared at the community center in my neighborhood outside the city one day and gave a handful of us kids a free lesson. I'll never forget it; he was patient and explained the game in detail, like he actually cared that we understood it. I learned a lot in that hour, from a decent man.
Here's the chapter list:
1. Underdogs
2. A Desperation to Win
3. Getting an Edge
4. The Boss
5. Mystique and Aura
6. Baseball Catches Up
7. The Ghosts Make a Final Appearance
8. The Issues of Alex
9. Marching to Different Drumbeats
10. End of the Curse
11. The Abyss
12. Broken Trust
13. "We Have a Problem"
14. The Last Race
15. Attack of the Midges
16. The End
Book Review: The Fleeting and Fragile Nature of Greatness
Summary: 5 Stars
Before A-Rod, before Jason Giambi, and before a 2008 offseason that saw the paranoid and panicking Yankees throw money at players like Old Man Potter trying to buy George Bailey's soul, there was a simpler team, a largely homegrown team, and a better team. The Yankees of the mid-to-late 90s were a band of brothers whose collective play and chemistry defined the "whole is greater than the sum of the parts" utopic dream often referenced in sports but rarely seen. They won championships in four of five seasons and seemed destined to keep on winning.
But they didn't.
At the helm of those glory years was Joe Torre, the even-tempered manager who (along with Derek Jeter) became the face of the franchise. A native New Yorker, Torre fielded a team that somehow both appealed to the blue collar elements of the fan base and also remained true to the regal history of the pinstripes. Even people who hated The Evil Empire respected their skipper.
Torre writes about his tenure in the Bronx in ''The Yankee Years,'' a book penned with Sports Illustrated writer Tom Verducci. Like a good novel, Torre's tale contains three distinct acts: his rise to the top managerial job in sports, an unprecedented run with the Yankees and the inevitable decline. Maybe if he would have waited a few years, more attention would have been focused on the first two parts of the story. As it is now, the team's decline overwhelms the story. A more apropos title may have been "The Death of the Yankees", as the book obsesses over the failures at the expense of giving a thorough account of the achievements of Joe Torre's Yankee Years.
A chief component to the Yankees' demise (according to Torre) was the free-spending, fantasy baseball-like revolving door of superstars suited in pinstripes by the aptly named GM Brian Cashman. The irresponsible spending of the Yankees' cash man and the poor returns on his investments has caused many people to describe the Yankees of the last ten years as, "the place superstars go to die". Torre echoes this opinion, as he regrets that solid, yeomen like Scott Brosius and Tino Martinez disappeared and were replaced high-priced prima donnas. What's worse is that in order to land some of the biggest flops, the Yankees had to deplete their minor leagues, the same farm system that once gave them Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera and other future greats.
An important note is that this is not a memoir. Torre is quoted in the book, sometimes in large passages, but he is more of the chief source of information than the author. Verducci stays largely absent from the book, allowing Torre's thoughts and remembrances fill the pages, but one must remember that direct words not assigned to Torre belong to the author. Along with Torre, Verducci uses interviews with many other subjects and his own thorough research to paint a complete picture of the Torre years and often interweaves the story of the Yankees into larger issues, like the steroids scandal.
So much of the publicity around this book relates to Torre's thoughts on Alex Rodriquez. Those looking for a sleazy attack on the third baseman will be disappointed. Torre does provide an interesting theory on how A-Rod's refusal to embrace failure actually leads to his troubles and that a more humble approach to superstardom and an understanding that all players are flawed would only help the superstar. Who knows? Maybe he is right. One thing's for sure: if A-Rod is going to hear that advice these days, he's going to have to read it in this book. Because Joe Torre's "Yankee Years" now belong to the ages.