* Too much, too late?

This two-page overview of three Yankees titles — The Yankees Years, by Joe Torre and Tom Verducci; A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez, by Selena Roberts; and American Icon: The Fall of Roger Clemens and the Rise of Steroids in America’s Pastime, by Thompson, Vinton, O’Keeffe and Red — appears in this weeks New York Times‘ Sunday book review section. And I have several problems with it.

For one thing, the timing. These books were released so long ago, relatively speaking (Years in February, the other two in May). Now in my day job at a weekly publication, I’m pretty liberal in the book review policy as farm as timing goes. But because we’re a speciality publication and the books we consider are pretty narrow in scope, we do what we want. We are not The New York Times, which should be concentrating on the cutting edge in all things newsworthy.

So why these books and why now? Each of them had been reviewed when they were originally released? With all the complaints about shrinking book sections, why did the editors decide it was worth re-examination, considering they were pretty much panned the first time around by the general reviewing public.

Second — and with all due disrespect — who the heck is Touré? The Times‘ bio describes him as “an on-air contributor to NBC and the author of “Never Drank the Kool-Aid,” a collection of essays.” Does a reviewer need any expertise in the topic of e book he or she is critiquing? When it comes to this genre (of which I’m obviously not very objective), I would say yes, but Touré doesn’t seem to have any. According to his MySpace page, he’s had a lot of experience covering the Hip-hop world, but when it comes to sports,

He has often evoked the participatory journalism of Tom Wolfe and George Plimpton, for example, playing high-stakes poker with Jay-Z, two-on-two basketball with Prince, one-on-one basketball with Wynton Marsalis, tennis with Jennifer Capriati, or writing illegal graffiti with known graffiti artists.

Sorry, I don’t get it. Nicholas Dawidoff, author of a couple of highly-regarded baseball-themed books, reviewed A-Rod, while the other two were handled by NYT staffer Michiko Kakutani.

Thirdly, Touré brings nothing new to the table, nothing we haven’t already read, as he infers in writing about American Icon, “[It] mostly covers ground that serious baseball fans already know, but it may answer some lingering Yankee questions,” he writes. I beg to differ: at this point, I don’t know if they even care any more.

You folks know me. I read anything about baseball, even bios on the Wheaties boxes, but given the publishing situation these days, I wish more thought would be given about needless duplication.

* Yeah, why no men’s book clubs?

Book Club Classics includes The Yankee Years among its suggestions for top men’s reads for the summer.

The Yankee Years

By Joe Torre

What it is: Joe Torre’s tale of his years as manager of the Yankees.

Why you should read it: Sure, Torre already wrote an autobiography and a self-help book, but this is the one baseball fans have been waiting for. Love or hate the Yankees, Torre’s book is still full of observations on the team and on the sport from a man who’s been around long enough to witness major shifts and changes. It may not be a “tell-all,” but Torre’s book has still received plenty of criticism from the Yankees as he opens up about the inner workings of the clubhouse. This summer reading pick for 2009 is highly recommended for baseball buffs.

* More National Pastime Radio

“Three baseball books are discussed: A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez by Selena Roberts, American Icon: The Fall of Roger Clemens and the Rise of Steroids in America’s Pastime by the staff of the New York Daily News, and The Yankee Years by Joe Torre and Tom Verducci.”

You read and listen to the segment here.

* Torre book finds an Angell

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t go back to a review of The Yankee Years; that so over. But I’ll make an exception for Roger Angell.

The veteran sportswriter praises the work of both Torre and Verducci (“Verducci has range and ease; he’s a shortstop on the page.”)

In the book, it’s a rush when you reach those latter-nineties or millennial late-inning Yankee explosions and Stadium-shaking endings, ….Hold it right there—only you can’t. The two biggest games in the book by far are Yankee defeats….

Illustration by Mark Ulriksen

Other great Angell lines:

• “The Steinbrenner obsession to win infects the Torre story like arsenic in a tenement flat.”
• “He never turned on one of his players in front of the media, and if he shows a bit more candor in the book, he remains a class act, as before.”
• “Less kindly teammates called [Alex Rodriguez] A-Fraud—a line that was seized upon and blown large by the tabloids when the first copies of “The Yankee Years” turned up, and attributed by inference to Torre [emphasis added]. It appears to have been a clubhouse joke, part of the open baiting that Rodriguez routinely endured.”

And finally,

• “[Torre is] better off where he is, away in the wrong time zone. He’s a cinch for the Hall of Fame—as a manager, not a player—whenever he’s ready to retire, and he’s already in the Grownups Hall of Fame, which has a few more members than the one in Cooperstown but tougher admission standards.

One last note: I’ve been enjoying Angell’s work for more than 30 years now, and this is the first time I can recall his dropping the “F-bomb.”

Good for him.

* RK Review: The Yankee Years (at long last)

by Joe Torre and Tom Verducci
Doubleday

The former manager of the New York Yankees — and one of its most successful — teams up with Sports Illustrated’s senior baseball writer for this unique and somewhat baffling presentation. Although Joe Torre gets top billing as the nominative author, the reader will get the impression that Tom Verducci is telling the story, since the narrative is written in the third person.

Torre was a former All-Star and Most Valuable Player during his 18-year career. He also managed the New York Mets, Atlanta Braves and St. Louis Cardinals before taking over the reigns of the Yankees.

For the most part, this is a standard baseball tale of hard work, success and frustration. The last element is especially so when one understands that George Steinbrenner, has been one of the most hands-on (or meddlesome, depending on one’s point of view) owners in the long history of the game. He went through managers like a cold sufferer goes through a box of tissues. Since acquiring the team prior to the 1973 season, he had hired — and fired — 13 field generals, including Billy Martin five times and four others at least twice. Torre added a stability to the team that hadn’t been known since Casey Stengel led them to a constant stream of pennants and world championships from 1949-60.

From the very beginning, Torre took control over a mix of veterans and rookies and molded them into a team, as trite as that might sound: The Yankees ran off a string of three consecutive World Series titles and four in five years thanks to a core of players like Paul O’Neill, Bernie Williams, Tino Martinzez, Scott Broscius, as well as up and comers like Derek Jeter, Jorge Posado, and Mariano Riveria.

Ultimately, The Yankee Years is a sad tale on the natural order of things in the sports world. Athletes grow older, lose their prowess and are replaced by others who may be better or worse, with different drives and agendas. That was part of Torre’s downfall. The players who followed O’Neill, Williams, and company seemed less interested in the Yankee tradition and more in individual performances. Some — like David Wells, Kyle Farnsworth, Carl Pavano and Kevin Brown, to name a few —were a constant source of disappointment. The Yankees kept winning, but the spark and joy were missing.

Working for Steinbrenner and his minions presented its own set of difficulties, constant scrutiny and job security being two of them. Despite his huge success, someone was always looking over Torre’s shoulder, quick to criticize if some bit of strategy backfired or if things weren’t running smoothly. After an initial euphoria, the tone of The Yankee Years becomes more forlorn with every chapter. Baseball fans know the inevitable outcome — Torre was not retained following the 2007 season and was named manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers (which he led to the playoffs last year) — but Verducci hammers the point home with passages such as “It was the 1,294th win with the Yankees for Torre, including postseason play, over 12 seasons. It would be the last,” and “He showered, dressed and left his office and the clubhouse believing this would be the final time he would do so as manager of the New York Yankees. He did not look back.” It is also telling that the book jacket features a picture of Torre walking away from the camera.

The pre-publication hullabaloo over The Yankee Years, Joe Torre’s “autobiography/memoirs,” can be summed up with a Shakespeare title: Much Ado About Nothing. Like the trailer of a two-star movie, the media — many members of which admitted not to have read the book in its entirety as they made their comments — cherry-picked parts for maximum bang. In particular, they focused on Torre’s remarks about Alex Rodriguez, whom he characterized as high-maintenance, more concerned with how he looked and performed than with his contributions to the team’s success. They failed to mention that Torre also praises Rodriguez: “Nobody has ever worked harder in my memory than this guy,” he writes.

Torre also expresses disappointment in his deteriorating relationship with Brian Cashman, the Yankees general manager, whom he accuses of not supporting him when the chips were down. To use an analogy from my favorite TV show, Lost, Torre is the John Locke character, a man of faith, while Cashman is Dr. Jack Shepard, the man of science.

Taken as a whole, The Yankee Years is a standard bit of baseball memoir, no worse and perhaps better than others that have been published in recent years, but certainly not worthy of all the hype it received. Too bad it couldn’t have had a happier ending.

A version of this review appears on Bookreporter.com.

— Reviewed by Ron Kaplan

* Holy ^T$*, Canseco was “right” after all

In an item on The New Yorker website, Ben McGrath reminds us that Jose Canseco, the author of Juiced and Vindicated reported on A-Rod’s juice use years ago, but no one wanted to believe him. Does that make Canseco a Cassandra?

In other book news of special interest to New York fans:

• Don’t look for a second volume by Joe Torre, this time about the Dodgers.
• And here’s a shocker — Darryl Strawberry writes about how riotous he and his 1980s Mets teammates were in his new book, Straw: Finding My Way, published by Ecco, a Harper Collins imprint. HC is also the company behind the Selena Robert’s book on Rodriguez, as mentioned previously on The Bookshelf.

* Another example of timing being everything

So what do you think: will the reports of A-Rod on steroids help the sale of Joe Torre’s book? Not that it needs much in the way of a push, according to this piece in the New York Daily News.

A suspicious person would wonder about the timing of the announcement. After all, it’s been six years since the tests were taken. How does the information just happen to leak out now?

Perhaps more important than Torre book sales, what will this mean for Richard Ben Cramer’s forthcoming biography on Rodriguez? If Cramer could publish a not-so-complimentary look at beloved Yankee hero Joe DiMaggio, what will he do to A-Rod?

Those that hate A-Rod are having a field day with all this.  Those who are on the fence might me tipping  away from him. Those who support him no doubt see this as a conspiracy.

At this point, I’m more interested in who leaked the info to the press — and why — than whether he did or did not take the drugs.

* On the go with Joe

New York newspapers devoted a lot of space to the return of Torre as he visits the Big Apple for his book tour.

The New York Times published this article on fan reaction during his Barnes and Noble stop in Manhattan.

The story, written by Joshua Robinson, offers the following thoughts by the author as expressed to his “customers”:

Yes, he stands by everything in the book, which he began working on nearly two years ago. No, it was never meant to be a tell-all exposé. Yes, he would have written it even if the Yankees had given him the contract he wanted to continue as the manager. And, Torre maintained over and over, there are no hard feelings, even if some people think there are.

“There’s no question bitter things happened,” he said during the bookstore appearance. “But when I left, it was more a sense of relief, trust me.”

* The Yankees and the future of the 1st Amendment

In trying to protect themselves against future “attacks” with their ” non-disparagement clause,” the Yankees have instead made themselves a laughing stock at best and a source of outrage at worst. Look for the ACLU to get involved at any moment. And PETA; they’re always looking for some publicity.

Among the numerous commentaries on the whole silly subject: ESPN weighs in, as does Arash Markazi of SI.com’s “For the Record” blog. Darren Garnick considers the situation on his Culture Schlock blog, as does RiverAveBlues, a Yankee-centric site.

* But I will defend to the death your right…Never mind.

In light of Joe Torre’s new book, the Yankees are considering a non-disparagement clause in their employee contracts.

According to a Newsday article by Wallace Mathews, “The Yankees are said to feel betrayed by Torre’s book, which has been interpreted as critical of some players, most notably Alex Rodriguez, and inaccurate in its recounting of the October 2007 meeting in Tampa at which Torre and the club agreed to part ways after four world championships and 12 consecutive playoff appearances.”

Wallace also notes that such a clause is already part of certain contracts.

He quotes an anonymous Yankee source:

“Up to now, we have always operated our employer-employee relationships on a basis of trust,” the official said. “But we never expected what we got from Joe. We may have to get a little tougher on this issue.”

I heard an interesting take on this subject on a recent episode of Pardon the Interruption. Co-host Tony Kornheiser elaborated on the Newsday piece, saying that the team wanted the clause to ensure that future Yankee books would be “positive in tone” and “do not breach the sanctitiy of the clubhouse.”

He suggested players use this as a bargaining chip. “If you can extort the Yankees for $2-5 million, which is more than you’d ever make in a book, takle the deal and don’t write the book.”

Kornheiser also pointed out that Torre is no longer associated with the Yankees and asked how long a statute of limitations should be?