'Yogi Berra - Eternal Yankee' By Allen Barra

Reviewed by Bill Lyon

Philadelphia Inquirer

With his stocky, runty torso and his boardinghouse-reach arms and his stubby, ungainly legs, he looked like he had been assembled from leftover parts, or as one writer of the day put it: "A body only an anthropologist could love."

But Lawrence Peter Berra played the most difficult and demanding position in all of sports, and played it so uncommonly well that there are people who consider him the greatest at his position of all time, and make a compelling, statistic-buttressed argument in his behalf.

One of those people is Allen Barra - one vowel removed from, and no relation to, his subject - a prolific and decorated writer of books, columns, and magazine articles, a baseball maven, and an unabashed champion of Berra, who is one of those people instantly recognized by one name. In this case:

Yogi.

The Grand Master of the Malaprop.

Surely the most quoted athlete of all time, cited so frequently that it requires some diligent digging to unearth exactly what he said and what he might have said. Or as Yogi himself might observe: "If I didn't say it, I should have."

Barra on Berra, neatly timed for Opening Day, makes for an impressive tome. It is an exhaustively researched, meticulously prepared, and lovingly presented biography of a man whom the author proclaims to be "America's most popular former athlete." (I would counter with Muhammad Ali, but that's a matter of opinion.)

It will require more willpower than I possess not to sneak ahead and turn immediately to Appendix B, Page 396, for a sampling of Yogiisms. Herewith, indulge:

When you come to the fork in the road, take it.

You know, a nickel isn't worth a dime any more. (To the economist Milton Friedman.)

What paper do you write for? (Upon being introduced to Ernest Hemingway.)

Thank you for making this day necessary. (To the fans, on Yogi Berra Day.)

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'The Yankee Years' by Joe Torre and Tom Verducci

'The Yankee Years'
By Joe Torre and Tom Verducci

Review By David Ulin
LA Times


Last week, as the controversy over Joe Torre and Tom Verducci's "The Yankee Years" was ratcheting up, I got an e-mail from my brother, who, like me, is a lifelong New York Yankees fan. "As I understand it," he wrote, "Torre is saying NYY is a tough place to work, very 'What have you done for me lately?' and if your name is not Piniella or Jeter, everyone is out to get you. No news there."

This is the reality for the Yankee faithful and has been since George Steinbrenner took control of the team in 1973. As for Torre's revelations that Alex Rodriguez is high-maintenance (No!) or that General Manager Brian Cashman failed to stand by him after the 2007 season . . . tell me something I don't know.

As it turns out, that's precisely what "The Yankee Years" does, providing 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.

When Torre took over the Yankees in 1996, baseball was less than two years removed from the catastrophic strike that stopped the 1994 season, forcing the cancellation of the World Series for the first time since 1904.

By 2007, when he left the team after losing the American League division series to the Cleveland Indians, baseball was huge business despite the exposure of some of its biggest stars ( Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds) as alleged cheaters, transformed by a new generation of executives who made decisions based on advanced statistical analyses.

On the surface, none of this appears to have much to do with the Yankees: Although Clemens and others on the 2000 team have been embroiled in the steroids scandal, the team never had an ingrown culture of cheating, while the new age, numbers-crunching style of management demands a patience Steinbrenner lacks.

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