March book reviews, part 2

The next installment in a series of book reviews on my current reading.

Today: The Yankee Years by Joe Torre and Tom Verducci.

Yesterday I said I would be reviewing two New York Yankees-related books, with the good one first. That leaves the lousy one for today.

And this one was truly lousy. You'd think that if one of the most successful managers in baseball, who was in charge of one of the most storied franchises in the game for over a decade, would get together with an elite sportswriter, you'd get a great book. Nope. It's terrible.

The problem, I think, starts with Tom Verducci, who obviously did most of the writing (with the "by Joe Torre" part due to his supplying quotes and background). I always thought Verducci was a great writer, but when I think back to his Sports Illustrated pieces, they all have the same qualities: magazine-length writing, great sources, and a couple good flourishes.

This book is written the same way. But the problem is, it's a book, not a magazine article. So, rather than getting a sweeping story of Torre's time with the Yankees, we get a bunch of individual storylines mashed together with horrid transitions (or a nice horizontal line off to the left of the page that's meant to indicate that we should not expect any kind of transition, or that the sections before and after the line will not be connected even remotely).

The book is really Verducci's take on all things baseball within the last decade and a half, with baseball's biggest centerpiece—the Yankees—providing a nice hook and an excuse to write an excessively long book (about 500 pages). You can tell he wrote several Sports Illustrated articles out of the content he has in the book, and he had no qualms dropping them in there among his bland telling of the franchise under Torre's reign.

The chapters are hastily divided and thwatched together with no apparent thought. Verducci employs terrible writing techniques, such as rhetorical questions—"What was it about Jeter that enabled him to succeed in clutch situations?"—then proceeds to answer them, like a cub reporter filing his first softball report.

It's no wonder all the reviewers of the book were focused on pulling random quotes and facts out then blowing them up for sensational story lines; there's no story here, and the details Torre and Yankees players reveal are the only interesting parts.

The magazine-style brevity to Verducci's storylines, which hiccup around within chapters and are awakened hundreds of pages later to be beat unreadable again, are just one of the ways Verducci shows he's not made for a full-length book. His two other aforementioned strengths—great sources and a couple good flourishes—also show up in the book, but they're ill-suited for a project of this magnitude.

Verducci overuses his sources, especially guys such as David Cone, who is quoted on nearly every other page. You can tell Verducci used Cone as a major source for everything, including non-Yankees material. It's as if Verducci humored the guy in the retirement home then felt he had to use everything he said. Now, Cone was extremely important to the Yankees' franchise and their string of championships, but couldn't a great writer like Verducci get a wider variety of sources?

Verducci's moments of good writing also doom him, because you can see what the book could have been. He has paragraphs of brilliance, with great storytelling and details. But most of the book is blandly written. He botches scintillating sports moments; he explains ideas and opinions until they're left to a whimperless death; he skips around on details and event descriptions that could have been organized far better.

By overrelying on quotes, Verducci misses the great storytelling that could have powered this book. Although he interviewed many good sources, they were all also mainly baseball players, which means when you quote them at length, you're going to have something that sounds as riveting as the news conference players give after their 152 games a year.

When it comes time to recount a great moment of Yankees history, such as the 2003 American League Championship Series, Verducci does a great job. It's just too bad he tells how it's going to end, and all the attitudes that went with it ending, before he has a chance to wind through the great narrative.

It's like an amateur tried to write the story, with no clue how to get good information, how to organize the information that he had, or how to dress up drab details enough to carry the reader.

Verducci does have strong moments. His chapter on steroids has a bit of a narrative, smooth writing, and good insight. Similar writing pops up elsewhere in the book. His use of statistics, and chronicling why the Yankees suffered during the Moneyball era despite having plenty of money, is top-notch. But a slow, unpowerful beginning kills the book before it can begin and sets the tone for all that the book really is.

I really think all these problems are Verducci's fault, because he had a willing subject to work with. Torre is very candid throughout the book, sharing not only juicy details but also his team concepts. While a manager, Torre was open with the media and easy to work with, and he even had some keen observations buried in the 15-line paragraph quotes Verducci chose to run.

Where the writing failed is in showing who Torre is. Over and over, Verducci tells us about Torre wanting this or liking this, or having the team be honest and blah blah blah blah blah. Show us this man. Give us some physical description. Reveal what he looked like during these great moments in Yankees history. Get inside his head, but not in block quotes. Where is his childhood? How much did you talk to his wife? His old teammates? Writers who have covered him?

The book lacks because it has been treated as an encyclopedia to hold Yankees details, not a story to show Yankees lore.

For those needing to brush up on their Yankees history, or to get inside the game of baseball via a great Verducci essay, this book is fine. But if you want a story, if you want the mystique that is New York, you will not find it here.