Supported by
Bronx Tales
People always ask me if I still root for the Yankees. The truth is, the only time I rooted for them was when I was a Yankee. And when I was in the minor leagues, I rooted for the Yankees to lose so they’d need help.
Growing up in the blue-collar town of Rochelle Park, N.J., you rooted for either the Brooklyn Dodgers or the New York Giants. I was a Giants fan, and I loved going to the Polo Grounds. Nobody rooted for the Yankees in Rochelle Park. It didn’t seem sporting — like shooting fish in a barrel. Yankee fans, we believed, were the sons of bankers who lived in towns with bigger houses and nicer lawns.
A town like nearby Ridgewood, for example, where we moved when I was 13. Of course, I continued rooting for my Giants — you never abandoned your team. But you could take a sabbatical under certain circumstances — as when the hated Dodgers won the National League pennant.
In that case, you rooted for the Yankees to thrash “dem bums” in the World Series. Then I loved the fireballing Chief Allie Reynolds, Old Reliable Tommy Henrich and the bad-ball-hitting Yogi Berra. “Oh yeah?” I’d jeer at Dodger fans. “Well, you’ll never beat the Yankees!” It was the taunt of last resort.
But in 1957, my beloved Giants left me and the Polo Grounds for faraway San Francisco. That was the year I graduated from high school. It was also the year I graduated from rooting for favorite teams.
Today I root for good sports stories. I root for the Chicago Cubs, who haven’t won a World Series in over 100 years. I’m rooting for two old pitchers: 49-year-old Jamie Moyer of the Colorado Rockies and the Yankee comebacker Andy Pettitte, who’s about to turn 40. And I root for knuckleball pitchers while they still walk the earth.
I’m also a fan of good writing, which is what we have with Marty Appel’s “Pinstripe Empire: The New York Yankees From Before the Babe to After the Boss” and Rob Fleder’s “Damn Yankees: Twenty-Four Major League Writers on the World’s Most Loved (and Hated) Team.”
Appel, whom I’ve known since he was hired to answer Mickey Mantle’s fan mail in 1968 (he became the team’s P.R. director) and who interviewed me for this book, has written an insider’s history enlivened by a rich store of carefully researched anecdotes, most of which I’d never heard before.
One of Appel’s sources for Babe Ruth stories was Little Ray Kelly, Ruth’s personal mascot. Little Ray was only 3 years old when Ruth spotted him playing catch. Besides being adorable, Little Ray’s job was to sit next to Ruth on the bench and bring him good luck and hot dogs. Did the players “watch their language in front of you?” Appel asked Little Ray, “who insisted on that nickname even as a fully grown accountant.” “Hell, no,” Little Ray said. “How do you think I learned to talk like this?”
Appel shows how some things never change. In 1920, Ruth’s first year with the Yankees, his impact on attendance was reflected in the ticket prices. Box seats rose to $1.65 and $2.20, grandstand climbed to $1.10 and some bleachers shot up to 75 cents. “The game has just become a business now,” fans grumbled.
And how history repeats itself. In 1904 a Yankee named Ned Garvin, who had “an amazing history of barroom brawls, some involving gunplay,” beat up an insurance salesman. This was 75 years, “almost to the day,” Appel writes, “before Billy Martin fought a marshmallow salesman.”
All the great tales are explored in depth, including the one about Joe DiMaggio’s never diving for a ball. Countering critics who believed that Joe thought diving was undignified, Appel quotes Yogi saying that Joe never had to dive “ ’cause he was always in the right position.” My thought is, what about all those balls just out of Joe’s reach? Surely he could have caught many of them by diving.
This is a marvelous book to take on vacation. It’s divided into 47 chapters — each one featuring a different player, milestone, era or fracas — and you can dip into it whenever the mood strikes.
Another good “dipper” is “Damn Yankees,” which was edited by Fleder, a onetime executive editor of Sports Illustrated, and which caused my wife to break into uncontrollable giggles, thereby interrupting my reading of Appel’s book (before we switched). Some of the best writers in the country discuss their relationship with the nation’s most iconic team.
Roy Blount Jr. starts out, in Chapter 1, with a Yogi story I hadn’t heard. A radio talk show host says: “I’m here with Yogi Berra, and we’re going to play a game of free association. I’ll just throw out a name, and Yogi will say the first thing that pops into his mind. Ready, Yogi?”
“O.K.”
“Mickey Mantle.”
“What about him?” Yogi asks.
Pete Dexter’s essay about Chuck Knoblauch’s throwing problems at second base builds to the point where it’s hard to breathe. On one play Knoblauch scoops up a ground ball and throws it directly into Box 47E, where Keith Olbermann’s mother “had, until that moment, been watching Yankee games unmolested since 1934.”
Michael Paterniti moved me with the story of his visit to Catfish Hunter’s farm in Hertford, N.C., on one of that great pitcher’s last days before he succumbed to A.L.S., Lou Gehrig’s disease. Barely able to move his arms, Catfish told fishing stories to his family and friends at a cookout — the “gales of laughter” rising like hugs for their beloved “Mr. Jimmy.”
Best of all is Frank Deford’s tirade on why he hates the Yankees. “I like just about everything about New York except the Yankees. It is like living in Vatican City and liking everything about the place but the Roman Catholics.” But it has made Frank a stronger, better person, “for I know that I am a finer slice of humanity,” he writes, “than the Yankee fans who abut and surround me. It is worse, I think, to cheer for a bully than to be ordained one.”
The Yankees should invite Frank to an Old-Timers’ Day. He can throw out the first bitch.
PINSTRIPE EMPIRE
The New York Yankees From Before the Babe to After the Boss
By Marty Appel
Illustrated. 620 pp. Bloomsbury. $28.
DAMN YANKEES
Twenty-Four Major League Writers on the World’s Most Loved (and Hated) Team
Edited by Rob Fleder
Illustrated. 290 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $27.99.
Jim Bouton is the author of “Ball Four” and “Foul Ball: My Fight to Save an Old Ballpark,” both of which were recently released as e-books. He narrates an audiobook version of “Ball Four.”
Explore More in Books
Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news? Start here.
James McBride’s novel sold a million copies, and he isn’t sure how he feels about that, as he considers the critical and commercial success of “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store.”
How did gender become a scary word? Judith Butler, the theorist who got us talking about the subject, has answers.
You never know what’s going to go wrong in these graphic novels, where Circus tigers, giant spiders, shifting borders and motherhood all threaten to end life as we know it.
When the author Tommy Orange received an impassioned email from a teacher in the Bronx, he dropped everything to visit the students who inspired it.
Do you want to be a better reader? Here’s some helpful advice to show you how to get the most out of your literary endeavor.
Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here.
Advertisement