250 Pages In
I have some more quibbles with this book, though I will say up front that it is very well written and entertaining.
First, more spelling mistakes and historical errors. For example, there is a comment about the 2003 ALCS and how "In Boston where more people were watching than saw the Patriots win the Super Bowl eight months earlier..." The only problem is the Patriots did not win the Super Bowl in 2003, they won in 2002 (and 2004 and 2005) so that should have read 20 months earlier.
But more troubling to me is the lack of proper balance in the critque of certain moves. For example, there is a long part in the book about how Torre did not want to sign Giambi and instead would have preferred to keep Tino for a year and then turn the job over to Nick Johnson. The book then details how Giambi ran into injury problems and other difficulties later on with the Yankees. Meanwhile, the reader is left to assume that Nick Johnson would have been a perfect solution and Torre was absolutely right. I loved Nick Johnson with the Yankees, but Nick Johnson can't stay healthy. He played in 38 games the last two years while Giambi played in almost 230. I think that might be relevant information when sizing up the two players.
In addition, the book continually lauds the core group of the dynatsy (Jeter, O'Neil, Bernie, Posada, Tino, Brosius) as "special" players, but then blames the Yankees for never adequately replacing them. Isn't that the point of a special player? I don't know who will close games for the Yankees in 2012, but I am 99.9% sure that it will not be a player as good as Rivera. Those guys were tremendously special, they always seemed to be at their best when it mattered the most and I don't see how you can fault the Yankees for not finding their equals. That's what makes them special!
Finally, there are passages like this one which drive me nuts:
"Quite simply, Enrique Wilson was one of the worst hitters to ever play for the New York Yankees. He appeared in 264 games for the Yankees and batted.216. Only four men in the history of the franchise ever hit worse with that much time in pinstropes....Morever, Wilson was neither especially fleet nor adept in the field."
I don't think a Yankee fan would dispute any of those assertions about Enrique Wilson. But who exactly was the one filling out the lineup with Wilson's name in it? This is where the use of a third person narrative really causes problems. Tom Verducci has correctly identified that Enrique Wilson was a bad player, but he hasn't asked his co-author why he kept putting Wilson into the lineup. I would love to hear something from Torre about what Wilson did to earn all that playing time.
Anyway, it's a very good book so far and Torre hasn't said anything I would take him to task for. Then again, I am only in 2003, history is going to get a little more choppy from here on out.
