New York Yankees: New York Yankees - 100 Years - The Official Retrospective

by Yankees

Book Overview

The New York Yankees. One hundred seasons of baseball. One hundred years of tradition. This official book celebrates the most successful team in sports history. Lavishly illustrated and designed with... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0345460901
• ISBN13: 9780345460905
• Release Date: April 2003
• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Length: 255 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 10.3" x 12.3"

Customer Reviews

Beautiful book

Great pictures. Beautiful book. If you really love the Yankies, you'll want to leave this one out on your coffee table to share with your friends and relatives or just pick up and browse in a spare minute. I love this book!

Great Gift

I ordered this book for a valentine's day present and it arrived before the scheduled delivery date and was in perfect condition.

Thanks!!

I ordered this book and the seller actually lived in my area and offered to deliver it to my house. Great Service!!

Loved it

I bought this book along with one other for my husband's birthday. He started reading it that night. The info is great and there are pictures in it that are not very often seen. Very interesting!

A stylish pat on the back for the New York Yankee franchise

As the book title says, this is a "retrospective" and not a history, which explains why there is little to be found about the early days of the New York Yankees in between being certified as a member in the American League of Professional Baseball Clubs and the purchase of George Herman Ruth from the Boston Red Sox. Despite the 41-win season of Jack Chesbro, everything before the Babe is prologue. Besides, for most of those years they were the New York Highlanders and they have never been considered part of the fabled team in pinstripes. The team's centennial is as good as excuse as any for a book like this, since there is essentially the same problem that would have faced a similar effort 50 years ago. The Yankees are once again an on-going dynasty so there seems no real reason to wait for the end of the Joe Torre years or for Derek Jeter to retire before putting together such a book.Edited by Mark Vancil and Mark Mandrake, "The New York Yankees - 100 Years - The Official Retrospective" is more in the style of sports journalism than academic history, which is fine. Throughout the volume there are a series of essays on the team's greatest players by some of the finest sports writers around: Richard W. Creamer on Babe Ruth, Donald Honig on Joe DiMaggio, Peter Golenbock on Mickey Mantle, and Ray Robinson on Lou Gehrig. Roger Kahn looks at "The Battle of the Boroughs" and Leonard Koppett writes about the Yankees dominance of New York City. There are, as you would expect in such a book, an All-Time Yankees team, selected by the New York-New Jersey Chapter of the Baseball Writers' Association of America, who also picked "The Top 25 Moment, Marks, and Events" that concludes the volume.The sportswriter picked those lists but the justifications are provided by Bill James, the dean of statistical analyses of the game of baseball and a person who knows how to make an argument supported by compelling evidence. For example, James makes a case for Roy White being a better player than Jim Rice and even goes so far as to argue that Whitey Ford's consistency was more important that the spectacular efforts of Sandy Koufax. James provides similar arguments for the Yankees Managers and pretty much settles the debate as to which New York Yankee team was the greatest of all time (no, it was not "Murderer's Row"). Actually, James ends up accounting for about half the text in the book, which is welcomed if you like his brand of analysis and disconcerting if you hold other beliefs. The book does skew towards the second half of the century, i.e., to the fans who would buy this nice looking book, which explains why the roster of great players gives space to Bobby Murcer but not Bob Meusel. As you would expect, the book is richly illustrated and you might be surprised that many of hte most familiar photographs in team history are not to be found in in this collection. Attention is paid more to the details than the big picture: Keith Olbermann tells Babe Dahlgr