Pinstripe Empire

March 12, 2012
In this affectionate fan’s notes to the team, former Yankees public relations director Appel regales baseball fans everywhere with a fast-paced, exhaustively and exhaustingly detailed, year-by-year chronicle of the team’s history. He covers the team from its beginnings in 1903 right up to the 2011 season, when Derek Jeter became the first Yankee to reach 3,000 hits and also to pass Mickey Mantle for most games played as a Yankee. Appel recreates the excitement and the debates over building Hilltop Park in Washington Heights, the first stadium for the team, then known as the Americans. He narrates the growth of the team as it moves from Hilltop Park to the Polo Grounds to the various incarnations of Yankee Stadium, and the growing enthusiasm among New Yorkers for the team. He reminds us that the now famous Yankee pinstripe uniforms first debuted in 1912, disappeared for two seasons, and then returned for good in 1915. In this definitive history, Appel avidly narrates the already well-known stories of the colorful players (the beloved Ruth, the bad boy Mantle, the now forgotten team player Bobby Richardson) and managers (the volatile Billy Martin and the wisecracking baseball genius Casey Stengel) whose passion for the game, athleticism, and dedication to the Yankee pinstripes helped create the franchise we know today. Agent: TK.

March 1, 2012
A former Yankees' PR director and sports commentator charts the vicissitudes of the beloved/hated team once known as the Highlanders. Appel (Munson: The Life and Death of a Yankee Captain, 2009, etc.) is no disinterested observer. He is a Yankees insider, and he has enviable contacts with the high and the low in Yankee history and occasionally slips easily into the first person. But he's also unable to be critical when circumstance calls for it. His account, for example, of the slow desegregation of the Yankees is brief, dry and emotionless. Of greatest interest are Appel's descriptions of the early years of the team--their first park, the great stars of Murderers' Row (Ruth, Gehrig and company), the building--and later remodeling--of the original Yankee Stadium and its emotional razing eight decades later. The author also offers the odd detail (Yogi Berra used a woman's falsie to pad his catcher's mitt), close looks at the great and not-so-great Yankee managers (Huggins, Stengel, Houk and Torre among the former) and a careful chronicle of the bizarre hire-and-fire-and-rehire history of Billy Martin and the irascible George Steinbrenner. Appel also notes the contributions of PA announcers, National Anthem singers, groundskeepers and others. But the author rushes through the most recent decades, trying to do justice to Reggie Jackson, Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez and so many others--an effort highlighting the near impossibility of his task: cramming between the covers of a single book the complicated history of a most complicated franchise. Torrents of information (good portions of which are genuinely interesting) cascade over readers, who will feel at times as if they're trying to fill a water glass beneath Niagara Falls.

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