New books chronicle Yankees-Red Sox rivalry
By Ron Berthel
Associated Press
While the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox compete for first place in the American League East, they're battling it out on the bookshelf, too, where new books about each team contend for fans' attention.
Alongside them, though, are other books, hardly also-rans, for a variety of baseball reading tastes: Among them are photo albums and essay collections, and books about various aspects of baseball trivia and history.
"When Boston Won the world Series" by Bob Ryan
Leading off for the Yankees is the coffee-table book "Yankees Century" (Houghton Mifflin, $35). Glenn Stout and Richard A. Johnson trace 100 years of Yankees history, from the team's birth in 1903 to its recent string of winning seasons. Getting assists are more than 200 black-and-white photos, and essays by Ira Berkow, Ring Lardner, David Halberstam and others.
In "The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship" (Hyperion, $22.95), Halberstam explores the 60-year friendship among Red Sox stars Bobby Doerr, Dominic DiMaggio, Johnny Pesky and Ted Williams. The story unfolds on a 1,300-mile road trip in 2001 as DiMaggio and Pesky make a final visit to Williams, whose health is failing (and who later died).
In "October Men" (Harcourt, $25), Roger Kahn, author of "The Boys of Summer," chronicles the Yankees' remarkable 1978 season, when they climbed from 14 games out in mid-July to tie Boston for first place at the end of the regular season. In the one-game playoff in Fenway Park, the Yankees came from behind — again — on light-hitting Bucky Dent's three-run home run to win the division, and eventually the World Series.
According to mystery novelist and Red Sox fan Doug Hornig, "The Boys of October" (Contemporary, $24.95) were the 1975 Red Sox, and the seven-game World Series they played against — and lost to — Cincinnati's "Big Red Machine" might have been the best ever. Hornig looks back at those great teams and players — Carl Yastrzemski and Carlton Fisk, Pete Rose and Johnny Bench — and how that memorable Series diverted the nation's attention from the gloom of an ailing economy and the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate.
The 1975 season also is the subject of "The Long Ball: The Summer of '75 — Spaceman, Catfish, Charlie Hustle, and the Greatest World Series Ever Played" (Little, Brown, $24.95) by Tom Adelman. He chronicles the season and its stars, and the "best ever" World Series, which included the "best ever game" — the sixth game, marked by Fisk's walk-off home run.
How did it feel to be young and a Yankee? New York Daily News columnist Bill Madden wanted to know. So he asked 17 former Yankees and one Yankee widow for "Pride of October" (Warner, $24.95). Among those interviewed are Joe Pepitone, Don Mattingly, Whitey Ford, Arlene Howard (Elston's widow) and Marius Russo, who was a rookie in 1939, the year terminally ill Lou Gehrig retired.
They sound like fiction, but they're histories: "When Boston Won the World Series" (Running Press, $18.95) by Bob Ryan, and "Autumn Glory" (Hill and Wang, $23) by Louis P. Masur each offer evidence that the Boston Americans — forerunners of the Red Sox — won a World Championship in 1903, beating the Pittsburgh Pirates in the first World Series.
And it sounds like history, but it's fiction: In "The Little Red (Sox) Book" (Triumph, $19.95), Bill "Spaceman" Lee, Boston's offbeat lefty reliever during the 1970s, offers an "alternate history" of his former team.
Two Yankees stars, one past, one present, are profiled in "DiMaggio: Setting the Record Straight" (MBI, $24.95) Morris Engelberg and Marv Schneider's biography of Joe DiMaggio; and in "Perfect I'm Not: Boomer on Beer, Brawls, Backaches, and Baseball" (Morrow, $25.95) by David Wells.
Yankee and Red Sox fans alike can take pride — or otherwise — in the exploits of Mickey McDermott, who lists both teams among the six on his major-league resume. In "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Cooperstown" (Triumph, $24.95), the southpaw from the 1950s and model for "The Rookie," Norman Rockwell's painting, relives his 12-year career in the majors, telling how, in spite of his tremendous baseball potential, he still has to buy a ticket to get into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
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The coffee table might be the place for these new baseball picture books: • "Classic Baseball" (Abrams, $35) by Dave Anderson features 160 photos, many in color, by Walter Iooss Jr. that span the past 40 years of baseball. Hank Aaron relaxes in the clubhouse with a cigarette; Willie Mays, in profile, studies the action from the Milwaukee dugout; and Cleveland's "Sudden Sam" McDowell warms up under the Florida palms. • "The Ballpark Book" (Sporting News, $39.95) by Ron Smith is a road trip to major league stadiums in 400 photos. This revised edition includes the newest parks in Pittsburgh, Milwaukee and Houston, as well as several parks of the past. • "Baseball's Book of Firsts" (Courage, $19.98) by Lloyd Johnson is exactly as advertised: The first player to wear a batting helmet, first televised game, first use of a tarp and the first player to hold out for more money — in 1870! — are among the more than 150 baseball originals, accompanied by dozens of illustrations. • "100 Years of the World Series" (Barnes & Noble-Sterling, $19.95) by Eric Enders describes every fall classic, from 1903 to 2002, accompanied by 600 illustrations and 50 pages of box scores. Smaller illustrated books include "Glove Affairs" (Triumph, $19.95), Noah Liberman's guide to the tools of the fielder's trade; and "Something To Write Home About" (Crown, $25.95) by Seth Swirsky, a collection of letters written about the game by President Bush, Babe Ruth, Gaylord Perry and a college student whose name really is Elizabeth Wrigley-Field. • Baseball anthologies: "Game Time" (Harcourt, $25), new and classic essays by Roger Angell; "Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville" (Norton, $24.95) scientist Stephen Jay Gould's essays about his "lifelong passion for baseball"; "The Jerome Holtzman Baseball Reader" (Triumph, $19.95), 61 pieces by the Chicago sportswriter and official historian for Major League Baseball; and "Lardner on Baseball" (The Lyons Press, $24.95), with fiction and nonfiction about baseball's early days. • Other books: Vince Staten discusses baseball memories and trivia, including how often a stadium's turnstiles are oiled, in "Why Is the Foul Pole Fair? (Simon & Schuster, $19.95). And in "The Hidden Language of Baseball" (Walker, $22), Paul Dickson discusses baseball signs and sign-stealing. And signs — road signs, that is — are what you'll need to follow in "Roadside Baseball" (Sporting News, $16.95 paperback). Chris Epting's tour of baseball attractions takes readers to Lefty O'Doul Bridge in San Francisco; a statue of Gil Hodges in Petersburg, Ind.; and the Old Town, Maine, grave site of Louis Sockalexis, the first known American Indian major leaguer. — Ron Berthel
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