Daily Archives: January 28, 2009

For Chyll Will and the whole neck-snappin’ Bronx Banter Crew:

Why is this man hot?

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I’ve read the Verducci-Torre book and have an article up at SI.com discussing, who else?  Alex Rodriguez:

Rodriguez takes up only a small portion of the narrative — the 22-page chapter devoted to him (“The Problem of Alex”) comes halfway through a book that is just shy of 500 pages. And while the tone of the chapter is often sharp, Verducci and Torre don’t simply rip Rodriguez. They admire that he was the hardest worker on the team, even if he was also a high-maintenance star. “Nobody works harder than Alex,” says Torre. “He’s a workaholic.”

Still, Rodriguez is held up as a symbol of the Yankees’ recent failure to win a World Series. He’s forever the un-Jeter, especially in the eyes of many Yankee fans.

“He may be the most underappreciated great baseball player in the history of the city,” says novelist Kevin Baker, who is currently writing a book about New York baseball. “Has any athlete ever kept as clean a nose in New York and gotten more flack? He hasn’t shot himself in a nightclub or turned over numerous cars like Babe Ruth or been accused of statutory rape like David Cone. [Jason] Giambi was forgiven for being a drug user. Rodriguez devotes himself to the game and the complaints never stop.”

I write the posts that make the Banter sing
I write the posts of news and links to things
I write the posts that make the hot stoves fry
I write the posts, I write the posts

(yes, I’m a bit delirious … I blame it on Torre and Verducci)

Anyway … here’s the news:

• The Times’ Jack Curry has some quotes from Torre on the initial reaction to the book:

“Knowing that my name is on it, I know I’m going to have to answer for it,” Torre said of the book’s contents.

Although Torre feels that betrayal is an inappropriate word to use to describe his feelings toward Cashman, there is no question that “The Yankee Years” leaves the impression that Torre was disappointed that Cashman was not a vocal supporter during the fateful “take-it-or-leave-it” contract meeting that Torre had with the Yankees after the 2007 postseason. …

… (But) Torre clearly felt Cashman could have done more. “There’s stuff in there where, from my angle, I looked at it one way and I’m sure, from his angle, he probably looked at it a different way,” Torre said in the telephone interview.

• Over at ESPN, Buster Olney takes Torre to task for the quagmire of authorship of the book:

… Those passages were based on Verducci’s reporting. They were written by Verducci. But it’s Torre’s book. And within the pages of this book with Torre’s name on it, some former colleagues are demeaned, and that was his choice. Verducci said in a radio interview on WFAN on Monday that all this is not really new, that everybody has known for years that Rodriguez has had difficulty assimilating with the Yankees’ veterans.

Here’s what’s new about it: The stories are in a book authored by Joe Torre. This is hardly a new concept. The fact that former first lady Nancy Reagan could be difficult was hardly a new concept, but when Ronald Reagan’s former chief of staff, Don Regan, published a book detailing that, well, it became a very big deal. The suggestion that the run-up to the Iraq war included misinformation was something posed by many reporters — but it became something very different when posited in a book by former White House spokesman Scott McClellan. The book is in Torre’s name. Says right there on the cover. By Joe Torre and Tom Verducci.

• The News has some second-hand A-Rod reactions to the book:

A-Rod also told people that nothing Torre could say would be more revealing of how he felt about his player than the act of batting him eighth in the lineup in Game 4 of the 2006 playoff series with the Tigers.

“Alex was really hurt by that,” one friend of A-Rod’s said Monday. “He believed that Torre did that to embarrass him and he knew then what Torre thought of him.

“So anything that comes out now wouldn’t compare to that. He’s just surprised that Torre would talk about these kinds of things because he always told the players the clubhouse and the bond with teammates was sacred, and not to be broken this way.”

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