Books in Brief
Taking on the Yankees: Winning and Losing in the Business of Baseball, 1903-2003 by Henry D. Fetter (W.W. Norton, 480 pp., $25.95). Hating the New York Yankees is as American as apple pie. Thus Henry Fetter’s book on how baseball teams succeed or fail uses a deceptive title to catch the reader’s attention: Taking on the Yankees. Fetter has actually written an interesting, if rambling, study of the way baseball organizations fashion winning teams. He focuses on the Giants, Cardinals, and Dodgers in their dealings with the Yankee challenge. This enables him to give a fascinating overview of baseball’s often bizarre organizational history.
Yankee greatness began with the single-minded determination of its first owner, Colonel Jacob Ruppert. The George Steinbrenner of his day, Ruppert wanted to win, and he wasn’t afraid to spend money to do so. Fetter notes that in the 1920s, the Yankees recorded a profit of $3.5 million and paid no dividends. Ruppert’s idea of a good game was simple: Yankees score eight runs in the first inning and then slowly pull away. There is no disputing the Yankee formula: Put together a good management team–general managers like Ed Barrow and George Weiss, and managers like Miller Huggins, Casey Stengel, and Joe Torre–give them players they need, and sit back to watch the pennants role in.
The Cardinals under Branch Rickey, baseball’s one true intellectual, tried a different approach, the farm system. Fetter argues that this didn’t really work and attributes the success of the Cardinals to Rickey’s instinctive baseball judgment, not his farm system. Still the farm system idea was co-opted by the Yankees in the 1940s as a way of providing a steady supply of talent such as Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford, and Mickey Mantle to the parent club.
The chapters on the Giants and the Dodgers are interesting but not really appropriate to Fetter’s argument. The Giants spent money unwisely, providing stockholders with dividends instead of reinvesting in the team, and thus fell behind the Yankees. The Dodgers first used Rickey’s farm system to build up their organization and then were the first team to tap into the African-American talent pool when Rickey signed Jackie Robinson. This enabled the Dodgers to dominate the National League for twenty years from the late 1940s until the early 1970s. Fetter rejects the revisionist view of Walter O’Malley and argues that O’Malley was, in fact, the villain, not the victim, of political wheeling and dealing in New York before he moved to Los Angeles.
Taking on the Yankees, despite some minor flaws, is insightful about the institutional development of baseball–a worthy addition to any library of good baseball books.
—John P. Rossi
Presidential Leadership: Rating the Best and the Worst in the White House, edited by James Taranto and Leonard Leo (Free Press, 304 pp., $26). Each of the essays in Presidential Leadership gives a concise, measured look at how our presidents shaped the executive branch, for good or ill. The book provides forgotten insights such as Roosevelt’s 1932 whistle-stop in Pittsburgh, in which he promised “that if elected he would slash federal expenditures 25 percent and balance the budget.” (He later denied he had ever made the speech.)
Unsurprisingly, readers will come away with renewed love for Washington and Lincoln. Yet Presidential Leadership also demands from us deeper respect for all the men who have held the title of chief executive. As William J. Bennett writes in his foreword, “Whatever is said of the worst of them, it must also be remembered that, at the very least, they submitted themselves–and their character–to public scrutiny and public service.”
—Nicole Topham
