Taking on the Yankees : winning and losing in the business of baseball, 1903-2003 / Henry D. Fetter.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Fetter, Henry D.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

New York Yankees (Baseball team)--History.

New York Yankees (Baseball team).

Baseball--Economic aspects--United States--History.

Baseball.

Baseball--United States--History.

Baseball--Economic aspects.

History.

United States.

Physical Description:

xi, 461 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 24 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York, N.Y. : W.W. Norton & Co., [2003]

Summary:

The New York Yankees are, without question, baseball's dominant team. Since capturing their first American League title in 1921, the Yankees have won 39 pennants and 26 World Series titles, a record unparalleled not only in baseball but also in all of professional sports. Reflecting on a century of Yankee history, Henry D. Fetter's Taking on the Yankees offers a unique perspective on the Bronx Bombers' success, examining their rise through the vantage point of their three greatest National League challengers: the New York Giants, the St. Louis Cardinals, and the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Against the colorful backdrop provided by these memorable rivalries, Taking on the Yankees sheds new light and challenges conventional wisdom on some of baseball's most remarkable events, commanding personalities, and enduring controversies: from the upstart Yanks' fortuitous purchase of Babe Ruth and their ensuing showdown against John McGraw's swaggering Giants to Branch Rickey's organizational revolution in St. Louis, which created the modern farm system; from the immortal Yankee-Dodgers rivalry, which ended in the heartbreaking demise of baseball in Brooklyn, to George Steinbrenner's recent revitalization of the Yankee dynasty in the age of free-agency and the resurrection of the Subway Series in the new millennium.

Based on extensive research in original sources, Taking on the Yankees focuses on the off-field circumstances -- the management strategies, economic forces, social changes, and political and legal pressures -- that played a decisive role in the Yankees' success on the diamond. The continuing contest for baseball supremacy is, in turn, placed in the context of the sport's own struggle to respond to a succession of social, economic, and legal challenges mounted by an ever-changing society.

Reconstructing big league baseball's difficult opening years, its awkward development in an expanding nation, and its eventual evolution into a major American business, Fetter explores the central role that the Yankee franchise and its top competitors played in shaping the future of the baseball enterprise. Along the way, he explores the personalities of the sport's most influential executives -- including Charles and Horace Stoneham of the Giants, Harry Frazee of the Red Sox, the Cardinal's Branch Rickey, the Dodgers' Walter O'Malley, and the Yankees' Jacob Ruppert and George Steinbrenner -- all of whom helped create the sport as we know it today.

The result is a riveting perspective on baseball's past century and an unconventional examination of the often-misunderstood relationship between business and sports.

Contents:

Going to "Goatville." The rise of the Yankees. The fall of the Giants

The residue of design? The problem. The opportunity. The ambiguous payoff

A rich and a despised man. The case against Brooklyn. Stadium games. From East to West

Damn Yankees, after all. A dynasty stumbles. Freeing the serfs. Playing under new rules.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 401-439) and index.

ISBN:

0393057194

OCLC:

51983227