Pantheon in Pinstripes

FRANK TEPEDINO. You don't remember him? Aw c'mon! Tommy Tresh, hell, he even made Rookie of the Year. No? Duke Carmel, the next DiMaggio, or Bobby Murcer, the next Mantle? Horace "Hoss" Clarke, keystone man fielding like a keystone--ricochet off the chest and take it from there--him neither? But you remember Ralph Houk, kicking the dirt; it sticks in your mind, an emblem of an era of frustration.

Tenth place in 1966. My God--the cellar? The Yankees? Eleven years without a pennant. Turn off Phil "Scooter" Rizzuto or Bill White or Bob Gamere (yes, Bob Gamere) in disgust and open the Baseball Encyclopedia, wallow in history, thrill to past glories. Pull out the Strat-O-Matic Baseball game, play the Old Timers teams: '27 Yankees, or '41 Yankees, or '50 Yankees, or '61 Yankees--dice-rolled greatness. "Babe Ruth comes to the plate, the Bambino, with sixty-count 'em-sixty circuit clouts this year, Lou Gehrig on deck. The Yanks winning this ballgame 12-1, winning, winning..."

"The history of the New York Yankees is virtually the history of baseball," New York Times columnist Dave Anderson writes in introducing this shameless horn-blower of a book. After those 11 years, you feel like blowing your horn; bask in the hubris, regreet old friends. Watch Babe Ruth's astonishing 60 home runs in 1927, and Roger "Bwana" Maris's 61 in '61; follow the Yankee Clipper through his 56 game hitting streak; trace a young Mickey Mantle's blasts till they go out of sight while Manager Casey Stengel, at your elbow, credits the incredible distance of the shot to the "stratmosphere" in Arizona.

And listen to the stories, about Ruth earing an 18-egg omlet, and the time he bellied up to Warren Harding before a game with the Senators and said "Hot as hell, ain't it, Prez?" Or how about the time Don "Perfect Game" Larsen totalled his car during spring training and Casey Stengel, when asked what Larsen was doing out at five in the morning, replied, "He went out to mail a letter." Or the time in 1977 when the Yanks almost traded Ron Guidry to the White Sox for once-and-future mediocrity Bucky Dent. Or the moron reporter who asked Maris whether he'd rather break Ruth's record or hit .300.

There's a marvelous photograph here, incidentally, of Maris returning to the Stadium on Old Timers' Day after a decade of bitterness, still wearing the aircraft-carrier haircut, arms spread wide to the applause. It stands out among the over 100 pictures, including some fine old shots of Ruth and Gehrig, which give this book the quality of a family picture album. The appendix lists the all-time Yankee statistical leaders and provides a game-by-game abstract of DiMaggio's streak and Maris's miracle year. And there's smooth writing throughout, particularly in Anderson's chapter on the DiMaggio years.

Murray Chass's chapter on the current champions, however, is hugely disappointing. Chass covers the Yankees for the New York Times, and covers them well, with style and accuracy. Here he gives us over 60 pages with almost nothing about baseball but plenty about theh Steinbrenner-Martin-Jackson love triangle. Admittedly, it's fun to read some of Reggie "Reggae" Jackson's egotistical yammerings:

"I'm just a black man to them who doesn't know how to be subservient. I'm a big black man with an IQ of 160 making $700,000 a year, and they treat me like dirt."

Or:

"The magnitude of me, the magnitude of the instance, the magnitude of New York...It's uncomfortable being me, it's uncomfortable being recognized instantly, it's uncomfortable being considered something I'm not, an idol or a monster, something hated or loved."

Yet focusing your coverage on this sort of thing only brings the National Pastime closer to professional wrestling.

BASEBALL INTRINSICALLY rejects the cult of personality, the People magazine approach to life. Sure, ballplayers have personalities; but they develop personalities on the field as well--DiMaggio's kingly elegance, Ryne Duren's fastball-to-the-loge weirdness. Thurman Munson's combative surliness--and, in the end, these personalities are more engaging. For the most part, you get these personalities in The Yankees, personalities on grass and clay, not carpeting. Your team, maybe, Remember Ross Moschito?