RSSIs Torre’s Tell-All a Grand Slam (and how many news outlets will use this same headline)?
Feb 03
Sports baseball, Yankees Comments Off
Question: What do you think of Joe Torre’s tell-all The Yankee Years
Answer: What do I think of Torre’s tell-all? I don’t think of Torre’s tell-all, really. I don’t have anything against the idea of a current manager putting together a book of experiences from a previous team, but isn’t this just the sports version of People magazine? Tom Verducci is a great writer (Torre’s “co-author,” a euphemism for “Joe talked about some stuff and Verducci wrote the thing”) and there will be fantastic research that he’s done to uncover really interesting quotations and comments from current and former players. But so what? What in the world could be in that book that is of any sports value or would tell us anything we didn’t know? What that guys did steroids? David Wells was a jackass? Shocker!
Here’s my guess? The biggest news in the book is that Torre isn’t the super duper nice, calm guy that he always played when managing the Yankees. There’s a great anecdote about two rival football coaches who screamed about each other before a big game and then called each other out in angry terms in interviews after the game. The feud was huge news. Of course, the coaches were then spotted by a reporter at the bar later that night, drinking beers together. When the sports writer looked at them, surprised, they both laughed. “It’s only a movie,” one of them is reported to have said.
That’s my analogy for what I figure will really come from this book -- all that we saw and heard, all the denials and feigned ignorance of Cool Joe Torre circa 1996-2008 -- it was all just a movie. And now he’s pissed and he’s not above exacting some revenge. Just because it’s reality TV doesn’t mean it isn’t still just TV. And so Torre’s pulling back some of the curtain for any gawkers who want a peek. Me, I don’t have a moral opposition to reading the juicy details or anything, I just have other important things I have to do.
…and better books to read like this one
