Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee
by Allen Barra
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Book Summary Information
Author: Allen BarraEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-03-30
ISBN: 0393062333
Number of pages: 480
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Book Reviews of Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee
Book Review: Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee - A Good Book, But More Of A History Than A Biography of Yogi Berra
Summary: 3 Stars
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee is a good book, and one of the more comprehensive sports histories I have read. Allen Barra's extensive research is evident in the amount of ground he covers and the copious references and footnotes included throughout. This text is almost like an academic thesis in its treatment of the history of the Yogi Berra Yankees.
My expectations were very high, being a huge baseball fan and admirer of Yogi Berra. The author does a great job of communicating how and why Yogi Berra is probably the most underrated superstar in the history of sports. Where I felt I was left wanting more from this book was in the actual biography of Yogi Berra as a man. For all those incredible events in baseball history, the author sets the stage with great statistics and trivia about all the key players. But for too many of those accounts, I am left wondering what Yogi was thinking or what was happening in his personal life during those moments.
The early chapters that covered Yogi's youth and development in the Italian "Hill" section of St. Louis are very good. They give the reader a sense of Yogi as a person that isn't often portrayed.
The sections on the Yankee dynasties of which Yogi Berra was a key component sometimes drift into box score copy. There are so many asides about the various teams from the 50s, 60s and 70s that it really seems like the author could have broken those out into a seperate book about the era. Yogi is portrayed like the other key players rather than the subject of this book. In fact, it takes till the final two chapters, 11 and 12, for Yogi to once again become the central character that he was in the early sections. I understand the need to place Yogi in the context of his accomplishments, but so many of those accounts do not even include mention of Yogi beyond his hitting stats.
RATING THE GREATEST CATCHERS
At the end of the book, there are some interesting appendices and a very lengthy acknowledgements section. The first appendix, "Was Yogi The Greatest," really could have been expanded and edited as a complete chapter of the book. There is a lot of statistical information that is used to compare Yogi against other similarly great catchers, primarily Johnny Bench, Roy Campanella, Mickey Cochrane and Bill Dickey. The author draws on a lot of sources to rank the players on offensive and defensive performance. We even have a year by year comparison of Yogi Berra and Johnny Bench using Total Baseball metrics, including the Total Player Ranking.
Where he delves into dangerous territory is in making the case that Yogi Berra improved the performance of the pitchers he caught for. He too easily discounts the other possible reasons Yogi's pitchers might have performed better. He also fails to support his thesis by not including an analysis of the pitchers that got to work with those other great catchers. Despite this, I think this section could have added a lot to the book had it been edited for clarity and expanded.
CONCLUSION
While I am happy to have read this book, after 400 pages I feel like I still have more questions than answers about who Yogi Berra really is as a person. Many of the accounts included of his life and accomplishments are well known. I was glad to read this book and I learned a lot from it. As for learning about Yogi Berra, I plan to seek out the many other books cited by the author.
This book is still worth reading, but is more of a history of his era than it is a biography of Yogi Berra.
Enjoy.
Summary of Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee
The gripping biography of the legendary Hall-of-Famer and one of the most quotable figures in American culture.
Yogi Berra is one of the most popular former athletes in American history, and the most quoted American since Abraham Lincoln. Part comedian, part feisty competitor, Berra is also the winningest player (fourteen pennants, ten World Series, three MVPs) in baseball history. In this revelatory biography, Allen Barra presents Yogi's remarkable life as never seen before, from his childhood in "Dago Hill," the Italian-American neighborhood in St. Louis, to his leading role on the 1949-53 Yankees, the only team to win five consecutive World Series, to the travails of the '64 pennant race, through his epic battles and final peace with George Steinbrenner. This biography, replete with nearly one hundred photos and countless "Yogi-isms," offers hilarious insights into many of baseball's greatest moments. From calling Don Larsen's perfect game to managing the 1973 "You Gotta Believe" New York Mets, Yogi's life and career are a virtual cutaway view of our national pastime in the twentieth century. 98 photographsUnited States Books
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