Thank you McFarland for providing this book for review consideration. All opinions are my own.

Mr. Book just finished Yankee Stories Untold: An Insider’s Memoir from Ruth to Jeter, by Rich Marazzi.

The author was a former high school and college baseball umpire who wrote a rules column for Yankees Magazine in the arky 1980s and has been a rules columnist for Baseball Digest and was hired as the Yankees rules consultant in 2004. I can just imagine the challenges of those jobs. I have a copy of the 2024 Official Rules of Major League Baseball at all times next to my laptop at my desk at work and know that whenever I have to open that book, it’s going to be a challenge trying to summarize whatever is the newest controversy of the day.

This book is so filled with good behind the scenes stories, it’s hard to figure out what to include. And, the stories don’t just feature Yankees. For example, there is a really good story about Earl Weaver being ejected during the national anthem. There’s also a great story about Joe DiMaggio yelling at a Yankee executive for paying for his autograph. The Phil Rizzuto telephone bill story was a classic.

Just about all of the chapters are so enjoyable that is hard to pick a favorite. It’s almost the equivalent of figuring out which of the Yankees’ great World Series championship teams was the best.

I can answer one question that the book asks. The author pointed out that Lou Gehrig stole home, as part of a double steal, for the first SB of his career and said he was wondering whether anyone else did it. Bryce Harper had a straight steal of home, off Cole Hamels, for his first MLB steal very early in his career. I don’t know of a complete list, and who else has done it, but do know that Gehrig can’t be the only one.

My one criticism of this book was its lack of coverage of the 1977-78 Yankees and all of the characters involved in that era. But that did not detract from how much I enjoyed this book. It was very easy to give this an A+ and induct it into the Hall of Fame Goodreads requires grades on a 1-5 star system. In my personal conversion system, an A+ equates to 5 stars. (A or A+: 5 stars, B+: 4 stars, B: 3 stars, C: 2 stars, D or F: 1 star).

This review has been posted at Goodreads and my blog, Mr. Book’s Book Reviews

Mr. Book originally finished reading this on June 6, 2024.