Skip to footer

8 new baseball books to carry you through spring training

Check out these recent books about America's pastime.

2. ‘The Yankee Way: Playing, Coaching, and My Life in Baseball,’ by Willie Randolph

  • By Ross Atkin

First and foremost, Willie Randolph is a Yankee, having spent most of his 18-year playing career in the Bronx, including on two World Series championship teams. Those years are at the heart of this memoir, but he also spent several years managing the Mets, which gives him a interesting perspective on the big-league rivalry in the Big Apple.

Here's an excerpt from "The Yankee Way": 

“Call it part of what some think of as Yankees’ arrogance, or just simply the fact that we played in different leagues and I played at a time when there was no inter-league play, but in a lot of people’s minds the Mets were a kind of distant moon around the Yankee planet.

“Personally, I’ve never agreed with that. Despite the intense interest the Yankees generate, New York is a National League town historically, and there has been interest in the so-called Senior Circuit since before the Yankees existed. The New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers were both NL teams. I don’t know if it’s the history, the fact that there’s no designated hitter in the NL, or what, but the Mets buzz is different than the Yankees. When they are winning, as they were in 2000, it’s not like when the Yankees are winning. Maybe Yankee fans are so accustomed to success that they don’t get as hyped up about the regular season as the Mets fans do. Maybe the Mets’ success, being a rarer commodity, is more valuable.”

2 of 8
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.