Joe DiMaggio and Phil Rizzuto were “Big Dago” and “Little Dago,” respectively, in the Yankees clubhouse during the 1940s. Those nicknames weren’t divisive, but a way of bringing everybody in the clubhouse into the same fold. The same held for Holtzman and Epstein. And yes, it was lighthearted. Nowhere did anybody… Read more

And you didn’t even get to the part where you compare Trump to Charlie Finley. Read more

Wow, thanks, Billy — that’s some fantastic praise. (You’re right about the dynamic characters. This would have made for a great story even if it had been a last-place team.) Read more

The things we do for our parents. Thanks for supporting the home office. Read more

Not too sure how to answer that. Reggie knew how to turn it on when he wanted to, but if he treated a kid like that, imagine his response to many sportswriters. I’m not sure he had anger issues so much as general cluelessness (combined with a general lack of giving a shit) about how his actions actually came off to… Read more

Mondays were half-price family nights, where every ticket was half off. It was a wild promotion, accounting for about a third of the overall attendance in one-seventh of the dates. On one hand, it put people in seats. On the other hand, it gave fans incentive to stay home Tuesday through Sunday in favor of getting the… Read more

Reggie grew up in the largely Jewish community of Wyncotte, PA. He had longstanding familiarity with Jews. Holtzman was convinced he understood where they were coming from when it came to those armbands. (Epstein, on the other hand, felt that it was just another way for Reggie to hog the spotlight.) Read more

I’ll bet. The main thing that book lacks is perspective. It came out in 1973, so Bergman had no idea how great that team would eventually become. Read more

Finley insisted that he’d built the team from nothing and could do it again, but only with a cash infusion delivered from the sales of Joe Rudi, Rollie Fingers and Vida Blue. It made sense. It was the dawn of the free agent era, and there was no way that Finley — who resisted free agency from the outset — was going to… Read more

Hard to go wrong with Ball Four, although that’s more “auto” and less “biography.” Read more

The idea of the DH was banging around for nearly a century by the time Finley came around, but his was the loudest voice in the room in the leadup to the AL’s implementation of it. He was perpetually looking for ways to boost offense, and this was a perfect solution. It’s possible that it would have passed even… Read more

I’m not sure. The did have 40-year reunions for each of those championship teams, and have issued bobbleheads for the three Hall of Famers — Jackson, Hunter and Fingers. Read more

Thank you, Rickey, for weighing in. Today, you are the greatest of all time. Read more

I heard plenty of stories about pot smoking, but not so much about coke. Seems like a decent thing — I can only imagine the kinds of clubhouse confrontations that would have resulted had everybody been wired. Read more

All I know is that he loved the things. During his meeting in Chicago with Bowie Kuhn — Finley had just sold Joe Rudi and Rollie Fingers to the Red Sox, and Vida Blue to the Yankees, and was pleading his case for the commissioner not to overturn the deals — he kept ordering BRs for the table. Nobody could stand them… Read more

Every time? No. But he was known to do stuff like that. Dick Williams once instructed a coach to answer the dugout phone and, knowing it was Finley calling, “tell him I’m not here.” Read more

I’d say it’s No. 1. Read more

Bando was the opposite of crazy — he had a force of personality that helped hold things together in a volatile clubhouse. Even Reggie admitted that Sal was the one they all looked up to. Read more

Like I say in the book, Finley possessed an unvarnished conviction that everything in the world would be better if only Finley himself were in charge. Read more

By and large, Finley’s fellow owners couldn’t stand the guy. He was a perpetual motion machine, determined to force baseball to advance, and they resisted. Then, as now, baseball was behind the times (the A’s re-introduced facial hair in 1972 after a half-century ban, despite the Summer of Love being over for several… Read more