It was the perfect season. In 1998, baseball's fans thrilled to Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire's home run slugfest and the Yankees won more games in a season than any team in Major League history. Baseball boomed across the US but the biggest bang was in New York where millions celebrated at a victory motorcade along the Avenue of Heroes.

A firsthand, behind-the-scenes account of the turmoil that pervaded the New York Yankee franchise in the late 1970s, this book discusses George Steinbrenner's purchase and continual rebuilding of the team--alongside a colorful cast of players and businessmen. Not merely a look at the time spent in Yankee Stadium, this chronicle also describes the team's public arguments, practical jokes, drunken excess, self-aggrandizing publicity efforts, and the ups and downs that accompanied the Yankees and George Steinbrenner through the 1970s and beyond.

A firsthand, behind-the-scenes account of the turmoil that pervaded the New York Yankee franchise in the late 1970s, this book discusses George Steinbrenner's purchase and continual rebuilding of the team--alongside a colorful cast of players and businessmen. Not merely a look at the time spent in Yankee Stadium, this chronicle also describes the team's public arguments, practical jokes, drunken excess, self-aggrandizing publicity efforts, and the ups and downs that accompanied the Yankees and George Steinbrenner through the 1970s and beyond.

From the incipient sexual desire of young girls visiting Derek Jeter's online fansite to the boozy macho heart of the Yankee Nation in the now-endangered bleachers, this book offers a riveting and unconventional foray into the underworld of baseball. 16 photos.

During the Civil War, southerners produced a vast body of writing about their northern foes, painting a picture of a money-grubbing, puritanical, and infidel enemy. Damn Yankees! explores the proliferation of this rhetoric and demonstrates how the perpetual vilification of northerners became a weapon during the war, fostering hatred and resistance among the people of the Confederacy. Drawing from speeches, cartoons, editorials, letters, and diaries, Damn Yankees! examines common themes in southern excoriation of the enemy. In sharp contrast to the presumed southern ideals of chivalry and honor, Confederates claimed that Yankees were rootless vagabonds who placed profit ahead of fidelity to religious and social traditions. Pervasive criticism of northerners created a framework for understanding their behavior during the war. When the Confederacy prevailed on the field of battle, it confirmed the Yankees' reputed physical and moral weakness. When the Yankees achieved military success, reports of depravity against vanquished foes abounded, stiffening the resolve of Confederate soldiers and civilians alike to protect their homeland and the sanctity of their women from Union degeneracy. From award-winning Civil War historian George C. Rable, Damn Yankees! is the first comprehensive study of anti-Union speech and writing, the ways these words shaped perceptions of and events in the war, and the rhetoric's enduring legacy in the South after the conflict had ended.

The definitive history of the world's greatest baseball team—with an all new afterword by the author.

“Leavy has hit it out of the park…A lot more than a biography. It’s a consideration of how we create our heroes, and how this hero’s self perception distinguishes him from nearly every other great athlete in living memory… a remarkably rich portrait.” — Time The New York Times bestseller about the baseball legend and famously reclusive Dodgers’ pitcher Sandy Koufax, from award-winning former Washington Post sportswriter Jane Leavy. Sandy Koufax reveals, for the first time, what drove the three-time Cy Young award winner to the pinnacle of baseball and then—just as quickly—into self-imposed exile.

A tragic wartime incident, revisited forty years later. Damnyankee is the compelling story of a World War II U.S. Navy submarine patrol bomber which ditched off the west coast of Ireland in 1944 in a seething North Atlantic storm. Four decades later an American arrived in Clifden, County Galway, claiming to have been a crew member on that aircraft lost at sea, and striving to somehow reconstruct this tragedy. With the help of a sergeant in the Garda, an Irish schoolboy, and an aging Irish maiden lady, the former bow gunner was able to reconstruct the incident. In the process, he found a way to honor those who lost their lives in the storm-lashed sea that tragic night. The author's familiarity with Ireland and all things Irish adds additional perspective to the book. From a beginning in Norfolk, Virginia to a partial salvation at the tiny village of Ailleabreach along the Galway coast, this book has something for both WWII aviation buffs as well as those hopelessly in love with the West of Ireland.