Lehman Brothers Book Reviews

Recently I took the time to read through the two books recently released about the fall of Lehman Brothers -- A Total Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers, by Lawrence McDonald, and The Murder of Lehman Brothers by Joseph Tibman. The author of the former was a vice president in the firm's distressed-debt department, which means he was at the bottom of the upper class of Lehman employees, and in the good days he was a guy making 7 figures a year. The author of the latter, Joseph Tibman, is unknown, as that name is simply a pen name for "Joe The Investment Banker Man" in an attempt to retain his anonymity. He was, however, an investment banker for Lehman Brothers over the several years prior to and leading up to the firm's collapse. Both stories give some decent insight and stories, clearly from insiders with each their own perspective on what happened over the final few years for the 150-year-old firm that went bankrupt to spark the U.S. market collapse late in 2008.

A Total Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers is the first book I read on this topic, obviously of special interest to me since I worked at Lehman for its final few years of existence myself and have my own set of experiences, preconceived notions and ideas about just what went wrong and when at the storied investment bank. I enjoyed this book, as it tells a good story from start to finish, albeit IMO focusing a bit too much up front on McDonald's former life before he got his start in investment banking as a convertible bond specialist. But McDonald does a good job of telling the story from the insider's perspective of Lehman's amassing of hundreds of billions of dollars of toxic real estate assets. The author does I think a very good job of giving a basic understanding of the derivative type of financial products which got the country's banks into this mess in the first place -- CMBS, RMBS, CDS, securitization of bonds in general, etc. -- and what Lehman Brothers' role was in the expansion of such financial instruments. McDonald worked in the fixed income division of Lehman, which is where all the shit hit the proverbial fan in 2007-2008, and as a result you really do get a very cool look from the inside from a guy who literally sat on Lehman's proprietary trading desk over Lehman's final few years, including several moments of foreshadowing where, according to the author, the directors in his area called the financial crisis a good couple of years before everything finally collapsed. The particularly good inside stuff in this book includes the stories behind some of the big trades made by Lehman with its own account both for and against subprime mortgage companies over the several months as the credit crunch first began in mid 2007 and into 2008, and especially the details of the secret meeting of 20 or so of Lehman's top managing directors in late Spring 2008 at a swank restaurant in the Upper East Side of Manhattan where it was decided that CEO and COO Dick Fuld and Joe Gregory were going to be overthrown.

One of the downsides to getting this particular insider's view, however, is I think the importance that McDonald seems to put on his group having seen the light all along with respect to the bets Lehman Brothers (and many other large banks) were making on real estate assets. To believe this author, his group and his group alone knew all along that Lehman was betting the firm on U.S. and eventually globally real estate prices continuing their inexorable march upwards, they regularly tried to scream it out to anyone who would listen, but unfortunately his smart leadership continually got pooh-poohed, silenced, or even pushed out of the firm if they did not simply back down from their calls for better risk management. In truth I am sure the reality is somewhere less clear than that, but for whatever reason this is the spin we get from reading A Colossal Failure of Common Sense, which to me smacks of self-servitude and untruth.

The other big downside to this particular book is that McDonald was laid off early in 2008 as the fixed income market deteriorated, and that is where the inside scoop and other details of the daily goings-on of the core of the firm really start to grow thin, because the author was no longer employed by Lehman Brothers and was no longer around in the thick of the battle day in and day out. And unfortunately for McDonald, mid-March -- just after he was laid off -- was the beginning of far and away the craziest, most volatile and ultimately most interesting part of the whole Lehman Brothers saga, including the collapse of Bear Stearns and then the several months of slow-motion downward sprial that eventually led to Lehman Brothers' bankruptcy and liquidation. To have all this great inside insight into what things were really like at the firm from 2005-2008, but then not have any personal insights regarding the period from March 2008 through to September when the firm filed its historic bankruptcy, causes this book ultimately to land far short of its potential if written by someone who stuck around the four walls of 745 7th Avenue all the way through to The End.

The Murder of Lehman Brothers does not suffer from this particular problem. Although the author intimates that he, too, lost his job in the wake of Lehman Brothers' bankruptcy declaration and subsequent sale of the U.S. investment banking business to the UK's Barclays Captial, he at least was present all through 2008, which is really where the rubber met the road on the fall of the company, and ultimately it's what everybody wants to read the most about. Joseph Tibman represents himself as a longtime Lehmanite, different from McDonald who only joined in 2005 while the credit bubble was still ramping up, and as such he includes some more details of the recent history of the firm, and in particular the rise to power of Dick Fuld as CEO of evnetually the nation's fourth largest investment bank. Tibman, like McDonald, does a good job of describing the process behind Lehman's amassing of billions of dollars of overinflated real estate assets. Tibman, being a more senior officer of the company than McDonald (who was just a vice president), also has probably better insights into the character of the leadership of the firm, the changes in the company's CFO, lead Risk Manager and COO along the way and what was really going on behind the scenes with each.

With all of the senior-level focus of The Murder of Lehman Brothers, though, Tibman ends up focusing more on that but less on telling a good story, which shows as his book almost reads more like a factual report whereas McDonald's attempt to chronicle the fall of Lehman reads more like a novel. And although Tibman does not attempt to make his own department look like the only people in the company who foresaw the firm's impending doom and tried to stop it, Tibman does in his own way spend a little too much time glorifying the investment banker lifestyle that he was ingrained with. Believe me, I've worked plenty of hard and potentially mind-numbing jobs in my day and I most definitely do not need a speech about how i-bankers are the best because they live in the moment with each deal, totally engrossing themselves, available 24-7, weekends, holidays, vacations, you name it. That sounds an awful lot like my current job as well as those I have held recently, and that bit gets a bit old for me just like McDonald's insistence on trumpeting up his own people and managers like they were the all-knowing ones trying to save the world.

In the end, there are a couple of themes conspicuously common to both books that I thought makes them worth mentioning here. First and foremost, the utter and complete hatred and disbelief towards Dick Fuld, and even more surprising, his #2 in command guy Joe Gregory. Each book absolutely shreds Fuld, depicting him as completely out of touch with what his firm was actually investing in and the positions it was taking, with Tibman repeatedly referring to Fuld's "castle" up on the 31st floor at the Lehman headquarters and how he continually withdrew from seeing anyone but his top lieutenants. Each book also saves special criticism for Joe Gregory, a guy I used to see all the time in my days at the firm, with both authors essentially blaming Gregory for the firm's insistence on building up its real estate portfolio, even in some cases without Fuld's active knowledge or blessing. This surprised me, as I can tell you that within the firm Gregory was not identified as being particularly responsible other than as someone who simply carried out the orders of his superior in Dick Fuld.

The other person who gets absolutely lambasted in both books is Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, the man behind the massive financial bailout package as well as the guy at the helm when Lehman Brothers ended up being allowed to fall. Basically, both authors prominently advance the favorite invective among former Lehman employees that Hank Paulson made the most disastrous financial decision in the history of the country in allowing Lehman Brothers to fail, and both authors go on to place the blame for the resulting crumbling in equity prices around the world squarely on the mantle of that decision being made. On this point I believe both authors totally miss the mark and like I said each falls victim in my view to the standard response of Lehman employees whose lives were thrown into total tumult as a result of the bankruptcy. But even with the benefit of hindsight, even having seen what happened to asset prices immediately following Lehman's failure, not only do I not think Hank Paulson "caused" the last and worst wave of the crisis by allowing Lehman to fall, but I tend to think of not bailing out Lehman as the one bright spot in what was otherwise a comically horrible run of decisions coming out of Treasury, the Fed and the rest of the Bush administration during late 2008. It's sad to me in a way that the authors of both of the books to come out detailing the fall of Lehman Brothers are unable to divorce themselves from the dogma that Lehman internally fed to its minions for months and months leading up to the firm's eventual downfall. But back at the time, basically nobody I know wanted the government (read that as "us taxpayers") to bail out Lehman Brothers, and the moral hazard argument simply has to stop somewhere lest we risk every financial institution knowing that they can risk whatever they want, act as recklessly as possible in pursuit of high returns, comfortable in the knowledge that the government will save them if things go sour. So no, I don't agree at all with the conclusion of both Lehman books that Paulson's greatest mistake was in allowing Lehman to fail. As I said at the time right here in the blog, I think Lehman should have been allowed to fail, after its CEO made very obvious gaffe after very obvious gaffe as his back got pushed closer and closer to the wall all through the spring and summer of 2008, and in fact I only wish that Hank Paulson had done a little more of "let failing" and a little less of "bailing out" than he did do throughout the financial crisis in 2008.

The last thing I would mention is that I also think both books did a sorry job of capturing some of the more generalized, less mortgage-specific mistakes that in my personal view as my own sort of insider clearly led to Lehman's downfall. For starters, Lehman Brothers, more than any other bank and frankly more than any other company I've ever heard of, insisted on clearly differentiating between the worth of its "front-office" people -- the revenue centers for the firm -- and the "back office" -- the cost centers. Sure, every large company has a lot of both, but at Lehman this differentiation was purposefully palpable -- almost like a modern-day caste system -- and not a day went by when you weren't impacted by it in some way. The firm's headquarters at 50th and 7th Ave in midtown was essentially reserved only for the revenue people. If you weren't directly generating revenue for the firm -- ie, if you weren't in the fixed income or equities divisions, a trader or a banker in some form -- then you could not even sit in the same building as the revenue guys. Instead of the posh Lehman-owned space in the HQ building, us back office folk were relegated to rented space on floors of other nearby buildings, sans the amenities and sans the cachet of working over at 745. The back office people had a nice holiday party ever year, but you should have seen the investment bankers' party which was always held on the same night but at a much more expensive (and fancy) location. The back office had a separate summer intern program from which I hired an intern in each of my three full years at the firm, but again the events, the expenditure, the opportunities were nothing compared to the business units' summer program, which was lavish to a fault. And the end result of all this palpable and deliberate focus on the non-revenue guys being second class citizens within Lehman had a dastardly effect on the firm in 2008, because among other things, the back office squarely included the Legal, Audit and Risk functions for the firm. When I see such a massive and clear failure of the firm to adequately protect itself in a period of flux in the marketplace, and yet the very functions like Legal, Audit and Risk being treated as lowlifes by the Brahman bankers and traders, more or less ignored for the most part company-wide, it becomes crystal clear that this was a major oversight on the part of Lehman's management that surely had a noticeable effect in the firm's last couple of years. Being a trader and a banker, the authors of these two Lehman books were both too hopelessly on the inside (and at the top) of this quasi-caste system to even see it for what it was, but the in my view the firm suffered immeasurably from this top-down belittling of the importance of the firm's back office functions to the long-term survival of the company.

The other factor which was totally ignored in each book but which I contend played a major role in the downfall of Lehman Brothers was the inexperience of the people in management positions at the firm, another thing I have also written about extensively here before. This was a bank where, for whatever reason, a ton of junior-type of people and less-skilled people received promotions and were, by the time the mid-2000s rolled along, occupying many positions of importance within the firm. I personally worked with multiple managers in the risk management function of the bank who were young -- as in, "never before seen a bear market" young, or "weren't even working in finance when the dot com bubble burst not that long ago" young. It was hard enough for any experienced risk manager to be able to decipher the mess of subprime and Alt-A mortgages that were packed into these complex mortgage backed securities that Lehman was amassing and selling in its last few years. To ask a young kid, someone who's never even lived through a time when the market's general bias is downwards, who's never lived through a real-life financial crisis of some kind, to be able to appreciate that risk, let alone to adequately hedge against it, is sheer folly. Similarly, not just some but most of the manager- level traders I used to work for at Lehman were young guys -- in their 30s, some even their 20s, and these were the guys being entrusted to run many areas of the firm's trading desks, to make decisions that impacted the firm's revenues and profits in a direct way during what proved to be a violent inflection point in the marketplace. Shit, even my own boss at Lehman was a 30-something, a guy with absolutely zero prior management experience, and boy did that ever show in how he ran our group. And this was not atypical at all at Lehman -- in retrospect, it was like a bunch of little kids trying to masquerade as if they were running the firm, doing all the "big people" jobs that they all could not believe they were able to land at such young, inexperienced times of their lives. And the result? Extreme pain.

In all, I did enjoy reading both A Total Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers, by Lawrence McDonald, and The Murder of Lehman Brothers by Joseph Tibman, but it's hard for me to know how much of that is translatable to those who were not also on the inside while the whole thing went down in 2008. The McDonald book overall is a better story -- more of a true novel, as I mentioned above -- while the Tibman book does a much better job of describing the details of what the final six months or so was like for people working inside Lehman during the firm's final slow-motion collapse to nothing. Each book contains some good discussion of what went wrong with the firm's bloated real estate portfolio, and each is full of the standard ex-Lehmanite rhetoric about our former CEO and what an egotistical, blinded buffoon he clearly was. But at the same time I think each author missed a golden opportunity to really tell the story of what took down this firm, probably because each of them was hopelessly on the inside of the systemic problems I was able to see as so prevalent so easily in my time at Lehman Brothers.

I would be interested in comments from anyone who might have read either or both books, or any other similar reading regarding last year's massive changes in the investment banking landscape.

Check-Raising the Devil

So I bit the bullet recently and purchased a copy of "Check-Raising the Devil", Mike Matusow's autobiography. I'm going to go out on a limb and say something I wouldn't normally say here, but to be perfectly honest I had stalled on picking up a copy of this book primarily because it was co-written by a couple of bloggers, and I figured if that's the case then it's probably not something I'm going to miss. And I guess I've read a few reviews of the book, and they seem ok but to be honest I don't recall reading a single review saying this book was really great or anything. I wasn't thinking about who the writers are specifically -- Mike Matusow himself, along with Amy Calistri and Tim Lavalli. Amy's is a blog I don't read often enough, but in a word it really kicks ass and is absolutely always a fantastic read, as Amy really tells a great story in everything she does. Yet I never put two and two together on the fact that Amy was involved in writing this book, and I'm still not sure it even would have mattered if I had as I just don't tend to give most bloggers' actual writing much respect (myself very much included).

Anyways, I was really out of books -- I wrote about this here maybe a month ago or so -- and eventually I bit the bullet and bought "Check-Raising the Devil" along with a stack of other books from trusty Amazon. I read a couple of the other things I had bought first (a couple of Vince Flynn novels so far (decent), and the latest Michael Lewis book on fatherhood (semi-decent)), and eventually I sat down to read about Matusow. I knew I wasn't going to love it but I was just hoping for a decent story about a guy I know is all kinds of fucked up, with hopefully good enough writing to keep me semi-interested for a while, and if I'm really lucky maybe some decent poker stories or tidbits along the way as well from one of the more successful big-tournament guys and cash guys out there today.

What I got was very unexpected. "Check-Raising the Devil" was to me a truly fascinating read. I give this book easily the best review I have seen of it anywhere else. I really liked it. I liked it so much that I even passed it on to my highly discerning brother in law, a claim that could be made only by a small handful of books ever. The authors do an excellent job of starting off with Matusow's roots, born in a trailer park in Vegas, working in the family business, gambling away all his earnings at video poker and slots in the casino across the street. They weave in Matusow's introduction to real live poker by another pro in the casino, and then to his beginnings trying to get a roll together and learn to play the game. Amy Calistri's influence in particular I think can be felt throughout the pages, as the story is told in a very easy-to-read way, almost like it is the "natural" way to tell Matusow's pretty incredible story, if that makes sense. It's a delicate balance and it's hard to describe, but it's there just like it is if you read Amy's blog with any regularity. She is good at telling a story.

Then the book took another surprising turn. Matusow recalls with amazing clarity the details of all of his big cash and tournament wins, and he gives a lot more of those details -- including the way he played particular hands, how he won and lost the biggest pots in the biggest tournaments of his life, everything. In particular is Matusow's details on the tournaments he has won, which are really interesting reads just for the poker in addition to the way the stories are told. It's kind of like reading "Positively Fifth Street" in that sense, if you enjoyed that book like I did. Matusow's and the author's descriptions of not just his winning of multiple WSOP bracelets, other 7-figure tournament wins and others, but the how of winning those tournaments, is really enjoyable for anyone who likes a good poker story with a little more detail about cards and specific hands than you would find in your random best-selling novel or James Bond movie.

Then of course there is the whole drug use and drug bust thing, which I have to admit is a friggin goldmine when it comes to writing a book like this. To your average guy on the street like me, I love reading the details of how a guy slips under the pallor of drug use and then eventually gets set up and busted for scoring some coke for a friend who was looking to buy. Throw in some Amy and Tim Lavalli with that kind of material, and you are once again left with a superbly interesting and well-told version of events. One of the things that I originally thought of as a criticism as I read the book was that it is pretty clear to me that Matusow isn't being totally honest with us in certain parts of this book, including telling 100% his side of the drug story, when I am quite sure the real truth was somewhere measurably worse than the way Mike spins the facts. But I'm not even sure that's a criticism anymore to tell the truth -- being able to see how human Mike is through this book, and how much to this day he is still deluding himself to some extent, it's all part of the whole experience of the book, and frankly if you read it through I think you will feel like me that it's actually perfectly a part of the Mike Matusow the book portrays. In any event, getting to read all about Matusow's drug use tournament poker tournaments, how it affected his game, and his drug regimen generally from back in the day and even today makes for a great read to someone like me and I bet to you out there as well.

Suffice it to say, "Check-Raising the Devil" has great material to work with in telling a truly interesting, enjoyable and nearly-all-true tale of a really interesting life, as told right from the horse's mouth itself. Amy Calistri and Tim Lavalli weave a great story that starts with what most of us would consider pretty humble-ass beginnings and details a rise through the big cash games and eventually to the top of the largest poker tournaments in the world. Like many quick rises to fame and fortune, Matusow falls off the cliff and deep into drug use, eventually hitting rock bottom and doing some pretty hard time in jail, which he also describes in very interesting detail for sure. Throughout all this is the theme of chemical imbalance in Mike's body and the need for drugs to keep him emotionally stable, which again flitters in and out of the text at just the right moments to keep the thread strong. What can I say, I really liked this book, and as most of you know by now I have generally pretty strict tastes on these things. "Check-Raising the Devil" gets an 8 out of 10 for me, and is easily worth picking up a copy of for anyone who likes a great story about one of the most truly interesting people in the poker world today.

Books

What am I reading these days?

A few months ago, I came to a very difficult realization: I have read basically all of the poker strategy books out there that I'm interested in reading. I've read Doyle, Sklansky, even modern guys like Lindgren and Negreanu on no-limit holdem. I've read all the Sklansky, Ed Miller, Jen Harman and others on limit holdem. I've read Ciaffone, Cloutier, Farha and others on Omaha. Todd Brunson and others on Stud. I've read the mtt-focused works, ranging from my boy Arnold Snyder to Michael Craig's Full Tilt tournament strategy guide, Gus Hansen, Rizen, PearlJammer et al and many, many others. I've read the sitngo-focused books -- mostly Colin Moshman but a few others as well. And I've pored through the cash game offerings from the old-time greats as well as Antonio Esfandiari, Barry Greenstein and countless others. When it comes to reading about poker methods, at this point in time I have basically read all that I care to read. For many years this was not the case, and I could always just hit up Amazon or Barnes & Noble and head to the poker books section, knowing there was always something more for me to read in this area. Now, the well has pretty much run dry at this point, I'm sure due to a combination of my having read so much as well as the dearth of new poker strategy books being published these days, and this leaves me scrambling to find something new and exciting to read about these days.

I went through a baseball book period for a while there earlier this year, and I read some really good stuff, much of it recommended by former baseball player and slumpbuster king Miami Don. And I enjoyed it. But then quickly I read all the baseball books I was interested in reading, and soon it was time to find something else. Then a few months ago, CK recommended a book called The Time Traveler's Wife for those of us big Lost fans out there who were looking at another 22 years until the next (and final) season of the best show of the millennium, and I picked it up from Amazon pretty quick. CK had indicated that it was a pretty decent book with a well-developed story and some interesting ideas for those interested in time travel. And I have to say, I agree with that assessment overall, having finished the book some time ago now.

Author Audrey Niffenegger does an interesting job of weaving what could be a very complex story together in a way that presents itself somewhat lightly to the reader, clueing us in right from the beginning to the fact that protagonist Henry (Eric Bana) randomly travels through time, without any control over the situation, and has been for much of his life. Unlike where Lost went astray in Season 5, Niffenegger takes great pains not to focus too much on the minutiae and possible paradoxes involved, instead taking as I mentioned what I view as a more light-handed approach to the whole time travel paradox situation. Like we saw near the end of Lost Season 5 with Miles, in Niffenegger's theory of time travel it is perfectly acceptable for the same person to travel back in time, run into himself, and even interact with himself in ways that could profoundly affect the past self's life going forward. Although time travel can always be a complicated subject, I thought Niffenegger did a great job of simply presenting things the way she wishes, and then just moving on rather than continuing to dwell on the paradoxes, the inconsistencies and the potential brain benders that can always result from any complex story that involves time travel.

The time travel aspect is the best part about The Time Traveler's Wife, and I think it makes for what is ultimately an interesting enough plot for someone who is in to Sci Fi (or Sy Fy as the case may be), time travel, or even just in to Lost and looking for some light reading to carry you over until next season begins. I will admit, however, that I didn't find much else in the book particularly moving. Ultimately, this is a book about a timeless love story, and I have to admit that most aspects of that angle were a bit wasted on my typical man, asshat frat crew self. I am sure there are loads of women out there who would long endlessly for the mystery and beauty of a love so pure and wonderful that it can span generations, multiple timelines, and a near-eternity of time spent together and apart. But I could have taken or left most of those aspects of the book. The reason I found it enjoyable really was Niffenegger's somewhat unique take on handling the whole time travel thing, and if you're interested in that stuff then you might enjoy this book despite the persistent love story themes that were hard to avoid throughout.

I had almost forgotten to finish this book review after starting it a couple of months ago, but then out of nowhere the other day I see this commercial on tv and, although the sound was down so I could not hear anything that was said on the commercial, from the pictures it looked to be describing the story of a guy who continually disappears randomly while running into the love of his life over the course of his and her lifetime. My interest perks up, and wouldn't you know it, it turns out they are coming out with a movie of this book sometime in August I believe. And while the female lead -- Rachel McAdams, who played Owen Wilson's love interest in Wedding Crashers among other roles -- is someone I like well enough, who has to turn up as the male lead in this film? None other than Eric Bana, who not only starred the worst Hulk movie humanly possible, but also managed to play the lead in Lucky You, easily the worst poker movie every filmable. So, even though I enjoyed this book and got to read it before the movie so as not to spoil my own enjoyment of the story, I will really be torn about going to see any flick starring the guy who is probably the worst actor of our time other than perhaps Nicholas Cage.

If you're really looking for something that hits on many of the same time travel themes as you saw this past season in Lost, and if you are a female type or a man in touch with his feminine side, then The Time Traveler's Wife is a pretty decent read. I give it a 6.5 or 7 out of 10 overall. But I can't recommend the movie with that clown in the lead role. And, I would also mention here again one of my all-time favorite books, Replay by Ken Grimwood, as probably the single best place I would recommend starting for someone who is more interested in more of a man's story about time travel, inspired by many of the same ideas raised in Lost Season 5.

So what else should I be reading out there? Anybody have any good suggestions?

Baseball Books

I have gotten several emails, blog comments and girly chats asking about what books I am reading now, and for the first time in a long time, that list is not dominated by poker books. I will admit that my standard work-commute book is still "Farha on Omaha", and I am taking my time getting through it as I've been reading some other things as well, but Sammy Farha's Omaha text is good enough. It presents the basic strategies of the most common forms of Omaha out there today, and Sammy throws in enough tidbits from his own personal experiences and stories that he has actually lived through that it stays pretty interesting. I wouldn't exactly call this book a detailed treatment of the finer points of Omaha, but for someone who already knows the basics of the game quite well, it's a decent read.

But the thing that is taking up most of my attention these days is not poker books at all, but rather books about sports, and in particular, about baseball. This all started fro girly chats some bloggers in the wake of Your World Champion Philadelphia Phillies nabbing their first World Series title since 1980 late last year, and that was when I first got the recommendation to read Michael Lewis's 2004 national bestseller "Moneyball", in addition to a few other books on America's Pasttime. So I actually went and ordered a bunch of baseball books from my favorite retail outlet (one of my favorite stocks, too), Amazon.com, and when they arrived they found their way to my top drawer and hadn't made much headway in getting out of there until just recently.

A couple of months ago, Tom Verducci's opus "The Yankee Years", co-written with former Yanks' manager Joe Torre, caused quite a stir in advance of its release when it was leaked that the book, among other things, revealed that Alex Rodriguez's Yankee teammates had called him "A-Fraud" since he arrived in New York a few years ago. That in turn caused the book to be written about and talked about all around the sports world, which led to Mike Francesca, easily my favorite New York sports radio host, to say on his radio show several weeks ago that the book was very well-written and all-around a good read. This happened to be one of the books I had ordered from Amazon, so long story short, I took it out and started reading. And you know what? I couldn't put it down.

And don't get me wrong, I am no kind of Yankees fan here. Not by a longshot. I am a Philly sports guy through and through as I have made painfully obvious and public here on the blog, and I feel no love for the Yankees at all. I see them as the Evil Empire of all of the sports world, I think they have made a mockery of the sport over the last decade or so, and really the only positive thing I can think to say about the Yankees is that at least they're not the Mets. So it's not like I've been yearning to read the memoirs of the skipper of the Yankees during their incredible championship run over the past decade-plus. Quite the opposite -- I did not expect to be particularly interested in the book, but I figured I would give it a try after hearing Francesca's recommendation of it, and I have to say, it was a really well done book. Verducci does the actual writing, with many passages clearly supplied directly from Torre's experiences and full of Torre quotes as well, and the combination provides what feels like an insider's view on what went down with the Yankees from 1995 to 2008, in more or less chronological order.

But what I found most interesting about "The Yankee Years" was not the pure Yankee anecdotes so much as the insight it provides into the way the team made many of its decisions related to the game, playoff strategies, and especially personnel decisions. As a total outsider like all of us, I have absolutely no clue who is making the player personnel decisions for a team like the Yankees, and more than that, how those decisions are being made remains an absolute mystery to me. Well, "The Yankee Years" gives some really interesting insight into all of that, starting from the interaction between George Steinbrenner, the Yankees' intractable owner, and team GM Brian Cashman, in planning who would be on the team year to year, discussing what holes the team needed to fill, and how best to fill those holes. Then throwing in the manager into the mix, I found it really fascinating to read about the interplay between Cashman and Torre, Cashman and Steinbrenner, and especially the direct relationship between Torre and Steinbrenner themselves. Verducci also does a great job integrating his chapter on A-Rod, a chapter on steroid use in baseball generally, and most of all, the notion that the Red Sox had somehow figured out an "inefficiency" in the game of baseball that enabled them to quickly staff their dugout with players who were undervalued in terms of salaries compared to their ability to contribute to the team's success. One of Verducci's central themes in "The Yankee Years" deals with just that, how the team easily surpassed the Red Sox in the early part of Torre's time with the team, and then what exactly happened after the year 2000 that caused the Red Sox to rise and the Yankees to simultaneously head in the other direction. All this talk about secular trends in the game of baseball and new innovations in the way a team could be built and managed really got my mind working, and for that I have to say that I really enjoyed "The Yankee Years" and would probably give it, overall, a B+ grade. It is worth reading in my view.

Moreover, as I mentioned, "The Yankee Years" really got me thinking. I don't think I waited five minutes after finishing that book before I immediately grabbed "Moneyball" out of that top drawer and dug right into it. Moneyball, it turns out for those of you who have not read it, is all about how Billy Beane and the Oakland A's in the 1990s managed to "beat the system" and find a way to field a team that could win 90 games, 100 games or even more in a season while maintaining one of the handful of smallest payrolls in the game. The book essentially takes many of the ideas I mentioned above that I loved about "The Yankee Years" -- how the owner and the GM interact, what the manager's role is, and how the selections are made about which players can best help the team -- and really makes that the central focus of the entire book. It details the new kinds of statistics that were considered important and even made gospel by the Oakland organization, from the GM all the way down to the farm system and even draft day decisions. In a nutshell, "Moneyball" really is the story of how the Oakland A's redefined what building a baseball team was all about, and in the end this movement led directly to the Red Sox's changes in the early 2000s that eventually won them their first World Series in fifty billion years in 2004. For anyone out there who considers themself a baseball fan and who has not read "Moneyball", I am almost through with it and so far it is looking at a solid B+ / A- mark as well.

The Yankee Years

Moneyball.

For anyone who's ever wondered how baseball decisions really get made, how teams decide who to draft, what team chemistry is really about, these books are for you.