Joe McCarthy: Architect of the Yankee Dynasty (review)

Joe McCarthy managed in the Major Leagues for twenty-four seasons. His teams, the Cubs, Yankees, and Red Sox, won 2,125 games, putting him sixth on the all-time list (after the 2005 season), and his Yankees captured seven World Series, including four in a row. He was the first manager to win pennants in both leagues, and his winning percentage, .615, is still the best ever. He managed Hornsby, Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, and Williams. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1957 and died at ninety in 1978. This book is his first biography.

McCarthy was born a Catholic in Germantown, Pennsylvania, and owed his baseball career to a priest who steered him away from plumbing and toward Niagara College. He left school to give professional ball a chance but never played a game in the Majors. As a Minor Leaguer from 1907 through 1921, he was generally a weak hitter but a deft infielder who overcame a youthful tendency to commit errors at key times. Like many other players with only moderate talent, he studied the game inside and out, and when he got the chance to manage, quickly became a skilled teacher and a master of tactics and strategy.

McCarthy's break came from William Veeck, Sr., the newspaperman William Wrigley, Jr., had hired to be the Cubs' president. Veeck had begun his journalistic career in Louisville, and he still had many contacts there while McCarthy was successfully managing the Colonels. Veeck was not nearly as much a renegade as his son would prove to be, but he was willing to challenge the conventional wisdom that former Major League players made the best managers. He hired McCarthy after Chicago had gone through three managers in 1925 and finished last. McCarthy asserted himself immediately by running a tightly disciplined spring training, and he showed who was boss by urging Veeck to acquire Hack Wilson from the Giants and trade Grover Cleveland Alexander, a star but an alcoholic, to the Cardinals. McCarthy got the Cubs to the World Series in 1929, but when they fell back to second place in 1930 he was unceremoniously let go with four days left in the season.

Sensing this impending turn of events, Yankees team president Ed Barrow had made discrete inquiries about McCarthy's interest in coming to New York, and a deal was quickly done. McCarthy inherited a team that had played second fiddle to Connie Mack's Athletics, but he led the Yankees back to first place in 1932. After three straight second place finishes, during which McCarthy bristled at the nickname "Second Place Joe," New York won four consecutive pennants and four World Series, losing only three Series games during that streak. Despite what the Yankees had accomplished during the 1920s, this run defined their success as a dynasty.

Levy's account is nearly all narrative, not a day-by-day retelling of each year in McCarthy's life, but quite thorough, especially during the baseball seasons. This approach has its merits. By writing chronologically and giving nearly every season its own chapter, Levy allows the reader to understand what this manager did on a daily basis, and he shows how McCarthy's skills developed and then, as his career stretched on, how they eroded. In particular, Levy demonstrates that it was McCarthy who invented what might be called the "Yankee way," that combination of intense professionalism, discipline without rules, attention to detail, and businesslike commitment to winning, winning, and winning again. Levy's portrait of McCarthy suggests comparisons to present-day managers Joe Torre and Tony La Russa, who evince much the same attitude.

At the same time, if Levy had devoted more space to analysis, he might have explored in greater depth several significant issues. He does not, for example, spend any time on the economics that were a necessary condition underlying the Yankees' success. Nor does he fully explore how McCarthy changed—and not for the better...