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Overview
Baseball fans love to second-guess managers' strategies and speculate about their styles of managing, and Leonard Koppett is no exception. Koppett brings 52 years as a working baseball writer to his understanding of these men in the dugout." "His analysis is based on personal interaction with all of the managers active since 1950 and their descriptions and judgments of the generation of men who preceded them. Every manager inherits his method from some influential manager he played for. Three seminal figures - John McGraw, Connie Mack, and Branch Rickey - form the trunk of a genealogical tree whose branches have eventually intertwined, but whose key characteristics remain identifiable nearly a century later in the style of current headliners like Joe Torre, Jim Leyland, Tony LaRussa, Dusty Baker, and Boddy Cox." "This highly acclaimed study, first published in 1993, has been updated to the year 2000 and now includes some recent winning managers and completes the careers of others.Veteran sportswriter Leonard Koppett takes a lively, thoughtful look at the most successful and influential baseball managers of the modern era. Filled with personal anecdotes from the author's long and distinguished career, this work traces the evolution of material sytle, through its practitioners, right up to the present day.
Synopsis
Baseball fans love to second-guess managers' strategies and speculate about their styles of managing, and Leonard Koppett is no exception. Koppett brings 52 years as a working baseball writer to his understanding of these men in the dugout." "His analysis is based on personal interaction with all of the managers active since 1950 and their descriptions and judgments of the generation of men who preceded them. Every manager inherits his method from some influential manager he played for. Three seminal figures - John McGraw, Connie Mack, and Branch Rickey - form the trunk of a genealogical tree whose branches have eventually intertwined, but whose key characteristics remain identifiable nearly a century later in the style of current headliners like Joe Torre, Jim Leyland, Tony LaRussa, Dusty Baker, and Boddy Cox." "This highly acclaimed study, first published in 1993, has been updated to the year 2000 and now includes some recent winning managers and completes the careers of others.
Publishers Weekly
The theory espoused by Koppett, a former New York Times sports columnist, is that all modern managers are descended from three seminal figures: John McGraw, who established the principle that the manager is the unquestioned boss of his team; Branch Rickey, who organized the teaching fundamentals; and Connie Mack, whose concentration on finding talented players enabled him to build two dynasties decades apart. Koppett's genealogy, for example, traces the influence of McGraw through Frankie Frisch and Leo Durocher to Bill Rigney. This otherwise splendid and original book overemphasizes New York managers, however. Among the 19 in-depth portraits, 11 are of men who led the Yankees, Giants, Dodgers or Mets. Photos not seen by PW. (Mar.)