A Book I Want to Read

There's an interesting interview today at Salon.com with author Allen Barra who has just published a biography of baseball great Yogi Berra. I remember reading Barra's columns in the Village Voice back in the 1980s, and always found his work to be both thoughtful and engaging. As he points out in this interview, although recognized as a star, Yogi was an even better player than many realized. His reputation often suffered as a result of the well-reported malapropisms that signaled him as something less than an intellectual (to put it mildly). But despite that wide public perception, Yogi was pretty much a success at everything and largely as a result of his own efforts, both mental and physical. What sounds particularly interesting about the book is the attention paid to Berra's salary battles with the Yankees during his heyday in the 1940s and 1950s. There's a common misperception that baseball only became a business with the advent of free agency and players agents in teh 1970s. Nothing could be further from the truth, it's just that teams retained so much clout in negotiations before that, that it was rare for that aspect of the game to be reported. Anyway, this looks like a good read, and some of you may want to check it out too.