Hartford Courant sportswriter Dom Amore reports that copies of “A Franchise on the Rise: the First Twenty Years of the New York Yankees,” are flying off the book shelves.
He will only have a few to sell at this free book talk this Thursday, July 26, at 6:30 p.m. at the Tolland Public Library, but Amore says if audience members bring the books, he will sign them. They can be purchased online at Barnes and Noble or Amazon.
The talk is part of the Tolland Public Library Foundation’s Eaton-Dimock-King Authors Series.
In its 115 years, the team has won a league-leading 27 world championships. Amore takes readers back in time to the era from 1903 to 1923, including the Yankees’ first ten years as the Highlanders, the move to Yankee Stadium and their first World Series in 1923.
Amore vividly recounts the snowy night that Honus Wagner was offered twenty crisp $1,000 bills to join the new franchise in New York; the story behind the holes punched in the outfield fence to facilitate the stealing of signs in 1909, and why the team thought it may have had the next big superstar in a college football player named George Halas.
Amore is a twenty-year member of the Baseball Writers Association of America who has been writing about sports for Connecticut newspapers since 1982. He has written for the Courant since 1988, covering the Yankees, Major League Baseball and baseball at all levels for much of that time. He has been named Connecticut Sportswriter of the Year four times by the National Sports Media Association and has won more than thirty state, local and national journalism awards.
The book includes a foreword by John Sterling, who has been the radio voice of the Yankees since 1989.
The talk is free, but registration is required. To register, call the library at 860-871-3620 or register online at tolland.org/library.