Almost Yankees: The Summer of '81 and the Greatest Baseball Team You've Never Heard Of

by J. David Herman

Almost Yankees is a poignant and nostalgic narrative of the lives and travails of Minor League Baseball, focusing on the 1981 championship season of the New York Yankees’ Triple-A farm club, the Columbus Clippers. That year was especially notable in the annals of baseball history as the year Major League Baseball went on strike in midseason. When that happened, the Clippers were suddenly the best team in baseball and found themselves the focus of national media attention. Many of these Minor Leaguers sensed this was their last, best chance to make an impression and fulfill their dreams to one day reach the majors.

The Clippers’ raw recruits, prospects, and Minor League veterans responded to this opportunity by playing the greatest baseball of their lives on the greatest team most of them would ever belong to. Then the strike ended, leaving them to return to their ordinary aspirational lives and to be just as quickly forgotten.

Almost Yankees is the previously untold baseball story of a team and its players performing in the shadow of one of the sport’s most famous teams and infamous owners. Featuring interviews with more than thirty former players (including Steve Balboni, Dave Righetti, Buck Showalter, and Pat Tabler) and dozens of other baseball and media figures, this season’s narrative chronicles success, failure, resilience, and redemption as told by a special group of players with hopes and dreams of big-league glory. J. David Herman, who worshipped the team as an eleven-year-old, tracked down his old heroes to learn their stories—and to better understand his own. The season proved to be a launching pad for some, a final chance for others, and the end of the dream for many others.
 

335 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 1, 2019

About the author

Seattle resident J. David Herman is a first-time author and former newspaper sports writer. He traces his love for journalism and storytelling back to age 9, when he created his own “front pages” on binder paper to cover the top news stories of the day. Sports gripped Herman a couple of years later, when he latched onto his hometown Columbus (Ohio) Clippers as a first favorite team. His passions for sports and storytelling soon merged. He wasn’t much of an athlete himself and was never the first kid picked for anything, until one of his grade-school teachers divided his class in two for an essay-writing contest, and Herman was, for once, the first one of the board. It was one of several moments that pointed him toward a writing career. After graduating from Gonzaga University, he wrote for newspapers in Washington and Idaho before moving to the web with MSNBC.com, Olympics.com and MSN.com. He’s spent the past 17 years in various roles with Microsoft, including his current position as a managing editor for Microsoft News. He lives in Seattle’s Maple Leaf neighborhood with his wife, Karin, and their three children.

Reviews

[Patrick Barry · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fine baseball book about the 1981 Columbus Clippers, the top farm team of the New York Yankees. In the Summer of 1981 Major League Baseball teams went on strike. This left Columbus as, arguably, the best playing baseball team that summer. The story tracks the players on that teams past, present and future struggles to become major leaguers. Despite being some of the best players at their level, many will never be granted a legitimate opportunity to be major leaguers. Injuries derail some, but the owner of the team's frequent acquisition of older players block others from being auditioned. So they wait, often forever for a chance to prove themselves at the major league level and the money that could bring. Good story, good people, good book. A labor of love by the author.