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Call the Yankees My Daddy: Reflections on Baseball, Race, and Family

About the Book

Call the Yankees My Daddy: Reflections on Baseball, Race, and Family

In CALL THE YANKEES MY DADDY, sportswriter Cecil Harris reminisces on his years spent covering baseball’s most storied team. In his position as the first full-time black beat reporter to cover the New York Yankees, Cecil Harris had an up-close perspective of the team that he’d followed as a fan ever since the 1960s. Raised in a family that rooted against both the Yankees and Red Sox because of both teams’ seeming reluctance to accept integration, Harris nevertheless carried a passion for pinstripes into his professional life. Here, we get priceless insight into the Yankees’ ascendancy in the late 1990s --- as well as their struggles to stave off a crumbling dynasty in the twenty-first century. Along the way, we meet Joe Torre, Don Zimmer, Derek Jeter, Hall of Fame legend Joe DiMaggio and many other top baseball personalities. Harris also offers keen insight into the role of race within baseball and the media, even showing how some American League stars sought to exploit Harris’s race for their own benefit.CALL THE YANKEES MY DADDY is an entertaining and highly readable narrative that takes us both onto the field and into the dugout and locker room with baseball’s biggest names, and in its biggest games.

Call the Yankees My Daddy: Reflections on Baseball, Race, and Family
by Cecil Harris

  • Publication Date: March 1, 2006
  • Genres: Nonfiction, Sports
  • Paperback: 256 pages
  • Publisher: The Lyons Press
  • ISBN-10: 1592289398
  • ISBN-13: 9781592289394