When 19-year-old Marty Appel got a job as a mail clerk for the New York Yankees, assigned to spend the summer of '68 answering Mickey Mantle’s fan letters, he couldn't have known it was just the start of over a half-century entwined with the Bronx Bombers. As a PR director, television producer, writer and historian, Appel never missed an opportunity to get to know the main characters --- and supporting cast --- of Yankees lore. The result is an unparalleled trove of colorful stories featuring a seemingly unending parade of characters, including Mantle, Joe DiMaggio, Yogi Berra, Thurman Munson, Derek Jeter, George Steinbrenner and everyone in between.

For more than 50 years, Casey Stengel lived baseball, first as a player and then as a manager. He made his biggest mark on the game, revolutionizing the role of manager while winning an astounding 10 pennants and seven World Series Championships with the Yankees. Playing with and against a Who's Who of Cooperstown --- Babe Ruth, Christy Mathewson, Ty Cobb --- and forming indelible, and sometimes complicated, relationships with Yogi Berra, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle and Billy Martin, Stengel was, for an astonishing five decades, the undisputed, hilarious and beloved face of baseball. Marty Appel paints an intimate portrait of a private man who was larger than life and remains the embodiment of the national pastime.

Since their breakthrough championship season in 1923, the New York Yankees have been baseball’s most successful franchise. Marty Appel, the Yankees’ PR director during the 1970s, now illuminates the team in all its century-plus of glory: clever, maneuvering owners; rowdy, talented players; and, of course, 27 championships.