Lou Piniella is a baseball “lifer,” one of those guys who has enjoyed a career in the national pastime for decades. He began as a minor leaguer after a promising amateur career, then played for 18 years, primarily for the New York Yankees, before changing over from labor to management. He was recognized for his skills both as a player (Rookie of the Year Award in 1969) and as a three-time Manager of the Year.

LOU: Fifty Years of Kicking Dirt, Playing Hard, and Winning Big in the Sweet Spot of Baseball is the second book about Piniella in less than a decade (SWEET LOU: Lou Piniella: A Life in Baseball was published by Triumph Books in 2009). Written with the assistance of the erstwhile New York Daily News sports columnist Bill Madden, LOU is a sweet story, but there’s really not much there there. Not to take anything away from Piniella, but aside from a few examples that prove his reputation as a “red-ass” (someone with a short fuse) was well-deserved, there isn’t much to say.

"LOU is a throwback to a kinder, gentler baseball memoir, which is somewhat striking given [Piniella's] reputation as a world class red-ass."

That may sound terrible about someone who devoted so much of his life to the game, but in today’s era of tell-all memoirs, Piniella is a downright teddy bear. He does not talk out of school about his teammates and bosses, even though he worked with some of the legendary characters in the game such as Reggie Jackson, Alex Rodriguez, Ken Griffey Jr. and Billy Martin, as well as a couple of team owners known for their Machiavellian tendencies: the Yankees’ George Steinbrenner, with his penchant for hiring and firing managers at the drop of a hat, and Marge Schott of the Cincinnati Reds, who loved to allow her St. Bernards to romp (and do their business) on the home field and once expressed an admiration for Hitler. Compare Piniella’s narrative with that of PAPI: My Story, by David Ortiz with Michael Holley, which has been getting a bit of buzz because of its incendiary comments about some managers and fellow players.

Piniella, who won a World Championship for the Reds in his first year as their skipper in 1990, also managed the Seattle Mariners (1993-2002); Tampa Bay Devil Rays, as they were then called (2003-2005); and Chicago Cubs (2007 to the three-quarter mark of the 2010 season). His 1,835 wins as a manager put him in the top 15 all-time, all but one of whom, he points out in an appendix, have been inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. (Is LOU a subtle campaign for consideration?) He is also among the leaders when it comes to being ejected from games with 63, a nod to that fiery temper, although that’s almost 100 fewer than Bobby Cox, who sits in the number one spot in that dubious category with 161.

One of the writing decisions that struck me as particularly noteworthy is the way Piniella writes about his two legendary bosses: he refers to “Mr. Steinbrenner,” yet Schott is always “Marge.” I wonder why that is. To be fair, however, Piniella refers to everyone he writes about (other than Steinbrenner) by their first names as well.

LOU is a throwback to a kinder, gentler baseball memoir, which is somewhat striking given his reputation as a world class red-ass.