Fritz Peterson (1942–2024)

Book 43: [When the Yankees Were On the Fritz: Revisiting the Horace Clarke Years] by Fritz Peterson



Fritz Peterson was a very good starting pitcher for the New York Yankees during the between-dynasty period of 1965 - 1974. Peterson and Mel Stottlemyre formed a very potent pitching tandem for several years, but unfortunately, other than Stottemyre's experiences in the World Series in his rookie year of 1964, neither ever pitched in a post-season game. This book is Peterson's memoir of those seasons, and his attempt to explain why those Yankees teams were so mediocre during that span despite their normally above average-to-excellent pitching staffs. Horace Clarke was the second baseman for all those seasons, and Peterson uses him to typify the mediocre quality of the position players that dotted the team's lineup. Peterson calls Clarke a good person and a hard worker. He was a mediocre hitter at best, and Peterson claims that Clarke was unwilling to complete doubleplays when there was a runner bearing down on him. He wouldn't "take one for the team," as Peterson puts it.

That period of Yankee history actually corresponds with my most passionate devotion to the team as a young fame, so I was very much looking forward to reading Peterson's memoir. Sadly, the book suffers from several flaws. One is that Peterson was an inveterate prankster and practical joker, and he delights in this book in relating an endless stream of such highjinks. I'm not really a fan of that sort of humor, so these anecdotes eventually made me impatient. Also, Peterson insists on giving thumbnail sketches of just about every player who was his teammate, for no matter how brief a time. In part these serve to make Peterson's point that the Yankees were contenting themselves over those years with bringing in over-the-hill veterans, or trading for "can't miss" young players who fizzled, as illustrations of why the Yankees could never win. But mostly, it seems, each such sketch provides an opportunity to describe the nicknames he gave each player and the pranks he pulled on them.

Finally, this is a self-published memoir, and the editing is simply atrocious. The reader stumbles over everything from egregious grammar and syntax errors, to anecdotes clearly missing entire sentences, to repetition, to the point of whole paragraphs sometimes being recreated in their entirety in multiple chapters. As a matter of fact, I believe the book is created on a "print-on-demand" basis, and I began to suspect that someone had printed out the wrong version of the file for my order. For example, there are frequent references to photographs that do not actually appear.

When Peterson actually gets down to talking real baseball, reminiscing about particular games and pennant races, the book is, indeed, as interesting as I was hoping it would be. Sadly, that doesn't happen often enough.

Peterson has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease, so maybe the pre-diagnosis onset of that horrible affliction affected the creation of this book. Illness or not, though, I wish Peterson had chosen to solicit the help of an editor. Anyway, Fritz is, was and always will be one of my very favorite ballplayers.… (mere)