A Franchise on the Rise

2018 marks 115 years since the inception of the New York Yankees--and what a 115-year period it's been! But how did the team that has since won a league-leading 27 world championships get started? In A Franchise on the Rise, veteran sportswriter Dom Amore takes readers back in time to the first twenty years of the team's existence, from 1903 to 1923, focusing on all the major players and events, including their first ten years as the Highlanders, their move to Yankee Stadium, and their subsequent first World Series in 1923. In doing so, Amore successfully finds the characters' own voices and thereby vividly reconstructs events of more than a century ago. He recounts the snowy night Honus Wagner was offered twenty crisp $1,000 bills to join the new franchise in New York; the story behind the holes punched in the outfield fence that facilitated the stealing of signs in 1909; and why the team thought it may have had the next big superstar in a college football end named George Halas. This is a tale about the business of baseball as it was done at the time and, in many ways, as it still must be done. There was no secret to building a winning organization. It took money and luck, but it also took a group of people working as a team, each allowed to do his job and each doing it superbly.

Dom Amore is a twenty-year member of the Baseball Writers Association of America who has been writing about sports for Connecticut newspapers since 1982 and for the Hartford Courant since 1988, covering the Yankees, MLB, and baseball at all levels for much of that time. He has been named the state's Sportswriter of the Year four times by the National Sports Media Association, and has won more than thirty state, local, and national journalism awards.
John Sterling has been the radio voice of the New York Yankees since 1989.

“In A Franchise on the Rise, baseball historian Dom Amore has proven equal to the challenge of turning the least known, least successful era of the New York Yankees into a compelling and fascinating read. Painstakingly researched, Yankee fans and baseball historians alike will applaud Amore's detailed, well-crafted treatment of the long-ignored pre-Babe Ruth Yankees.” - Bill Madden, 2010 Baseball Hall of Fame J.G. Taylor Spink Award winner

“Few people know and appreciate the complete history of the Yankees like Dom Amore. That’s what makes him the perfect person to bring to life what is essentially the superhero origin story of baseball’s most celebrated franchise. This is like learning about Krypton rather than Superman. We all know about Ruth & Gehrig, Mantle & Maris, Billy & George, Jeter & Mariano. Now we get the stories we don’t know by heart. You can’t call yourself a true Yankees fan until you know the whole story, the one Dom Amore tells in vivid detail.” - Sweeny Murti, WFAN

“For those who believe Yankees history began the day Babe Ruth reported for work in the spring of 1920, Dom Amore has written an essential primer on their long, occasionally difficult, and always colorful journey from the dregs of the American League to the throne of American sports. No other writer could have told this story as it needed to be told, and whether you are a fan of the Yankees or just of splendid storytelling this is a welcome addition to your bookshelf.” -Mike Vaccaro, Sports columnist, New York Post; Author, 1941: The Greatest Year in Sports

"What the early Yankees lacked in pennants they made up for with great turn-of-the-century characters. What a rogues gallery were they. Dom Amore mines this era beautifully." - Marty Appel, author of Pinstripe Empire, Casey Stengel, and Munson

"The Yankees are the most successful organization in baseball history. Dom Amore does a wonderful job of taking us back to the beginning of that journey. A thorough and entertaining read for fans of baseball history." - Jack Curry, YES Network analyst