It is not often that I think that I might buy a book about sports. Sure, I buy the odd tome about the Red Sox when I travel and have received welcome gifts about any number of sports like hockey and soccer. But this flap about former and highly successful Yankee Manager Joe Torre has me interested. WFAN has called it a man code violation and others are using stronger words about his strong words like these:

As for Sheffield, who accused Torre of being a racist after leaving the Yankees, Torre recounts a team meeting in 2005 when he accused Sheffield of loafing, and their subsequent meeting about it. Sheffield insisted he wasn't loafing, and Torre said if that was truly the case, then he apologized. "He seemed to believe me," Torre said, "but he was always a suspicious person." Torre wasn't so much critical of the oft-injured Pavano as revealing of the clubhouse feeling about him, saying, "The players all hated him. It was no secret."

The shocking thing about the book is, of course, that Torre presented himself as a class act. Yet he himself was treated like dirt at the end of his tenure in pin stripes. These things raise ethical issues in a context which allows for non-ideological considerations. Face facts: it is good to hate the Yankees. I hate Manchester United, the Montreal Canadians and the Dallas Cowboys, too. All were teams that won the championship plenty growing up and whose fans were insufferable. There was a sense their destiny was to win. How tedious. How like putting a bull's eye on one's back.How proper to be mocked. How proper it is to respect Patrick Roy for how he went out.

But are these things enough to do the dirty? Do they make it right about venting after the fact? Isn't it just clean fun to giggle over hearing A-Rod was known as A-Fraud?