Perhaps this week while reading “A Legend in the Making: The New York Yankees in 1939” I ate some cranky sandwiches. I found various minor irritations in this book and few reasons to overlook them.

This book, released earlier this year, is the first from Richard Tofel, who is the assistant to the publisher at the Wall Street Journal and vice president of Dow Jones & Company. He is a graduate of Harvard College, the Harvard Law School and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. Those are impressive titles and degrees. Yet I wonder if Tofel would not have been more qualified to write a book about business or public policy.

That is not to insinuate that in order to write a great baseball book one has to have sniffed jocks all over the National and American leagues. David Halberstam has written two great baseball books on seasons long since past and he has spent his life writing foremost about more important affairs than those requiring a bat and ball. In fact, I’d rather read a baseball book from an insightful reporter and highly skilled author with no baseball beat writing experience than one from a writer who has no perspective outside of a baseball diamond.

Yet “A Legend in the Making” lacks a sense of baseball savvy. The nature of the project — writing about a single baseball team in a single year — lends itself to a great deal of play by play, which can be boring (there is a reason your baseball team’s beat writer is limited to 15 inches of game copy each morning and it’s not a lack of space). It is not an easy trick to make such reports interesting and Tofel does not have the necessary flair. He characterizes players and events as “remarkable” and the season as “unforgettable” (can you forget something you didn’t see?) without providing evidence. He also inserts clichéd verbs — clubbing, slamming — before nearly every offensive statistical total. The fact that the 1939 Yankees routed the American League (they played .700 baseball and no other team reach .590) and swept in the World Series makes a book about that team as drama-filled as a modern-day Yankees pursuit of a top-flight free agent. That’s not a strike against Tofel, but it does make a book-length story anticlimactic. The author then needs to provide a compelling reason to finish the book (by that I mean a more compelling reason than the fact the reader happens to be writing a review of it).

This book touches all of the bases in 1939, but it lacks depth. Tofel hits on biographical information for each of the Yankee regulars and several of the role players (manager Joe McCarthy was not a believer in using his bench) and several of those short tales are interesting. It’s likely nitpicking, but during various vignettes about those players, Tofel insists on using the words “now” and “today” to describe events that took place not “now,” “today” or even in 1939, and I found those words unnecessary and at times confusing to the tangential stories.

A book about 1939 or any other season is not only about that season. Events took place before and after that year that provide perspective to the story at hand. But Tofel bounces around so much within given chapters — though fortunately those chapters are chronologically labeled — that following along is harder than it needs to be.

Throughout the first three-fourths of the book, Tofel inserts paragraphs from non-baseball news items elsewhere in the world (apparently, little happened in the final two months of the baseball season). These written-about events include developments that are harbingers of World War II as well as meaningless historical markers, such as professional tennis championships and the national phenomenon that had college kids swallowing live goldfish in large numbers and keeping statistical records of those achievements. After reading “A Legend in the Making,” I can find neither rhyme nor reason why some events were included and others were not — or why any non-baseball, non-Yankees specific event was written in detail at all.

Ray Robinson, an author of several recommended baseball books, including “Iron Horse,” apparently served as a mentor of some kind to Tofel, as was noted in Tofel’s acknowledgments. Robinson often includes historical references in his books, though usually as relevant footnotes. Tofel simply broke up chapters with italicized paragraphs, to write about things such as Sigmund Freud’s death, for whatever reason. My issue is more of a criticism of the way the book was organized and focused rather than a knock on the inclusion of headlines from the world away from the ballpark.

Given that most readers who pick up “A Legend in the Making” are aware that the Yankees won the 1939 World Series, I presumed the author would devote considerable space to the notion that team is the greatest of all-time. Often, that tagline is ascribed to the 1939 team during debates on barstools and in between innings at the ballpark. Tofel gets around to asking the question — in the final chapter — and he devotes all of a page and a half of a response. Of course, such a discussion is always inconclusive, but a more worthwhile analysis than Tofel provided would have been welcome.

Tofel basically considers only two teams in the debate — the 1927 Yankees being the other — and relies on quotes from The Sporting News by Dan Daniel, the old New York baseball writer, and statements made by McCarthy, some of which that were uttered before his team had won the ‘39 Series. Tofel apparently never considers other teams — not the 1929 Philadelphia Athletics, not the 1998 Yankees, none of the other great clubs in Major League Baseball’s long history. Pooh-hoo.

One thing I did like about the book was Tofel’s accurate portrayal of the events surrounding Lou Gehrig’s rapidly declining health and Lou Gehrig Day at Yankee Stadium on July 5, 1939, during which the Iron Horse said he considered himself the “luckiest man on the face of the earth.” Tofel also provides interesting details about Yankee brass, including the opening chapter about the role of the “Colonel” Jacob Ruppert in building the New York franchise, which without question is the most successful in baseball and arguably all of professional sports.

If you want an overview of possibly the best team ever, this book offers a primer. If you are looking for a great read by a great storyteller about a great period in baseball, look elsewhere on the bookshelf. And if you are interested to read about 1939, no doubt a fascinating year in the life of baseball, I’d push another title on you — Talmage Boston’s “1939: Baseball’s Pivotal Year: From the Golden Age to the Modern Era,” which was published in 1994.