“Pinstripe Empire: The New York Yankees From Before the Babe to After the Boss,” by Marty Appel; Bloomsbury (620 pages, $28)Marty Appel suffers from a public perception problem. As a longtime sports publicist, he has been grouped into a category of nonjournalistic authors who are acknowledged but only semi-respected.Authors tend to be snobs (I plead guilty), and either you’re a journalist or you’re not. That’s why when we piece together a list of today’s top sports biographers, it’s headlined by the likes of Howard Bryant of ESPN, Jane Leavy of The Washington Post, and Leigh Montville of Sports Illustrated.If Appel is mentioned — well, scratch that. He isn’t. No PR types allowed.This oversight, however, ends now. In “Pinstripe Empire: The New York Yankees From Before the Babe to After the Boss,” Appel has written an important, memorable and riveting history of the world’s most dominant sports franchise. The book is, as one would expect, voluminous (620 pages, 47 chapters), but reads like a gripping, action-packed novel, one era more fascinating than the next.Though he worked as the Yankees’ public relations director during much of the George Steinbrenner-Billy Martin-Reggie Jackson heyday (or, one might say, melee), Appel avoids the temptation to hyper-focus on the periods he knows best. Instead, “Pinstripe Empire” is an ode to the wide-ranging and long-lasting majesty of the Bronx Bombers.It begins, unconventionally, not with Babe Ruth’s (fabled) called shot, or Derek Jeter’s 3,000th hit, but with a man, Phil Schenck, whom the majority of Homo sapiens have never heard of. Back in 1903, Schenck was the head groundskeeper of a brand-new New York baseball team called the Highlanders. With the season fast approaching, according to Appel, Schenck looked across the landscape that would soon become Hilltop Park and wailed, “There is not a level spot on the whole property.”The true beauty of “Pinstripe Empire” doesn’t emerge with the big moments, but in the small, obscure slivers in time that most fans either never knew or simply forgot.It is the mark of a strong biographer, acknowledging that sometimes we’ve learned pretty much everything there is to know about an event. For Appel, “Pinstripe Empire” is a blow to public perception. He’s a journalist. An undisputed journalist.