“Pinstripe Empire: The New York Yankees From Before the Babe to After the Boss” by Marty Appel (Bloomsbury, 620 pgs., $28)

Marty Appel suffers from a public perception problem.

As a longtime sports publicist, he has been grouped into a category of non-journalistic authors who are acknowledged but only semi-respected. It’s not all that different from the author bio on a book jacket that reads “So-and-so has appeared on numerous talk shows, blogs regularly about pudding, enjoys fishing and jogging and lives in Montana with his wife; his dog, Norma; his two cats, Hal and Sal; and a guinea pig, Lex Luthor.”

Uh, no thank you.

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 Howard Bryant (ESPN), Jane Leavy (The Washington Post), Leigh Montville (Sports Illustrated), Jonathan Eig (The Wall Street Journal), Mark Kriegel (Fox Sports) and Laura Hillenbrand (American Heritage).

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.”

Behind Wee Willie Keeler, a 12-year veteran who made a whopping $10,000, the Highlanders went 72-62, finishing fourth in the American League and providing fans with what Appel calls, “just not a very exciting ball club.”

And yet, via Appel’s craftsmanship, they are exciting. There were oddball trades (the franchise’s first-ever deal brought Norm “The Tabasco Kid” Elberfeld from Detroit) and funky nicknames (William “Wid” Conroy, anyone?) and the cliched-yet-genuine ideal of a bunch of hard-charging young men embarking on the adventure of a big league season.

In fact, 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. Though the intricacies of Jackson’s three-homer game against the Los Angeles Dodgers in the 1977 World Series are, indeed, covered, Appel wisely reviews the achievement in a couple of paragraphs. 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 Yankees fans, “Pinstripe Empire” is a wonderful gift.

For Appel, it’s a blow to public perception.

He’s a journalist. An undisputed journalist.