Caruso Barbara - Damn Yankees

T WENTY -F OUR M AJOR L EAGUE
W RITERS ON THE W ORLDS
M OST L OVED (AND H ATED) T EAM

Edited by ROB FLEDER

For Marilyn, of course

ROY BLOUNT JR.

SALLY JENKINS

BRUCE McCALL

PETE DEXTER

CHARLES P. PIERCE

MICHAEL PATERNITI

NATHANIEL RICH

STEVE WULF

J. R. MOEHRINGER

JAMES SUROWIECKI

LEIGH MONTVILLE

FRANK DEFORD

WILL LEITCH

JANE LEAVY

DANIEL OKRENT

RICHARD HOFFER

RICK TELANDER

COLUM McCANN

WILLIAM NACK

BILL JAMES

DAN BARRY

ROGER DIRECTOR

TOM VERDUCCI

STEVE RUSHIN

E veryone has an opinion about the Yankees. More than an opinion in most cases, but an opinion at the very least. We are not talking here about the never-ending bar-stool chatter that sustains baseball fans, the daily sifting of heroes and bums, but the idea of the Yankees. This is a hot-button topic, though you can never be sure, when you press the button, what will go off.

I was reminded of this when I started to call prospective contributors for this book. In the matter of the Yankees, there is no neutral ground, no Switzerland. Extreme, even fanatical views are the norm. These views are not necessarily rooted in sports, because the Yankees, while certainly a great sports story, are also an institution, a myth, a symbol. And what they symbolize is everything good and strong and true about baseball and America and the human race in general. Either that, or pure evil, the bad guys, the black hats. Those predisposed to the latter view look forand findconfirmation everywhere.

To wit: in September 2010, the front page of the New York Times brought news of an important cultural trend. It seems that criminals, particularly those who inflict or threaten bodily harm, turn up more often than one might expect wearing Yankee gear. At arraignments, in mug shots, on surveillance videos, in victims descriptions, the classic interlocking NY logo is a fixture. A curious phenomenon has emerged at the intersection of fashion, sports and crime, the Times reportedand Yankeephobes will immediately recognize this intersection as the teams permanent home addressdozens of men and women who have robbed, beaten, stabbed, and shot at their fellow New Yorkers have done so while wearing Yankee caps or clothing. When it comes time to pick headwear for a felony, only ski masks and silk stockings come close. (In the New York area, Yankee-clad criminals outnumber those showing Mets colors by a factor of roughly ten to one.)

This trend started in New York, but soon spread. Before you knew it, a man in suburban Chicago had stuck up a Chase bank wearing a Yankee cap; and a couple thousand miles farther west, in Seattle, a young man in a similar cap assaulted an eighty-one-year-old woman in her home. Many months later, when Muammar Gaddafi was finally killed, one of the insurgents who claimed credit for shooting the Libyan dictator in the head appeared in a widely circulated photograph brandishing Gaddafis pistol and styling a flat-brimmed, slightly tilted Yankee cap.

Truth is, none of this came as a surprise to me. By the time the Times reported the correlation between crime and the Yankees, I had already talked with quite a few writers about the team. Naturally, there were those who believe the Yankees are exemplars of grace and the epitome of wealth and powerbut, you know, in a good way. But what I heard with striking frequency was that they are and forever shall be the devils spawn. Of course violent criminals wear Yankee caps. What better way to cover their horns?

Are we getting a little hysterical? Maybe. But consider what David Rakoff, the comic writer whose lacerating wit is often turned on himself, had to say in an e-mail rant about the moral fabric of baseball and of the Yankees in particular, by way of declining an invitation to rant at greater length for this collection:

I hate baseball because of the lachrymose false moral component of it all, because it wraps itself in the flag in precisely the way the Republicans do and takes credit for the opposite of what it really is. You know, the Mama Grizzly whose daughter gets knocked up and who quits her job but gets points as a sticktoitive protectress. Baseballand by baseball I mean its codifying straight-guy interpreters, its bloated Docker-clad commentariattraffics in that same false nostalgia, fancying itself some sublime iteration of American values, exceptionalism, and purity when, in fact, its just a deeply corporate sham of over-funded competition

Rakoff went on to note that the team he loathes most of all iswho else?the Yankees, the apotheosis of Eminent Domain and rapacious capitalism. You dont have to be from Boston to hate the Yankees. Rakoff, though he lives in New York, was born in Canada. The passions stirred by the Yankees are international, if not quite universal.

For all that, I believe that Yankee fans are much like other fans. I speak here from personal experience. Our devotion often begins, like that of fans everywhere, as an accident of geography. We are not evil because we formed an attachment to a particular baseball team (or, as some would suggest, formed that attachment to this particular team because we are evil). I grew up just north of New York City, not far beyond the Bronx, with the voices of Mel Allen and Red Barber in my ear and the Yankees in my heart; if my parents had lived fifty miles to the north, it wouldve been the Red Sox. It never felt like a choice. I was and always will be a Yankee fan. I was born that way.

Was I warped by my attachment to such a team? Its possible. After all, my god was Mickey Mantle, a carousing drunk with ungodly talent. And even as a little kid I could tell that the Yankees won far more often than was really fair. So it might be true that a kid growing up in the thrall of a supremely successful team can develop a skewed perspective on the world. Its not that we expect to win at all times and all things, but experience has taught us that its at least worth a try.

And while I am not perverse enough to suggest that it was a handicap to grow up devoted to a juggernautsome would say a bullying behemothI have noticed how often over the years Ive felt compelled, after admitting my allegiance to the Yankees, to sheepishly apologize for it. I have been apologizing for the Yankees all my life. And yet, there they are, soft and fuzzy, at the center of all those cherished memories, the formative events that made me love baseball and my team forever: the first time my dad took me to the Stadium (a 70 drubbing by the White Sox); the moment I first laid eyes, from my seat behind a pillar, on the brilliant green of the field there; the undiminished thrill and the affirmation of hope whenever Mantle came through in the clutch, as he seemed always to do; the snapshots of each of my kids at their first Yankee game and the one of my oldest, much later, at that first fraught game in New York, post9/11.

Listen to me: loyalty, devotion, allegiance, affirmation of hope, everlasting love No wonder half the world hates the Yankees. All this mawkish sentiment is undignified. And for that, as well, I feel curiously compelled to apologize.

What requires no apology is what came forth from this extraordinary group of writers when their Yankee button was pushed. Its true I never knew exactly what Id get when I mentioned the Yankees to them. All I knew for sure was that Id get a rise.