by Jim Gerard
You die and go to Hell, these things happen. You’re expecting fire, brimstone, banishment from God’s presence. But instead of Satan—or worse, some Ivy League intern—you’re confronted by a drunken lout missing several teeth who has an Anglo-Saxonism tattooed on the inside of his lower lip. He’s completely naked, except for a blue cloth cap sporting the interlocking “NY.” He greets you with the words, “You suck!”
Then you realize that your punishment is even worse than you anticipated, and that you’ve mistakenly fallen into the ninth circle of Hell, the one reserved for Yankee fans. And that you will spend the rest of eternity being reminded of all the World Championships, taunted, punched out, and besoddened with stale beer, while being forced to watch it all broadcast on the biggest Jumbotron you’ve ever seen.
As Gay Talese wrote almost 50 years ago, “There are fans—and there are Yankee fans.” They’re a mutant species, all right. Spoiled, vulgar front-runners who sprout like fungi when the team clinches another pennant, only to slither back under their rocks at the first sign of a losing streak. Insecure losers who try to live vicariously through a bunch of multimillionaires. Neanderthals who, when they stop brawling with the opposition fans, turn their inchoate rage on each other. Storm troopers of couchpotatodom in JETER T-shirts who strut through the baseball universe with a bellicose sense of entitlement, then wonder, “Why do they hate us?” Feral creatures who turn the bleachers into their own jungle preserve and have been known to dangle their victims over the facing of the upper deck.
They’ve been called “the ugly Americans of sport who flaunt an assumption of wealth and dominance”1 and “the closest thing this country has to soccer hooligans.”2
And since the team started winning again in the mid-1990s, they’ve spread like algae: The smarmy guy in accounting who wears a Yankee T-shirt with his designerknockoff suit. The loutish brother-in-law who interrupts grace at Thanksgiving dinner to bellow about Jeter’s “clutch”-ness. The drunken miscreants who used to take every opportunity to taunt Red Sox fans with the chant “1918!”—Boston’s last championship before 2004 being the only fact they know about that year (“World War One? Who gives a shit?”) and possibly the only historical detail of any kind that’s rattling around the empty warehouses of their brains. The pathetic, whiny, live-with-their-mother shut-ins who have a less active social life than Norman Bates and pester sports-talk jocks with their embarrassing tantrums and delusional trade proposals: “Mad Dog, WE GOTTA TRADE BRAD HALSEY AND FELIX ESCALONA FOR THE BIG UNIT! IT’S A NO-BRAINER!” The pandering politicos like carpetbagger Hillary Clinton, whose lead-footed attempt to ingratiate herself with New Yorkers during her senatorial campaign by wearing a Yankee cap was met with derision, even by Yankee fans. If she were a home-run ball, they would have thrown her back.
Taken individually, Yankee fans are a bad day at the beach, but a stadium full of them is exponentially scarier and amplifies the team’s fascistic overtones—its kitschy mythologizing, perpetual usurping of other teams’ players, and cheerleading by Mussolini-in-training Rudy Giuliani. In Bob Woodward’s Bush at War, Karl Rove is even quoted comparing the reaction of a New York Yankee crowd to an appearance by Bush as being “like a Nazi rally.” And—let’s face it—they’re owned by an evil genius who would love nothing more than to clone a master race of free agents.
With all their pennants and championships, you’d think Yankee fans would be euphoric. But instead, they’re a miserable lot who seem unable to derive any satisfaction from their team’s success. For them, winning is like crack—no amount is ever enough and they can’t live without it. That’s what leads to their strange junkie-like behavior, which Yankee fan-blogger Larry Mahnken calls “arrogant paranoia.” Mahnken posted on his Replacement Level Yankee Blog, “[Yankee fans] lack any confidence in the starting pitching, the relief pitching, and even the lineup, but then they express absolute certainty that they’ll win the World Series anyway, not because of their strength, but because the Red Sox and Cardinals will ‘choke.’ ”
That’s dementia, all right. But then again, we’re talking about Yankee fans, the best of whom are tortured sociopaths and the worst of whom are ...
BLEACHER CREATURES
The Yankee image is bland, upper-class, corporate. Always has been. You see this in the demeanor of the players, who approach the game with the assiduousness of grim bureaucrats (what sportswriters call “professionalism”). You also see it in the core of their fan base—baronial types hermetically ensconced in their luxury boxes and upper-middle-class frat-man execs from Westchester. Talese nailed Yankee fandom almost 50 years ago: “Wall Street bankers back the Yankees; Smith College girls approve of them. God, Brooks Brothers, and United States Steel are believed to be solidly in the Yankees’ corner.”3 So no, the Bombers aren’t exactly the people’s team ...
... except for one corner of Yankee Stadium, 2,385 seats spread over 27 rows of backless benches in Section 39, inhabited by wild denizens whose booing, boozing, and brawling has turned the area into the Outhouse That Ruth Built.
They call themselves the Bleacher Creatures, and they’re loud, violent, abusive, ADDled troglodytes. They have to be herded into Yankee Stadium through two back entrances (they’re not allowed anywhere else) and are under surveillance by two New York City cops and two stadium security guards. They spend the entire game clapping, chanting, cursing, banging on percussion instruments, and dissing everything that moves—the opposing right-fielder, slumping Yankees, the umps, the program vendor, box-seat holders, fans with colorfully dyed hair (“East Village! East Village!”), and Dick Cheney, who they booed when he attended a Yankees game and his picture was flashed on the scoreboard (proving they recognize a fellow asshole when they see one). They even learned Japanese obscenities to greet Ichiro Suzuki when he made his first New York appearance. They were the only baseball fans to boo and insult Blue Jays first baseman Carlos Delgado for refusing to stand during the playing of God Bless America to protest against the U.S. war in Iraq.
In 1985, they even jeered vocalist Mary O’.Dowd so vociferously while she sang the Canadian national anthem that she stopped in midsong and ran off the field crying.4 And of course, they have a long Yankee tradition of booing their own hometown heroes, including Joe DiMaggio and Roger Maris, who they abused so mercilessly during his 1961 chase of Babe Ruth’s home-run record that it caused the sensitive right-fielder’s hair to fall out. (Remember what Bob Uecker once said of Philadelphia fans—“They’d boo Santa Claus”? Well, Bleacher Creatures wouldn’t only boo St. Nick, they’d kick the crap out of him and his elves, too. “That’s for not bringing us a lefty specialist last December!”)
The Creatures are a fraternity of sadists who exploit the personal shortcomings of Yankee opponents. (They seem to have advance scouts.) They so cruelly heckled Chicago White Sox outfielder Wil Cordero—who had pled guilty to spousal battery in the off-season—that, after he’d played the first game of a three-game series in right field, the team moved him to another position (out of earshot) for the next two games. And their taunts to David Justice of “Hal-le Ber-ry!” (Justice’s ex-wife, who accused him of domestic violence) are celebrated among connoisseurs of malicious mockery. The Creatures make no bones about their mean-spiritedness. One admitted to Dan Raley of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, “The best part is when we find out the intimate details. You know, something that goes on in their life, like drugs, or booze, marital problems, or wife-beating. What we do to these guys, if people did that to me at my job every day, I’d shoot myself.”
Just in case the targeted opposing players don’t get the verbal message, the Creatures indiscriminately hurl whatever objects are at hand. Sticks, stones, coins, knives, batteries, inflatable dolls, transistor radios, heads of cabbage (the last three items were all hurled at José Canseco)—they’d chuck the Monuments if they could dislodge them. They’re so bent on mayhem, beer vendors have been instructed : “Please don’t feed the Creatures” (who skirt the prohibition
by tanking up before their arrival, right before game time).
Their streak of violent nihilism extends to inanimate objects, as illustrated by the Creature who not only grabbed a beach ball wafting across the stands, but pulled out his pocketknife and violently stabbed it while the other Creatures cheered.
Are they loud? A Toronto writer, accustomed to the decorous murmuring of Blue Jays fans, said that one hundred Bleacher Creatures made more noise than a crowd of 20,000 at the SkyDome.
Then there’s the “YMCA’ chant. After the fifth inning of every Yankees home game, to the sounds of the Village People’s “YMCA,” the groundskeepers rake the infield until the chorus, when they drop their tools to lead the crowd in semaphoring the letters of the song. That the onetime gay anthem has become an innocent family ritual is an irony that seems lost on everyone concerned—except the Bleacher Creatures, who have “composed” substitute lyrics that return the song to its, um, rightful context. The new lyrics start, “Gay man, get up off your knees,” and go downhill from there. As they sing, the Creatures “out” arbitrary victims in the crowd, which can lead to violent confrontation.
The Creatures are clannish, territorial, and, in their own macho, blue-collar way, self-important. They have their own Cesspool of Heroes such as Tina, Queen of the Bleachers, and Loudmouth Larry, whose idea of a witticism is yelling to the program vendor, “Yo! Give me a Playboy!”; their own version of a luxury box (they intimidate out-of-towners who have innocently stumbled onto their turf into migrating to other sections), and their own grunge version of Monument Park. After one bleacherite, Ali Ramirez, passed away in 1996, a gold plate was affixed to Seat 29, Row A, Section 39. It reads: THIS SEAT IS TAKEN IN THE MEMORY OF ALI RAMIREZ, THE ORIGINAL BLEACHER CREATURE. Ali’s claim to fame? Banging a pan nonstop.
ONE-WAY LOYALTY: HOW THE YANKEES SCREW THEIR FANS
Fans like this offer themselves to the team as a beer-bellied militia, and how does the Yankee organization treat them?
Well, first they shut them out of post-season tickets. For example, in 1999, only 5,000 out of 57,000 tickets for each World Series game were made available to the public; the rest were diverted to corporate cronies and influential politicos. To dispense the rest, the team has staged lotteries, but they’ve been quickly corrupted, as cops escon friends or the well connected to the front of the line.
This cavalier indifference to loyal customers goes way back in Yankee history. In the last game the team ever played in the Polo Grounds before moving to Yankee Stadium, against the Philadelphia Athletics, a mob desperate to see rising slugger Babe Ruth play long-ball stampeded the gate after it was announced that the game was sold out. One person was killed, dozens were injured, and parts of the park were torn to shreds. Less than 10 years later, on May 19, 1929, a severe mid-game rainstorm sent right-field bleacherites—the Ur-Creatures, as it were—dashing for the only exit the team had kept open. In this cattle run, two died and dozens more were injured. It was later discovered that owner Jacob Ruppert had kept the exits locked so he wouldn’t have to give out rain checks.
It’s not enough for the Yankee brass to squeeze every last dime from the loyalists; it also keeps the fans under such close surveillance—from police, private security, rooftop spy cameras, and the Orwellian Goodyear Blimp—it’s as if they suspected Osama bin Laden was in the park and passing coded signs to al-Qaeda through their opponent’s third-base coach.
The ultimate chutzpah? The Yankee management’s longtime (and mostly empty) threat to move the team to Jersey. (See Chapter 6: Condemning the House That Ruth Built.)
Even the Fake
Yankees Fans Suck
While the Yankees and MLB were awaiting the outcome of a court case arising from the team’s decision to sign their lucrative marketing deal with Adidas, Bud Selig allowed the Yankees to run Adidas ads within the team’s local region as long as no players were shown. Adidas’s United States ad agency decided by necessity to organize a campaign around fans. So they created five fictional characters, the “ANSKY” guys, balding, endomorphic schlubs who jam into the backseat of a cab each wearing a letter of the word “YANKS” painted on his belly—only in their haste to squeeze into the taxi, they scramble their letters. The cabbie asks, “What the hell is Ansky?” A bit of slapstick ensues as they attempt to de-Scrabble themselves. The ads not only won a Clio award but one at the Cannes Film Festival (the Asshole d’Or). The ANSKY-ITES also had their own float in the Yanks’ Canyon of Heroes World Series parade.
Believe it or not, the Bleacher Creatures complained; they felt they deserved their own float, too.
NOTES
1 Robert Lipstye, New York Times.
2 Dean Chatwin, Those Damn Yankees.
3 John Kuenster, Baseball Digest, December 2000.
4 Ibid.
Chapter Four
THE MADNESS OF KING GEORGE
He’s every worker’s nightmare, the satanic CEO; a fanatically controlling overlord who borrows his warmed-over rhetoric from Vince Lombardi and his managerial style from Stalin. He hogs all of the credit and assumes none of the blame. He humiliates his players by berating them in the press, apologizing to fans for losses, and posting “inspirational” messages—“When the going gets tough, the tough get going”—on the Diamond Vision scoreboard. He’s a ruthless, acquisitive, hypocritical, obnoxious “turtlenecked gargoyle”1—in other words, the personification of the New York Yankees.
George Steinbrenner is the most visible and most influential owner in American team sports. He’s also a convicted felon (and the first person to attain that status in connection with the Watergate burglary), an opera buffo villain (played as such by Larry David on Seinfeld), and a 74-year-old man who spends more time on Page Six than Britney Spears.
He prattles endlessly about “Yankee tradition” and how “winning is everything” and cites the wisdom of generals. Yet in reality, he’s like every other bully—the first to back down if confronted, hit the panic button, and point the accusatory finger at everyone but himself. He dubs certain players “warriors,” while he “spits the bit.” Buster Olney, in his book, The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty, records that in the eighth inning of Game 6 of the 2003 World Series, with the Yanks down, 2—0, Steinbrenner cornered general manager Brian Cashman. “Meeting in Tampa Monday,” he snapped. “And it’s not going to be pleasant. There are going to be big changes.” The game wasn’t even over. And in the bottom of the ninth in Game 7 of the 2001 World Series, after leadoff hitter Mark Grace dumped a single into centerfield, Steinbrenner turned to an undoubtedly mystified attendant in the visitors’ clubhouse, jabbed a finger and said, “If we lose this, it’s all your fault.”
In his 31 years as Yankees owner, King George has run his team like a pinstriped dictatorship, hiring friends and cronies, buying politicians, and holding periodic purges. During his long, dysfunctional relationship with manager Billy Martin (see sidebar), he even conducted the baseball equivalent of show trials, in which the now-chastened manager would display public contrition for his unruly behavior and pledge eternal fealty to the pinstripes. Team executives are held under the baseball version of house arrest—he has punished Cashman by “grounding” him so he couldn’t attend baseball’s winter meetings, and once banned him from walking on the grass behind home plate, presumably because that would prevent him from talking to reporters.2
So omnipresent is his intimidation that even top lieutenants such as Mark Newman have been known to get down on their hands and knees to smooth a rug at the team’s Tampa headquarters, for fear of contravening the Boss’s demand for military perfection. (“Even when he’s not here, he’s here,” Newman said, sounding like a North Korean peasant caught talking to a Western reporter.)
FrankenSteinbrenner instills a cultlike paranoia about losing by making endless late-night phone calls to employees and ordering them to remain at their office posts after losses. Some employees of the YES network, speaking to me off the record, said they often had to stay at
work for several hours after night games, yet were expected back early the next morning. The impression I got was that hostages in Iraq had higher morale.
The threat of imminent dismissal hangs over the organization like the Asia cloud, and with good reason. Steinbrenner, a berserk headhunter, has changed managers 20 times in his first 23 seasons as owner (including firing Billy Martin five times and rehiring him four times) and general managers 11 times in his 31-year reign of terror. Coaches are demoted for having a runner thrown out at home,3 and they serve as convenient scapegoats if their hitters, pitchers, and catchers don’t meet George’s impossible standards.
Steinbrenner, a former vice president of the United States Olympic Committee, wreathes himself in the flag. He hangs quotations from Douglas MacArthur at the team’s Tampa training complex and often wears an Ol’ Glory pin on his jacket lapel. The Yankees are the only major league team that plays “God Bless America” during every home game. He believes so much in American democracy that he was convicted for making illegal contributions to Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign.
Steinbrenner’s ham-fisted micromanaging has swayed the franchise between eras of rousing success and pratfalling ineptitude. In the 1970s, he pioneered in the acquisition of free agents Catfish Hunter and Reggie Jackson, and the team won two championships. In the 1980s, he signed busts such as Dave Collins and Danny Tartabull, and the team crashed and burned. It was only in the early 1990s, when he was sitting out his second suspension from baseball, that then-GM Gene Michael (who he had already fired as manager numerous times) and manager Buck Showalter had the freedom to lay the groundwork for the Joe Torre dynasty.
George once proudly declared, “I never have a heart attack. I give them.” And he has—to employees, other owners, and Yankee fans—but then, they deserve it.