Yankees Suck!

by Jim Gerard

  All Along the Watchtower

  Over the years, the Stadium has hosted not just baseball, but championship prize fights, Papal masses, and soccer matches. But the all-time attendance record was set not by a YankeesDodgers World Series game or Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, but by the Jehovah’s Witnesses. As many as 123,707 of them convened in a single day there during the 1950s.

  Another fan described conditions in the stands as no better: “It’s absolutely filthy. By the fifth inning, heaps of garbage overflowed from huge bins under the bleachers, and it didn’t look much better in the rest of the stadium. Steinbrenner has let the Stadium go to seed.”

  YANKEE CUISINE

  What can you say about Yankee Stadium food? Styrofoam peanuts. Fossilized pretzels. Eight-dollar beer with all of the botulism and none of the taste. Jeff Marron, writing on ESPN.com, says of the overpriced frankfurter-manques:A friend volunteered to eat a couple. The next day he got sick. On the subway home, I got to talking with another fan who sat in the loge boxes on the left-field side. He said he ordered a hot dog with sauerkraut at one stand near his seat. This left the concessionaires befuddled. They told him that if he wanted sauerkraut, he’d have to go to a hot dog stand on the other side of the stadium.

  Jesus, the last time anybody rationed sauerkraut was in the Warsaw Ghetto.

  Five Reasons Why New Yorkers Should Hate Yankee Stadium

  The stadium refurbishment in the mid-1970s cost $180 million; the proposed new stadium will cost the city $450 million. Here are some municipal improvements the city can make if they let the Bombers go elsewhere.

  1. $110 million for a program for dislocated workers cut from federal aid.

  2. $240 million to replace money cut from the federal budget to fight poverty.

  3. $50 million to improve public housing.

  4. $20 million to help implement a new election law.

  5. $20 million to help restore cuts to bioterrorism funds.

  As for the nachos—for which, inexplicably, there are interminable lines—a neighbor of Marron’s put it this way: “I ate a piece of my napkin with my nachos, and I didn’t notice.”

  CONTRIVED SPONTANEITY

  You would think that having a dynastic, perennially contending team and a collection of All-Stars would be enough to captivate Yankees fans. Not so. As if they were lemmings looking for a cliff, the organization insists on stage-managing every nanosecond of the fans’ attention. The scoreboard impels them to clap, cheer, and boo. It distracts them with “subway races,” in which colored icons representing New York underground lines “race” while the fans—undoubtedly with action riding on it—scream things like, “Eat me, six-train!”

  To remind fans that there are higher causes than laying odds on a predetermined video game, the crowd is overdosed on patriotism, first with “The Star-Spangled Banner,” then, during the seventh-inning stretch, with a version of “God Bless America” by Kate Smith or Irish tenor Ronan Tynan. For 12 years, John Luhrs, a scoreboard “character generator” (responsible for compiling stats to be flashed on DiamondVision), lurched to the Rednex tune “Cotton Eye Joe” like a cowboy with a neurological disorder—much to the Yankee fans’ delight.

  While Sinatra’s post-game “New York, New York” was an inspired choice, the team has on occasion shifted to Liza Minnelli’s version, a decision that can only be explained as a desperate attempt to market baseball to the Hedda Lettuce crowd.

  A THREAT OR A PROMISE? SHUT UP AND MOVE TO JERSEY

  Although the Stadium was built in 1923, the current version is really only 30 years old. That’s because in 1973-74, the original park was “modernized”—that is, almost completely torn down and rebuilt, during which its once-cavernous dimensions (it was 463 feet to dead center field) were drastically reduced and the monuments moved from the field of play to an area beyond the center-field fence now called “Monument Park.” (The team played its home games at Shea Stadium for those two years.) According to author Neil DeMause, the renovation, originally estimated at $19 million, ended up costing the city $129 million. “At the time, the club promised that some of the Stadium funds would go for public services, but none of it did.“1

  New Yankees Promotions

  To combat the Red Sox’ innovative revenue streams—such as leading tour groups through Fenway Park—the Yankees have devised a list of new promotions:1. George Steinbrenner available to haunt your children’s Halloween party.

  2. Fan Depreciation Day. Yanks’ owner is allowed to write off entire crowd for tax purposes. All fans in attendance must sign a release confirming that they were not as loyal as they had been the previous year.

  3. Anabolic Giambi Bobblehead Night. All fans 18 and over receive Jason Giambi bobblehead doll. Treat with clear or creamy substances and watch it grow.

  4. “Outing” Night. Closeted homosexuals 18 and over are identified by public-address announcer Bob Sheppard, and their pictures are shown on DiamondVision.

  5. Kiss Jeter’s Rings Day. All fans are allowed to kiss Derek Jeter’s four World Series rings and request miracles from Joe Torre.

  6. Michael Kay Hostage Night. Fan drawing winning ticket gets to take Michael Kay home and lock him in a closet. Kay then is allowed one Cingular call to the bullpen to plead for his life.

  7. Vegan Day. All vegan fans are fed to the Bleacher Creatures.

  8. Fear Factor Night. Fans have eyelids taped open as Yanks’ middle relievers enter game.

  Not content with a fully renovated home, Steinbrenner began clamoring for a spanking new one less than 10 years later, intimating that the Bronx environs were a perilous deterrent to fans. Yet almost 4 million fans attended games there in 2004—a team record—and due to a police-security presence fit for a G8 summit, the Stadium neighborhood is the safest place in the Bronx on game nights.

  During the mid-1980s and for more than a decade thereafter, as the expiration of the Yankees’ lease with the city (the landlord of Yankee Stadium) approached, Steinbrenner periodically threatened to move the team, first to New Jersey, then to the west side of midtown Manhattan. As Chatwin wrote in Those Damn Yankees: Steinbrenner’s people and the Boss himself engaged in a campaign of speculation and misinformation designed to flesh out the best offers. The Boss sought to move the club to Manhattan, or maybe it was New Jersey, or perhaps he just wanted to create the appearance that all his options were open to jack up the franchise’s value in the midst of negotiations to sell. Meanwhile, [Mayor Rudy Giuliani] supported Steinbrenner’s explorations, warned the governor of New Jersey to keep her hands off his teams, and battled his rival, Peter Vallone, the head of the city council and author of a ballot referendum that would allow the voters to forbid the use of public funds to facilitate the Boss’ move from the Bronx to Manhattan along the Hudson. City taxpayers did not want to hand hundreds of millions to a billionaire, and Vallone’s initiative unleashed a rare wave of populist sentiment in New York City.

  In 1998, only hours before the fourth home game of the season, a quarter-ton expansion joint crashed through a seat in the loge section along the third-base line. Steinbrenner seized on the accident to declare that the park’s very foundation was crumbling—another argument for a new home. However, Gaston Silva, the city’s chief buildings investigator, did a full stadium inspection and declared that it could stand for another 75 years. “ ‘Crumbling’ is a popular word teams use when they want a new stadium,” says DeMause.

  THE PROPOSED NEW STADIUM—BOONDOGGLE. INSULT, OR NECESSARY CIVIC IMPROVEMENT?

  Public opposition to a parasitic taxpayer-funded giveaway didn’t deter King George. His incestuous ties with the Giuliani administration netted him a new, $70 million minor-league park in Staten Island (the only right-wing borough in the city), the funds for which might’ve gone toward, say, repairing public schools.

  Undeterred by a change at Gracie Mansion and exploiting a loophole in the city’s political system that enables the rich and powerful to end-run around a public referendum, Steinbre
nner greased enough palms at City Hall to unveil yet another new stadium plan.

  Early last year, it was reported that the Yankees would build a new, $750 million stadium across the street from their current home. New York Business said that the team would ask for $450 million in public-infrastructure investment to build a hotel and conference center, improve and increase public transportation to the area, and build three new parks elsewhere in the Bronx. They would likely seek to finance the facility by issuing tax-exempt Industrial Development Authority bonds, to be paid off with revenue from the new stadium, which would include 50 megabucks-generating skyboxes. (They could also sell the naming rights for $10 million or so. In other words, the new Stadium could be the House that Wal-Mart Built. Or Yanks Depot.)

  GEORGE’S ULTIMATE SCAM

  Just when you thought that FrankenStein had emptied his bag of dirty tricks, he has now apparently concocted a brazen scheme in which not only would city taxpayers help subsidize his latest pleasure dome, but so would his fellow baseball owners. Neil DeMause says that the Yankee arch-fiend has uncovered a flaw in the Collective Bargaining Agreement that would force baseball’s other 29 teams to pay nearly half its cost.

  DeMause described the breathtaking con on the Baseball Prospectus website:The Yankees are offering to pay the entire $750 million cost of building a stadium in Macombs Dam Park, across 161st Street from Yankee Stadium. The existing ballpark would be demolished to make way for a parking garage (though the New York Times has reported that the design would retain “the ball field and the most recognizable elements of the structure,” which is hard to picture). The city and state would kick in somewhere between $300 million and $450 million to build a new hotel and conference center, and obtain new parkland elsewhere in the Bronx to make up for the destruction of Macombs Dam Park.

  DeMause says that the team would foot the bill for the new stadium by exploiting an obscure clause in MLB’s Basic Agreement that allows teams to deduct “Stadium Operations Expenses”—including stadium construction debt—from their revenue-sharing payments. The Yankees currently pay a marginal revenue-sharing rate of about 39 percent of local revenue, so “taking a deduction for $40 million a year in stadium bond payments would thus earn the Yankees a $15.6 million-a-year write-off on their annual revenue-sharing obligations. Over time, about $300 million of the House That George Built would be paid for by the other 29 teams.” Not only that, but any revenue that Steinbrenner gets from the publicly funded hotel and conference center would be pure profit, untouchable by his fellow owners.

  In other words, the new ballpark would be less a venue for baseball games than a tax-sheltering entertainment complex. The new economic paradigm—which could be changed in 2006 when the players and owners revisit the Basic Agreement—encourages teams to pursue non-baseball-related product. A roller coaster going through center field? Anything’s possible. (Besides, could it hurt the Yanks’ defense any more than Williams and Lofton?)

  NOTES

  1 Interview with the author.

  2 Online chat with Cramer, October 25, 2000, www.cnn. com/COMMUNITY/transcripts/2000/10/25/cramer.

  3 Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life, Richard Ben Cramer (Simon & Schuster, 2000).

  4 From www.wordiq.com/definition/New_York_Yankees.

  Chapter Seven

  YANKEE LOWLIGHTS

  Yankee Haters, you have seen the team highlight reel so often, you probably remember Tino’s homer off Byung-Hyun Kim in the 2001 Series with more clarity than your own honeymoon. To restore your sanity, I’m performing an intervention. The idea is to replace your bad memories of exultant Yankee victories with deeply satisfying, meaningful reflections....I’m talking about Maz in ’61, Edgar driving in Griffey in ’95, and Ortiz and Schilling driving a stake through the Bambino’s heart last October. In other words, here are 100 years of Yankee Lowlights, the worst moments in franchise history:

  1980 ALCS VS. KANSAS CITY ROYALS, GAME 3: BRETT ROASTS THE GOOSE

  1. October 10, 1980. With the Yanks down two games to none in the best-of-five series, they held a 2-1 lead going into the top of the seventh with their ace reliever, Goose Gossage, on the mound. But all-time Yankee nemesis George Brett belted a three-run homer off Gossage—his second homer of the series—and sent the Yankees home. Michael Vogel, writing on Alex Belth’s blog, Bronx Banter, said, “I was at that game and don’t recall the energy of Yankee Stadium ever deflating so much so quickly.”

  2002 DIVISION SERIES VS. ANAHEIM ANGELS: THUNDERSTIX

  2. In this series, the Halos bombarded Yankee pitching, torpedoing everything close to a strike. Game 2: Back-to-back shots by Garret Anderson and Troy Glaus in the top of the eighth put Anaheim ahead and stunned Yankee fans. The Angels scored two more and took a 7-4 lead. In the bottom of the inning, the Yanks got one back and loaded the bases with two outs with Mr. November, Derek Jeter, facing Troy Percival. Jeter was called out on a pitch a half-foot outside.

  Game 3: An early 6-1 Yankee lead evaporated, Mike Mussina pulled a groin muscle and had to leave the game, and a pair of bloop RBI singles by the Angels in the sixth and seventh tied the game before Bengie Molina’s single and Tim Salmon’s two-run eighth-inning homer helped Anaheim pull away.

  Game 4: The baseball gods continued to curse the Bombers, steering sure home runs foul or keeping them in the park. Jeter was robbed of an extra-base hit by Anderson’s incredible catch in left. As 50,000 Anaheim fans rattled their Thunderstix, the Angels mercilessly slew David Wells and ended the Yanks’ season with a 10-hit, 8-run bottom of the fifth.

  1995 DIVISION SERIES VS. SEATTLE MARINERS: EDGAR THE YANKEE KILLER

  3. Game 4: In the Yanks’ first playoff appearance in 14 years, they held a 2-1 game lead. But the immobile but deadly Edgar Martinez went yard twice, one of them a grand slam, as Seattle overcame a 6-1 Yankee lead to tie the series.

  Game 5: Donnie Baseball’s last game. In the top of the eleventh, a base hit by Randy Velarde—ex—pilot of the Columbus Shuttle—off a relieving Randy Johnson gave the Yanks a one-run lead. But with men on first and second in the bottom of the inning, Edgar played executioner for the second night in a row as he ripped a Jack McDowell pitch down the left-field line and Griffey dashed home from first with the winning run. To relieve their despair, some Yankee fans went out and beat up some Red Sox fans.

  1997 DIVISION SERIES VS. CLEVELAND INDIANS, GAME 4: MO BLOWS IT, PART I

  4. The Yanks were four outs away from ending the series when, in the bottom of the eighth, their newly anointed closer Mariano Rivera came in to preserve a 2-1 lead. But Sandy Alomar took Rivera’s outside fastball over the right-field wall to tie the game. In the ninth with future Yankee malcontent Kenny Lofton on second and two outs, Omar Vizquel hit a ground ball back to Ramiro Mendoza that deflected off his glove and toward the shortstop hole vacated by Jeter, who had expected the ball to go up the middle. Lofton scored the winning run, and the next night the Indians sent the Yanks home to whine away the off-season.

  2001 WORLD SERIES VS. ARIZONA DIAMONDBACKS, GAME 7: MO BLOWS IT, PART II

  5. In one of the most melodramatic series of all time, the Yanks’ two incredible ninth-inning comebacks in Games 5 and 6 seemed to inject their fans with a sense of karmic certitude. In the eighth inning of Game 7, Alfonso Soriano golfed a shoe-top splitter from Curt Schilling deep into the left-center-field seats to put the Yanks up, 2-1. But in the bottom of the ninth, Rivera, who had shut down the Snakes in the eighth, fell apart. After Mark Grace singled to lead off, Rivera threw errantly high to second on Damian Miller’s bunt. Jay Bell then bunted right to Rivera, who tossed it to Scott Brosius for the force at third. With plenty of time to get Bell at first for the double play, Brosius, one of the “clutch” Yankees, inexplicably froze and held the ball. Tony Womack’s double tied it, and Rivera plunked Craig Counsell to load the bases. Then Luis Gonzalez blooped a single over a questionably drawn-in infield to end the series. The Yanks and their fans—who after 9/11 had apparently felt that it was Ariz
ona’s patriotic duty to lose the series—were in toxic shock. It was if the terrorists had won.

  JUNE 12, 2003, YANKEE STADIUM, INTERLEAGUE GAME VS. HOUSTON ASTROS: STEP RIGHT UP AND NO-HIT THE YANKS

  6. Six Astro pitchers combined to pitch the first no-hitter against the Yanks since Hoyt Wilhelm’s in 1958. At one point, eight straight Yanks struck out, a team record. After ace Roy Oswalt pulled a groin muscle in the second inning, Peter Munro, Kirk Saarloos, Brad Lidge, Octavio Dotel, and Billy Wagner finished off the 8-0 win. It was the most pitchers ever used to complete a no-hitter, and the Yanks swung so feebly that the Astros could’ve brought in J. R. Richard and Larry Dierker without changing the result. After the game, Joe Torre admitted, “This is one of the worst games I’ve ever been involved in. It was a total, inexcusable performance.” It was rumored that Steinbrenner kept the team for extra batting practice until 5 a.m.—with the Stadium lights turned off.

  1960 WORLD SERIES VS. PITTSBURGH PIRATES: MAZ’S WALK-OFF

  7. A series in which the heavily-favored Yanks outscored the Pirates 55-27, beating them 16-3, 12-0, and 10-0, and yet lost the series. In Game at Pittsburgh’s cavernous Forbes Field, the Yanks led 7-4 going into the bottom of the eighth, when the Pirates rallied for five runs, which included a three-run blast by catcher Hal Smith. (This led broadcaster Jack Brickhouse to say that “Forbes Field at this moment is an outdoor insane asylum.”) Behind 9-7, the Yankees came back with two runs in the top of the ninth to tie the score. In the bottom of the ninth, light-hitting second baseman Bill Mazeroski, who had hit only 11 home runs during the season, led off against Ralph Terry. On a 1-0 count, Maz lined a ball over the left-field wall as left fielder Yogi Berra turned his back to home plate and, like a character in Beckett, waited despondently for a ball to come back in play that never would. Red Smith described the moment in his column the following day: “Terry watched the ball disappear, brandished his glove hand high overhead, shook himself like a wet spaniel, and started fighting through the mobs that came boiling from the stands to use Mazeroski like a trampoline.”