Those Damn Yankees

This paperback edition of Dean Chadwin’s widely-discussed book has been expanded to include the Yankee’s World Series appearance in the 1999 season. The New York Yankees have won twenty-five championships, more than any other American professional sports franchise. The team’s rich history includes a color bar, the towering home runs and bottomless appetites of Babe Ruth, the early and intensely lamented death of Lou Gehrig, frequent labor disputes between players and owners, and the free verse of Yogi Berra and Phil Rizzuto. The 1999 season has emerged as one of the franchise’s most memorable both on and off the field. As the squad raced through an all-time record for victories to win the World Series, observers wondered whether the club’s stadium would return to its wandering ways of a century ago. The Yankees abandoned Baltimore in 1902. After seventy-five years in the Bronx, Yankee management are now pursuing a move to Manhattan or the suburbs that could tap into millions of public dollars. Those Damn Yankees is a riveting and unconventional foray into the murky underworld of baseball, from the incipient sexual desire of young girls visiting the Derek Jeter on-line fansite to the boozy macho heart of the Yankee Nation in the now-endangered bleachers. In compelling asides, Dean Chadwin looks at issues such as baseball’s cult of memory, numerology in sport and society, the emergence of an anti-competitive baseball league of haves and have-nots, and a sporting cartel’s exploitation of inter-city economic warfare.“Dean Chadwin has written a provocative political history of the Yankees in the tradition if Jim Bouton and Howard Zinn. A must-read for anyone considering a vote for Rudy Giuliani next time around, whatever office he may be seeking.”—Andrew Zimbalist, author of Baseball and Billions