Yankees Suck! Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  Chapter One - SURE, THEY’RE SUCCESSFUL, BUT THEY CHEAT

  Chapter Two - ALL-TIME WORST YANKEE TRADES

  Chapter Three - THE FANS

  Chapter Four - THE MADNESS OF KING GEORGE

  Chapter Five - THE DARK SIDE OF THE YANKEES

  Chapter Six - CONDEMNING THE HOUSE THAT RUTH BUILT

  Chapter Seven - YANKEE LOWLIGHTS

  Chapter Eight - THE ALL-TIME WORST YANKEES

  Chapter Nine - THE YANKEE KILLERS

  Chapter Ten - THE DYNASTY

  Chapter Eleven - YANKEES SUCK ACROSS AMERICA

  Firable Offenses

  Worth Apologizing Over...

  Roadside Amusements

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  Introduction

  My friend Mike hates the Yankees. He hates them because in 1964, when he was 10 years old, they fired as manager his hero, Yogi Berra. When Yogi moved to the Mets for his career swan song, Mike went with him, and for the last 40 years, Mike has been a staunch Mets fan. But the ardor with which he supports his team pales in comparison to his loathing of the Yankees (which I believe has reached a cancerous stage). I honestly think he’d return the Mets’ two championship trophies if that could somehow revoke all those Yankees flags.

  All across the country, there are a lot of people like Mike—fans who have two favorite teams: their home team and whoever is playing against the Yankees that day. Yankee Hating has become a cottage industry. Besides the ubiquitous YANKEES SUCK T-shirts, there’s a “Discount Hate Yankees” channel on eBay, including a Hate Yankees Watch ($19.97), and Yankee Hater websites such as yankeessuck. com. (Who knows? Right now, someone out there may be hatching an anti-Yankee satellite radio station.)

  This book is for all of you, from plumbers to professors, doctors to rockers—like the band Bender X, whose song “Yankees Suck,” begins with a note to Yankees fans regarding Derek Jeter’s efforts to remove equipment from Chuck Knoblauch’s locker, specifically his balls.

  We conceived of this as a handbook for Bomber bashers that shows how anyone, anywhere, of any age, can hate the Yankees like the most hardened denizen of Lansdowne Street in Boston. It’s full of information, anecdotes, humor, and innuendo that will help you silence even the most truculent, arrogant Yankees fan, whether in a barroom argument or a bleacher donnybrook. Not least, it will help focus your rage, disappointment, and burning jealousy from opening day right up until the Yanks walk away with yet another completely undeserved World Series Championship.

  Chapter One

  SURE, THEY’RE SUCCESSFUL, BUT THEY CHEAT

  As any Yankee fan will tell you within five seconds of meeting him, the Yankees are far and away the most successful team in the history of professional sports. This statement will usually be followed by a tally of their pennants and World Championships.

  But the Yankee fan who gets in your face shouting “Thirty-nine!” or “Twenty-six!” like some demented bingo player won’t ever explain how his beloved Bombers managed to haul in all that heavy gold leaf. Here’s where you butt in and tell him the truth: that the Yankee glory is a whore, bought and paid for. Here are the real secrets to the Yankee success:1. They patrol the free-agent waters like a great white shark, driving up prices and forcing other teams to the sidelines—and often, bidding against themselves. Which means the players and their agents love them. In the last few years alone, the Yanks have signed Mike Mussina, Jason Giambi, and Gary Sheffield (among others), plus re-upped home-grown stars such as Bernie Williams and Derek Jeter to long-term contracts equal to the gross national product of Togo. While these stars have contributed to Yankee pennants, these Faustian pacts come with a downside: All these players are aging and for the most part less productive. And they’re unbenchable.

  2. They lure stars who want to continue or finish their careers “playing on a winner” away from teams who know they can’t afford to re-sign them as free agents. Take Exhibit A-Rod. Despite having the highest contract in baseball history—a cool $250 million over 10 years—the superstar agreed to forfeit his future as the greatest shortstop in baseball history to play third base for the Yanks, who peddled a mercurial, rapidly aging (two years, overnight) talent in Alfonso Soriano to Texas. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the Rangers agreed to pay a chunk of A-Rod’s salary. (Later, it was rumored that Rangers owner Tom Hicks so wanted to divest himself of A-Rod’s contract that he would’ve given him away for a YES network tote bag.) The fact that the Yanks have created their own market for talent is why you hear rumors that they’re interested in almost every player in the big leagues. (What’s next? YANKS REANIMATE LEFTY GROVE; WILL SURGICALLY ATTACH ARM TO FÉLIX HEREDIA’S BODY) At last season’s trading deadline, the baseball world was shocked by the Yanks’ failure to wrest Randy Johnson from Arizona, as if the D-backs had defied a papal decree. (The reason Johnson remained stranded in the desert was most likely Diamondbacks owner Jerry Colangelo’s desire to avenge himself on Yankee owner George Steinbrenner for stealing David Wells out from under a handshake free-agent agreement two years earlier. See Chapter 11: Yankees Suck Across America.)

  3. They pluck non-English-speaking international free agents blinded by the promise of big-city glamour and Jordanesque endorsement deals. Sometimes these signings are golden—Hideki Matsui, Orlando “El Duque” Hernández—while others are the baseball equivalent of back-alley abortions, botchings that the team tries to bury as quickly as possible. Think of Hideki Irabu, who went from golden-armed prospect to “fat pussy toad”—what Steinbrenner called the pitcher after an exhibition game when he forgot that his job description included occasionally covering first base—and Andy Morales, a Cuban third baseman who couldn’t excel even in the Eastern League and who clambered around the hot corner like a dancing bear that had escaped from the Russian circus. (The Yanks so soured on Morales that they tried to back out of his contract by claiming that he had misrepresented his age, which proves that lying about your birth date is only acceptable if, like El Duque and Soriano, you produce.)

  4. They fill out the back of their roster with substitute outfielders and set-up men (e.g., Steve Karsay and Tom Gordon) who would be stars on other cl
ubs but who—like matinee idols who work for a pittance just to be in a Woody Allen picture—are willing to become glorified spear-carriers for YankeeBucks. (This gives me an idea: The team could print its own money, which would be standard currency only among baseball players and their agents. The colorful higher-denomination bills would feature Yankee greats—Joe DiMaggio on the thousand, Mickey Mantle on the hundred, and so on, with Stump Merrill on the face of the penny.)

  The Yankees can do all this—gobbling up one prized asset after another like a corporate raider—because they have unique competitive advantages:◆ Geography. They play in the largest metropolitan region in the country, home to more than 20 million people. They share it with only one other major league team—the poorly run Mets—when by all accounts it has the population to support five clubs. Steinbrenner bought the Yankees from CBS in 1972 for $10 million—about $3 million less than CBS had originally paid! The franchise is now estimated to be worth $832 million. Darren Rovell, the sports business reporter for ESPN.com, says, “What [Steinbrenner] was buying was not just the team, but the rights to the New York market, the biggest in the country, with all its revenue streams.”1

  ◆ Attendance. The Yankees led the American League in home and road attendance last year, drawing close to 4 million fans in 2004, their all-time record at the Stadium. Forbes magazine stated that they made $119 million in gate receipts in 2003 as part of their total revenues of $238 million. That means they could close the Stadium to fans and, based on media and marketing income, have a $119 million payroll, which would still be the largest in baseball. In New York, the team has become a cultural institution, like MoMA and The Producers, declared general manager Brian Cashman to the New York Times. So now people come to Yankee games not to steal a souvenir ball from an innocent child or vomit on their neighbors but to be seen doing same. The Yankees have been perennially first in road attendance, even during the team’s mid-’60s descent. After all, the Yankees are loathed by fans everywhere (See Chapter 11: Yankees Suck Across America), and even the lowliest Royals fan eagerly heads to the park when the Yanks come to town, knowing that if his club can trounce the lordly Bombers, the season won’t be a total loss.

  ◆ Cable money. Although the Yankees are demonized for exploiting their superior economic advantages, their financial domination didn’t really start until 1988 when, amid an explosive growth in cable television, the Madison Square Garden network paid $486 million over 12 years for the rights to telecast the team’s games. Neil DeMause, author of Field of Schemes, a study of the ways in which professional sports franchises extort new stadiums from cities, says that “When it comes to creative accounting, the Boss has always been at the cutting edge.”2 In the 1980s, Steinbrenner paid himself a “consulting fee” to negotiate his own cable contract. In 2002, after the team failed to come to an agreement with Cablevision’s MSG network to telecast their games, Steinbrenner realized that owning his own cable network was a much better deal. It offered potential riches, greater control over what its announcers said, and a way to market his games, tickets, players, and merchandise 365 days a year. So the Yanks partnered with Goldman Sachs, the New Jersey Nets, and the New Jersey Devils to set up YES, for Yankees Entertainment and Sports (assuming you consider Michael Kay’s celebrity anilingus, otherwise known as “Center Stage,” entertaining). Goldman Sachs and Providence Equity invested $340 million for their 40 percent share; Yankee Global Enterprises owns 35 percent; and some former Nets and current Devils owners own the rest. No one knows exactly how much revenue the Yankees derive from YES—neither the Yankees nor YES are obligated to open their books to the public—but estimates range from $50 million to $100 million. Like other clubs who are part of media companies, the team shuffles YES revenue to the baseball side of the accounting ledger, where it remains protected from MLB’s revenue-sharing agreement. DeMause says, “George is taking fifty million dollars out of one of his pockets and putting it in another ... helping him evade attempts by fellow owners to force him to share the bounty that comes from operating the most lucrative franchise in baseball.” Bud Selig has made noises about auditing the Yankees, but for now the Yanks continue to save as much as $20 million a year with this sleight of hand. (Of course, once they had leveraged their deal with the Devils, the Yanks broke up the cartel.) Another way the Yanks subvert the revenue-sharing agreement is to shift some of their merchandising efforts to the YES network website. The Yanks could potentially rake in another $10 million or so if they sold the naming rights to their stadium, either the current one or the proposed new one they’re trying to shake down from the city. (See Chapter 6: Condemning the House That Ruth Built.) For example, the Yanks might potentially be able to sell the naming rights to the multinational of their choice. (“It’s Zoloft Night at Pfizer Park. All depressives get half-price admission, plus a Dr. Phil bobblehead.”) However, either because their lease with New York City prevents it or they felt they would lose “brand” equity, the team has decided against it. Instead, they did the next best thing ...

  ◆ All major league baseball clubs are party to a marketing agreement, which mandates that they equally share the profits from the sale of merchandise, use of team logos, etc. In 1999, Steinbrenner signed an independent, 10-year, $94 million sponsorship deal with Adidas—money that the other clubs couldn’t touch. When commissioner Bud Selig nixed the deal, George sued, claiming that the other owners were acting as a cartel unfairly restraining trade. Selig caved, and the deal went ahead. In 2001, the team made cross-promotional deals with Manchester United, the Yankees of England’s Premier League soccer, giving YES the right to telecast Man U’s games in America. Another move that yields a few million a year was selling special Japanese advertising signage to display behind home plate during games—ads targeted not just at New York’s Japanese community, but at the millions of fans back in Japan who worship Hideki Matsui like he’s the emperor and now get to watch 135 big-league games a year thanks to a six-year, $200 million rights deal that Major League Baseball signed with Dentsu in 2003. (Eighty percent of those games involve the Yankees, Mets, or Mariners.)

  ◆ When you combine the huge fan pool and windfall media deals that arise from perfect location, plus Enronesque bookkeeping feats, you end up with the biggest advantage of all:

  ◆ Payroll.

  These are the major league team payrolls as of mid- 2004:3 1. New York Yankees $183,335,513

  2. Boston $125,208,542

  3. Anaheim $101,909,667

  4. New York Mets $95,754,304

  5. Philadelphia $93,219,167

  6. Chicago Cubs $91,101,667

  7. Los Angeles $89,694,343

  8. Atlanta $88,507,788

  9. San Francisco $82,019,166

  10. St. Louis $81,008,517

  11. Seattle $78,483,834

  12. Houston $74,666,303

  13. Arizona $70,204,984

  14. Colorado $68,610,403

  15. Chicago White Sox $68,262,500

  16. San Diego $63,689,503

  17. Oakland $59,825,167

  18. Texas $59,025,973

  19. Minnesota $53,585,000

  20. Toronto $50,017,000

  21. Detroit $49,828,554

  22. Baltimore $49,212,653

  23. Kansas City $47,609,000

  24. Montreal $43,197,500

  25. Cincinnati $42,722,858

  26. Florida $42,118,042

  27. Pittsburgh $40,227,929

  28. Cleveland $34,569,300

  29. Tampa Bay $28,706,667

  30. Milwaukee $27,518,500

  The Yanks top the list, as they have for most of the last decade. A brief glance at the payroll disparity between New York and the clubs on the bottom of the list means they pay their starting rotation as much as some clubs’ entire payrolls. It also means that the Yankees could buy the entire rosters of Montreal/Washington, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Tampa Bay, and Milwaukee, with enough left over to sign a couple of defecting “imperialist lackeys” from Cuba. They could
make those teams play their own five-team fantasy league—in the nude. Or move the Pirates to, say, Vladivostok. On the other hand, George might pay back Bud Selig for levying the luxury tax on him by turning Miller Field into a used-car lot.

  But why bother shopping at Wal-Mart when you can afford Tiffany’s? The Yanks much prefer to spend their $183 million or so on superstars, who they pay like gods, and middle relievers, who they pay like superstars. Here are the available figures for the current Yankee payroll, broken down by player:4

  OK, let’s break this down:◆ A-Rod’s contract is huge, but thanks to the kind of perverse socialism that only exists among owners of professional sports franchises, his former employer, Tom Hicks, is paying a hefty chunk.

  ◆ They paid Kevin Brown about $3 million to punch a clubhouse wall (after being spanked by the Sox during the regular season, Brown broke his non-pitching hand taking his frustrations out on a wall that was clearly asking for trouble), and another five or six million went to the intestinal parasite that sidelined the psychotic pitcher for over a month. (If you factor in the parasite that crippled Giambi for several months ... sorry, Enrique Wilson, they paid a microorganism about ten times what you made. Of course, the parasite had a much better year.)

  ◆ Mussina missed almost two months—which comes to a loss of around $5.5 million—and even at his best, he’s always been not quite good enough to win post-season contests or Cy Young Awards, or to pitch perfect games. (Even his best friend calls him “Mr. Almost.”)

  ◆ Bernie Williams seems to have popped a few strings and is ready to enter his next stage of life—guitarist wannabe who is patronized by real musicians for his jock-celebrity value.

  ◆ What can you say about Gary Sheffield, who’s either a transparent liar or so dumb that, as he claims, he thought the steroid “cream” he was sold by a juice-peddling member of Barry Bonds’s entourage at the now-infamous BALCO lab was some sort of high-octane Tiger Balm. While Sheff had a great year, the possibility of his indictment by John Ashcroft and subsequent disciplinary action from Major League Baseball could cause the team big problems, especially if it happens after free-agent hunting season. Future: Joins uncle Dwight Gooden in special Detox Wing of the Hall of Fame.