Those Damn Yankees: The Secret Life of America's Greatest Franchise [Hardcover]

Dean Chadwin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 1999

It was the perfect season. In 1998, baseball's fans thrilled to Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire's home run slugfest and the Yankees won more games in a season than any team in Major League history. Baseball boomed across the US but the biggest bang was in New York where millions celebrated at a victory motorcade along the Avenue of Heroes. It takes courage, and perhaps a little perversity, to decline an invitation to such a party, but Dean Chadwin was otherwise engaged. In a savvy, discursive look at the Yankees' 1998 season Chadwin questions whether the foundation of the team's victory, unmatched television revenues being used to buy the best players, might not spell the end of competition and declining public interest in the national game. Records tumbled, Chadwin contends, less because of unprecedented excellence than as a result of grotesquely unequal competition between the haves and have-nots of the Major League, an imbalance which shows every sign of getting worse. Chadwin's irreverent journey is taken on rarely traveled byways through the Yankee legend: a century of fan misbehavior, the roots of statistical obsessions, the corrupt ties between the game and the media, and fraught attitudes toward race and sexuality which continue to haunt the franchise today. Readers are seated on the bleachers to hear the Creature's fifth inning anthem 'YMCA', sung to the words 'Why are you gay?', and are escorted to the office of the Boss as he shafts Darryl Strawberry, sues his partners, and tells Mayor Rudy Giuliani that, if he is good, he'll be allowed to donate hundreds of millions of public money toward a new stadium. Those Damn Yankees sounds a warning on the future of baseball as it abandons the spellbinding tension of closely fought games for one sided charades dressed up as tv spectacles. Such a shift will likely sustain the Yankee's winning streak and will certainly ensure even bigger profits for the top sides' owners, but it will sadly leave many of the game's truest fans outside the gate.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Chadwin, himself a New Yorker, may need to travel the streets of his city more cautiously. While he presents a thorough, well-considered assessment of the history and current status of baseball's most venerable institution, Chadwin can't seem to find much good in the team's past or present; from the fans (chiefly the "Bleacher Creatures"--the cheap-seat-inhabiting zealots described here as homophobic, obnoxious, and insensitive) to the owner (Now that's a new idea: criticizing George Steinbrenner!) to beloved manager Joe Torre and the players themselves, he spares virtually no one in his criticism of the team.

Though many of Chadwin's critiques ring true, the same complaints could be made of countless other top athletic teams, in baseball and elsewhere. Still, he does acknowledge that professional sports are a business rather than a microcosm of society (as so many of us, particularly sportswriters, want to believe); Yankees fans, it must be said, are particularly savvy in this regard: "Within the Yankee Nation ... fans embrace a 'Just Win, Baby' belief system because they know that the game contains no unique moral dimension that elevates it above other human endeavors." No matter what, Americans--and, most importantly, New Yorkers--will continue to love them. --Leah Ball

From Library Journal

It wouldn't be much of a stretch if this highly critical study of the New York Yankees past and present were to pin the ebola virus or ethnic cleansing in Kosovo on the Yanks. (New York-based writer and attorney Chadwin points out, for instance, that Phillies general manager Herb Pennock, who threatened to pull his team off the field to protest the Dodgers' hiring Jackie Robinson, was a former Yankee. Are we to infer that Pennock came by his racism through his association with the "Yankee Nation"?) But despite his hammering at the Yankees, Chadwin's true target remains cloudy. Is it the Yankees? Is it major league baseball, rife with the same sins he ascribes to New Yorkers? Owner George Steinbrenner, who has deservedly worn bull's-eyes for years? Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who is portrayed as Steinbrenner's partner in crime? Despite its cogent discussions of racism in baseball and the devolution of major league franchises into haves and have-nots, this is recommended only for libraries with comprehensive sports collections or those located in the New York area. AJim G. Burns, Ottumwa P.L., IA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Verso Books; illustrated edition edition (May 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1859847137
• ISBN-13: 978-1859847138
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,176,512 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Wholly without a point, May 2, 2004

By 

Eric San Juan (Brick, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Those Damn Yankees: The Secret Life of America's Greatest Franchise (Paperback)

It's hard to find anything to like about this book.

Not surprising, as author Dean Chadwin finds it hard to find something to like about, well, anything.

Chadwin's book is puzzling. While most works of non-fiction have a point - chronicling an era or person or event, informing about a topic, or editorializing on an issue - Chadwin seems to have forged ahead with little point outside the notion that the Yankees are not only the Great Evil of baseball, but one of the great evils of the world. If he could have pinned the first World War on the Yankees, he would have.

Space is allotted for diatribes on racism (the Yankees, you'll note, are a racist organization), homophobia (the Yankees have a special something that draws homophobes to the team, it seems), bad business (the Yankees are Enron and Standard Oil rolled into one) and New York politics (no, we're unsure how this is relevant to the team allegedly being chronicled, but darnit, Rudy is a bad guy). Chadwin makes it a point to tell us Steinbrenner is a bad guy (really?), that Yankee players are all tainted (they were, after all, Yankees), that most bad people around baseball can be traced back to the Yankees (he will bend over backwards to link bad behavior and the team), and that the so-called "bleacher creatures" represent Yankee fans as a whole (a bunch of loathsome, homophobic, racist drunkards, if Chadwin's book is to be believed).

Make no mistake, the author can write. His prose never bores, the pacing is good, and he can turn a phrase. Those looking for a tome that will help reinforce their Yankee hatred will relish in this book. It's certainly well put together.

For most readers, especially those looking for a good book about baseball or the New York Yankees, this will be a book you'll want to skip. It's about neither. It's about the author's politics.

Dean Chadwin's book isn't to be skipped because its target is the cherished New York Yankees - have at them, I say - it's to be skipped because it's little more than a lengthy rant without a point by a bitter man.

At least, that's how it reads. Once. Because it's not worth reading twice.

9 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars quell the nausea, November 4, 2001

By 

Orrin C. Judd "brothersjudddotcom" (Hanover, NH USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Those Damn Yankees: The Secret Life of America's Greatest Franchise (Hardcover)

I've argued this point too often to defend it again here; let me just state it : Men are conservative. One result of this political bias is that, for the most part, sports coverage tends to be fairly conservative too. Sure, sports writers and fans may moan about player salaries and big market teams, giving themselves a faint patina of egalitarianism, but as a general rule, don't begrudge them the money much, and, for all the lip service given to competitive balance, are never happier than when great teams come along. Take Michael Jordan's Chicago Bulls for example; you never heard a peep about the gazillion dollars that Michael made or about the fact that no one else had any shot at the title. Those years, during which the NBA hit its all time peak in popularity, will be remembered for the dominance of not merely one team, but one player.

Likewise, in those years where the NFL is truly competitive and small market teams have a shot at the Super Bowl, no one watches the games. The Rams vs. the Titans may have been a nice story, but no one followed it. Meanwhile, on most other issues, fans and journalists are positively reactionary. The trend towards old style ballparks, classic uniforms, and more traditional rules are all manifestations of a core belief that most sports were better forty years ago than they are today.

So it is a rather extraordinary thing when an author pens a sports book that can truly be described as politically radical. The Yankees are to Dean Chadwin as the Soviet Union was to Ronald Reagan--the focus of evil in the modern world. This book is a frequently funny, always splenetic, only sometimes ridiculous, tirade aimed at the racism, homophobia, exploitativeness, acquisitiveness, ignorance, intolerance, duplicity, and greed of George Steinbrenner, the fans, the athletes, baseball in general, and Rudy Guliani, and the other politicians who are so eager to spend public money to keep or lure professional franchises.

Personally, I grew up in Northern New Jersey, where there were only two kinds of people. Those who rooted for the Yankees/Giants/Rangers/Knicks were the worst kind of front running filth, the kind of people who would have remained Loyalist during the American Revolution, or, were they French (and they nearly were) would have been Vichy rather than Resistance. These people expected victory as something of a birthright, and weren't particular about how it was secured. The rest of us, though we liked to see our teams win periodically (the Mets in '69, '73, '86 seemed to have an adequate pace), actually did not peg our loyalties to championships--we stuck by our squads even at their most hopeless (and perhaps only a lifelong Nets fan can truly even comprehend the meaning of the word "hopeless."). Now I live in New England, root (as one must) for the Red Sox (though still a Met fan too) and have drunk deep at the well of Yankee hatred. So I thoroughly enjoyed the sheer venom that Chadwin spews in this book. It goes over the edge in certain places and some of his political beliefs are simply too absurd to be taken seriously, but he's right on the money about what a boondoggle all of this publicly funded stadium construction is, and the book is generally such a drastic change of pace from the glut of onanistic Yankee hagiographies we've been inundated with over the years that he deserves credit just for swimming against the hegemonic pinstriped tide.

It is necessary to loathe the Yankees. And while it is not necessary to read this book in order to summon the appropriate loathing, it certainly helps. The next time some Billy Crystal/Bob Costas type wells up when talking about how the best day of his childhood was that day at the Stadium when Mickey hit two, grab this book and turn to pretty much any page, it will surely help quell the nausea.

GRADE : C

4 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Love it or hate it/love them or hate them, November 14, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Those Damn Yankees: The Secret Life of America's Greatest Franchise (Paperback)

There are really only three ways to take this book. Love the Yanks = hate the book; hate the Yanks = like the book; or, prefer an opinionated, well-researched, theoretical, political, interesting, polemical treatment of baseball over the usual insipid drivel = love the book.