Introduction: The Urban Legends

The New York Yankees have long been the most storied franchise in sports. But not all the stories are true.

No, even the most famed of teams has been misremembered, misrepresented, misunderstood, and otherwise mis’ed through history’s many tellings and re-tellings. All along, the fictional has co-existed with the factual, rumors have mingled with reality, exaggerations have mixed with exactitudes.

Much of the mis’ing problem, no doubt, comes from the way that Yankee lore traces well back into the 1920’s and 1930’s, an era with very different standards of journalism. From that long-bygone time until at least the 1960’s, baseball was treated more as entertainment than as news, and otherwise bored beat reporters felt perfectly free to craft semi-fictional tales selling the game through some measure of color, humanity, humor, what-have-you; long-retired chroniclers freely confessed that they polished quotations beyond all recognition, covered up unpleasant incidents, concocted others, and generally acted as public relation flacks without portfolio.* They were more storytellers than straight-up news reporters.


*My favorite example of the old ways: years afterwards, it was revealed that sometime in the 1920’s, a married player ran through the aisle of a crowded railroad car, naked, trailed by an equally naked woman clutching a knife.
Who was she? What was with the cutlery?
Who knows?
The ‘reporters’ at hand glanced up, chuckled, and promptly went back to their poker hands. They’d never heard of Woodward and Bernstein.


Just as long as they didn’t shade matters so much as to be completely implausible- an iguana escape couldn’t be passed off as a Godzilla rampage- the media saw the unannounced forays into creative writing as a means to go about the ultracompetitive business of selling newspapers and books in New York, the most ultracompetitive city of them all.

That long legacy of less-than-scrupulous reportage meant that Yankees images were, very often, ‘legendary’ in the original sense of the term- their essential realities were grafted onto elements of the fanciful, the made-up. They contained some truth, alright, but it was rarely just the truth and nothing but the truth. In all the tale-telling, for instance, Mickey Mantle wasn’t just blessed with immense strength and speed, but with nearly-superhuman powers, and Yogi Berra wasn’t just the author of a handful of memorable quips, but something like a one-man comedy festival. And so on. Almost always, the original depictions were focused on selling, selling, selling, then took on a life of their own because those who should have known better basically 1) didn't know better, 2) didn't care, or 3) didn’t want to rock the boat.

Another significant factor in the creation of Yankee mythology was the extreme nature of the franchise itself. It goes without saying that, for nearly 90 years, it’s been the National Pastime’s true flagship- home to the most championships, workplace of the most Hall of Famers, most familiar touchstone to everything from personalities and rivalries and traditions and virtually everything else that makes baseball baseball. Surely the Yankees own the all-time franchise record for all-time franchise records, so when commentators need to put a new spin on the club’s already stupendous essentials, they’ve been tempted to puff them up so they’re even larger than life.

Babe Ruth, for instance, possessed a personal charisma and cultural impact to match his on-field accomplishments, so it’s no wonder that he tended to attract all manner of wild rumors, controversies, and claims in the way that magnets attract steel. Much of it- from whatever basis - endured because it tapped into the public’s ready fascination with his entire persona. Lou Gehrig, similarly, has always been linked to figures like Wally Pipp and Cal Ripken, Jr. because the connections, however misconceived, seemed to highlight Gehrig’s essential qualities. Closer to the present day, Reggie Jackson’s undeniable flair for the dramatic and Derek Jeter’s sense of cool have provided a hook for more punched-up copy.

Anyway, this book is a long overdue attempt to deal with all that not-truth, to retire some sacred cows, to knock over a few apple carts, to bull-rush a couple of china shops, to crash a few conventions. Its skeptical spirit seems long overdue, but might invite some other questions of its own, so best to get that out of the way right away.

For one thing, a few fans might simply prefer their team history as is, and that’s fair enough. They shouldn’t buy this book. The following chapters are all about revisiting the Yankees’ old retrospectives and, where appropriate, replacing them with something more sound and reliable; it’s just the kind of thing hard-line traditionalists will hate. They should stick with Santa Claus.

Others might see a critique of Yankee myths as a veiled attack on the team itself, as an indirect means to ‘cut them down to size’. Not so.

For the record, I’m a big Yankee fan. Have been ever since dad took me, age five, to see the ‘Bronx Zoo’ team of 1977, and researching the Yankees’ miscellaneous myths has only made me admire the franchise even more. I’ve found that, in more than a few instances, their most memorable moments have been even more wondrous than we’ve been led to believe and, even when that wasn’t the case, it was alright. The Yankees aren’t so very delicate. They don’t need old wives’ tales to make them the most extraordinary team of them all- they’re all that without the extra hoo-ha, thankyouverymuch. Always have been, always will be.

Finally, there’s the question of accuracy. A skeptic/reader has every right to say “well, Mr. Smarty-Pants Author, who I’ve never heard of, how do you know your answers are so 100% reliably exactly right?”

To that the only honest answer is: “I don’t.”

In most every instance, some measure of credible evidence and stats provide solid rejoinders to some pretty flimsy notions. I mean, there are objective facts and black-and-white numbers that tell us that the ’79 Yankees didn’t collapse after Thurman Munson’s death and Yankee Stadium was, in all but name, demolished long ago. These may be inconvenient facts and ignored numbers, but they do exist, and they declare that what most commentators and fans think they know just ain’t so.

Beyond that, admittedly, there are some cases that will never be completely closed.

Much has been lost in the mists of time, so it is, indeed, within the realm of possibility that the Pittsburgh Pirates were, in fact, swept out of the 1927 World Series because they were demoralized by their opponents’ pre-game batting practice. I wasn’t there- not even my grandpa was there- so I can’t claim any metaphysical certainty over what went down on that particular day. Me and grandpa weren’t witnesses to the Babe’s ‘called shot’ incident, either, and, in the world of worlds, I acknowledge there is the slimmest of chances that Reggie Jackson possesses a 160 IQ. That sort of thing. There’s no first-hand, iron-clad information on those issues, and many more besides, so the cases against them, no matter how persuasive, has to be circumstantial in nature.

Still, even where it’s been impossible to come up with infallible answers to everything, it’s often been possible to produce some significantly better answers to alot. That’s what this book is about. It’s for anyone who wants to examine, re-examine, think, and re-think what’s behind the New York Yankees’ most popular myths, legends, and lore.

C’mon. Let’s go.

‘The Truth About Ruth (And More):

Posted 2/14/2009 @ 7:58 PM | New Book- 'The Truth About Ruth (And More)'