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Those Damned Yankees
The Not-So-Great History of Baseball's Evil Empire
By Clarke Canfield

$15.95
Softcover, 196 pages, Sports/New England
ISBN: 0-9763231-2-5


 

ABOUT THE BOOK
This book is for the people all over the globe who hate the New York Yankees and all they represent.

Countering the myth of New York Yankee infallibility, Those Damned Yankees: The Not-So-Great History of Baseball's Evil Empire relates the trials and tribulations of baseball's most hated team and serves as the definitive guide for those who hate them.

Author Clarke Canfield, a long-time New England journalist and current reporter with The Associated Press, relates every rich and juicy detail – the disastrous seasons, the blowout losses, the infantile behavior of players, the horrible trades and all the crushing playoff and World Series defeats. It is a book to warm the hearts of Yankee haters and true baseball fans everywhere.

"I've been writing this book since I was born," says Canfield. "I wanted to sort through the mounds of Yankee hype and get to the truth about why any intelligent baseball fan – in or out of Red Sox Nation – must hate the Yankees."

Canfield has enlisted the help of some well-known media personalities and sports reporters to help him relate the intense emotions that are stirred by those who wear pinstripes. The book features essays by former Red Sox pitcher Bill "Spaceman" Lee, Dale Arnold of WEEI radio, Tom Caron of NESN, Kevin Thomas of the Portland Press-Herald, John Holyoke of The Bangor Daily News and Kevin Witt of the Times-Herald Record of Middletown, New York.

REVIEWS
"If it isn't the best baseball book I've read, it's darn close."
– The Community Leader

"Red Sox fans have a New Best Friend. ... I don't know when I have enjoyed any book more."
– Bangor Daily News

"This is a very funny and revealing expose of the team people love to hate."
– Kennebec Journal

"It's refreshing to find a book that will tell it like it is. That is not afraid to face the Evil Empire. A book and an author willing to look at flaws and expose cracks. I admire Mr. Canfield for his candid, albeit, comedic point of view."
– MaineToday.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Clarke Canfield, a native of Boston who comes from a long line of Yankee haters, has hated the Yankees since birth. The experience of the Red Sox beating the Yankees to win the American League Pennant in 2004, and then going on to win the World Series, was so sweet that he was inspired to write Those Damned Yankees as a tribute to all the baseball fans who hate the Yankees just as much as he does and for just as long.

Canfield has been a journalist for more than 25 years. He currently works for The Associated Press and previously worked at daily newspapers in Arkansas, Nashville, and Maine. He has been an editor at three magazines and also has worked as a freelance writer. He earned a degree from the University of Denver and a master's degree in journalism from Boston University. He now lives in South Portland, Maine, where he plays baseball with his son and roots against the Yankees.


EXCERPT
“ I was barely old enough to ride when I began clothespinning baseball cards to my bicycle spokes. Not just any cards, mind you – Yankee cards.

It was the mid-'60s, and I was an avid baseball card collector. I had hundreds of them that I kept in an old 6.5-gallon popcorn tin in the corner of my bedroom. The players from other teams stayed in the tin can, to be looked at and studied until I remembered every single statistic (down to pinch hits and bases on balls) from every single card.

But the Yankee cards – Mantle, Maris, Ford, Pepitone, Kubek, Richardson and the others – were given special treatment. I jammed them into my bicycle spokes and rode with the wind until the cards were torn to shreds, clickety-click by clickety-click.

My friends weren't so particular about which cards they stuck onto their spokes – any old one would do for them as long as they achieved the desired clickety-click effect. But my loathing of the Yankees reached depths they could only imagine. I was a Boston native, transplanted to the St. Louis suburbs in the mid-'60s. I recalled the headlines of merciless poundings the Red Sox endured at the hands of the Yankees. I knew the stories of the smug and cocksure Yankee dominance. Hating the Yankees was in my blood, a longtime Boston tradition, and I wasn't about to fail to do my part.

So it was only natural that when it came to spoke-jamming, the Yankees were the cards of choice for my red Schwinn three-speed. I'd ride in a flash until the clicking of the cards was so fast it became a whir like a plane's propeller. And what became of the cards? They tattered and frayed and shredded and virtually disintegrated, to my delight. If they fell off the spokes, I'd turn around and run over them, with a big old grin stretched across my face.

The years passed and Yankee players came and went. But my ill will toward the team remained constant – and became stronger once I moved back to New England as an adult. There were new sets of Yankee characters to hate: Jackson, Nettles, Dent, Jeter, Strawberry, Posada, A-Rod and former Red Sox players like Clemens and Boggs. I even hated the good guys, like Mattingly, just because they wore pinstripes. At the top of the list was Steinbrenner, a symbol of greedy arrogance.

I look back on those spoke-jamming years with fondness. I'm sure I destroyed a valuable Mickey Mantle or Roger Maris card along the way, possibly throwing away a future small fortune for the jubilation of the moment. That realization, though, just gives me one more reason to hate the Yankees. ”