Thanks for the memories: Banned in the Bronx

The Yankee Hater Memoirs, 1953-2005, by Gene Hutmaker and (with some reluctance) Michael A. Hutmaker, VirtualBookWorm, 2006.

Not every author has the luxury — or even necessity — of working with a large publishing company. More and more these days, writers are going solo, finding alternate ways of getting their work to the public.

Gene Hutmaker decided to go this route with his personal reminiscences of his life as a for the the “evil empire.” In Banned in the Bronx: The Yankee Hater Memoirs 1953-2005, he recalls all the things that “turned” him, from the days of Mantle, Ford, Berra, and Stengel to the latest incarnation of Jeter, Rodriguez, Pettitte, and Girardi. Like any true hater, he revels in their pains and agonizes in their glories. Being a Yankee hater myself, I took a great deal of enjoyment out of the Bronx — “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” and all that.

Why do we become fans of a player or team or, on the flip side, how do we decide who to focus on as a source of enmity? That has plenty of psychological ramifications and is therefore out of the scope of this blog. It could purely be a contrarian issue. In our house, my wife and I are Mets fans and our daughter has been a Yankees fan since she knew what baseball was (she a spiteful little thing even then). Hutmaker’s own sons are Yankees fans. But something set off the pater and he felt compelled to blow off some steam with this book, a compilation of 50-plus years’ worth of history mixed in with personal observations, mixed in with a few off-the-field thoughts (such as the bombing of the Twin Towers. He follows a chronological approach so it’s easy to see the diametrically opposed ups and downs. My favorite chapters dealt with the 1986 season and pretty much every time the Red Sox had a better season than the Yankees.

There’s also a nice chart at the end featuring Hutmaker’s top 100 “enemies of the Empire,” including players, managers, commissioners and inanimate objects, such as the drain cover that short-changed Mantle’s career.

Books such as Banned in the Bronx are earnest endeavors or varying degrees of quality. How can one argue against things that are important enough to the author that he or she feels compelled to put in all that hard work and time. This one is among the better examples, although it still has a few flaws. The book is almost 400 pages; it could have be substantially shortened by the omission of too many statistics that don’t add much to Hutmaker’s narrative (and his con’s commentary) which is the real reason to read Banned.