The Juju Rules: Or, How to Win Ballgames from Your Couch: A Memoir of a Fan Obsessed

Contents

Title Page

Contents

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Prologue: When Ari Met Seely

Opening Day

Off the Wall

Swept Away

The Dice of God

Bobby, Mickey, and the Duke

The Two-Second Threshold

Rudy May Not

Yankee Love

The Yankee Crier

The Hoosier Show Lounge Massacre

Thurman

George Brett

The Ultimate Yankee Fan

Damned Fool

Tar

New Hampshire

Touching the Stone

Jay-bird

The Knot

George Steinbrenner Must Die

Frank Crosetti

Peyer

The Trip

The Rizzutonic Verses

Yankee Incentive Rewards

Bringing the Neg

Alphonso

Apocalypse

Iraq

Glavin

Epilogue: The Yard

Postscript

Remembering Lindsay

About the Author

Connect with HMH

First Mariner Books edition 2013

Copyright © 2012 by Hart Seely

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

www.hmhco.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Seely, Hart, date.

The juju rules : or, how to win ballgames from your couch : a memoir of a Yankee fan obsessed / Hart Seely.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-547-62237-8 (hardback)

ISBN 978-0-544-00220-3 (pbk.)

1. New York Yankees (Baseball team)—Miscellanea. 2. New York Yankees (Baseball team)—Humor. I. Title.

GV875.N4S44 2012

796.357'647471—dc23

2011036905

Cover design by Martha Kennedy

Cover photograph by Guy Jarvis

eISBN 978-0-547-62239-2

v3.0317

Article on page 201 used with the permission of the Associated Press copyright © 2011. All rights reserved.

Photo on page 269 © Madeline Seely.

To the Secret Yankee Club

and secret Yankees everywhere

★

Acknowledgments

★

The author wishes to thank the following people for their support and encouragement in the writing of this book: Allan Burnett, Justin Chamberlain, Carsten Sabathia, John D. Damon, Phillip D. Coke, Philip J. Hughes, C. Edward Gaudin, E. Scott Hinske, Alfredo Aceves, B. Anthony Bruney, Nicholas Swisher, Melky A. Cabrera, Brett M. Gardner, Susan Canavan, Jorge Rafael (Villeta) Posada, Robinson J. Cano, Bruce Nichols, Ramiro (Gauna) Pena, Dámaso (Sabinon) Marté, Barbara L. Jatkola, David Robertson, Jerry Wayne Hairston Jr., David McCormick, Andrew E. Pettitte, Jose Benjamin (Matta) Molina, M. Charles Teixeira, Francisco Cervelli, Alexander E. Rodriguez, Captain Derek Sanderson Jeter, and the Honorable Reverend Mariano Rivera.

Note: Since its inception in June 2007, the author’s alternative Yankee reality website IT IS HIGH! IT IS FAR! IT IS . . . caught (johnsterling.blogspot.com) has generated more than 1.5 million page loads.

Most important, since IT IS HIGH! was launched, the Yankees have won 60 percent of their games—a rate significantly higher than the franchise’s all-time winning percentage of 57.8.

I believe these extra wins are a direct result of the website’s surgically targeted juju transmissions.

This writer has faithfully sought to describe the events of his life as accurately as possible, without the distortions of eloquence or wit.

Nevertheless, some readers may chafe at the detailed descriptions, accounts, and other use of play-by-play, which, without the expressed written consent of Major League Baseball, is prohibited.

They should rest assured that all instructions on the assembly of juju weapons have been altered slightly to render them ineffective if used on American soil against the New York Yankees.

A final note: If the book is adapted into a film, the author requests that he be depicted as sleeping with more women—specifically, the nun in chapter 10.

Prologue: When Ari Met Seely

★

True story: In 2003, I personally broke the news to Ari Fleischer—then White House press secretary in the hell-bound administration of George W. Bush—that the Yankees’ only decent starter of late, Jose Contreras, alias the Bronze Titan, had tweaked a gonad and was headed for the disabled list.

Oh, no, Fleischer said. He’s our only decent starter of late.

Ari had phoned to praise my hilarious op-ed piece in that morning’s New York Times. After a few spineless pleasantries, we cut to the glaring, red-meat issue of the day: the senior citizen kazoo band that was masquerading as the New York Yankees’ starting rotation. History will show that while Fleischer horribly understated the consequences of invading Iraq, his dire assessment of our pitching staff proved to be chillingly dead-on.

I tell this story not to boast about having a hilarious op-ed piece in the Times, an event so common that it’s beneath mention. I tell it to save a life. Your life.

Originally, I planned to model this book on John Grogan’s 2005 bestseller, Marley & Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog, the inspirational, 300-plus-page tribute to his Labrador retriever, which was later transmogrified into an Owen Wilson movie and a lucrative series of spinoffs, including the children’s book A Very Marley Christmas. Hell, I’ve had dogs. Good dogs, each one as loyal and commercially viable as Marley. I quickly conceived a project with the working title Me & Bullwinkle: Livin’ and Lovin’ with the World’s Most Commercially Viable Dog, only to realize that every writer in America would be sniffing from the same literary kibble. I foresaw the bestseller list:

Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Tricksie

Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Fluffy

Glenn Beck, Arguing with Poodles: The Continuing Assault by Untrained Lap Dogs on Our Furniture

Barack Obama, The Audacity of Bo

Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, Liv-a-Snaps for the Soul

That day brought a revelation: In our lives, baseball players fill the same niche as pets.

Think about it. Your favorite major leaguer’s career has the life span of a beagle. Some players go twenty years. Some get hit by Buicks. You’ve got your loyal Cal Ripkens, who never tire of fetching the ball, and your rabid Ty Cobbs, who need an iron muzzle and cattle-grade shock collar. Some players simply cannot be trained. You feed them, walk them, rub their tummies, but with the bases loaded and two out, they pee all over the carpet.

Applying the Marley template, I decided to write Jeet & Me, a delightful book and future motion picture about my amazing adventures with Derek Jeter. For example, there was his courageous 2004 headlong dive into the stands against Boston, his flip play at home plate in the 2001 playoffs, and his heartfelt speech in 2008 after the final game in Yankee Stadium. What about Jeet’s game-opening home run against the Mets in the 2000 Subway Series? Or the ball he hit that landed in twelve-year-old Jeffrey Maier’s outstretched glove in the 1996 postseason? Or his glorious 3,000th hit, a home run, in 2011? Let’s not forget his women: actresses, singers, supermodels, all of whom I often Google. I have so many fond memories of Derek, where would I start? (Of course, I’d store a few holiday chestnuts for A Very Jeet Christmas.)

There’s just one rub: during those inspirational Jeterian moments, I did not exist.

Generally, I have no clue where I was or what I was doing, other than that I was screaming at some cowering, defenseless TV. I was in a bar, or my living room, or hiding behind a couch—frozen like a Bond girl squealing Look out, James!—while some pitcher tried to separate Jeet from his sternum. In those situations, I was attempting to channel incalculable amounts of energy into Jeet’s astral plane, and I was surely frightening small children, most notably my own. But it’s all a thick, frothy blur. I wasn’t there. I was just watching on TV.

Good grief. At least with a dog, you get up and run around the yard. To scratch his belly, you don’t just lie on the couch and toggle a remote.

Some folks render unto humanity great gifts, such as American League pennants. Others exist to pace the rug, chew their knuckles, and watch. Sadly, I am of the latter species.

I am the wedding guest who leaves the crowded ballroom to monitor scores that scroll across the TV.

I am the father who can recite the Yankees’ Double-A pitching rotation at Trenton, but not his children’s middle school teachers.

I am one of the reasons so many people hate the Yankees, or at least Yankee fans.

I am that sad soul who is commonly introduced as the biggest Yankee fan you’ll ever meet, which is code for "Whatever you do, don’t mention the Yankees!"

I was always this way. The Yankees are the ghosts that whisper over my shoulder, the schizophrenic voice of God inside my head. In the shower, I rally the team, like Churchill addressing the collective British soul. Lying in bed, I converse with Derek, share pitching secrets with Mariano, and dispense fatherly advice to Joba.

Some say only Jesus Christ is capable of offering unequivocal love to those he will never know. They never met a Yankee fan.

But it’s not always love. Inside me lurks a dark, swaggering presence, a Yankee Mr. Hyde. I cannot control him. I cannot reason with him. He is coarse and insatiable, petty and vindictive, a truly bad sport. He cheers when enemy players get hurt. He forgives the behavior of any Yankee, knowing the only crime is losing. He would sell his soul, if he had one, for a decent bullpen lefty. When we win, he boils with the rapture of one who has been touched by God. And when we lose, he is measuring nearby bridges.

Throughout my life, I have seldom made personal decisions without seeking input from this monster, this fiend, who eyes me so disappointingly in the mirror.

I am not sure whether this book is a celebration of sports or a one-way journey into mental illness. But here goes . . .

True story: I win ballgames for the New York Yankees.

1

★

Opening Day

It starts this way. I’m scrunched up on my mother’s lap, surrounded by grownups in the flicker from an Admiral console TV, which is the size of my playpen. The image, my earliest memory, survives in black and white, except for the red lipstick smear on Mom’s cigarette filter and the front-pocket pack of Pall Malls, which forms a lump in her breast when I cuddle.

They’re watching a ballgame. I want to believe it is the epic 1956 World Series between the Yankees and Brooklyn Dodgers, when Yogi Berra not only performs a flying bear hug onto the perfect Don Larsen but also homers twice to win game seven. In a perfect world, it would be Larsen’s perfect game, but I honestly cannot say. It could be a meaningless contest against a team nobody gives a whit about, such as Boston.

I am as cute as I will ever be—curly hair, missing tooth, wandering eye—peak toddler foliage. Somebody asks a question, and it doesn’t register that the person is addressing me. I burrow into my mom’s belly, my safe house, and inhale the warmth of her breasts.

Harty, she says, they want to know who you’re rooting for.

This washes over me. I have no idea what she means.

But for the first time, I do sense one awesome concept: the universe—that is, the godlike adults who live up above the gray-blue nicotine cloud—awaits my opinion. I have the microphone and the podium. I have an audience, though no idea of what to do with it.

So I say the words that someone has planted: Yang-geez.

The house erupts with laughter and applause. For the first time, I have killed a crowd. Mom gives me a squeeze. Instead of snuggling deeper, I turn to acknowledge my fans. They fling back their heads and throw smoke at the ceiling, twiddling the ice in their tumblers, gurgling approval. They love me. Everybody loves me.

Best. Moment. Ever.

It will take years to process what just happened.

Let me tell you about my dad, Hart I. Seely Jr. He was a beery, unfulfilled, small-town cheese. He ran the Waverly Sun, the weekly newspaper that his father founded around 1910. Back then, when upstate New York boomed with windowless brick factories and shotgun housing, my grandfather—the original Hart I. Seely—launched a chain of rural papers. He was a beery, fulfilled, small-town cheese. He became a vice president of Rotary International and traveled across the country giving motivational speeches to civic boosters. Folks called him "Hart I.—for I AM!—Seely." That probably sums him up.

My grandfather died in a car crash near Watkins Glen before I was born. His death forced my dad to come home from working on the railroad, which he loved, to manage the family newspaper, which he loathed.

Today, my dad would be considered repressed, quirky, and effectively self-medicated, his life filled with rites and routines that only he understood.

Each morning, he rushed home from the office to eat lunch while watching Hollywood Squares, the first TV show dedicated to the proposition that all men are not created equal: some are celebrities. Dad loved that show, lies and all. He could accept that the stars received their questions in advance, even though it reeked of the scandals that years earlier had nearly gutted America’s game show industry. He recognized that the basic rules of morality were suspended in the presence of fame, even the B-list variety, the Florence Hendersons and Robert Q. Lewises, who owed much of their fame to being famous.

What riled him was how the great game of tic-tac-toe had been subverted.

My dad used a stopwatch to determine the exact amount of game play in an average twenty-four-minute Hollywood Squares, if one disregarded the time wasted on celebrity–host banter. He calculated that one episode offered less than two minutes of actual game action. This infuriated him. Whenever Rose Marie started yapping with Peter Marshall, Dad would blurt, Jesus Christ! Let’s get this round in! If, with three minutes left in the show, a contestant picked Paul Lynde, Dad would slam his glass on the desk and yell, It’s over, damn it! We won’t have enough time! He claimed to have written the producers a nasty letter. They never responded.

Throughout his life, my dad raced against time. He’d ram our Ford station wagon across Waverly, touching the brakes only to make them squeal. From the backseat, it was like watching futuristic sequences from Grand Theft Auto. At every stop, he’d fume at the enemy drivers. Any day now, Lady Bird! he’d yell. We’re waiting, Lord Buckington! Make your move, Queenie! But when Queenie made her move, he would goose the gas and try to beat her through the intersection. Okay, Your Highness, you wanted it? You got it!

In those face-offs, my mom usually sided with Queenie. "Make your own move! she’d bark from the death seat. Don’t blame her! You’re the one using both lanes!"

Thank you, Louise, he would grumble, squeezing the wheel. "Thank you so much for supporting me as a loving wife and . . . Hey, Helen Keller, you don’t see a stop sign?"

My friends in Little League appreciated Dad’s disdain for the pretensions of adulthood. Once, at the annual father-son game, he pulled his shirt out of his pants and staggered around with a hip flask, pantomiming a drunk who was trying to bribe the umpires. He had everyone crying. Your old man, a teammate said, he don’t give a shit. From a kid, this was the highest compliment to be paid, the Nobel Prize in Parenthood.

Later, when our football team beat Bath High School, Dad’s front-page headline boasted, WAVERLY TAKES BATH, COMES OUT CLEAN. When we lost to Thomas Edison High School near Elmira, he wrote, EDISON SHORT-CIRCUITS RED-AND-WHITE’S CHARGE. On one legendary weekend, Dad showcased his carpentry skills to my Cub Scout troop by disassembling a sawhorse and nailing it back together—only to find an extra piece. We never figured out where it came from or where it was supposed to go. It stood in the corner of our garage, a reminder of the mysteries of life that lurked everywhere, even in Waverly, New York.

In football, my father claimed to root for the Dallas Cowboys and Los Angeles Rams, because they are the cities that killed the Kennedys! Hearing this, the stunned audience would search his deadpan face for a sign that he was joking and then giggle nervously after none was brokered. But as Dad aged, and as he drank, his punch lines grew louder, though not funnier, and some of the darkest ones ossified into angry political opinions, as if his worldview was being molded by the half-baked zingers of some bad comedy routine. The words he once spoke to provoke shocked reactions now became his core beliefs. I’d hear the whispers: Whatever you do, don’t get him started . . .

But on this day, in the TV room, as I nuzzle Mom’s pack of cigarettes, there is one joke that everyone knows to be absolutely, 100 percent real—which means it is no joke at all: my dad has an all-consuming hatred of the New York Yankees.

It centers his identity. It is his mission statement. He often says he hates the Yankees more than he hates life itself. His favorite team: APY—Anybody Playing the Yankees. He hates Mickey Mantle. He hates Whitey Ford. He hates Yogi Berra—if such a thought can be imagined. He says, when times look bleak, he thinks of a Yankee loss, and the sun comes out, the roses bloom, and God smiles.

Yes, the God of my father hates Yogi Berra, too.

So on this day, in the moment of my greatest triumph, the Seely clan is gathered, and—who knows, maybe Don Larsen is throwing his perfect game. My dad is hunched over and shackled down, the son of the local big fish, stuck in the town he spent his youth vowing to escape. John Fitzgerald Kennedy is alive, Derek Sanderson Jeter is not, and Lawrence Peter Berra has yet to reexperience déjà vu for the first time. When the gallery asks me to name my favorite team, it is not my answer—Yang-geez—that moves the applause needle into the red. No, their laughter stems instead from Dad’s death mask expression, as he shakes his head, lowers his eyes, blows out his cheeks, and takes a long, hard pull from his glass.

Yeah, somebody coached me. It had to be him. But he didn’t foresee the outcome.

This day, for unexplained reasons, I become a lifelong Yankee fan. I’m Peter Parker, bitten by the radioactive spider. From that moment on, every molecule inside me is changed. I become the Yankee boy, the lunatic fan, bent in a direction that ensures that my father and I will always collide—even if, when we hit, we smash into neutrinos.

We will quarrel over lineups. We will fight over balls and strikes. We will argue over whether Roger Maris belongs in the Hall of Fame (he does, by the way), and whether Thurman Munson is better than Carlton Fisk (he wasn’t, by the way). At times, we will stop talking altogether. At times, we will tell each other to go to hell.

Today, I realize my father’s intentions. He was pushing my buttons, the ones he’d installed, perhaps without knowing it. The Yankees were the one subject that shouldn’t matter, the one harmless disagreement where a father and son should always find safe harbor. Who really cared if Munson was better than Fisk? Seriously, who really cared?

He just didn’t see what was coming.

THE ART OF JUJU

Before he retired from broadcasting in 1996, Phil Rizzuto made it a point never to switch topics during a Yankee rally. He might be recounting a recent trip to Utica, a story with no remote connection to the game. As long as the Yankees kept hitting, Phil would keep talking about Utica—a stream-of-consciousness filibuster that eventually would include a few lucky restaurants and car dealerships. Later, if the Yankees needed a run, he’d resurrect the Utica trip, just to see if any magic remained in the tank.

Gotta get back to Utica, White! he’d yell to his partner, Bill White. "Amazing town! Had a great meal at . . . Base hit by Murcer!"

My dad hated Rizzuto. He called him a fool, a laughingstock, a clown—and he prosecuted Phil’s every gaffe with the rage of a Salem witch judge. Often, late in a game, Dad would crank down the TV volume and launch a furious, point-by-point rebuttal to everything Rizzuto had said. This usually continued well beyond the postgame show and sometimes deep into the night, unspooling into ever higher magnitudes as I marched up to bed.

Phil’s tangents never bothered me. I knew exactly what he was doing. He was trying to win us a ballgame. And he was not alone.

I don’t watch Yankee games. I work them. I pour myself into each pitch, certain that my movements, my physical and mental actions, have an impact—and that somehow, I matter.

I sit one way when the Yankees are at bat, another way when they’re in the field. If three Yankees get consecutive base hits, I note where I am and what I am doing. It’s instinctive. It’s beyond my control. Some region of my brain records stance and whereabouts, then scours the universe for a psychic link to the game, like a police scanner roaming for signals. If I’m in the kitchen, as long as the Yankee hits keep coming, I’ll stay planted. If I’m on the phone, I’ll keep talking—my own private Utica. I never tamper with Yankee success.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not a fool, a laughingstock, or a clown. It takes at least three hits to sell me on a juju position. I agree with the supervillain Auric Goldfinger, who explained to James Bond, Once is happenstance; twice is coincidence; three times is enemy action.

That was a man who recognized the power of threes. So did the architects of baseball. Three strikes, you’re out. Three outs per inning. Three outfielders. Three bases. Nine fielders—three times three. Twenty-seven outs—three times three times three. Babe Ruth wore three. He hit sixty home runs, twenty times three, in 1927. Three is the first odd prime number. America put three golf balls on the moon. Bad luck happens in threes. And when the Yankees record three straight hits, it’s not happenstance, it’s not coincidence, it’s not Toronto pitching. Something has flared in the universe, and if you want to win the game, damn it, it’s no time to switch chairs.

Listen: I am not a kook.

Friends will tell you I’m a straight thinker, a realist, a regular guy. I don’t do hooey. No shaking of beads. No pyramids, no magnets, no crop circles in Area 51. Aside from my father’s sawhorse, I have yet to meet a mystery that cannot be explained through third-grade science. I don’t believe in UFOs, Bigfoot, or Nessie. I don’t even believe that for every drop of rain that falls, a flower grows. Seriously, do the math.

I’m normal. Get it? I drive six miles over the speed limit because the cops can’t nail you at six. I keep library books an extra day because they give you a grace period before the overdue fine kicks in. I’m too educated to play the lotto, too disciplined to run off with a floozy, too wily to get caught checking girlie websites at work. I married a great woman and raised three great kids. When I walk down the street, people say, There goes a run-of-the-mill, totally average, regular slob. Just don’t get him started on the Yankees.

Because when the Yankees lose, I blame myself. Always have.

Listen: I realize there is no way my physical and mental gyrations on a living room couch in upstate New York can affect a ballgame a thousand miles away.

It cannot happen. It does not happen. It will never happen.

But what if, on a certain day, a certain person happens to move a certain way, which sends a certain wave of unknown energy particles—let’s call them Rizzutons—through a certain unexplained wormhole, causing a certain 90 mph fastball to hang like a Christmas ornament in the center of a certain batter’s wheelhouse?

I’m not saying it happens. I’m just saying that until a few years ago, we called Pluto a planet. We still don’t know what electricity is—I don’t, anyway—or why extension cords always knot up when left alone, or why elevators stop at certain floors when there’s nobody waiting to step aboard. Don’t call it happenstance. Don’t say coincidence. It’s direct action. The only question is whether it stems from friend or foe.

In my life as a Yankee fan, I have devised offensive and defensive schemes that should win at least ninety-five games per season. In most years, that clinches a wild card berth. It’s not my fault if both Boston and Tampa win ninety-six.