Decades after it became a hit movie and musical--"Damn Yankees"--this classic baseball fable, restored to its original title, is being introduced to a new generation.
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Decades after it became a hit movie and musical--"Damn Yankees"--this classic baseball fable, restored to its original title, is being introduced to a new generation.
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Add this copy of The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant to cart. $12.99, good condition, Sold by newlegacybooks rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Annandale, NJ, UNITED STATES, published 2004 by W. W. Norton & Company.
Add this copy of The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant to cart. $14.99, very good condition, Sold by HPB-Ruby rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Dallas, TX, UNITED STATES, published 2004 by W. W. Norton & Company.
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Add this copy of The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant to cart. $16.81, good condition, Sold by Wonder Book - Member ABAA/ILAB rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Frederick, MD, UNITED STATES.
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Good. Good condition. (New York Yankees, Baseball, Fiction) A copy that has been read but remains intact. May contain markings such as bookplates, stamps, limited notes and highlighting, or a few light stains. Bundled media such as CDs, DVDs, floppy disks or access codes may not be included.
Add this copy of The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant to cart. $16.95, fair condition, Sold by Village Bookmarket rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Palmyra, NY, UNITED STATES, published 1954 by W. W. Norton & Company.
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Fair with no dust jacket. Wear, rubbing and soil to covers. Small chips/tears at corners, along edges and at spine ends. Heavy rubbing and discoloration of spine. Backstrap broken at back joint from spine head down for 2 1/2" and then torn from back to front. Front side still attached. Closed edge soiled. Binding tight, text clean. A Little Store that's BIG on Service.; Book Club Edition; 250 pages; J-2-27-09.
Add this copy of The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant to cart. $17.39, fair condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Reno rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Reno, NV, UNITED STATES, published by W. W. Norton.
Add this copy of The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant to cart. $17.43, very good condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Atlanta rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Austell, GA, UNITED STATES, published by W. W. Norton.
Add this copy of The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant to cart. $17.43, very good condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Baltimore rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Halethorpe, MD, UNITED STATES, published by W. W. Norton.
Add this copy of The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant to cart. $17.43, good condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Atlanta rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Austell, GA, UNITED STATES, published by W. W. Norton.
Add this copy of The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant to cart. $17.43, good condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Dallas rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Dallas, TX, UNITED STATES, published by W. W. Norton.
Add this copy of The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant to cart. $17.43, good condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Baltimore rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Halethorpe, MD, UNITED STATES, published by W. W. Norton.
--Read the book (YYLtP) as a kid and loved it. Picked it up a half a century later and still loved it, which is the ultimate comment to timeliness and universal appeal. It's about good old time baseball and that first love which one never quite gets over no matter how much the guarantors of the game mess with the rules and the venue.
Graustark
Apr 3, 2007
Hits it outta the park
What I don?t know about baseball would fill a baseball stadium. Which, not surprisingly, I don?t help do very often. However, I do like the idea of liking baseball, an attitude that people who love baseball treat as beneath contempt: You either like baseball, in their opinion, or you?re degenerate. Also, I like baseball novels, a taste which ditto: People who love baseball say they?re nothing like baseball. Oh yeah? I say a baseball novel might take eight hours to read and a baseball game seems to take eight hours to play. Thus is Einstein confirmed. One baseball novel I remember with special fondness is ?The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant,? by Douglass Wallop, upon which the stage and movie musical ?Damn Yankees? is based. The book was published more than 50 years ago. Wallop, a former wire-service reporter who wrote one earlier novel, ?Night Light,? died in 1985. ?The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant? is only slightest less out of circulation than its author. A paperback edition, under the title ?Damn Yankees,? was brought out in the 1990s in conjunction with the revival of the stage musical, but has since gone out of print. You may remember something of the Faustian plot: Joe Boyd, a 50-year-old real estate agent in Washington, D.C., is a never-say-die fan of the old Washington Senators, perennial also-rans of the American League. Though the book was published in 1954, it is set in 1958, when, to Joe?s unspeakable frustration, it looks as if the hated Yankees are headed for their 10th consecutive pennant and the Senators for their customary cellar. Joe sells his soul to the devil ? a Yankees fan doing business here under the name of Applegate, a crafty fellow who affects loud shirts and yellow saddle shoes and lights matches on his skin ? to transform himself into the twentyish Joe Hardy. Young Joe joins the Senators and, as a come-from-nowhere Galahad, slays the loutish Yankees and pushes his team within an inch of the pennant. Though these are the days before free agenting, Joe sells his soul on an option basis ? not for nothing is he in real estate ? and so we can sense some wriggle room here. We can also sense that, Joe being Joe, none of that wriggle room extends to the moral dilemma facing him in the form of a luscious lady named Lola. And so forth. It is not high art, but it is all good fun, mostly well-written, ends happily, and points up a few morals that don?t get pointed up all that much anymore. I think that is partly why I remembered this novel so fondly for so long. It?s not really a baseball novel; it?s a love story ? the love of a man for his wife. I know, I know ? how often does that occur in literature, right? But we must allow that it is possible for such things to happen in fiction now and then, however much they may strain the bounds of literary conventions. When Joe Boyd becomes Joe Hardy, he must leave his matronly wife behind, and he discovers he needs his wife more than a fish needs a bicycle. The bland and conformist 1950s, you know. Also, because it is the story of a man ?fated to live decently . . . even to the end of his natural life,? a man who ?felt he understood how misery had come to Midas.? Answered prayers, you know. But mostly because it is the story of a man who, at the end, loses his blind passion for baseball. Joe Hardy is transformed back into Joe Boyd in the crucial pennant-race game as he is rounding third and heading for home ? real home. Who says you can?t go home again? By way of footnote: In 1954, the year of the book?s original publication, the Yankees did lose the pennant, to Cleveland. In 1958, the year of its setting, they won both the pennant and the World Series ? over the Milwaukee Braves.
