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HEADLINE: Yankees Find Cheer in the Cheap Seats; Run at Baseball History Intensifies Fans' Raucous Love for Team

BYLINE: Blaine Harden, Washington Post Staff Writer

DATELINE: NEW YORK, Aug. 3

BODY:


In a season of home run theatrics, the New York Yankees do not have a serious slugger. Their home run leader, the veteran Darryl Strawberry, has a bum knee and he limps.

In an era of celebrity, the Yankees do not have a franchise-making superstar. The team's most famous face is that of the hated owner, George Steinbrenner. He keeps threatening to move his ballclub unless taxpayers build him a fancy stadium in Manhattan.

Yet these no-name Yankees are winning at a faster clip than any of the storied teams of Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle or Reggie Jackson. This story is a backdoor view of the team's run for the best record in the history of baseball, as witnessed for a week from the cheap seats, where language is vulgar, fights are frequent and the concrete flooring is slippery with spilled beer.

What goes on in the $ 7 seats in the Bronx is precisely what Steinbrenner hopes to escape with a new Manhattan stadium, where ticket prices will be much higher and climate-controlled skyboxes will be occupied by Wall Street swells who presumably won't spill beer on each other's heads.

In this summer of relentless winning, the Yankees have found a deliciously ironic way to delight blue-collar fans in the cheap seats and drive Steinbrenner nuts.

They win.

They are on track to lure more than 3 million fans into the South Bronx, the lowest-rent corner of the low-rent borough where Steinbrenner insists living conditions are "a crime" and where he says God-fearing fans are afraid to come at night to watch baseball.

Inconveniently for the Boss, attendance this season is up 17 percent, and the bleachers are jammed with ill-mannered fans who, with each Yankees win, seem to get more ornery.

Where else would the success of a sports team that wins nearly three out of every four contests be celebrated by fans who several times a game join in a rousing chorus of: "Everybody sucks!"?

What other group of baseball enthusiasts, during a day game when tens of thousands of summer-camp children are in the stadium, would stand, point at the kids and chant: "There's no Santa Claus! There's no Santa Claus!"?

Still, as this season of winning has gathered momentum, players on the field and misanthropes in the bleachers have bonded in a manner never before seen in 75 seasons at Yankee Stadium.

It started by accident in May, a day before David Wells, a pitcher better known for his paunch than his precision, threw a perfect game -- something that only one other pitcher has done in Yankees history. In retrospect, Wells's excellence -- no hits, no walks, no one reaching first -- was a harbinger of the season to come.

So, too, was what John Zenes, a lumber salesman from Matamoras, Pa., pulled off from out in the bleachers. Zenes, who has a foghorn voice, shouted the name of Yankees first baseman Tino Martinez. Astonishing everyone in the bleachers, Martinez turned around while playing his position in the first inning and wagged his glove at Zenes.

"What the hell?" thought Zenes, whose daughter's first words (after "mommy" and "daddy") were "Yankees baseball." He tried it again, this time shouting the name of the second baseman, Chuck Knoblauch. He, too, turned around and waved.

A new Yankees tradition was born in the House That Ruth Built. In the first half of the first inning of every home contest since then, the bleachers have become part of the Yankees' winning formula.

Fans shout the name of each Yankee in the field, excluding the pitcher and catcher, whom they regard as too busy to be disturbed. In the order called, players turn toward right field and flap their gloves. Some even salute.

In return, fans in the bleachers coo, high-five and wriggle with delight.

A Pursuit That Suits

All the instruments agree, baseball is back this year. Stadium attendance, television ratings, the sale of licensed merchandise are all up smartly. At the heart of the revival is Mark McGwire's assault on the single-season home run mark. The hulking first baseman for the St. Louis Cardinals is on track to demolish the best-known record in sports. McGwire, who hits home runs as far as anyone ever has, offers fans a pure act of aggression. His quest is comprehensible to even the most casual consumer of sporting news. He is pursuing records set by ballplayers that people have heard of: The 61 homers Roger Maris hit in 1961 and Babe Ruth's 60 home runs in 1927.

The Yankees, by contrast, are pursuing a record set not by legends, but by ghosts, obscure ghosts, forgotten teams with forgotten stars. The 1906 Cubs went 116-36, with a winning percentage of .763. The 1902 Pirates went 103-36, with a winning percentage of .741. The Yankees' winning percentage is now .733.

Instead of Maris or Ruth, the Yankees are chasing fractions of percentage points. For those who follow the numbers, the race is endlessly upsetting. Winning is less sweet and losing is triply sour. For every game the Yankees lose, they have to win three more just to stay even with the ghosts of baseball past.

Yet, for those who fill the cheap seats at Yankee Stadium night after night, there could not be a more appropriate goal -- at least until playoff time -- than this near-impossible hunt for historic excellence. It suits an unforgiving and often unstable crowd that hates to lose and is never satisfied with merely winning.

"The way I figure it, winning gets kind of boring, because you expect they will win. At the end of the season, I guess I will think I saw history," says Mike March, 25, a security guard in midtown Manhattan and a bleachers regular.

A Peculiar Brand of Crazy

Based on their new tradition of communing each game with each Yankees starting player, it is tempting to think of the fans in the cheap seats as part of one big, happy Yankees-support group. That is not the case. Giddy extroversion out in the bleachers is almost always married to vulgarity, belligerence and cynicism.

"This is the largest and most dysfunctional family I have ever seen in my life," explains Larry Palumbo, 27, an accountant from Syosset, N.Y., who's been sitting in the bleachers for four years.

Palumbo's dysfunctional contribution is torturing the other team's right fielder. He shouts the player's name and then, in a voice that drips malice and sexual innuendo, announces: "We got your WIFE up here."

The blend of childlike enthusiasm and vile insult infected every game of a recent Yankees homestand, beginning with a sweltering nine-hour, Monday night doubleheader against Detroit. Fans in the bleachers did not simply ridicule and harass the opposing team, they ridiculed and harassed each other.

In the evening's first game, a 17-inning marathon that lasted nearly six hours, one singularly intense Yankees fan tried to roll back the ambient cynicism. It ended badly for him.

Mr. Intensity, as he will be called, seemed to fit in among the unkempt hordes in the bleachers. He was shirtless, bearded and badly tattooed. He wore droopy blue-jeans cutoffs that showed off his Fruit of the Loom underwear. Twitchy and glistening with sweat, he was kind of a Charles Manson with pep, strutting to and fro on the walkway in front of the bleachers.

By the 15th inning, with the crowd stupefied by heat, with the score deadlocked at 3-3, Mr. Intensity grew furious at the absence of peppy intensity in the bleachers. He turned to the crowd, raised both arms over his head, bugged out his eyes and screamed: "Yankees baseball! Yankees baseball!"

A few hundred people joined the chant. But their heart wasn't in it. Had this been Baltimore or St. Louis or Seattle, perhaps there would have been more noise. But Mr. Intensity had the wrong look for New York, the wrong way of being crazy. He lacked both irony and malice. He was merely loud.

Up in the bleachers someone shouted: "Take a tranquilizer!"

Chastened, Mr. Intensity took his seat.

The 'Bleacher Creatures'

They call themselves the "Bleacher Creatures" and their queen is a 35-year-old former dancer and out-of-work caterer named Tina Lewis.

"If I don't say you're a Creature, you're not a Creature," says Lewis. "I'm in charge because I'm the one who has been here regular for 15 straight years."

She was sitting in a box seat near third base at the stadium in 1983 when she heard someone banging a cow bell out beyond right field. She followed the banging out to the bleachers and befriended Ali Ramirez, the guy with the bell.

When Ramirez died two years ago (and was buried on the day Dwight Gooden pitched a no-hitter at the stadium) it was Lewis who informed the Yankees front office and secured a moment of silence in his honor. It was Lewis who anointed the next banger of the cow bell. And it is Lewis who attempts, with limited success, to rein in the excesses of the Creatures who surround her in the bleachers.

Among those she attempts to control is Steve Krauss, 19, of Staten Island. Blessed with a big voice, he often leads several hundred Creatures in an obscene "Knock-Knock, Who's There" routine.

Krauss remembers the edgy misbehavior that first attracted him to the bleachers: "I used to sit in the upper deck. So one day this guy is ringing the cow bell down here in the bleachers. So I come over, lean out from the upper deck in right field and take a look. About 300 people are looking up at me from the bleachers and saying: 'Jump! Jump!' That struck me as funny. So I been coming down here every since."

To monitor fans who think jumping from the upper deck is funny, the Yankees have hired a former New York City policeman named Bill Boyd. He decides when boorish bad manners cross the line into illegal weirdness. Thirty years a street cop, Boyd bears a strong resemblance to New York's law-and-order mayor, Rudolph W. Giuliani. So the Creatures call him Rudy. When Boyd visits the bleachers, they greet him with a friendly chorus of "Rudy sucks!"

"It is part of the game," says Boyd, who has befriended many of the Creatures, whom he describes as "not the most sophisticated people in the world, but they know baseball."

The endless shower of insults and profanity that rains out of the bleachers has forced Boyd, working his first season as a liaison between the Yankees and the NYPD, to become something of lexicographer.

"The word 'sucks' is kind of accepted today," says Boyd.

When the Creatures use that verb intransitively, in a sentence such as "Boston sucks," Boyd says he can live with it. But when they give the verb an object, Boyd tosses them out of the stadium.

"Some people come to Yankee Stadium with the idea that it is like the zoo and they want to act like zoo people," Boyd says. "We don't let them do it. If we get an unruly group, we single out the unruliest guy and we throw him out."

In the bleachers, there are a couple of ejections per game and one or two fights. The fights usually are caused by spilled beer. No one, though, has been seriously hurt in the bleachers this year.

Most Creatures, Boyd notes, come to watch baseball, not to fight, and he says they are exceedingly knowledgeable about the game. That knowledge can push the edges of obsession.

Vanessa Candelaria, for instance, is dizzy with thoughts of Derek Jeter, the Yankees shortstop and New York heartthrob. While other Creatures are noisily questioning the sexual proclivities of the opposing team's outfielders, Candelaria maintains her focus. She believes Jeter, after his recent split from pop diva Mariah Carey, is on the market.

"I just want to meet him, know him, go out with him," says Candelaria, 21, who studies nursing at Bronx Community College and attends nearly every home game. "One of these days, I'm going to be famous and I will be able to be with him. I know that he hears me screaming for him. I know the batboy tells him that I am his number one fan out here. I remember when he started off in 1996, he got a double. I remember everything."

There are many Creatures who obsess purely on baseball. Foremost among them is Steve Lipa, 39, a messenger who works in midtown. He comes to the stadium early each game with a clipboard and several sharpened pencils. Like many blue-collar Creatures, he finds ballpark food too expensive. So he usually brings peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, crackers and an apple. He wears headphones tuned into a broadcast of the game and scores each pitch. To protect his sanity and keep beer off his scorecard, he sits well away from the noisiest of the Creatures.

"The name they give me here is Stat Man. Things just stick in my mind," he said. "I have been coming to the bleachers for 18 years. I remember stumbling upon a group of guys out here who seemed friendly. It was August of 1980 and Tommy John was pitching against the Red Sox. It was a heartbreaking loss, 4-3."

Speaking very loudly because he never takes off his headphones during a game, Stat Man describes the 1998 season as the most satisfying of his life. But he also worries about the big picture -- the future of the Yankees in the Bronx. Looking around Yankee Stadium, he grimaces and says, "We don't know whether we will see this place much longer."

The Restless Owner

There is an undertow to this season of winning.

Steinbrenner wants his team out of the ballyard that has been the stage for a record 23 World Series champions and for players like Ruth, Gehrig and DiMaggio, whose names are part of the vocabulary of American sport.

"They are the Bronx Bombers and it's great. But you have to look forward. Society has to move forward," Steinbrenner said in a radio interview this week.

The Bronx is not to the Boss's taste. He said the borough is blighted by traffic jams and inadequate parking. He claimed, too, that businesses and residents are fleeing the Bronx, although census data show that in the past 15 years more than 35,000 people have moved into the borough and President Clinton praised the place last year as one of the country's outstanding examples of urban renewal.

Steinbrenner wants what many millionaire sports franchise owners around the United States have succeeded in getting: a new stadium mostly paid for by taxpayers. Irking the Boss are polls showing that New Yorkers want the team to stay put. Although they would pay to refurbish the stadium in the Bronx, polls show they don't want to spend any public money on a new stadium in Manhattan.

The sentiment is so strong that Steinbrenner has needed the support of his friend the mayor to head off a proposed referendum that would turn popular will into law. Giuliani has obliged Steinbrenner, so far, by using technicalities in New York City election law to keep the referendum off the fall ballot. If the measure ever does reach the voters, frustrating Steinbrenner, it could trigger the departure of the Yankees from the city.

Giuliani, who has national political ambitions, would then go down in history not only as the mayor who famously reduced crime, but as the one who lost the most famous team in sports. The mayor is all too aware that, in Brooklyn, voters are still steaming over the loss of the Dodgers to Los Angeles. That was 40 years ago.

Back in the Cheap Seats

The undertow, though, is barely perceptible in the bleachers, as the Yankees keep racking up wins.

On a recent Monday-through-Friday homestand, they took four of five games, a pace just ahead of what they need to break the all-time winning percentage. They won as they usually win, with sound pitching, timely hitting, good defense and a minimum of fuss.

That is, until Friday, when extraordinary measures were needed.

It was a midsummer evening and the week's sweltering heat was swept away by a cool, dry breeze out of the north. The soupy gray sky above the stadium turned deep blue and there was a fancy lace of pink clouds.

Tina Lewis, queen of the Creatures, wore a half-dozen gold chains with gold Yankees pendants. Stat Man, pencils sharpened, headphones on, wore his lucky Yankees jersey. In addition to the usual Creatures, the bleachers were choked with couples on dates. Teenage girls wore halter tops, their perfume competing with the odor of hotdog breath.

Friday nights are always frantic for the cops and private security guards who work the bleachers. Young men show off by drinking too much. As the game began, two NYPD officers who had not worked the bleachers before were posted in front of the noisiest of the Creatures. The cops looked disgusted as they scanned the crowd.

On the field, the visiting Chicago White Sox took advantage of Yankees third baseman Scott Brosius, who muffed a ground ball and later dropped a throw that would have prevented a run.

"Aw, come on. What's with the defense tonight?" snarled Stat Man, as the Yankees entered the top of the sixth inning down 4-3.

The Creatures, unaccustomed to losing, were restless. Steve Krauss, the regular from Staten Island who often leads the crowd in the vulgar sing-along, stood in the aisles and screamed. His words, among other things, violated the rules about the use of the verb "suck."

In the bottom of the sixth, Darryl Strawberry, the 36-year-old designated hitter with the wobbly left knee, came to the plate. There were two outs and a runner on first. The count ran to three balls and two strikes before Strawberry connected with an outside fastball. It seemed at first to be just a high fly ball. But it kept going, more than 422 feet, soaring over the center field fence.

As Strawberry limped around the bases, the Creatures entered a zone of high-five delirium. They quickly turned resentful, though, in the seventh, when the two cops nearest the Creatures, having heard quite enough of Krauss, grabbed him and escorted him out of the stadium.

Strawberry's home run was all the Yankees needed. The game ended 5-4. Another win. As the bleachers emptied, the late Frank Sinatra's voice came over the public address system, as it does after every game. His "New York, New York" has become a benediction for this extraordinary season -- confirmation that even the dead want the Yankees to win and stay in the Bronx.

Standing ankle deep in bleacher trash, three 12-year-olds from New Jersey joined Sinatra: "I want to wake up in a city that doesn't sleep. . . ."

The queen of the Creatures, however, was having none of it. Tina Lewis wanted the cops to explain why they had tossed one of her boys.

"I am taking this very badly," she said.

Winning Streak

The New York Yankees this season are on pace to have one of the best records in the history of baseball.

Team Year Record Winning

percentage

Chicago Cubs 1906 116-36 .763

Pittsburgh Pirates 1902 103-36 .741

New York Yankees 1998 77-28* .733

Pirates 1909 110-42 .724

Cleveland Indians 1954 111-43 .721

Yankees 1927 110-44 .714

* As of Aug. 3



GRAPHIC: PH,,HELAYNE SEIDMAN FOR TWP, Lisa Fox gets into the loud spirit of the cheap seats as she watches a New York Yankees game from the bleachers. A police officer keeps a stern eye on spirited fans like Tina Lewis and her "Bleacher Creatures," who like to shower insults on the opposing teams. Rob Albanese and Diana Campagna, left, cheer from their cheap seats. Fans in the bleacher seats are loud, often unruly and profane, and very knowledgeable. At right, Gail Chazak wears a Deker Jeter shirt and buttons.

LOAD-DATE: August 04, 1998