Yankees Be Damned

Seventeen miles from Lexington, Mass., is the town of Dracut, cradle of another American revolution, in which the defiant act of a single citizen has threatened an oppressive empire.

Karen Vergakes, a youth softball coach in Dracut, told officials of her league last April that she and her team of 10- to 13-year-old girls no longer wished to be called the Yankees. "One of the mothers said to me, 'It's about time someone had the courage to do this,'" recalls Vergakes. "Players had been telling me, 'Coach Karen, we can't have that name.'"

Because the league already had a Red Sox, the Yankees were allowed to become the Spinners, in homage to the nearby Lowell Spinners, a Class A affiliate of the Boston Red Sox. If not exactly a Shot Heard Round the World, Vergakes's stand was a call to arms in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, where trembling Little Leaguers have dreaded drawing the black bean of the Yankees nickname for more than half a century. "We've heard of kids crying when they're told they'll be playing for the Yankees," says Tim Bawmann, general manager of the Lowell Spinners, who hatched a program this winter to provide uniforms for any youth team in the state that changes its name from Yankees to Spinners, in much the way that some troubled cities provide cash to people who turn in their handguns.

In New England, youth teams often hold Opening Day ceremonies that include a parade. "When the Yankees are announced," says Bawmann, "they get booed."

"It's true, and it's kind of sad," says Lou Cobuccio, who has sat on the board of the Tewksbury (Mass.) Youth Baseball League for seven years. "We've been seeing it for some time now. We have a T-ball team called the Yankees--these are 4 1/2- to 6-year-old kids--and they have to hear it, marching in the parade in their Yankees' stuff." It takes a village to raze a child.

And so Tewksbury Youth Baseball has eliminated six Yankees teams, and Highland Little League has buried two more in a growing necropolis of Mass. graves.

Highland has retained a squad of Yankees T-ballers who get to keep their T-shirts when the season ends, a Pyrrhic perk in Massachusetts, where Yankees of every pinstripe are Posada non grata. "Boys on the baseball Yankees have told my daughter they burn their shirts after the season," says Vergakes, whose 10-year-old girl, Nikki, will play for Mom's Spinners team this season.

The Lowell Spinners didn't formally announce their Yankees Elimination Program until last week, but already 30 teams have abandoned the Yankees name, including even one from a youth bowling league. "We called nearly every [baseball] league in the state and found that close to half of them had already eliminated the Yankees name," says Jon Goode, communications director of the Lowell Spinners.

Now the Spinners are working on the other half and hoping that YEP spreads, like an antivirus, to the whole of New England. "We heard from the coach of a Yankees team who would walk his kids to an ice cream stand after games and they'd get harassed," says Bawmann. "At the ice cream stand!"

Bawmann stresses that this Bronx cheer is "all in good fun" and that the Spinners are not unaware of the program's inevitable dividend of publicity. This is, after all, the franchise that held Birth Night, in which 30 very pregnant women were seated behind home plate, eight ambulances at the ready, with the first lady to go into labor winning a year's supply of diapers. The team has honored Angel, the daughter of Michael Jackson's chimp, Bubbles. And in an entirely unrelated promotion, the Spinners held a Peter Gammons look-alike night. Their bobblehead giveaway in the likeness of Lowell native Jack Kerouac was so popular that the doll is enshrined in Cooperstown.