Weather permitting, I should be at Yankees Stadium this afternoon for opening day. So, I figured I’d share one of my favorite jokes from Billy Wilder’s One, Two, Three (a film I also wrote about last week). James Cagney plays a Coca-Cola executive in West Berlin who’s supposed to be making sure his boss’ 17-year-old daughter, Scarlett (Pamela Tiffin), stays out of trouble. He does a bad job, though, because Scarlett sneaks into East Berlin, marries a young communist and gets pregnant with his child. When Cagney’s character asks the girl why she’s been helping to blow up balloons featuring the words, “Yankee Go Home”, she replies that where she comes from (Atlanta), everyone hates Yankees.

I know it’s not meant to be baseball-related, but I sometimes like to pretend that Scarlett has foreseen the ‘96 and ‘99 World Series (the film takes place a few years after the Braves beat the Yankees in the 1957 World Series, but the team wasn’t yet in Atlanta at that time). And I wonder if most Yankees fans would appreciate that line or see it as a reason to hate One, Two, Three. I’ve encountered a lot of fans of the team who are just that serious that they would probably boycott a movie that makes their Bombers sound or look bad. Here’s five such films I figure no “true” Yankees fan can admit to enjoying:

1. Damn Yankees - Obviously it’s in the title that this is anti-Yankees propaganda. Adapted from a stage musical of the same name, the 1958 film is about a Washington Senators fan who sells his soul to the devil in order to play for the team and help them defeat the Yanks for the league pennant.
2. Fever Pitch - A movie about a Red Sox fan and set during the 2004 season? No self-respecting Yankees fan was caught dead seeing this in the theater. Now, perhaps it’s less taboo since Johnny Damon, who appears in the film, has been a Yankee for awhile, but three years ago it was probably difficult for Yankee fans to accept that the rival team was given its own feature film. Even though we’ve had The Pride of the Yankees, Babe, 61*, The Bronx is Burning, That Touch of Mink and a number of other films in which our team figures prominently.
3. For Love of the Game - Never mind that we like Kevin Costner best in a baseball film or that now, after seeing Spider-Man 3, we shouldn’t mind Sam Raimi doing a movie like this one. The fact that it’s about a single game in which Costner’s character pitches a perfect game against the Yankees makes it deserving of its own t-shirt: “For Love of the Game sucks!”. There’s a guy I used to work with who’d definitely buy it.
4. Major League - Yeah, it’s got a few laughs, but lets not forget that again the Yankees are the team played against in the finale. And they lose. Another t-shirt for my old co-worker: “Major League sucks!”
5. The Bad News Bears - This one (as well as Linklater’s useless remake) is about little league baseball, but it’s still unfortunate that the Yankees are by name considered the villains. At least they win this time.