Baseball? It's just a game - as simple as a ball and a bat. Yet, as complex as the American spirit it symbolizes. It's a sport, business - and sometimes even religion. ~Ernie Harwell, "The Game for All America," 1955
When Douglass Wallop penned the 1954 novel The Year The Yankees Lost the Pennant, he had no idea what a historical foreshadowing he had just captured in his work. Written during a time in which the New York Yankees were dominating Major League baseball, the novel was adapted into a musical by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross and appropriately entitled Damn Yankees.
Opening on 5/5/55, the musical's protagonist, Joe Boyd, a disgruntled lifetime fan of the ever-defeated Washington Senators to long time nemesis New York Yankees proclaimed, "I'd sell my soul for one long-ball hitter!"
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