Your Yankee Superfandom Is Not Welcome

Interesting story about the paranoid corporate buffoonery of the Yankees who decided that novelist Jane Heller's "Confessions of a She-Fan" was "too controversial" to be a part of the Yankees' Opening Day commemorative program.

Heller wrote an extensive blog post about the spat, wondering why a full-page ad for her book, which from my understanding is sort of a love letter to the team, was not approved:

While my book does have enough salty language to make a sailor blush, it's hardly "controversial," unless you count the night I begged my husband to follow A-Rod into a restaurant men's room so I'd have a funny anecdote to write about.

When I told a friend what had happened, she said sarcastically, "So the Yankees blackballed their #1 fan. Good PR on their part."

This incident has become popular thanks to today's Page Six mention and Heller has received plenty of support, even an offer from another publishing house to run her ad in a Yankee Stadium commemorative edition. The person at this company shared their own tales of the difficulty of dealing with the Yankees, including this incident that happened with a furniture company that wanted to advertise in the Yankees program:

This company designed an ad for the Yankees program showing a row of seats at the Stadium, one of which had a type of office chair super-imposed on it. George Steinbrenner wouldn't approve the ad because he thought the office chair was too wide and would insinuate that Yankee fans were fat.

It's stories like these that almost make the Seinfeld caricature of Steinbrenner seem remarkably accurate. The Yankees And I Are Going Through A Rough Patch [Confessions Of A She-Fan]