The year we wuzzen’t robbed

Damn Yankees! 1958 (111 minutes) produced and directed by George Abbott and Stanley Donen, screenplay by George Abbott, choreography by Bob Fosse, music and lyrics by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, from the novel The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, by John Douglass Wallop.

With Washington’s baseball team in the postseason for the first time in 80 years, this campy classic musical comedy celebrates that city’s long-suffering fans. It will put a smile on the face of every baseball fan who ever yelled at a television or radio over a bad call or bonehead play.

Joe Boyd (Robert Shafer) is a die-hard Washington Senators fan of the late 1950s, during one of the Yankee ‘dynastic’ periods, when the Senators held sway over the American League East cellar without the least glimmer of hope in sight, and fans like Boyd hollered at televisions and radios across the greater District of Columbia broadcast area to no avail—or almost none.

When Boyd moans that he would sell his soul for a pennant, the sympathetic, obliging Mr. Applegate (Ray Walston, better known to 1960s television kids as Uncle Martin of the series My Favorite Martian) materializes mysteriously with a proposition. Yep, that’s right: Old Nick.

Boyd and Applegate strike their bargain. Boyd becomes Joe Hardy (Tab Hunter), a 22-year-old baseball phee-nom from Samuel Clemens’ hometown Hannibal, Missouri, (played on the field in archival footage by 1957 Senators #2 Roy Sievers)—curious shades of today’s Nationals wunderkinder Bryce Harper and Stephen Strasberg.

Applegate’s pad is as purple as his prose, and tellingly has the best view in town of the U.S. Capitol Building. His helper, Broadway star Gwen Verdon’s polymorphously perverse Lola, applies ‘A Little Brains, A Little Talent’ in order to try to get ‘Whatever LolaWants…’ 

But in the end, as Senators manager Benny Van Buren (Russ Brown) tells Hardy, ‘This game of baseball is only one half skill. The other half is something else, something bigger.’ Van Buren and his coaching staff launch into the classic ‘You’ve gotta have heart.’

Fun to imagine current Nationals manager Davey Johnson and his staff breaking into this song-and-dance routine in the club house (maybe this was Bobby Valentine’s problem this year). No doubt they could not agree more with the sentiment.

The movie stars most of the cast of the original Broadway hit. Look for Jean Stapleton in her first film, as one of Boyd’s neighbors.