Championships, champagne and ticker-tape parades – that’s the story of New York Yankees baseball, right? Not if you were on the team in 1990.
During that season, the team’s combustible owner, George Steinbrenner, was banned from baseball after connecting with gambler Howard Spira to discredit one of his own players, Dave Winfield. Outfielder Mel Hall brought two cougar cubs into the clubhouse and had a relationship with an underage high school student. On the field, the team was so bad that pitcher Andy Hawkins threw a no-hitter – and still lost. The Yankees stumbled to a last-place finish in the American League East. Their lowlight reel from the season gets a second look in a new documentary on Peacock in the US – Bronx Zoo ‘90: Crime, Chaos and Baseball.
“There’s a little bit of human drama in a Goodfellas way,” says the film’s director, DJ Caruso. “I feel like this documentary, this docuseries, is for everyone. If you like true crime, you’re going to like this documentary. If you like sports, you’re going to love this documentary … I think there’s a really broad audience for this, and it’s not just a baseball documentary.”
If you pine for the late 1980s and early 90s, get ready for some nostalgic moments, from Pac-Man to Mike Tyson’s upset loss to Buster Douglas to pre-gentrification New York City. There’s even Nelson Mandela visiting Yankee Stadium and donning a Yankees cap, plus the era’s tabloid headlines in all their glory – “Boss Answered Call of the Vile,” “One Owner Away From a Championship.”
The idea to revisit that season came during the onset of the Covid pandemic in 2020. With the world in lockdown, and baseball on hiatus, New York Post sports columnist Joel Sherman got the OK to do a retrospective on the 1990 squad. Sherman was part of the story – back then, he was a second-year Yankees beat reporter for the Post. Now the series has been adapted for the screen, featuring interviews with many of the principals – including Spira and Hall, plus prosecutor Kim D’Avignon, who eventually helped send the latter to prison.
As Sherman notes in the third and final episode, abnormal became the new normal in 1990.
Even before the year began there were seismic shocks. Sherman turned on the TV while hosting Christmas Eve dinner with his future wife…