Soberly considered, the New York Yankees and their fans present a moral dilemma. Our consciences, naturally abhorring everything abominable, tell us that such things simply ought not exist. And yet we also know that the evil they represent is one we would not really want eradicated. Somehow we depend on it, not because it appeals to some morbid subliminal fascination with the horrific in us, and not even because it teaches us about the world''s deep Darwinian laws, but because it answers to a psychological need. By exciting in us that sweet cold loathing that only they induce--that strangely tender malice, at once so delicious and yet so purifying--the Yankees and their followers provide us an emotional hygiene. They give us occasion for the discharge of a dark, dangerous passion, but one unburdened by guilt. The detestation that any rational soul spontaneously feels for the Yankees is so innocent, so uncontaminated by spite--just instinctive revulsion before something obscene, like the goat-headed god of the diabolists--and there are few luxuries more gorgeously nourishing than the license to hate with an unclouded conscience. Yankees fans, of course, never having drunk from those healing springs, typically mistake this hatred for envy, and so for an inverted admiration.

But nothing could be further from the truth. Yes, those of us from smaller markets sometimes fall prey to a slightly petulant, even bilious resentment at all that boughten glory--the exorbitant free-agent contracts, the legions of scouts, the colossal television revenues--but who can blame us? And how could we fail to be vexed by the fawning servility of a national media incapable of telling the beautiful from the meretricious? I mean, be reasonable: How often, as Derek Jeter''s retirement approached, were we made to endure the squealing ecstasies of television announcers too bedazzled by the fastidious delicacy of his dainty coupé-chassé en tournant on grounders to his right to notice his minuscule range or flimsy arm? Why were we forced to see him awarded a preposterous two additional gold gloves in his dotage when his defense was scarcely better than mediocre in his prime? Who, moreover, can forget the obligatorily bibulous rhapsodies from sports commentators in the waning days of the old Yankee Stadium--grown men dissolving in foaming raptures over a "great tradition" in its twilight or intoning solemn encomia to the glorious "temple of sport" soon be reduced to dust? Temple, forsooth! More like the largest brothel in the world, being torn down only because a larger, glitzier brothel was being erected across the street. (Really, how does a Yankees fan''s pride in all those purchased championships differ from the self-delusion of a man staggering out of a bawdy house at dawn, complimenting himself on his magnificent powers of seduction?) So, I confess it: there is some resentment. But it never degenerates into emulousness or envy. No one from another market wants a team like the Yankees. The notion is appalling. Could any franchise be more devoid of romance? What has it ever represented but the brute power of money? One can admire the Cardinals'' magnificent history, or cherish fond memories of the great Orioles, Reds, or A''s teams of the past. But no morally sane soul could delight in that graceless enormity in the Bronx, or its supremacy over smaller markets.

It is an intrinsically depraved pleasure, like a taste for bear-baiting. And certainly none of us wants to be anything like Yankees fans--especially after seeing them at close quarters. Certainly, I have witnessed them in Baltimore during weekend series often enough to know the horror in full. Not that it is easy to recall clearly. The trauma is too violent. Memory cringes, whines, tries to slink away. One recollects only a kaleidoscopic flux of gruesomely fragmentary impressions, too outlandish to be perfectly accurate, too vivid to be entirely false: nightmarish revenants from the dim haunts of the collective unconscious.monstrous, abortive shapes emerging from the abysmal murk of evolutionary history.

things pre-hominid, even pre-mammalian, with indeterminate allotments of limbs.forms never quite resolving into discrete organisms, constantly spilling over and into one another, making it uncertain where one ends and another begins. It really is awful: ghastly glistening flesh, reminiscent of snails, of eels, of cuttlefish.tentacles coiling and uncoiling, stretching and contracting.lidless orbicular eyes eerily waving on slender stalks.squamous hides, barbed quills, the unguinous sheen of cutaneous toxins.serrated tails, craggy horns, sallow fangs, gleaming talons.fragrances fungal and poisonous.

sickly iridescences undulating across pallid, gelatinous underbellies or shimmering along slick, filmy scales. And what raucous yawps of elation they emit, like sea-lions crying out in erotic transport. How languidly and grossly they intertwine with one another--how clumsily, lewdly, indiscriminately--like lascivious cephalopods merged in seething tangles of prehensile carnality. And somehow, without having to see, one knows things about them: that the categories "parent," "sibling," and "mate" are only hazily delineated in their minds; that they suck nourishment from cellulose, heavy metals, and cactus spines; that, should they grow hungry on the journey home, they may pull over to the side of the road to devour their young. One simply knows. (excerpted from chapter 2).