‘Bronx Zoo ’90: Crime, Chaos and Baseball’ is a mind-boggling baseball docuseries

For some reason, a terrible Yankees season has gotten the multi-part streaming documentary treatment, 34 years later.

Welcome back to Baseball Week here at The S.S. Ben Hecht newsletter. Here is a review of a new streaming documentary series.

I’m not exactly clear why Bronx Zoo ’90: Crime, Chaos, and Baseball exists or who it’s for. The three-part docuseries, which debuts on Peacock on Thursday, tells the story of a not-very-good and not-very-interesting New York Yankees team from many years ago that does not justify a three-part docuseries. Even a single feature doc would have been a stretch. 

The ’90 Yankees weren’t even the most intriguing Yankees team to be known as the “Bronx Zoo”; that term is more associated with the Yankees championship team from 1978 and was the name of Sparky Lyle’s memoir of that year. 

The docuseries, directed by Hollywood filmmaker DJ Caruso, is based on a series of columns by veteran New York Post columnist Joel Sherman, which ran throughout the pandemic sports shutdown in the summer of 2020. I understand why that sort of thing would have appealed to a New York tabloid newspaper audience, likely to skew toward Yankee fandom and an old enough age to remember these events.  

But as a general interest, streaming docuseries? I just don’t get it. Especially since it’s precluded from going with a light, jokey tone because a big part of the story is that a guy on the team was a child sex offender. 

And that’s before we get to some of my least favorite sports documentary tics, like a talking head declaring that “to be in [this town], you gotta be tough- and [the local team] represented who we were!” And that, like so many documentaries these days, it opens with a five-minute highlight reel/commercial for the movie you’re already watching.

The 1990 Yankees had the worst record of any Yankees club of the last few decades. Still, they weren’t particularly different from most other unsuccessful New York sports teams, including a number of Knicks and Mets squads in the last 30 years: There was a combination of ill-advised free agent signings, players with “character concerns,” revolving-door coaching firings, and everyone involved not being especially savvy when it comes to dealing with the New York media. 

But the underlying assumption, it appears, is that the New York Yankees are always entitled to be great and that because they had one last-place season more than 30 years ago, that’s somehow worthy of a three-part documentary. 

In Bronx Zoo, are lots of minor subplots, such as the death the previous winter of five-time Yankee manager Billy Martin, free agent signee Pascual Perez acting strangely and being a disappointment, Andy Hawkins pitching a no-hitter but somehow losing the game, and Deion Sanders taking a break from his football career to play, not very well, for the Yankees, but not letting it temper his trademark arrogance. Later in the season, rookie first baseman Kevin Maas filled in for the injured Don Mattingly, hitting many home runs but later proving a flash in the pan. 

But really, The Bronx Zoo ‘90 has three main subjects: That year’s Yankees team was very bad on the field, George Steinbrenner faced suspension from baseball for hiring a convicted gambler to dig up dirt on star Dave Winfield, and outfielder Mel Hall was openly dating a 15-year-old while playing for the team, part of a pattern that would land him in prison. 

The film treats these things with equal severity and emphasis, which is all wrong.  That the team knew that Hall was an open pederast and was aware enough about the details to allow his high school-aged girlfriend to sit with the player’s wives at games — and that a picture of Hall and the girlfriend attending the prom was included in the team’s media guide — is a much, much bigger scandal and outrage than the other two things. 

This wasn’t the 1950s, it was 1990. And that’s even before we learn another Yankee, Luis Polonia, had been convicted the previous year of the same crime. 

Beyond that, the film actually includes a jailhouse interview with Hall, who is serving 45 years in prison on multiple sex crime convictions. If you’re going to give a convicted child sex abuser a say in your documentary, you better have a good reason for doing so. But Hall has absolutely nothing notable to say about either his crimes or his baseball career, except for revealing that he once lived with his underaged victim in Trump Tower. 

Speaking of the former president, Steinbrenner’s style is so similar to that of Trump that the film mentions it. The film provides a tick-tock of the episode when the Yankees owner paid a convicted gambler and alleged FBI mob informant, Howard Spira, to provide him with dirt on Winfield, some business involving alleged embezzlement from his charitable foundation. 

Spira, later convicted of extorting Steinbrenner, appears in the documentary, raising all sorts of questions as to why the wealthy Yankees owner bothered with a two-bit mediocrity like him. Didn’t George have access to a better class of tough guy?

The film also makes clear that Steinbrenner, despite his legendary status, mostly presided over chaos and dysfunction. Having anything to do with a guy like Spira was a massive error in judgment; this was just a year after the Pete Rose suspension, and associating with gamblers was and is a major no-no in the eyes of baseball. 

He would be suspended for three years, and the film buys the Yankee fan conventional wisdom that Steinbrenner’s absence in the first half of the 1990s set the organization up for success, with “real baseball men” like Gene Michael in charge, to set the stage for the Yankee dynasty that began in 1996. (Among the believers in that theory is… Howard Spira himself, who in the film takes personal credit for the late-‘90s dynasty.)

However, that is far superior to the counter-myth that followed Steinbrenner’s death, which is that all was hunky-dory during his ownership and that none of whatever bad stuff is happening with the current Yanks “never would have happened if The Boss was alive.” 

 There’s undoubtedly some truth to the first myth, although don’t forget that those championship teams also had two players, Chad Curtis and John Wetteland, who would later join Mel Hall among the ranks of convicted child sex offenders. 

Bronx Zoo ‘90 may be of interest to hardcore Yankee fans of a certain age, but its selection of choices is mind-boggling. Also, if you Google “Bronx Zoo” and “Peacock,” most of the results aren’t about baseball: