In the case of “City of Thieves,” it seemed to me that a survivor of the heroic siege of Leningrad — an underdog par excellence — would have a moral obligation to become a Dodgers fan, and then perhaps to transform into a Mets fan once the Bums desert Flatbush. The man’s arrival in New York would have come not long before the opening scene of Don DeLillo’s “Underworld,” which has the Dodgers facing off against the Giants at the Polo Grounds in the 1951 pennant playoff. Even though I grew up hating both these teams, neither of them is in any way revolting. Nor are the Mets, who are merely cheesy. But it is simply unconscionable that a survivor of the siege would become a Yankees fan. Stalin would have been a Yankees fan. There’s a guy who loved to gang up on the weak and defenseless. There’s a front-runner if there ever was one.

My refusal to read books about the Yankees or their fans also extends to books written by supporters of the team. Thus, when I learned that Salman Rushdie had adopted the Yankees, who beat my Phillies in the World Series last year, it eliminated any chance that I would ever read “The Satanic Verses,” no matter how good it is. This attitude is rooted partly in principle and partly in pathology: I, like most Americans, resent the Yankees’ success while secretly wishing that my cheapskate teams would imitate them and go out and purchase championship after championship. But I further ridicule the notion that Yankees fans experience the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat the way the rest of us do. Rooting for the Yankees, as a friend of mine said, is like rooting for the air. It’s about as daring as rooting for a pack of ravenous pit bulls in a showdown with a blind, one-legged bunny rabbit.

Image Credit... Illustration by Chris Gash

My revulsion does not end with the Yankees. I also refuse to read books whose characters or authors have any affiliation with the Dallas Cowboys, the Los Angeles Lakers, the Duke University men’s basket­ball team, the University of Southern California football team or Manchester United, the Yankees’ European football evil twin. All of these entities are promiscuously vile. So implacable is my hatred of Man United (glamour-boy David Beckham’s old team) that when I met the gifted mystery writer Val McDermid at the Dublin Writers Festival last year, and found out she was a Manchester United fan — even though she is not from Manchester — I immediately unloaded all my Val McDermid mysteries and started bad-mouthing her work to my friends. I’m dead serious about this stuff.

Happily, precious few novels mention the Yankees, the Lakers, Duke, U.S.C. or Manchester United, much less the Cowboys. This is no accident. Editors have long understood that allowing an author to link his characters with a widely execrated sports franchise would turn off millions of potential readers, so they have gently urged these authors to excise such references, particularly if they occur early in the book, when the reader is still making up his mind whether it is worth plowing ahead. Here are a few examples of passages that were wisely deleted from famous writers’ manuscripts before they went to press:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Charles Darnay was rooting for the ripping side fielded by the Jacobins, while Sydney Carton was all agog about those first-rate chaps from Manchester United.” (“A Tale of Two Cities”)