Yankin' Our Chains

When major-league teams come to town to play the Oakland A's, they don't stay in Oaktown, but here in San Francisco. We don't know exactly why they snub Oakland. Maybe they don't want their million-dollar investments gunned down outside a dance club. Or maybe it's because San Francisco is just way more awesome.

Over the years the New York Yankees and their $195 million squad have chosen to stay at hotels in Downtown S.F. like the Parc 55. In order to keep sophisticated baseball fans or groupies from bugging the team, players register at their hotel under aliases. The idea is to prevent some starfucker from calling the front desk and asking to talk to, say, Mariano Rivera, and then buzzing the all-star closer while he's enjoying premium-channel television.

We have it on good authority that the Bronx Bombers used some of the following aliases during their stay in San Francisco earlier this month:

·Little Papi: Clever, very clever, fellas. For non-baseball fans, this is a play on "Big Papi," the nickname of slugger David Ortiz, who plays for the Yankees' rivals, the Boston Red Sox.

·Sunny Delight: Apparently, somebody on the team loves a certain orange "drink" (nee juice).

·Axel Foley: Someone's an Eddie Murphy fan, eh. This is the name of Murphy's character in Beverly Hills Cop.

·Joe Saturday: Our guess would be that this is a riff on Jack Webb's famous detective on Dragnet, Joe Friday. It's a totally ancient reference, meaning this is probably the alias of an older fellow like manager Joe Torre.

·Nacho Libre: This was a terrible movie, but a funny pseudonym.

·Henry Hill: He inspired Goodfellas, the movie Scorsese should have won an Oscar for.

·Jack Daniels: Hey, is David Wells still on this team?

·Bo Lacock: We have no fuckin' clue where this came from. But it sure sounds nasty.