yet another Steinbrenner abomination
I knew him but never met him
Long-time Manhattan Loft Guy readers will not be surprised to know that I am a big baseball fan*, given the number of occasional baseball-themed discursions over the years. I was going to write something in July for a group of friends who were sharing thoughts on The Principal Owner of The NY Yankees, George Steinbrenner, and figured that if I was going to write anyway, I may as well write here. But I got bogged down, I started and stopped, and the timeliness (if any) faded.
However … I tuned in late to last night’s game and my jaw dropped at a picture of the “monument” unveiled before the game. (There are pictures of it everywhere on the inter-tubes, but Geo Vec has one in the NY Times, here.) True to form in our dysfunctional relationship, TPOoTNYY once again set my blood on ‘boil’.
Be warned: if you have already read more on TPOoTNYY than you want to, put your hands up and step away from the monitor.
a monstrous monument
The Thing is 7 x 5 feet, dwarfing the other plaques in Monument Park. Is it ten times bigger, or only five times bigger than everything else??
Whether or not TPOoTNYY dictated the size, it is so typically George that it is a perfect reflection of his priorities, of his Being-In-Charge-ness, of his ego. The guy acted as if he were Larger Than Life, and now The Thing says that he was Larger Than Ruth (and Gehrig, and Dimaggio, et al.) by a factor of Five+.
The scale is so extreme, I can only imagine that the family’s extended discussion started with someone suggesting that they take up the entire wall as a monument, so that the ‘compromise’ to a plaque that is only 5 x 7 feet must have seemed a modest gesture.
back in July
I was fascinated after he died that so many articles, obits, memorials about TPOoTNYY attempted balance … everyone seems to feel required to at least refer to The Dark Side of TPOoTNYY. (Will we get the same with Cheney, I wonder.) Here are three I collected from the Times back then, here, here, and here, but they were everywhere that baseball fans or New Yorkers congregated.
our relationship
My first surviving baseball memories date from the 1964 World Series, so I matured as a baseball fan and as a Yankee fan in the Dark Ages of no World Series (1965 – 1975). TPOoTNYY arrived, of course, in 1973, but by then the Yankees were “my” team, as much as they could belong to anyone. He just put the money together to buy them. I took my dad (a recovering Indians fan) to his first World Series game, the Reggie game in 1977. My daughter threw a complete game her first time out (at age 4 months, the “day” they threw Bobbie Murcer so he could retire in mid-season with dignity and they could bring up a young good-glove-no-power first baseman who would later wear #23). I shared them with millions of others, but they were my team, dammit.
Sure, there were hints right away that TPOoTNYY might be a problem, but he did seem committed to winning.
By the time that I got a 16-game season package to Yankee Stadium in 1980 (Opening Day, all Sunday games, Old Timer’s Day, one holiday) it ws clear that TPOoTNYY was a problem, but it was still my team, and I resolved that even he could not ruin that relationship for me. Oh, how he tried!
People who did not live through it cannot appreciate the disgust felt by many True Yankee Fans (not all, but many): the “George Must Go!” chants in the stands; the photocopies of pictures of TPOoTNYY with a red circle and slash across his face; the game at which word circulated (from people listening to a radio in the Stadium??) that he had accepted a Lifetime Ban from baseball (probably over the paying-a-low-life-to-dig-dirt-on-your-best-player thing, but I can’t remember, and it is not important) … the feeling after that announcement among Yankee fans was general euphoria. Metaphorical dancing in the streets, singing “Ding, dong, the witch is dead …”; that kind of euphoria.
But it didn’t last. Sigh.
After The Strike in 1994 I was disgusted with MLB as well as with TPOoTNYY. So when I dropped my season package after 16 years I wrote a two page letter to TPOoTNYY to explain. I didn’t want him to think it had anything to do with him bashing the Bronx as a place where nice people could not feel safe, or because he did not extort more parking concessions from the City, or because the subways were dangerous at night, or any of the other BS he promoted. I was disgusted with Baseball as an Industry, and with TPOoTNYY as an owner.
Imagine this: the letter became a minor classic among friends and friends of friends, but I never got a response from the Yankees after 16 years as a ticket holder.
winning excuses all? really??
The apologists for TPOoTNYY tend to balance any admitted shortcomings by noting (a) that he really wanted to win, and pushed … err …. (to be most gentle) …. relentlessly to win, and (b) that he did ITAL make the Yankees winners. This apology is wrong on baseball terms and on moral terms.
In baseball terms, he was always a football guy who thought The Answer was always to try harder (giving 110% 120% of the time), while the baseball pros knew that this game required concentrated relaxation. I will forever believe that the Yankees succeeded in spite of efforts by TPOoTNYY to turn up the stress level so that they would hit the other guy harder, somehow.
Oh, and in baseball terms, people seem to forget that the seeds of The Great Yankee Teams of the late 1990s were sown when TPOoTNYY was banned from baseball (sadly, not for life) and could not force My Baseball People to trade away the young Jeters, Posadas, Pettittes, Riveras, et al., for former and waning All-Stars. By the time he came back (drat!), the momentum had swung and Gene Michael’s work was bearing fruit too obvious for even TPOoTNYY to ignore. (Thank you, Stick!)
In moral terms, the apologists have a lot to answer for. Results matter, but process cannot be ignored. John D. Rockefeller was an unscrupulous, rapacious, monopolist who built a huge industrial and financial empire, but there was more of a sense then that the Titans of Industry had been (would always be) Robber Barons; in that earlier time, it took two generations for the Rockefeller wealth to take on a sheen of respectability.
The apologists act as though TPOoTNYY made that transition in 25 years.
Worse, they act as though there was no other way for the Yankees to have succeeded, other than for TPOoTNYY to terrorize employees from the top of the food chain to the bottom (then to ‘atone’ by private acts of charity), to attack and belittle his players (from trying to extort Winfield out of his contract rights, to saying a young pitcher ‘spit the bit’ after a poor performance, to branding an imported pitcher a puss-y toad), to showing his ‘passion’ by fighting with (non-existent) Dodger fans in an elevator in LA, to … (add your own personal lowlights).
some credit
TPOoTNYY and his executives put together a marvelous business, generating revenue that his competitors could not even dream about (and profits that were not too shabby). To his credit, he plowed the revenue into the team, creating a foundation that could make the Yankees perennial contenders indefinitely (unless The Sons pull a Wilpon; always a possibility, no?). I can’t take that away from him.
But to me (and many other mature Yankee fans), the Yankees succeeded in spite of TPOoTNYY, not because of him. His ego was such that the more loudly he claimed the mantle of Yankee Greatness the more crass his grasping became.
I always wanted to see an analysis of what TPOoTNYY did to the shipping company he inherited from his father, that generated the wealth he was able to leverage into a billion dollar Yankee franchise. I suspect he ran it into Davy Jones locker. His management “style” is indicated in this quote today from Cashman in that Geo Vec column, which is obviously intended by the GM to be complimentary:
“I can’t tell you how many people it takes to replace him,” Cashman said. “He was the ticket manager, the marketing director, the general manager, the manager in the dugout, the stadium manager.”
cue the baker
I misplaced my Steinbrenner angst two months ago, within a week or so after he died … especially with the Fair and Balanced reporting and blogging that followed. But seeing that “monument” really takes the cake. Because I have no editor, I can just vent and click
*That’s “fan”, as in FANatic, of course.
© Sandy Mattingly 2010
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