I Beg to Differ

I can’t stand it! I know it isn’t fashionable to speak ill of the recently deceased. But enough praise has just been heaped on the former owner of the New York Yankees that in my opinion undeserved is a gross understatement. I have no reservations speaking my mind about a man who I feel has figuratively defecated on the national pastime and my favorite spectator sport.

News in the year I first started following baseball began with Lou Gehrig’s tragic enforced retirement. Joe DiMaggio was in ascendance. Ted Williams, who was later to dominate much of the game’s news, was in his rookie season. During my teens names of established stars like Bob Feller and Hank Greenberg, along with newcomers like Stan Musial and Jackie Robinson were all the talk. Until the l970’s and free agency the headlines were about the players and an occasional manager. Owners were relatively publicly obscure figures with the exception of Branch Rickey who merited the attention for obvious reasons.

For over thirty years I admit to having such disdain for the man that I have refrained from speaking his name, using his title in its stead. I’ve forgotten many of the details. But there was a time when I could have written a short book about his sins against the sport from which he has taken so much. They cover a variety of misdeeds, the most egregious involving bullying people in his employ, players and occasionally managers. He was in the habit of bragging about his relatively few good decisions, which had been traditionally made by managers and general managers, and ignoring the many bad ones. For those who boast of his team’s success, in spite of my love of the game it’s the only sport I know of in which the phrase “small market team” is part of the vernacular. It might also be mentioned that in this decade the team’s only championship has come after he stepped down, suggesting that his presence has detracted from the production of those whose services he has purchased. The man’s narcissism was such that he would surely have been peeved had he known about sharing the obituary ceremonies at the Stadium with the team’s announcer Bob Shepherd.   

The following is a letter I wrote to the New Haven Register during the 2007 post season. In it I broke the habit of not mentioning his name because “principal owner of the New York Yankees” is a bit cumbersome.

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Most people who know that George Steinbrenner is the owner of the New York Yankees probably cannot name the owner of any other baseball team or, for that matter, the second baseman for the Yankees, Robinson Cano. News of Joe Torre’s termination, which contained almost as much mention of Steinbrenner as it did of Torre, was made during the league championship series, the semi finals of baseball’s championship, from which the Yankees had just been eliminated and from which the news was a major distraction. Couldn’t the announcement have waited a week or ten days till the season had ended?

Baseball fans should be worried, or at least bothered, by a team owner becoming better known than all his competitors, almost all the players and even competing for publicity with the game itself. An exception might have been Branch Rickey. But he was famous for what he had done for baseball; think Jackie Robinson. Steinbrenner’s fame comes from what he has been doing to the game.

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Addendum; News of the hiring of a new manager was announced days later during the final game of that year’s World Series.