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Originally Posted by Muhammad Cohen, The Guardian
George Steinbrenner was a loser. While insisting that nothing less than wining was acceptable, Steinbrenner owned the New York Yankees during the team's longest World Series drought since its first appearance in 1921, a dry spell directly attributable to Steinbrenner's insistent mismanagement.
Steinbrenner, who died on Tuesday at age 80, was a bully and a brat, devoid of humility, class, and civility, born on third base, deluded that he'd hit a triple, and convinced he had to tell the whole world how he'd done it. Famed for his bombast and for making himself bigger than his players and team, tolerated only because he had money and power, this Yankee Doodle Dandy born on the Fourth of July paved the way for America to become a loser by his example.
Just about every bit of praise eulogising Steinbrenner is 180 degrees wrong. The city's mayor, Michael Bloomberg, called him "a quintessential New Yorker" despite Steinbrenner hailing from Cleveland (Bloomberg's from Boston, weekends in Bermuda), living in Tampa, and blackmailing New Yorkers with threats to move the Yankees out of town to get a new $1.5bn (£1m) stadium that embodies his penchant for vulgar excess. He was a terrific businessman, a daring capitalist who insisted he needed public handouts for his billion-dollar family company; taxpayers underwrote the bonds for that new Yankee stadium and renovated the previous one, and have been rewarded with ticket prices that top out at $2,500.
Steinbrenner was a laughable figure in the comedy series Seinfeld with nothing funny about him. He was a generous man whose many donations we never heard about – as anyone who follows baseball has heard about constantly for the past 35 years – who was breathtakingly cruel and petty. He was a great sportsman, suspended twice from baseball for breaking the rules and convicted for breaking the law. He was a great Yankee who infuriated and alienated the team's players and fans and insulted the Yankees' traditions and greatest legends.
Days before Steinbrenner, the beloved Yankee Stadium announcer Bob Sheppard died. Yankee fan websites are abuzz with variants on the theme that Steinbrenner had clung to life to wait for Sheppard to announce his arrival in heaven. Believe me, if there is a heaven, George Steinbrenner won't be there.
I covered the Yankees as a wire service reporter during the 1980s at the height – or depth – of Steinbrenner's reign of error. He spent lavishly, as always thanks to lavish team income, to assemble the best team money could buy, but the Yankees didn't win any titles.
With his American football mentality – if he hadn't gotten rich from the family business, he would have become an itinerant assistant coach, wearing out his welcome at high schools across America after a year or two – Steinbrenner couldn't understand that baseball is a marathon, with a season of 162 games, not 16, and that no team can win every day.
Steinbrenner's impatience led to bad choices, and his megalomania forbade him from taking responsibility for them. So he fired managers, general managers and even public relations directors, with comic frequency. He dismissed the Yankees Hall of Famer Yogi Berra 16 games into the 1985 season, breaking an explicit promise that Berra had demanded before accepting the thankless manager's job. Berra, who played on a record 10 Yankee championship teams, refused to associate with the team until Steinbrenner apologised. He did – 14 years later.
Leading baseball's salary explosion, Steinbrenner believed that paying players like supermen would make them play that way. When they failed – and even the best hitters fail more than 60% of the time – Steinbrenner assumed the right to berate and humiliate them. One late afternoon in the Yankee clubhouse in 1988, the captain, Don Mattingly, the quiet centre of team turbulence, launched a spontaneous outburst against Steinbrenner. "All they give you here is money," he said, bemoaning the lack of respect, courtesy and dignity on offer.
The best player on those 1980s teams was Dave Winfield, signed to a record 10-year, $18m contract. Winfield was a superbly gifted athlete, drafted in three professional sports, and a classy, handsome, personable individual, among the first athletes to establish his own charitable foundation. I was convinced he'd be America's first black president.
Winfield compiled most of his Hall of Fame credentials as a Yankee, but Steinbrenner had signed him to replace Reggie Jackson, the self-styled Mr October (October being the month for the World Series). Winfield failed to get a hit in the Yankees' 1981 World Series loss to the Los Angeles Dodgers. Steinbrenner took it as a person insult. He derided Winfield as "Mr May". In 1988, Winfield set a record for driving in runs during April and told reporters: "Now it's on to May, and you know about me and May."
To get even with Winfield, and perhaps void his contract, Steinbrenner hired a lowlife named Howard Spira to spy on the player, hoping to find some dirt, particularly financial malfeasance, at the Dave Winfield Foundation. Spira got nothing on Winfield but lowered the boom on Steinbrenner.
Spira wasn't just any lowlife, he was a chronic gambler. Since bookmakers paid off the Chicago White Sox (thereafter the Black Sox) to lose the 1919 World Series, gambling has been baseball's cardinal sin. Steinbrenner's sleazy association earned him his second suspension from the game – the first followed his conviction for making illegal campaign contributions to fellow football fan Richard Nixon – and, ironically, set the stage for the Yankees to end their record post-season drought and create the dynasty that had eluded them under Steinbrenner's misrule.
With Steinbrenner out of the way, the Yankees were able to develop young players rather than trade them away for veterans in hope of a quick fix. The core team that won four out of five straight World Series and reached the playoffs every year from 1995 through 2007, came together when real baseball professionals ran the franchise.
Yet Steinbrenner was there front and centre to take credit for success while blaming others for failure. In his last gasp of conceit before formally ceding control of the team to his son Hank, Steinbrenner orchestrated the dismissal of manager Joe Torre, who'd led the Yankees to the postseason for 12 consecutive years.
Over four decades, Steinbrenner embodied and popularised the values of America's culture of arrogance seen in the banishment of civility and fact from political discourse, the Iraq invasion – a US victory, according to much of the press – obscene executive pay, and the 2008 economic meltdown. Yes, George, you really were a Yankee Doodle Dandy.
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