Bleacher Creature Feature

8 March 2002

George Steinbrenner is a raving egomaniac.

George Steinbrenner is a criminal who had to be pardoned by our fortieth president.

George Steinbrenner is a lunatic who only occaionally understands the game of baseball.

I intensely dislike George Steinbrenner.

I am also thrilled to death that he owns my favorite team.

Let me explain...

Steinbrenner bought the Yankees in the 1970s from CBS. The team was, for the first time since the 1910s, a non-factor in the American League. From 1920 until 1964, it was exceedingly rare to see the Yankees not be in first or second place (mostly first), and those downturns were either a) fleeting or b) due to World War II. Hell, between 1947 and 1964, they only didn't win the AL pennant three times (1948, 1954, and 1959).

But when Steinbrenner bought the Yanks, the dominant teams in the league were the Baltimore Orioles of Earl Weaver and the Oakland A's who smashed their way to three straight World Series victories from 1972-1974.

Steinbrenner's determination was to return the Yankees to glory, and he was going to be the one to do it. He didn't buy the team in order to get rich. He was already rich. And he didn't just want a tax dodge (if it was just that, he could've gone after his hometown Cleveland Indians). No, he wanted a winner. He wanted to own the greatest team ever. Sensibly, he bought them at their lowest value as a franchise in fifty years.

He then built a winner. The Yankees returned to the top of the AL in 1976, won the World Series in 1977, made a historic comeback to win again in 1978, and finished first again in 1980 and 1981, only to be knocked out of the playoffs in '80 by the Royals and lost the Series to the Dodgers in '81.

Then the bottom fell out. It was inevitable, because Steinbrenner couldn't leave anything well enough alone. His highly public feuds with on-again-off-again manager Billy Martin, with Dave Winfield, with Reggie Jackson, with the New York media all combined to create an atmosphere that Sparky Lyle referred to as The Bronx Zoo in his famed autobiography, an appellation that would forever apply to the Yankee teams of the late 1970s/early 1980s.

By the end of the 1980s, they were in worse shape than when Steinbrenner bought them. He kept trading away the future of the team in order to pick up high-priced veterans who did the team no good (Ed Whitson, Dave LaRoche, Steve Kemp, Jack Clark, etc.), hired a succession of dim-bulb managers (Bucky Dent, Stump Merrill), utterly wasted the best years of Don Mattingly's career, and eventually left the team with a barren farm system, an old and useless team, and a last-place finish.

Then he was suspended from baseball

It was the best thing ever to happen to him. And also to the team.

During his exile, Steinbrenner must have had some kind of epiphany. He obviously realized that the best thing he could do for the team was to stay away from it. In his absence, Gene Michael, one of the three or four best judges of young talent in the game, started to rebuild the farm system. The team made some good trades (most notably getting Paul O'Neill from the Reds for Roberto Kelly, which, looking back, is one of the more one-sided trades the Yanks have made since that one in 1919 involving some guy named Ruth...), brought up some talented kids named Pettitte and Williams, and a manager who knew how to bring a team through a rebuilding phase in Buck Showalter.

(Side note: Showalter's developing an interesting pattern. He laid the foundation for the late-90s champion Yankees, but got fired for not being able to go all the way. The next year, the Yanks won the World Series. He was then hired by the expansion Diamondbacks to build their team from scratch. Then he was fired for not being able to go all the way and the next year, the Snakes won the big trophy. This is a good argument for Showalter being hired by the Red Sox, since he can manage there for a couple of years, get fired, and then maybe the Bosox will get that World Series win they've been angling for since 1918...)

The Yankees have been on top of the baseball world since 1996, and one of the main reasons is because Steinbrenner has mostly kept his hands off. Every once in a while he gets a jones to add some flashy player he thinks is cool, but it's rare and hey, Hideki Irabu wasn't that bad. (I'm less sanguine about David Wells' return to pinstripes, but I'll cover that in another BCF installment.) Yes, he's a raving egotist, but he's an egotist with a purpose: he wants the best baseball team in the world, and his time away obviously made him realize that the way to accomplish that is to let the people who know what they're doing do their jobs. Now he has precisely what he wanted all along.

Besides Michael and the rest of his scouts, he's also got a very canny General Manager in Brian Cashman, a steady and talented manager in Joe Torre, and a player development system that has to be the envy of everyone this side of the A's.

The latter is the kicker. The foundation on which the Yankees' championship teams of the last six years have been built are Andy Pettitte (the one constant in the starting rotation since 1995), Bernie Williams (arguably the best center fielder in the league, if not the game), Jorge Posada (the best catcher in the league not nicknamed "Pudge"), Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, and Ramiro Mendoza (still the Yanks' most versatile weapon, and probably still their best-kept secret despite the number of times he's come through on national television), and over the next few years, Alfonso Soriano, Nick Johnson, Ted Lilly, and Shane Spencer are likely to be added to the list. What these guys all have in common is that they came up in the Yankee farm system. And aside from Lilly, they all have a solid place on the 2002 team (and given the fragility of Sterling Hitchcock's arm, David Wells' back, and Orlando Hernandez's superego, Lilly could have a good shot, too). They've got some other good looking prospects waiting in the wings, too, including Juan Rivera, Brandon Knight, Christian Parker, and Randy Kiesler.

It's popular for people to deride the Yankees, calling them the best team money can buy, and that they play in a different field than the rest of baseball. These are colossally ignorant statements that ignore the very hard work that has gone into making the Yankees the team to beat, and also ignore the realities of the rest of the baseball world.

See, that's the other reason why I'm glad Steinbrenner owns my team. Yeah, he's an old rich white guy who makes a lot of money off of owning the best team in baseball, but he sinks that money right back into the team to keep it the best team in baseball. Sure, he made potloads of money off the TV and radio deals, but that money also enabled him to sign Jason Giambi.

And yeah, the Yankees are spending a lot of money on their players. So are the Red Sox. So are the Dodgers. So are the Orioles. But what matters isn't the money, it's how you spend it. Sure, the Yankees are giving flipping great wodges of cash to Jason Giambi and Derek Jeter and Bernie Williams and Mike Mussina. But if they weren't, somebody else would be (Exhibit A: Mr. Rodriguez in Texas). These players are among the elite in the game. Yes, the Yanks spent a lot to bring Moose and Giambi to New York, but the Dodgers right now are paying Darren Dreifort and Andy Ashby a combined $15.4 million a year to sit on the disabled list. Kansas City is paying Roberto Hernandez $6 million this year to stink up the bullpen so much they have to hand out gas masks in the ninth inning of Royals games (and then the Royals have the balls to cry poverty and say they can't afford to keep Jermaine Dye when they're wasting money on an easily replaceable, weak closer). The Red Sox paid $7 million last year to Dante Bichette to occupy a roster space that would have been more productive if given to a ferret. Brady Anderson was paid over $7 million by the Orioles to be the worst leadoff hitter in the history of the universe last year. And so on.

Besides, the Yankees are hardly the richest team, really. Oh sure, they spend as much or more money than anyone else, but look at some of the other owners. Minnesota Twins owner Carl Pohlad is one of the richest people in the country, richer than Steinbrenner. He could spend that money on the Twins, but he'd rather whine about how they can't be competitive while he pockets the revenue-sharing money for himself. (It must have come as something of a shock to Pohlad to see that the team in fact was competitive last year, spending a chunk of the year in first place, and getting a concomitant rise in attendance. It put the lie to the idea that people will only come to the stadium if it's a new "mallpark." In fact, people come to the game if the team is good. Or, of course, if the team is the Chicago Cubs, who seem to draw no matter how much they suck...)

The Atlanta Braves are owned by AOL/Time Warner. The Dodgers are owned by the same folks who own the Fox Network. The Angels are owned by Disney. The Cubs are owned by Tribune Media. All of these organizations have huge financial resources they could draw on to improve their clubs in the same ways that the Yankees have. Yet they choose not to. (If Disney spent half the money on the Angels' farm system that they have on doofy marketing maneuvers to make the team a part of The Disney Experience For The Whole Family, the Angels might actually be worth watching instead of languishing behind the Mariners and A's.)

I wouldn't want George Steinbrenner to marry my sister (if I had a sister, anyhow). I'd sooner throw a drink in his face than share one with him.

But I'm glad he owns my team.

NEXT: A Pitcher is Worth a Thousand Words

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