July 13, 2010

George Steinbrenner, the longtime owner of the New York Yankees and a virtual poster boy for 20th century unsportsmanlike conduct, has died of a heart attack in Tampa, FL, at the age of 80. Since I live in New York, that means the next few days will be filled with scores of retroactively "fond" remembrances of one of the most reviled figures in baseball history.

The local coverage will be heavy with apologists, since the Yankees won a handful of World Series rings during Steinbrenner’s reign of terror, and that’s all that really matters in the most spoiled city on earth, at least as far as the mouth-breathing masses are concerned.

I, however, breathe through my nose, and I’m not buying it. Just because I’m sorry he died - it’s a shame if pretty much anyone dies - that doesn’t mean I have to pretend Steinbrenner applied more dignity than he did to the task of operating the Yankees while he was living.

Oftentimes, Steinbrenner was an outright embarrassment, both as a plain old man and as a rich and famous man with a distasteful amount of self-regard. His bombastic buffoonery, if I can sound like Howard Cosell for a minute, used to make me uncomfortable when I was a kid. Imagine my response to it when I grew up and recognized how an adult is supposed to behave.

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In a real find for bargain hunters, Steinbrenner was actually two types of asses in one— an asshole and a jackass. He did, however, reap enough riches from his rotating state of assy-ness to be able to donate large sums of money to charity. That, of course, is the main thing most people want to discuss now that he’s gone, and I’ve also noticed several mentions of his willingness to “make fun of himself.”

Rest assured, though, that Steinbrenner could be a self-absorbed dick who treated people like cattle if they weren’t ready to grovel and do his bidding…and he was the one who judged their commitment to the all-important cause of getting The Boss (not Bruce Springsteen) another World Series ring. It should also be pointed out that, if you treat decent people like shit then dress up in funny outfits, appear on “Saturday Night Live,” and make jokes about yourself during interviews, you’re still a dick. In fact, you’re a bigger dick than you would be if you just acted like a jerk and kept your mouth shut.

"I haven't always done a good job, and I haven't always been successful," Steinbrenner said in 2005. "But I know that I have tried." Yeah, what nobility. He tried really hard, even though he displayed not an inkling of respect for the people surrounding him, both in the front office and between the lines. Working for the Yankees, especially from around 1975-1990, must have been akin to trying to hold down a job while the Grim Reaper swung a scythe over your head.

I often wondered if Steinbrenner had any fun at all when he wasn’t celebrating a championship, and that’s fucking sad for a person with the kind of money and freedom he enjoyed. More often than not, Steinbrenner loomed like Lord Vader, sitting in his cushy box at Yankee Stadium deciding which head he could pointlessly roll the next morning because his team full of mere humans was on a 6-game losing streak. It’s a miracle no one ever punched his lights out during the height of one of his apoplexies, but maybe it’s not, since he threw money around by the fistful when there was something he wanted.

That also gets you a few fond remembrances when you're dead.

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Manhattan-style Yankee fans, as I’ve pointed out in the past, have very short memories once a pinstriped jerk-off starts winning for them; remember the supposed taint added to Alex Rodriguez’s “legacy” when he admitted to past steroid use early last year? Sure you do, but just barely, because A-Rod finally delivered in the playoffs in 2009, and the Yankees won yet another championship. These days nobody even brings up the fact that Rodriguez was a cheat during a very profitable and statistically astounding stretch of his career. Now, he’s a True Yankee, and isn’t he cute?! Throw the confetti. Wipe a tear from your eye.

It’s the same thing with Steinbrenner, who would literally get booed in his own stadium - or, on the flip side, receive a huge cheer when it was announced he had been banned from the league in 1990 - but get serenaded like a great American folk hero every time there was another championship parade. Here’s just a sampling of some of the horse shit Steinbrenner served up on a platter while he ran the Yankees:

* Billy Martin, the famously drunken douche bag Yankee manager, was run through Steinbrenner’s meat grinder so many different times, I’d be surprised if he could have told you just how many seasons he actually managed the team…and not because he might have been crocked while you were asking him.

Martin was theoretically in charge of the squad from 1975-78,1979, 1983, 1985, and 1988— with none of those final four stints lasting a full season because Steinbrenner would regularly fire the poor sonofabitch for excessive scotch-scented surliness. Even though there were a few American League pennants and one outright championship to show for it, the Steinbrenner-Martin mating dance did far more to tarnish the Yankees’ illustrious image than to burnish it. The famous tell-all book from this period is Sparky Lyle and Peter Golenbock’s “The Bronx Zoo,” and that just about sums it up, although I think the title does a bit of a disservice to zoo animals.

* There’s a long line of Yankee kings of the world, running all the way from Ruth and Gehrig to DiMaggio to Mantle to Jackson, and, yes, to Alex Rodriguez. But you’d be hard-pressed to name a more beloved Yankee than the legendary catcher, Yogi Berra, he of “When you get to a fork in the road, take it” and “That restaurant is so crowded nobody goes there” fame. But winning more World Series rings than literally any player in history and learning the ropes under the tutelage of Casey Stengel wasn’t enough for Steinbrenner when Berra took over the Yankees in 1984.

The team didn’t exactly rip it up that year, but Berra agreed to stay at the helm as long as Steinbrenner assured him he would not be fired during the 1985 season, a stipulation that Steinbrenner agreed to. Then he fired Berra 16 games into the 1985 season…or, more precisely, he had one of his underlings fire him. Berra was so incensed, he set foot in Yankee Stadium only one time over the next 15 years. He started coming back regularly when Steinbrenner finally delivered a public apology in the late 1990s.

* Steinbrenner didn’t get along with the Yankees’ expensive free agent right fielder, Dave Winfield, throughout the 1980s. As time went on, the relationship between the two men grew absolutely toxic, with Steinbrenner regularly and openly deriding Winfield during interviews. Years later, it was discovered that Steinbrenner was not above feeding unflattering, often untrue stories about Winfield to the New York press.

In 1989, Steinbrenner was barred from baseball “for life” (the ban finally lasted two years for some reason, which isn’t much of a life) when it came to light that he had paid a mobbed-up gambler named Howard Spira $40,000 for embarrassing information about Winfield. Think about that— the owner of the team was spending money in an effort to ruin one of his star players. But he also gave a lot to charity!

It’s revealing to note, by the way, that on the two occasions Steinbrenner was banned from the game - the other was in 1977-78, when he was found guilty of having illegally contributed cash to Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign - the Yankees were as successful as they had ever been during the normally hands-all-over-everything Steinbrenner era.

The intricacies of the game were so far beyond Steinbrenner’s grasp, his guiding modus operandi was to simply buy the biggest names on the market at the end of each season, then stand around and bitch and moan when they weren’t playing as well as expected. Then he’d say shitty things in the newspaper, and finally fire the “responsible” party, who, it turned out, was never George Steinbrenner.

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I’m not involved, of course, but I would bypass burying Steinbrenner with a bat or an autographed ball, and just make sure he’s gripping a checkbook and his lawyer’s telephone number.

Paul Tatara