I wasn't too upset about the Yankee Love Fest that
was Fox's coverage of OMG THE LAST ALL STAR GAME AT YANKEE STADIUM. I
mean, yeah, it was completely over the top and so full of fake,
sepia-toned wistfulness it would make Ken Burns retch.
But the months and months of hype leading up to it meant you knew it
was gonna be like that. If you insisted on watching the All Star Game,
knowing full well it was going to be 4 hours of Joe Buck bending over
and spreading for the Pinstripe Bullet, you really have no right to
complain about it.
I did wish, however, that more attention had been paid to the two following details.
1)
Yankee Stadium hasn't been condemned. It's not about to turn into dust.
It's old and outdated, but the Yankees could continue to play there if
they really wanted to. So essentially, this "celebration" of the last
year at Yankee Stadium is really a celebration of the Yankees building
a billion dollar monument to themselves--with more than half of that
money coming from city bonds, while the team tries and hold New York
over a barrel for even more public funds to complete it.
1a)
Oh, and they destroyed one of the few public parks in their Bronx
neighborhood in order to do it. The team insists that they'll pay to
replace it with another public park, but that new park will be located
on the other side of the Deegan. So go fuck yourselves, local
residents, we need that space for a Hard Rock Café!
2)
When the history of Yankee Stadium is rehashed by nostalgia junkie
writers, they inevitably bring up Ruth, DiMaggio, Mantle, and so on.
They seldom mention the fact that the current Yankee Stadium shares
almost nothing with the Yankee Stadium that those legends played in,
except for the name. The Stadium received an enormous makeover in the
early 70s (totally publicly funded, by the way), to add a few seats and
completely drain it of all idiosyncracies and charm. If you see
pictures of the original version,
it looks more like Ebbets Field or the old Tiger Stadium, a classic
pre-war ballpark. The redesigned version that opened in 1976 looks like
Shea Stadium in navy blue (which even the most ardent Mets fan will
tell you is a bad thing). So when people lament the impending loss of
the House that Ruth Built, guess what? That place has already been gone
for over 30 years.
But
again, the full-press Yankee love was hardly surprising. What I did
find surprising was the unbridled worship of George Steinbrenner that
came along with it. During the broadcast, Joe Buck went out of his way
to spend an entire inning talking about how great Steinbrenner was, and
how he deserves to be in the Hall of Fame. Tim McCarver, who I think
might now be legally retarded, agreed with him, as if Big Stein was as
much a no-brainer HOF vote as Mariano Rivera.
Today's
NY papers were all pretty much in line with this POV, praising
Steinbrenner and his winning winningness, and his ability to have his
team's stadium host an All Star Game. Midget Mike Lupica's column was typical of the lot, chronicling George's trip onto the Yankee Stadium field as if it was Caesar crossing the Rubicon.
At
this point, I have to rub my eyes and blurt a Hanna Barbera-ish
"ah-geda-ah-geda-HUH?" Because apparently I blinked some time in the
last 15 years or so, and it must have been at the exact second someone
switched the setting on George Steinbrenner's Public Opinion to Adoring
Adulation. Because for as long as I've been alive, it was set at either
Derision, Disgust, or Searing Hatred.
There's
few things I hate more than historic revisionism. And I especially hate
it when it's being performed on an event that I remember. I don't like
someone trying to mindfuck me into thinking that my memories are the
total opposite of what I vividly remember. The case of George
Steinbrenner is a minor one in the grand scheme of things. But that
doesn't mean I can't call bullshit on his image makeover.
Allow me to flash back to my childhood, when I religiously read and reread a series of books called The Baseball Hall of Shame.
The first volume had a chapter called "Odious Owners," and its
inaugural inductee was Big Stein himself. I quote from their intro:
"Revolutions
have been won with less bloodshed, human rights violations, and
atrocities than that which have been inflicted on the Yankees during
George Steinbrenner's reign of terror."
This
is from a book published in 1985, and reflects the general opinion
regarding Steinbrenner's ownership at the time: He was not the driving
force behind the team, but an impediment to any hope of success.
Almost immediately after Steinbrenner bought the Yankees in 1972, he was banned from the game for 15 months because of illegal contributions to Richard Nixon's CREEP fund.
He got around the ban by berating his least favorite players via tape
recorded, obscenity-filled tirades. He also probably orchestrated the
extremely unpopular swap of Bobby Murcer for Bobby Bonds in absentia,
the first of many really horrible trades he would insist on during his
career.
Joe Torre managed for 12 years,
so it's easy to forget that Steinbrenner used to run through managers
like tissue paper. From 1972 to 1996, the Yankees had 20 managerial
changes, all of them instigated by Big Stein himself. This includes
five different tours of duty for Billy Martin. Their love-hate
relationship was the stuff of Sophoclean tragedy.
He
also fired Yogi Berra a mere 17 games into the 1985 season. And rather
than tell the Yankee legend himself, Steinbrenner dispatched coach
Clyde King to deliver the bad news. Class.
Steinbrenner
didn't just shitcan managers on a whim. He was also fond of meaningless
firings of various coaches as warning shots to whoever happened to be
in the manager's seat at the time. The tales are legion of him firing
low-level employees who offended him in some way. And he loved to
banish players who'd had a bad outing or two to Columbus as punishment.
Barring that, he would publicly question
the heart and integrity of his players. Whether it was doubting the
"guts" of pitcher Jim Beattie or calling Hideki Irabu "a fat pussy
toad", Steinbrenner was always willing to destroy a player's reputation
and confidence just to grab himself a few headlines.
By
the late 1980s, fed up fans started bringing signs to the park saying
things like STEINBRENNER MUST GO. This prompted the owner to kick out
the offending protestors, which in turn prompted free speech lawsuits
from the ACLU.
Oh, and he secretly paid a professional gambler $40,000 to dig up dirt on Dave Winfield, a move that resulted in his second suspension. So, to reiterate: classy.
I
still remember when Steinbrenner was suspended in 1990. I remember it
because I was at my grandparents' house, and so was one of my uncles,
an absolutely insane Yankees fanatic. He was literally jumping up and
down. YES, HE'S GONE! FINALLY, THEY GOT RID OF THAT SON OF A BITCH!
My
uncle's reaction was the prevailing feeling among fans, who gave a
standing ovation at Yankee Stadium when the news was announced: with
Steinbrenner gone, maybe the team could finally get back on the right track.
So
what happened in the intervening years to cause a total 180 in
reputation? The fact that he's sick and frail helps. Nothing makes a
person's reputation bulletproof more than a debilitating disease. When
Ronald Reagan left office, his reputation was at its lowest ebb. But
once he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, suddenly his legacy was
unassailable. Now, Republicans want his face on everything from the
penny to Mount Rushmore.
More
importantly, the Yankees have made the playoffs every year since1995.
During that time, they won six AL pennants and four World Series
titles. The Yankees are amid a dominant streak unseen since the Bronx
Bomber dynasty that began in the late 1940s and lasted into the early
1960s. You can gloss over a lot of past indiscretions when you win.
Here's
the problem, though: George Steinbrenner has had virtually nothing to
do with this success on the field. Unless you want to give him credit
for not being as much of a meddling douchebag as he used to be.
You
can directly trace the team's rise back to the top to his suspension in
the early 1990s. While Big Stein was away from the game, the Yankees
farm system was nurturing prospects like Mariano Rivera, Bernie
Williams, Derek Jeter, and Andy Pettitte. Considering Steinbrenner's
track record of trading away minor leaguers for beaten-up vets, it is
highly likely that most of these future franchise cornerstones would
never have worn pinstripes if he was running the team while they were
minor leaguers.
In The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty,
Buster Olney ascribes the success of the 1990s Yankees to a new
hands-off approach by Steinbrenner. And you would agree after looking
at what free agents were acquired under his watch. He did go hard after
Reggie Jackson, which resulted in two World Series titles. But after
that, his record is pretty checkered, particularly when it came to
pitchers. Thanks to Steinbrenner's whims, the Yanks were stuck with
such stiffs as Tim Leary, Andy Hawkins, Doyle Alexander, and Steve
Trout.
Of course, the Yankees became a
multibillion dollar juggernaut under Steinbrenner's watch. But
seriously, who cares? That's great for his bank account, and it should
keep Hank in gold diapers for another few years, but it's not relevant
to baseball as it's played on the field. It makes me think of how many
people praise Madonna for being such a great "businesswoman". Good for
her, but does that make her last album any less shitty?
Most
sportswriters nowadays barely acknowledge Steinbrenner's past at all.
And if they do, they dismiss it by saying, "everything he does, it's
because he wants to win so bad." Who the fuck doesn't want to
win? Yeah, George Steinbrenner totally revolutionized the game. For
decades, owners tried to succeed by losing, until Steinbrenner came
along and said, "Screw you guys, I'm going to try to win by winning!"
And
what kind of message does this send? It's okay to treat people like
toilet paper as long as you're doing it in the service of winning! In
fact, as long as you really, really want to win badly, anything you do
is completely excusable! A country based on those values is totally the
kind of country I want to live in!
I'm
not saying you can't make an argument for putting George Steinbrenner
in the Hall of Fame. And if being a bad human being were a
disqualification, there would be a lot less plaques in Cooperstown. But
you have to consider the several decades of mismanagement and
douchebaggery outlined above.
If you
think he's still a HOFer after all that, fine. But you can't ignore
some really shitty history. Unless you're 99 percent of the media,
apparently.