by Jim Gerard
THE GEORGE STEINBRENNER STORY
George Steinbrenner grew up in suburban Cleveland, the son of a shipbuilder. His first jobs included coaching high school football and basketball in Columbus, Ohio. (Under some strange psychodynamic spell, George would later punish errant—and marginal—Yankees by exiling them to this city on what became known as the Columbus Shuttle. Utility infielder Randy Velarde was shuttled so frequently, he should’ve taken flying lessons.)
In 1956, Steinbrenner married Joan Zieg, who hasn’t been heard from since and who may be imprisoned in a dungeon far below the Yankee Stadium bleachers, along with Ed Whitson and Bobby Meacham. The following year, he joined his father’s struggling American Shipbuilding Company, from which he would make his millions before eventually running it aground. (It filed for bankruptcy protection in the early 1990s.) In 1960, Steinbrenner bought the Cleveland Pipers of the American Basketball League, a foreshadowing of more ambitious franchise conquests and the sports equivalent of Hitler seizing the Sudetenland. However, he was unable to raise enough money to join the NBA, and the Pipers went under.
His total ignorance of how to run a baseball team didn’t curb his ambition to own one. In the early 1970s, he offered $9 million to buy the Cleveland Indians and was turned down. (Let’s do some alternate history here: What if George had owned the Indians instead of the Yankees? Without the revenues accrued from living in a large market, he would’ve probably mishandled the team out of existence, but not before blaming his failures on the “big market clubs,” accusing Albert Belle of “jaking it” and having “Hillerich & Bradsby” permanently tattooed on his skull.)
In 1973 he assembled a group of private investors to purchase the New York Yankees from the Columbia Broadcasting System for $10 million. (The franchise is now estimated to be worth almost one hundred times that amount.) At the press conference, he said he would not be involved in the team’s daily operations. (Hey, they believed Hitler when he said he wanted peace.) The palace intrigue began immediately. His first general partner quit after four months, the first of many defections from George’s realm. One of his co-investors, John McMullen, said, “There is nothing more limited than being a limited partner of George Steinbrenner.”
George entered baseball at the dawn of free agency, which he opposed—“I am dead set against free agency. It can ruin baseball,” he proclaimed—until Oakland A’s pitcher Jim “Catfish” Hunter was released from his contract in 1974. Then George anted up for the pitcher the unheard-of salary of $2.85 million for four years, a deal that raised the contractual bar and made enemies of his fellow owners.
Right after the Hunter deal, he was indicted for funneling money to Nixon. While Steinbrenner has always demanded unquestioned loyalty from his minions, before his conviction, he contemplated snitching to obtain a more lenient sentence, according to the website The Smoking Gun:[In a] memo prepared by lawyers with the Watergate special prosecutor, Steinbrenner attorney Edward Bennett Williams said that his client had information on other illegal contributions, not to mention the sale of ambassadorships and a Teamsters slush fund. Steinbrenner, whose offer was rejected, eventually pleaded guilty to a felony conspiracy count as well as a misdemeanor charge.... For 15 years, he petitioned for a presidential pardon until Ronald Reagan gave it to him in 1989, two days before he left office.4
Commissioner Bowie Kuhn suspended Steinbrenner for two years. He later reduced the punishment to nine months, just in time for George to open the Bronx Zoo, the feuding, circus-like mid-‘70s squad that staged more brawls than the WWF and had more drama queens than you’d find at Wigstock. George was omnipresent, ripping players, coaches, umpires, and league officials; second-guessing managers; and delivering rah-rah clubhouse diatribes. It seems a day didn’t pass without Steinbrenner and/or some of his overpaid mercenaries catfighting on the back pages. And the staggering turnover of Yankee personnel throughout the late ’70S led third baseman Graig Nettles to quip, “Every year is like being traded—a new manager and a whole new team.”
Somehow, the team won, which drew out two distinctly Steinbrenneiian traits: (1) he usurped all the credit for the team’s success, when it was general managers Al Rosen and Gabe Paul who had made the trades for Graig Nettles, Mickey Rivers, Ed Figueroa, Chris Chambliss, and others; and (2) revealing his total lack of talent evaluation, he had pressured his front office to trade a future Yankee star—in this case, Ron Guidry. (Fifteen years later, GM Gene Michael prevented him from trading the young Bernie Williams.) In the 1970s, the team won three pennants and two World Series, but why dwell on them? It’s like reminding yourself of an ex-girlfriend who posted graphic details of your sexual inadequacy on Friendster.
George & Billy
Steinbrenner and Martin. Baseball’s answer to George and Martha, an Albee-esque psychodrama played out on the back pages, full of fury and surreal, theater-of-the-absurd twists and turns that left even diehard Yankee fans stunned and bewildered and Yankee haters chortling with schadenfreude. George would fire Billy for public insults, drunken brawling, or insubordination, then magically rehire him. Here’s a quick summation of the most twisted relationship in the history of American sports: ◆ July 24, 1978: With the Yankees far behind the first-place Red Sox, Martin lashes out at Reggie Jackson and Steinbrenner, “One’s a born liar; the other’s convicted.” A few days later in Kansas City, a sobbing Martin reads a prepared statement in which he resigns as the Yankee manager.
◆ July 29, 1978: During Old-Timers Day at Yankee Stadium, it is announced that Martin will return to manage the Yanks in 1980, surprising players, fans, and especially Bob Lemon, who had just been named interim manager. Lame-duck Lemon leads the team from 14½ games out to win the pennant and World Series.
◆ October 28, 1979: After reassuming the helm a year earlier than what had previously been announced, Martin is fired by Steinbrenner again after the psychotic manager gets into yet another of his barroom brawls. Dick Howser is named to replace him.
◆ April 25, 1982: Just 14 games into the season, Steinbrenner fires Lemon and replaces him with Gene Michael, the man Lemon had replaced the previous September.
◆ January 11, 1983: Round 3—George hires Billy as manager, replacing Clyde King.
◆ December 16, 1983: Martin is fired again and given a front-office job. (This is another favorite ploy of Steinbrenner’s, always keeping disgraced employees in liege to him.) Yogi Berra is named the new manager.
◆ April 28, 1985: After the Yankees lose to the White Sox 4-3 on a bases-loaded walk in the bottom of the ninth, Yogi is replaced by none other than Martin. George, ever the coward, makes ex-skipper-turned-pitching-coach King deliver the pink slip, and a furious Berra vows never to set foot in Yankee Stadium again as long as Steinbrenner is the owner.
◆ October 27, 1985: Martin is fired again, replaced by Lou Piniella.
◆ October 19, 1987: Piniella is replaced by Martin.
◆ June 23, 1988: Steinbrenner fires Martin for the fifth time, replacing him again with Lou Piniella.
By this time, the Billy & George act had gotten stale, like the road company of “The Sunshine Boys.” Yet this strange codependency lasted until the end of Martin’s life. When he crashed his car into a tree near his home in Fen-ton, New York on Christmas Day in 1989, he was working as a “special consultant” to Steinbrenner.
In the 1980s, King George seemed more interested in tabloid appearances than the success of his club, and his tyrannical interference wreaked havoc with the franchise. He was like a spoiled kid playing in a rotisserie league. There were defections of luminaries Goose Gossage, Nettles, and Jackson; mindless acquisitions of derelict stars (Steve Kemp, Jack Clark, Toby Harrah, Butch Hobson) and mediocrities (Whitson, John Mayberry, Mike Armstrong); impulsive, irrational firings (after manager Dick Howser was let go after a 103-win season and ALCS loss in 1980, Steinbrenner explained that “He’s leaving to pursue a great real-estate deal in Florida”), the inept assembling of the stumbling 1982 “speed Yankees
” that finished fifth, and a general atmosphere of fear and loathing in which Steve Trout couldn’t find the plate with a divining rod and Whitson hyperventilated before each of his horrendous starts.
Despite having three Hall of Fame-worthy everyday players (Dave Winfield, who was elected; Rickey Henderson, who will be, and Don Mattingly, who would’ve been if he hadn’t hurt his back), the ’80S were the first decade since 1910 in which the team didn’t win a championship.
“BAD HOOKUP”: THE HOWARD SPIRA INCIDENT
It sounds like a film noir plot: Owner signs free-agent superstar, grows disenchanted, is sued by the star over the funding of the free agent’s nonprofit foundation, and looks to vengefully discredit him by paying an entry-level hoodlum—who had worked as the superstar’s gofer until said star spurned his request to pay off a huge gambling debt—to dig dirt. James M. Cain, meet George M. Steinbrenner.
It was 1987, and the Yankees were spiraling into the division cellar. So what does Steinbrenner do? Launch a vendetta against Dave Winfield, who he had just traded to California after first giving the outfielder a 10-year, $15 million contract. The Boss blamed Winfield for the team’s failure to win championships, derisively referred to him as “Mr. May,” and refused to honor an agreement to pay $300,000 in annual donations to Winfield’s charity, thereby instigating a series of bitter lawsuits.
Meanwhile, Howard Spira, a wormy little nonentity (who in the Hollywood biopic would’ve been played by Elisha Cook, Jr.) described as a “sycophantic errand boy” to Winfield, was begging the star to pay off certain creditors who didn’t know the meaning of “debt consolidation.” When Big Dave refused, sleazeball Spira approached Big George, who—astonishingly—paid him forty grand to be his personal truffle pig and root out any info that could damage Winfield’s reputation.
In a classic plot twist, Spira turned from informer to extortionist and now demanded $110,000 from Mr. Bluster, who later insisted that he paid up because Spira “scared me, and he really scared my children.” As it turned out, George had reason to be afraid: In July 1990, Commissioner Fay Vincent, dismissing the idea that the nebbish Spira could possibly be extorting from a multimillionaire power-broker, banned George from any hands-on operation of the Yankees. When the suspension was announced during a Yankee home game, all 24,000 fans gave it a standing ovation that lasted a full minute. It was perhaps the Yankee fans’ greatest moment.
Vincent planned to suspend Steinbrenner for two years, but the latter, for reasons nobody can produce, asked for a lifetime ban. Was it a cry for help? (“Stop me before I trade Buhner for Phelps!”) We may never know. Even after Spira was convicted of extortion—he got 2½ years—Vincent upheld George’s suspension. With George out of the way—his son-in-law, team vice president Joseph Molloy, was appointed as the club’s “acting” managing general partner—GM Gene Michael and other execs incubated the 1990s Yankee dynasty, secure in the knowledge that George couldn’t panic-trade away their budding stars for the carcasses of washed-up free agents. Damn you, Fay Vincent!
The ban was lifted after three years, and later, when Steinbrenner was asked about the Spira incident, his response was, “Bad hookup. Bad hookup. There were reasons, but no reason would’ve been good enough to have done that ... I wish Dave Winfield and I hadn’t pulled apart.” (When it came time for Winfield to enter the Hall of Fame, it was rumored that George tried to bribe him into wearing his Yankee cap. Winfield waltzed into Coopers-town as a San Diego Padre.)
THE BARREN YEARS
By the early 1990s, Steinbrenner had sunk the Yanks like one of his dad’s battleships. The team was a mélange of stiffs and spare parts managed by a guy named Stump Merrill, who, after a clubhouse meal, cleaned his teeth with a game-used sock. Steinbrenner’s malign treatment of Winfield and other players (as well as the team’s disintegration) scared away free agents, who feared that sooner or later, regardless of their performance, George would turn on them. The team’s fortunes only turned around when George, right before he went into suspended animation, hired Gene Michael as GM in 1991. Within two years, Michael had weeded out the malcontents like Mel Hall and boosted the team to a 88-74 record. Did George, after his reinstatement, appreciate the reconstruction job Michael had done? No way, according to Olney.
“This team is messed up,” he told Michael. “The players are messed up; everything is messed up. This was in good shape when I left.” Two years later, after the Yanks’ first playoff appearance in 14 years, Mr. Bluster demoted Michael to scout. He continued to hog credit until the team lost, when he would blame his “baseball people.” Bob Watson, who succeeded Michael as GM, was once asked who these “baseball people” were. “They’re the little people who run around in his head,” he replied. Within three years, Watson, his health shot by George’s harassment, quit.
Of course, this was right in the middle of the dynasty, a really ugly period in Yankee Hater history, a seemingly endless loop of Jetes, Paulie, Torre, and the rest spraying champagne all over George’s JV football coach windbreaker.
One wonders if the team’s exceptional run was fueled more than anything else by the players’ knowledge that the only thing that could keep Mt. Steinbrenner relatively dormant was not losing. But no team, not even the Yankees, with all their ill-gotten gains, can always win, and their failure to take home a championship in the past four years has led to the return of Evil George: the guy who makes veiled threats about the job security of his manager, supersedes his “baseball people” to acquire clubhouse malignancies such as Raul Mondesi, causes his GM, Brian Cashman, to grind his teeth to their nubs, and in a fit of petulance after the 2002 playoff loss to Anaheim, threatens to cut his employees’ dental plan—in effect, sacrificing his employees’ wisdom teeth for a half-season of Bubba Crosby. (The Boss backed down when his son Hal offered to pay the $150,000 out of his own pocket to save the plan.)
Steinbrenner is 74, seemingly kept alive, like a modern mummy, by the talismanic power of owning the Yankees. But there are signs that he’s failing. In late 2003, while attending the funeral of the great Cleveland Browns quarterback Otto Graham, he collapsed. At the time it was attributed to his grief over his old pal. However, the real cause may have been the considerable stress George was in after receiving subpoenas from the New York State Lobbying Commission over free tickets given to area political officials. Four days later, the Yankees agreed to pay a $75,000 fine and turn over the names of politicians who had received tickets, curtailing any further investigation.
While he may survive long enough to see the fruits of those bribes—a new Yankee Stadium extorted from the city—eventually he’ll pass over to the other side. (The image I have is him screaming, “You listen to me! I used to own the Devils!”) The rest of us can take satisfaction that he’ll spend eternity on the ultimate losing team. With Billy Martin as his manager.
THE FUTURE: WILL YOUNG ELEPHANTS LEAVE A COLOSSAL MESS?
Observers of the Yankees are unclear about the team’s post-George future5 and, much like Kremlinologists pondering the succession of Soviet leaders, can only speculate. The three candidates—who George calls “the young elephants” —are his two sons, Hank and Hal, and his son-in-law Steve Swindal, who’s married to George’s daughter, Jennifer. (His other daughter, Jessica, writes children’s books. How about The Little Engine That Spit the Bit?)
It’s been reported that George treated his kids like his father, Henry Steinbrenner, did him—with grandiose expectations, verbal abuse, and little love. According to his daughter, Jennifer, the Steinbrenner spawn were expected to excel at every childhood endeavor.6 (You can just hear George screaming, “You call that potty training?”)
Hank seems more interested in tending to his dad’s horse-racing interests, while Hal is described as lacking the passion to run a big-league baseball team. This leaves Swindal, who married into the family business and likes to pilot tugboats.7 (Maybe he could use one to tow Jason Giambi out to sea.)
George, who probably doesn’t tru
st his own blood—why should he?—seems to prefer Swindal, who he tapped to negotiate Joe Torre’s current contract.
While George could always sell the team, he has reportedly taken the necessary steps to slowly shift power to the elephants in a way that would ease the burden of inheritance taxes. In retirement, he might, like other major-league owners (e.g., George Argyros) who have contributed to George W. Bush’s campaigns, expect to be appointed an ambassador, to a country like Italy. (“What you do mean, national strike? Get me Connors on the line!”)
But for now, King George sits atop the throne of Yankeedom, and—who knows?—he may be there forever. Author Neil DeMause speculates that “Steinbrenner spent his most recent two-year suspension being reanimated in a lab.”
As long as Torre and Cashman are nominally in charge, the team should have relative stability. But what happens when they leave? The scuttlebutt among agents and major-league executives is that some players are wary of inking long-term pacts with the Yankees for fear of the climate once the manager and GM leave the team. If we cross our fingers, we’ll see the late-1980s-early-1990s redux.
Perhaps George’s greatest legacy is that he’s created in his image—winning-obsessed, perpetually dissatisfied, impossibly demanding, paranoid, manic, and highly neurotic—a host of Mini Me‘s, who have all of those personality flaws without any of his money or power. They’re called Yankee fans.
More George Lowlights
1. George bullied the Hall of Fame to elect undeserving shortstop-broadcaster-icon Phil Rizzuto by boycotting the Hall of Fame game. Since the plurality of HOF visitors are Yankee fans, the action carries some muscle, and the Veterans’ Committee enshrined the Scooter and his cryogenically frozen cannolis.
2. You’re fired! George taught his good buddy Donald Trump the meaning of the phrase with his impetuous mass dismissals. During the 1970s and 1980s, he fired an average of 30 employees per season. In 1996, Steinbrenner surpassed himself by canning 56 employees. Many of his replacements are family friends, whose appointments he justifies by declaring that he wants to promote “unity” within the backroom staff. The morning after the Yanks lost to the Florida Marlins in the 2003 World Series, Steinbrenner fired the first employee he came across in his Tampa headquarters. He’s fired people so arbitrarily that he soon forgets he’s done so. Lou Saban, Yankees president in 1981, recalls: “One night we were having a benefit for a police officer killed in the line of duty. George was in Tampa. I made a special presentation before the game. There was a full house, fifty-four thousand people. We’re up five-zero in the third inning when the sky just opens up. It starts raining like I never could believe. My phone rings. It’s George. He’s not happy. He wants to know how it looks. ‘The field is in-undated,’ I tell him. So he hangs up on me.Ten minutes later, the phone rings again. It’s George. ‘What’s going on?’ ‘You know what’s going on. It’s pouring. Water is cascading into the dugouts.’ He hangs up on me again. He calls two more times. He tells me to call the umpires and tell them to do everything they can to get the game in. He hangs up on me both times. The phone rings again. Guess who? He wants to know what’s going on. I tell him it’s still raining and looks terrible. ‘Why didn’t you know it was going to rain?’ he says. ‘George, I’m not the guy upstairs! I don’t turn on the valves!’ ‘You’re fired!’ he says, and bang, hangs up the phone again. After the game got rained out, we went into George’s office and drank up his liquor. I got home at four in the morning. At nine a.m. George is in his office in the Stadium asking Mary, my secretary, ‘Where’s Saban?’ ‘He’s not here. You fired him last night.’ ‘What are you talking about? You tell him he better be in this office in an hour.’”8