Yankee Fans And How The Media Thinks The World Revolves Around Them, Part 2: Apparently George Steinbrenner Did Some Good Things After All?

 

In 1980, Dick Howser became manager of the Yankees after the team had finished fourth the previous year. It had been a despairing season, filled with two managerial firings, injuries to multiple stars and the death of Thurman Munson. Billy Martin might have been gone but the Bronx Zoo still lived.

Quietly and with little fanfare, Howser led the Yankees to another division win. They won 103 games that season, not just the most in baseball but the most that any Yankee team had managed since 1963. Even their two most recent world champions in 1977 and 1978 had not won that many games.

In that year’s ALCS, the Yankees faced the Kansas City Royal, who they had defeated previous three year’s running. This year, the Royals swept them in three games (the Division series back then was a best-in-five).

After the Phillies defeated the Royals in the World Series, George Steinbrenner fired Howser.  Well, that’s not how he said it. Instead, he had a bizarre press conference in which he said Howser was ‘resigning’ to pursue opportunities in real estate. Even the New York media, used to the circus Steinbrenner ran by this point, was flummoxed by what happened. Howser said nothing at the press conference or afterwards. Eventually the Royals would hire him as manager and in 1985 he led them to the first world championship in their franchises history.

This was not the most bizarre or inexplicable firing of a manager (or indeed anyone who worked for the Yankees) that Steinbrenner would ever do, but it has to be the most pathetic display he would ever put forth. I mention this fiasco in particular to give context to what I read in the New York tabloids following the Astros sweep of the Yankees for the AL Pennant.

As someone who has fundamentally become used to the bloodthirsty nature of the New York sports media and the tabloids in particular, I wasn’t not particularly surprised by the press’ reaction. Aaron Judge, who just two weeks ago was being celebrated for breaking Roger Maris’ home run record and nearly winning the triple crown, is now the subject of whether he should be signed for free agency this year because of his disappointing postseason. Aaron Boone, who led his team to the division title past a tricky Cleveland team and all the other injuries and foibles  has already had his head managed for the guillotine. They even go so far as to criticize Hal Steinbrenner, actually wishing that there was a way to trade ownership.

All of this is par for the course whenever any New York team has a disappointing season – which as we all know means winning the championship in whatever sport there in. But it was looking in the article criticizing Hal Steinbrenner that I realized just how far the New York Media is now willing to go to accept a winner.

Not only did the writer say: “George Steinbrenner would never let this stand,” they spent two full paragraphs defending his record.  I won’t repeat it, but I’ll give you the gist: “Sure he was a horrible person to management, his players and everybody who works for him, but his team won seven World Series.” It’s not the quite the same thing as calling Hitler a ‘deeply flawed man who nevertheless accomplished many things for Germany,” but it shows a similar lack of knowledge of history and faulty memory.

I know that going without a World Championship for over a decade causes a lack of oxygen and blood flow to any Yankee fans brain but let me make several things clear: there’s an argument that Steinbrenner did nothing to help the Yankees win any of his world Championships” and far more to cause disarray. Here’s my logic.

When Steinbrenner bought the Yankees, he had to spent most of the first two seasons – 1973 and 1974 – serving a probation for illegal campaign contributions to Richard Nixon. The Yankees, who had been gradually improving in the 1970s, came within two games of winning the AL East in 1974. Bill Virdon was named manager of the Year in 1974; when the Yankees got off to a poor start in 1975, he was fired and replaced with Billy Martin (for the first time) Steinbrenner also signed Catfish Hunter as a free agent for five years. He performed excellently for his first year, and then declined exponentially with each season winning the Yankees a grand total of 61 games before he washed out.

The Yankees won their first pennant in 1976. When they were swept by the Reds in the World Series, Steinbrenner insisted – against the wishes of Martin – on signing Reggie Jackson as a free agent. It’s hard to argue this was a bad choice – Jackson was the key element of the Yankees back-to-back World Series – but there was so much brawling in clubhouse divides between Martin and Jackson that eventually Martin was fired (for the first time).

After Howser was fired in 1980, the Yankees spent the next thirteen years unable to win a division title. There was a constant rotation of managers and general managers (Billy Martin alone was hired and fired three additional time; he had been considered for a fourth stint before he died in a car crash.) Yankee legends like Yogi Berra claimed they would never set foot in Yankee Stadium. Players were constantly subjects of abuse by Steinbrenner, and indeed his fury over Dave Winfield’s contract became so insane that his attempts to gather blackmail information on him finally led to commissioner Fay Vincent suspending him from ownership for three years in 1991.

Between 1991 and 1994, GMs Gene Michael was able to operate in peace. He was able to make good contractual hirings of smaller players instead of expensive free agents. He began to develop and sign future Yankee stalwarts such as Andy Petite,  Bernie Williams, Mariano Rivera, and a little known shortstop Derek Jeter. When Steinbrenner returned to ownership at the end of 1994, the Yankees were leading the ALCS by a substantial margin before the strike ended the season and any chance of postseason. The next year, under the management of Buck Showalter the Yankees reached the postseason for the first time in fourteen years. But when they lost the division title to Seattle in five games, all of this became irrelevant to Steinbrenner. Both Michael and Showalter were fired, and Steinbrenner replaced Michael with Brian Cashman. Cashman hired Joe Torre, who at the time was mocked by the New York press for having never played or managed on a World Series team. At the time, I remember the world expected Torre to fail. He proved the world wrong and kept doing so for the next five years.

Don’t think for a moment that Steinbrenner had mellowed. Torre might speak highly and I imagine the core four will to their graves but winning four world series in five years will do that. There were all sorts of ways I could see Steinbrenner have fired Torre in those five years. (All right, not in 1998.) If Jeffrey Maier had not taken a home run away from Baltimore in the 1996 ALCS, if the Braves had held on to their six to nothing lead in Game 4 of that year’s World Series, he could have lost his job. If they had not followed up their ‘disappointing’ 1997 season (Baltimore beat them that year in the Division series) with 114 wins in 1998 and a clean march to a World Series. If their near total collapse near the end of the 1999 regular season had not ended in another postseason sweep. And of course if the Mets had managed to defeat them in the 2000 World Series. Steinbrenner would have risked greater outcry from the press and the fans each successive year, but that had never stopped him before. In all honesty, I’m surprised Torre lasted until 2007  - after the Red Sox came back to defeat the Yankees in the 2004 ALCS,  I would have expected Steinbrenner to call a press conference saying Torre wanted to spend more time with his family a few weeks later. I mean, the Yankees were not permitted to lose to Boston. Until 2004, that was what the Red Sox were for. (And lets be honest: it only really became a rivalry until 2003. Back then, it was a media creation more than anything in sports.)

And it’s not like Steinbrenner had made things better for baseball while this was going on: he was still spending obscene amounts on free agency well into the 2000s. He spent $105 Million for Kevin Brown (which was a disaster) a quarter of a billion dollars for Alex Rodriguez (like the Yankees needed another shortstop) and ended up disposing of Tino Martinez and Paul O’Neill when their contracts ran out despite the rings that they had brought him. None of this got them any closer to a World Series for the rest of the 2000s, they only won in 2009.

So just to remind Yankee fans and journalists: the longest gap between World Series appearances in your team was between 1978 and 1996, a period where Steinbrenner had full and total control over his team. And you guys hated him for it at the time, remember? The media excoriated him. Fans chanted ‘Steinbrenner sucks’. Attendance in the 1980s was much lower than the Mets. Hell, Seinfeld actually had a two season story line where George got his job basically by living out Yankee fans fantasy and telling Steinbrenner what a crappy owner he was. Even his fellow owners had a horrible time dealing with him.  That’s the owner the New York tabloids now wish was back in charge. I know there are a lot of apologists for baseball history these days – people who want to claim that Ty Cobb was not a psychopath and Charles Comiskey did not force the White Sox to throw the World Series by being a terrible owner, for example – but at least, they have the benefit of an entire century to let the dust settle and people forget.  I remember very vividly what Steinbrenner was like, and so do most of the journalist who work in sports today.  They don’t have any excuses.

Almost everything that is wrong with the economics of baseball can be laid at Steinbrenner’s feet. He was the first major signer of free agents to million-dollar contracts, and his teams won World Championship not long after. That correlation did not necessarily equal causation in most of those case didn’t matter to his fellow owners: they have been following his lead ever since and kept following it well after returns started to become very diminishing. Baseball has always been a battle between the have and the have-nots, and the Yankees were always among the haves. Now there are franchises who don’t have the value that we are considering paying Aaron Judge. The only reason the press doesn’t want to pay him $300 million today is because he didn’t perform well last week. If he’d led the team to a championship, they say they should pay him more and not even blink at the argument.

But that is fundamentally the attitude of New York sports media. Whatever it takes to win, no matter what it does to the team or the league or the game their playing. Sports are the province of New York. The rest of the country just lives in it.

I wish I could say this was entirely due to the dominance of the Yankees, but it does predate them quite a bit. In order to give a more detailed explanation of this history – and how the Yankees not only weaponized it but made it toxic – I’ll follow up later this week.