I’m not much of a baseball fan, but as a New York resident and Williams alumn, it seems I’m contractually obligated to say something about the death of Yankee owner George Steinbrenner. He was a fixture in New York sports for as long as I’ve been aware of them, and his impact on baseball and sports in general was gigantic– Steinbrenner and Al Davis are the template for all the meddlesome modern sports owners (Mark Cuban, Jerry Jones, Dan Snyder, etc.), for good or ill.
He could be kind of a crazed asshole– he was suspended by Major League Baseball for a few years in the early 1990’s after paying a gambler to spy on Dave Winfield (for some deranged reason that never made sense to anybody else). But there’s no question he loved his team and wanted to win. In the end, that early-’90’s suspension was probably the best thing that happened to the Yankees (and possibly the worst thing to happen to small-market baseball)– freed from his day-to-day meddling for a few years, they built an actual team, and laid the groundwork for the late-90’s Yankee dynasty, and their current media empire.
My favorite of the handful of mocking tributes I’ve seen are yesterday’s Medium Large and this photo headline from the Onion. Among more sincere tributes, this Slate story by a former Yankee bat-boy stands out for getting both his obsessive micro-managing streak and his occasional extreme generosity. And I’m oddly happy to learn (from the NYT obit) that he approved his portrayal on Seinfeld, which provided some of that show’s more inspired bits.
He’ll be missed, both by his family and by the legions of sports reporters who will have to find somebody else to write about. It’ll be a tough role to fill– we’ve got owners now who are crazy, and owners who are successful, but none who are both crazy and successful in quite the way Steinbrenner was.