Posted on 07/13/2010 6:47:13 AM PDT by Haiku Guy
Steinbrenner has been the Yankees owner for as long as I have been around. He was abrasive, vindictive, often petty but got results. I don’t forgive him for not saving the old Yankees stadium (should have been a museum not leveled for parking!), but he will be missed.
A loss for the sporting world.
You're right. Losing Billy Martin WAS a loss.
R.I.P. George Steinbrenner.
St. Peter has already undergone a long overdue haircut and is now clean shaven.
When Mickey Mantle was young, he worked as a lead miner in the off season.
You know what? He was a winner and brought the Yankees back to greatness. Did what he needed to do, made mistakes along the way. If he was GS, owner of the whatever town losers, nobody would be as disrespectful as some seem to be. He was very charitable and kept a lot of that quiet. He bought a team for $10m that is now worth $1.6 billion according to ESPN, all while wining 7 world championships, 11 AL championships and 16 division championships since ‘73. So he was a winner and successful capitalist I see. He had a lot of money to spend, and no one ever says this but I’m glad he used his money to win! I really wouldn’t want an owner with a lot of cash and a crappy team! He died on a day with his team holding the best record in baseball. Go Yankees! Let’s get number 28!
Sorry about the double post. He was funny on SNL, the skit where he worked in a grocery store and was told to fire someone and with a straight face said “It’s just not in my nature to fire someone!”
It's also worth noting that the dominant Yankee teams of the late 1990s had very few big-name free agents on them. They were built around a core of home-grown Yankee talent (think of Derek Jeter, Bernie Williams, Jorge Posada and Mariano Rivera) surrounded by role players who made timely contributions on the field (Scott Broscius, Darryl Strawberry, Jim Leyritz, etc.).
From 1973 to 2009 -- a period of less than 40 years -- there have been 19 different World Series champions. Now there are a lot of factors that come into play here . . . including league expansion, wild card playoff teams, and multiple rounds of post-season play that make it possible for a team to win a World Series without even winning its own division during the regular season. But this idea that MLB in its "good old days" was somehow a well-balanced, competitive league where any and all teams could effectively compete for a championship is a complete myth.
This was from an online article I read this morning . . .
At his first meeting as a public-sector member of the USOC executive board in 1987, he went ballistic after learning the USOC had sent $10,000 from a friendship fund to Japan.
“Ten thousand dollars to the Japs?” he blustered. “This [expletive] has got to stop.”
LOL. That man sure was a character. He will be greatly missed by a lot of folks.
I think NASCARNation is right -- this was largely driven by tax considerations. I believe Steinbrenner had already moved his shipbuilding business to the Tampa area some years earlier -- for tax purposes as well as business reasons (Great Lakes shipping had been in decline for years, and the U.S. Navy was getting to be a key customer for companies in that industry).
I believe the Tampa location also helps the team's PLAYERS reduce their New York State tax burden. A number of them (including Derek Jeter) establish an official residence in Florida so they can allocate as much of their earnings as possible to that state instead of New York.
This is a complete myth. Sure, he has paid -- and overpaid -- a disproportionate share of his players over the years. But his arrival on the scene in MLB just happened to coincide with the two biggest influences that would eventually drive player salaries through the roof. These would include: (1) the elimination of baseball's "reserve clause" in 1975, which ushered in the modern era of free agency for players whose contracts had expired; and (2) the enormous growth of television revenue for MLB in general and for individual teams. Free agency gave players more leverage in contract negotiations, and the growing TV revenue gave owners the ability to meet those demands for higher salaries.
The fact that the Yankees play in the nation's largest metropolitan area has given them a big advantage over other teams when it comes to local TV revenue, but they are not unique. Let's not forget that Atlanta is a "small market" in many respects (especially in comparison to places like New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, etc.), but that didn't stop them from dominating the National League through the 1990s. This was because Ted Turner also owned his own national cable TV network (TBS), and he was able to use it to generate national television revenue for his local team.
Only for the "Out-of-town" scoreboard in Left Field and this was actually my choice. The other scoreboards were started by a California division of the company I was working for at the time. They used computers made by Computer Automation. The California group got in over their heads at the Stadium (and also the Montreal Olympics) and my group was directed by Corporate Hdqrs to take over. In fact I'm pretty sure that "Out-of-town" scoreboard was a "gift" to the Yankees to sort of salve the wounds caused by all the early problems with the other scoreboards. It definitely wasn't part of the original plan of the Stadium remake of the mid 70s.
ML/NJ
One of the great traditions of the "middle" stadium (1976-2009) -- and maybe even in the new one -- was the arrangement of pennant flags for all the American League teams on flag poles along the facade above the outfield bleachers. On game days the flags were arranged in the order of the American League standings that day. I once had the unusual experience in the 1980s of watching the stadium staff re-arrange several of the flags between games of a doubleheader -- when the American League Eastern Division standings were changed after the result of the first game.
I guess he believed in AMERICA FIRST.
“It’s interesting that all the talk about how the “big-money” era of MLB has ruined the competitive balance of the league overlooks the fact that exactly the opposite is true.”
You will get absolutely no argument from me.
The Pirates are simply leeching off MLB’s system. They could be as competitive as Minnesota, Tampa Bay (a team that holds its own in a division with the bloody Red Sox and Yankees), California, etc. Hell, even Cleveland hasn’t done that bad during the time Pittsburgh has been on it’s 17, soon to be 18 year streak of consecutive losing seasons. Milwaukee shows some flashes of brilliance every now and then .... they are in a smaller market than Pittsburgh.
The Pirates cried poor from 1993 until they got “Taxpayer Park” in 2001. From there, they simply kept their mouths shut and let the money pour in. The minute Nutting virtually took control in 2003, we traded Aramis Ramirez and an older, but very effective Kenny Lofton for a block, a rock, and an AIDS victim ... the commisioner’s office should have blocked that trade (in all fairness, we got Jose Hernandez ... a guy they had to bench towards the end of the year since he was about to break the strikeout record for a player, Bobby Hill who was a failed prospect, and someone else, a pitcher whose name I forget). From that point forward, we’ve done nothing but dump salary the instant the team is a free agent or two from at least resembling something called winning.
The Pirates will tell you it’s “for the future” ... the truth is that they like to cut their players that are MLB “capable” (and there aren’t many) and go for the cheap “prospects” that lack talent. What’s maddening is that the welfare system MLB uses has no salary floor, so if ticket sales go down, their share of the welfare goes up. The team merely exists when it should be contracted.
They still are $90M in the hole from what I gather. Of course, when they were a garbage team in Three Rivers Stadium, that was a real problem. Now that they are worth around $300M, that $90M is not that big of a deal. Still “cry poor” is the mantra of the idiots down at 110 Federal Street, Pittsburgh, PA. The morons in this area still go to games there too. That has got to stop before there is going to be any real change.
Steinbrenner at least ran his team like a business ... if he saw a hole, he’d plug it. He built the Yes Network and, quite frankly, he had earned the right to spend a ton of cash on players given MLB’s economic system. He took plenty of risks to get the Yankees where they are today. While I personally hate the team and the players ... it’s just “hate” in the sense that I love watching these Goliaths fall to underdogs :-). Trust me, if the Pirates had a Steinbrenner running that team, I’d be in heaven.
Teams like the Pirates are more concerned about whining and screwing over their fan base with false promises. The useless MLB commissioner plays a huge role in teams like the Pirates leeching off the system. Instead of playing the cards they are dealt and getting the team back to some level of normality, they are free to cry and dismantle theirselves anytime the get near the threshold of having to spend a few $$$ to make the team a bit more than a AAAA franchise.
Teams like the Pirates are in the business of using “baseball” to sell their firework shows. Once they sink to that level (no self respecting baseball person wants anything to do with that cesspool of a team), they should contract the team and/or force the owner to sell to someone who’d run the team like a baseball franchise instead of a marketing gimmick.
I loved the Pirates growing up, but, anymore, Red Sox or Rays baseball is a hell of a lot more fun to watch :-). I never thought in a million years I’d like AL “baseball” :-).
Sorry for the rant ... I just hate seeing a bunch of crybabies that do NOTHING to fix the problems when plenty of solutions exist.
I read something very interesting in the last couple of days about George Steinbrenner and his role as a key player in the "free agent era" in MLB. The Yankees' first big signing in the modern era was Catfish Hunter, who they signed to a five-year, $3.8 million deal in 1975 after Hunter was declared a free agent by an arbitrator in a breach of contract dispute with A's owner Charlie Finley. It turns out that Hunter was being offered more money by at least two teams -- including possibly even $1M more over five years by the San Diego Padres (who were then owned by McDonald's founder Ray Kroc).
But Hunter signed with the Yankees because they were willing to structure the deal exactly the way he wanted it . . . with only $750,000 as his total salary over the five years, and the rest paid to Catfish Hunter and his family in various forms -- including a $1 million signing bonus, fifteen years of deferred salary (he was still getting paid under those terms well into the 1990s, even though he retired in 1979), a $1 million life insurance policy, and annuities for his children to pay for college. Sometimes I wonder if the Yankees under Steinbrenner's leadership were able to sign players like this back in the 1970s because they were among the few teams at the time that were comfortable with the kinds of complex deals that would eventually become commonplace among professional athletes.
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