Remembering Yankee Owner George Steinbrenner
- Author: Min-Q Kim
- Posted on: Tuesday July 13, 2010 at 6:00 AM
- Filed under: sports, business, new york yankees, george steinbrenner, exclusive
George Steinbrenner, owner of the New York Yankees, died Tuesday morning of a heart attack. His name is synonymous with the New York Yankees, baseball's glamour franchise. But it wasn't always that way. The man known simply as 'The Boss' bought the team in 1973 for a little less than $9 million. At last estimate, the Yankees have been valued at around $1.2 billion (with a 'b'), with a new stadium and a cable television network devoted entirely to the team and its doings. He was blustery, totally unreasonable at times, and ruled with an iron fist. But the Yankees enjoyed 11 pennants and 7 World Series championships under his watch, so it's hard to argue with his methods.
"Show me a good loser and I'll show you a loser," he told '60 Minutes' in a 1987 interview. That was Steinbrenner.
His life reads like any other, we suppose... He made his money in shipping, then bought a stale Yankees franchise from CBS, as part of an investment group. He quickly started running the show, with or without his investment group's approval, demanding the team's training facility be run like a boot camp, forbidding his players to wear beards or long hair, once benching star first basemen Don Mattingly for refusing to cut his hair.
He fired managers whenever he felt like. He fired Yogi Berra 16 games into the '85 season. And he played yo-yo with Billy Martin's career, who served as Yankee manager five different times through the 70's and 80's, which inspired this famous Seinfeld spoof.
He made illegal campaign contributions to Richard Nixon in 1974, which led to one of two suspensions from baseball. The other was when he hired a private investigator to dig up dirt on newly acquired right fielder Dave Winfield over a contract dispute.
Steinbrenner and Winfield, 1989. (AP, via NYTimes)
His insatiable pursuit of big-name players led Major League Baseball to implement revenue sharing to try to curtail his outlandish spending, but it only seemed to egg him on. He consistently outbid other teams for the game's best players. After one particularly heated bidding war over Cuban pitcher Jose Contreras, which of course the Yankees won, Boston Red Sox president Larry Lucchino called Steinbrenner's Yankees 'The Evil Empire.' In 2009, three of the four highest paid players in baseball manned the Yankee infield. Yankee fans, on the other hand, don't seem to mind.
"Hello? Big-named player? Come play for me." (AP)
From the beginning, Steinbrenner believed the Yankee brand was something very valuable, and grew it to where it stands now -- a veritable empire. He was the first to realize that the actual games were a sellable commodity, and sold broadcast rights to local channel MSG, initially, before the real stroke of genius: starting his own cable network (The YES Network). Regional sports networks have since popped up all over the country. George Steinbrenner turned the Yankees into the model sports franchise.
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