COMMENTARY : Steinbrenner Can Outbid Them All, but He Won’t Do It

George Steinbrenner sits in his command post in his cap with the 50-mission crush, the scrambled eggs on the visor, the red phone at one hand and the red button at the other. He has the weapon none of the other teams in all of baseball can match: He can blow them all away in the war for free agents.

But it is the Doomsday Weapon, the neutron bomb of his staggering cable television contract, and he does not dare use it. If he did, it could destroy the world he seeks to conquer.

So he is now forced to fight a conventional war, which evidence says he can’t win, no matter how he stamps his foot and insists that it isn’t so. Wriggle and squirm as he will, his team is going into the season with the realization that if Steinbrenner had to pick a pitcher to win one game, he would pick Pascual Perez.

That thought will throw some cold water on a night of New Year’s revelry.

Free agents who could go anywhere they chose have chosen to go somewhere else. The chickens are going somewhere else to roost. If they are afraid to play for the New York Yankees, who can blame them?

Mark Davis’ agent spoke of it as a trend.

“Absolutely ludicrous,” Steinbrenner responded from his shipbuilding office in Tampa, Fla., on Tuesday.

“Not everybody can take New York,” Steinbrenner maintained. “It’s not Steinbrenner and it’s not the Yankees. It’s a little bit of Yankee tradition. A lot of people don’t like or understand the New York life style. To say Steinbrenner can’t get the best players and blame me is crazy.”

The bottom line comes in two parts: One is that Steinbrenner’s pinstripes are a heavy burden at any price; two is that Steinbrenner is afraid to offer so much more money that they can’t refuse to play for his team. That’s what he used to do, but it’s dangerous for him to be such a bully these days.

Steinbrenner was the first to grasp the handle of the free-agent market and he made it work for him. In effect he made the rules they all had to live by and he dominated the game. He made offers to players they couldn’t refuse. So he picked a few clunkers; he found enough winners.

Then the world caught up, and he hasn’t won anything since 1981. Now that he has an advantage on everybody again, he is afraid to remake the rules.

He can outbid everybody; he can overwhelm the biggest of offers, but he doesn’t dare. He has that cable-TV contract that will give him nearly $50 million a year through the year 2001. Local radio and television give him nearly three times what anybody else gets.

But suppose he went out and offered Mark Langston $20 million for five years instead of the $16 million Langston accepted from the California Angels. Suppose Steinbrenner offered Mark Davis $18 million for four years; would Davis have taken $13 million from the Kansas City Royals?

Suppose Steinbrenner went out and broke the barriers the way he used to. That’s just what he won’t do. Nobody’s going to call him irresponsible, no sirree. He’s treating that local cable bonanza as if it were the big bomb. The teams share the big network contract; nobody shares Steinbrenner’s local money.

“Guys in the smaller TV markets are saying the Yankees are in the big market,” he said. “I’m being a good boy. We didn’t break the $3-million barrier; Gene Autry did in California. And then Oakland. Then who breaks the record is Kansas City. The next time Ewing Kauffman says they don’t have the market to compete with me, I’ll say, ‘Sit down and shut up.’ ”

What he is afraid of is revenue sharing. The National Football League has it to protect the like of the Green Bay Packers from the bullies of the big cities. When Steinbrenner is recognized as too strong for the health of the game, the game will have to do something. The game will have to make him share.

So he offers more but only a little more--as such things go. Davis, the Cy Young relief pitcher of the National League, declined Steinbrenner’s offer of $16.5 million for five years. That was $3.5 million more--guaranteed--for an additional year. It was a bigger package but only a little more per year.

Everybody has money these days: not as much as the Yankees but enough to offer players so much money that even the greediest have to consider such altruistic matters as where they might be happy--and where they might thrive as players. Then they have to look at history.

Steinbrenner’s people told Mark Langston to get his best offer and then get back to the Yankees. And Langston chose not to call back; he didn’t want to know Steinbrenner’s last best offer. He said he preferred the California coast, where his wife could seek her career on the silver screen.

And then Davis could say he preferred the atmosphere and the stability that Kansas City had and New York didn’t. He wasn’t going to sign with the Yankees no matter what they offered.

To an extent they rejected New York, but what was it that made New York an obstacle? Steve Sax, last year’s Yankee catch, thrived in New York. He hustled, which is his style, and created his own world. “I really have found New York to be a very pleasant place to play,” he said. Tommy John, among the most sensitive of athletes to the needs of his family, found the area thoroughly livable.

But there is still the specter of Ed Whitson turned inside out by playing for the Yankees and no less a man than Jack Clark wanting out after a half-season of finding out that a slump on the Yankees isn’t the same as a slump on the St. Louis Cardinals. Ballplayers and their connections make peculiar associations. Storm Davis was at the brink of signing with the Toronto Blue Jays. Then a maniac killed 14 women in Montreal, and Davis’ wife begged him not to sign with Toronto.

Steinbrenner says now: “No way Davis would have fit in in New York. Some guys don’t want the challenge of New York.”

Whatever New York demands, his demands are a multiple. The image of the Yankees--real or imagined--is of his making. So when he thinks he can’t get the players he really wants, he has to bid much more than the market demands for Andy Hawkins, who was 15-15 as his record predicted, and for Perez.