COMMENTARY : Steinbrenner Keeps Team but Loses What He Loved: His Forum

Baseball didn’t take George Steinbrenner’s team away from him Monday. It did something more necessary; it took away his forum.

For too many years, The Boss had made the New York Yankees his personal podium, almost single-handedly keeping tabloids in the banner-headline business.

Long before he paid Howard Spira $40,000, Steinbrenner had lost touch with the best interests of baseball, let alone those of the Yankees.

Agreeing not to take Commissioner Fay Vincent’s decision to reduce him to a minority shareholder to court might have been the only thing Steinbrenner has done for baseball in a decade--and then, it came because lawyers advised him he would lose.

If Pete Rose ably represented the tragedy of greed, Steinbrenner embodied the ugliest side of wealth. For years, he hired and fired at whim, belittled employees while turning baseball’s proudest franchise into a personal toy.

Vincent will allow Steinbrenner to keep a piece of his team, turn his profits and enjoy the American system of free enterprise. From now on, however, The Boss won’t be--and will need permission from baseball to so much as attend games.

Through his actions, Vincent has sent a message that there are limits to the indignities baseball will accept. Now, and for as long as it is played, baseball must come first.

Under Steinbrenner, the Yankees had ceased being New York’s team and became George’s team. When they lost, he vilified them, sent them to the minors, insulted them in print, ordered tickets withheld from certain players’ wives.

When fans began chanting an anti-Steinbrenner slogan in Yankee Stadium in the early ‘80s, Steinbrenner told the New York Post: “They can say anything they want. I’ve got their money in my back pocket.”

For nearly two decades, he feuded with the biggest names in baseball: Reggie Jackson, Dave Winfield, Ron Guidry, Dave Righetti, Rickey Henderson, Don Mattingly.

He didn’t merely fire good baseball men--all owners do that--he tried to break them. He broke his word and the rules, frequently.

In Steinbrenner’s world, success was measured by $500-million cable-television contracts and having his quotes played above New York Mets games on the sports pages.

Money was power, until Vincent pulled the plug Monday. Finally, baseball stood up to its resident bully.

In the days and weeks to come, Steinbrenner will play the martyr, telling anyone who listens that he accepted Vincent’s punishment quietly rather than drag baseball into courts where, he will argue, he most certainly would have won.

It doesn’t matter. The man Newsweek magazine put on its cover this week--as the most hated man in baseball--has been told to go stand in a corner by the father figure of the game.

And beginning this morning, New York will have two baseball teams again. The game is better for it.