Silk Purse Became Sow’s Ear

For decades, the cry has gone up in baseball, “Break Up The Yankees!”

They were stifling the game. They were one of the most hated organizations in the world, ranked alongside the Krupp Works in Germany, the warlords in China, the Cossacks in Russia. They weren’t a team, they were a monarchy. The Hapsburgs of baseball.

They were haughty, imperious, overbearing. They really weren’t an athletic hegemony, they were an economic hegemony. They made more money on the side than other franchises did on ticket sales. One year, 1934, the New York Yankees drew 81,000 to an afternoon doubleheader against the Detroit Tigers. That was 1,000 more than the St. Louis Browns drew for that entire season.

If two teams were bidding for a star prospect and one of them was the Yankees, there was very little doubt where the athlete would go. The Yankees could even offer him less. He would make it up in World Series checks.

Their symbol, fittingly, was a top hat. Between 1921 and 1964, they won 29 pennants and World Series championships were almost automatic. They won World Series games by scores of 18-4, 12-6, 13-5. Those weren’t games, they were batting practices.

They usually kept the same manager throughout their streaks--Miller Huggins in the ‘20s, Joe McCarthy in the ‘30s and ‘40s, Casey Stengel in the ‘50s. Their owner was a German brewer who spoke with a heavy accent and called the great Babe “Root.”

They made a travesty of the game, as the saying goes. Watching a Yankee game was like watching a guy pulling wings off a butterfly. For sickos.

And then, someone finally came along and broke up the Yankees!

You’d think they’d give him a ticker-tape parade. The keys to every city in the league. Instant installation in the Hall of Fame.

Know what they did? Kicked him out of the game, is what they did! Suspended him. Stripped him of his epaulets. Threw him out the front door. Ordered him into exile.

Is that any way to treat a public benefactor of this magnitude?

George Steinbrenner should be a statue in every ballpark in the country. Instead, I’m not sure he dares show his face.

George did what the game couldn’t do in 43 years--broke up the Yankees. He turned a once-proud franchise into a collection of clods. He made them the laughingstock of the grand old game. He lost the town to the Mets--the Mets!--and he lost the game to a lot of bozos the Yankees used to beat regularly like a gong.

It wasn’t easy. The Yankees took a lot of breaking up. They went down like the Ottoman Empire. The dismantling required a lot of concentrating.

George was equal to it. He began by discharging managers, throwing them out the door like drunks in a waterfront bar at 2 a.m. He never really gave anybody a chance to even know his players. George didn’t really want a strong manager. George saw it as a ventriloquist act. When a manager talked, you could see George’s lips move.

He bought players for reputation, not prowess. He lucked out with Reggie Jackson. Reggie came with a pennant attached, like Babe Ruth or Mickey Mantle. Other acquisitions came with fifth place attached.

He had a team of strangers. They were like passengers in the same plane. Yankees in the past didn’t like each other sometimes. But they knew each other.

George didn’t take much out of the Yankees--just their soul.

But where was he when we needed him? Where was he when they were swallowing baseball whole, when a World Series had about as much suspense as a drowning?

Still, you might say George opened up the game. Even unwittingly, he broke up the Yankee monopoly as effectively as a Justice Department task force busting up a cartel. The Yankees are only a shell of their former selves, and we have George Steinbrenner to thank.

And what thanks does he get? Out! There’s the door! Never darken it again!

Tsk, tsk! That’s gratitude for you.

Of course, George didn’t set off on this trust-busting venture as a public service. It just kind of happened.

Poor George! You see, I think I have a handle on George’s problem. George never properly grasped the fundamental character of baseball. George’s background was all in football, first at his alma mater, Williams College, then at Ohio State, where he worshipped at the knee of Woody Hayes, no less. Then, he was an assistant coach at Northwestern and Purdue.

George thought baseball could be run like football--locker room pep talks, motivational programs, pom-pons, cheerleading. He never caught onto the basic precept that baseball, unlike football, is not a team game, it’s a series of solo performances.

That’s why you don’t have to pump up a baseball player any more than you do an opera star. You might have to put some fight in an interior lineman in football. After all, nobody knows what he’s doing on any given play except the coach assigned to him. He can dog it.

But a baseball player is like a guy doing his aria or a tap dance in a spotlight. The last thing he wants to do is humiliate himself. He doesn’t need any fight talks, any pleas, any exhortations to win one for the old Gipper or someone’s sick aunt in Peoria. If he can knock that ball out of the lot, he will. Even if his mother is pitching. The last time anybody made out in baseball because he wasn’t doing his best up there was in the 1919 World Series.

None of George’s shtick worked in baseball. He simply never really got the hang of it. Sarcasm, threats, tantrums, backdoor punishments--none of them ever worked a better performance. George thought it was going to be like Notre Dame- Army. Michigan vs. Ohio State. Pure emotion. It was more like an orchestrated, set-piece war. Baseball calls for careful, rational, deliberate thought, not runaway adrenaline flow.

Still, George broke up the Yankees, didn’t he? The game owes him that. Even the Red Sox sneak into an occasional pennant now. The old St. Louis Browns, now the Baltimore Orioles, even do it.

They booted George out for giving $40,000 to some character who bets the horses and eats with his hat on. I guess that’s a no-no. Baseball is getting quite sanctimonious.

So, George is out of here after all he’s done. Well, sort of. I think he appointed his son in his place. I guess because his chauffeur was busy.

So I don’t have too much worry that the Yankees will claw their way back to the throne. Funny, but I get the feeling George will still find a way to keep those good men down. He always has.

But what if he can’t? What if some management comes along and restores the Yanks to their old-time tyranny?

The commissioner of baseball said he ran George out in “the best interests of the game.” We’ll be the judge of that, commissioner. Particularly if the Yanks come back to win World Series games, 18-4. We may be begging George to come back and break them up again--in the best interests of the game.