A Mover and a Shaker Is George

You picture a battleground on the desert of southern Iraq. Disabled tanks gather dust in the sun. Weapons carriers are heavily damaged. Puffs of smoke rise in the distance.

But it is quiet. George Steinbrenner has surrendered to the baseball coalition. He is barred from the training acreage of his once-proud army, billed as the New York Yankees.

Resolutely, George announces he shall return.

“Over our dead bats,” the Yankees respond.

Indeed, their bats, gloves, arms and other instruments related to the game are gone, proof of which is, the club finished last in the American League East last season.

In 1990, they win only 69 games. It is their worst season since 1912. Those who worship the Yankees fall into depression. Life in the Bronx no longer has meaning.

We are sitting with the 19th manager appointed by Steinbrenner during his 17-year incumbency as curator of the Yanks.

Actually, the man represents the 19th managerial change, considering that Steinbrenner enlisted some managers more than once.

Billy Martin was hired to the same job five times, a major league record he took to his final resting place.

Carl Harrison Merrill, proceeding as Stump, is a nice man. He comes from Maine, which exports more lobsters than managers.

Stump doesn’t know what hit him. He takes the job last June and sees Steinbrenner kicked out in August amid commotion not known to New York baseball since Steinbrenner was kicked out before.

“If we were a good team, we could overcome the distractions,” Stump says. “But we aren’t that good. But we aren’t as bad as we looked, either.”

“What proof are you offering in that regard?” he is asked.

“No one is going to tell me that Tim Leary should have finished 9-19 last year,” he replies. “With any kind of team around him, this is not a nine-game winner.”

Leary shrugs. The Yankees are his fifth stop in major league baseball, normal, he says, for pitchers “except Fernando (Valenzuela).”

“If one is in my line of work, all one can ask is to start in the big leagues,” says Leary, a graduate of UCLA. “Everything else you take in stride.”

Holder of a degree in finance, Leary has converted nine victories into a three-year contact worth $6 million, proving one isn’t dealing here with some kind of imbecile.

Steve Sax never earned a university degree. A truck driver’s son, he learned nimbly to take a .260 batting average last season and turn it into a contract worth $3.1 million a year through 1995.

Up until then, Sax was earning $1.4 million. Disgusted with the Yankees and what he saw as a no-hope environment, he looked for a trade, preferably to the Angels.

The Yankees taught him a lesson. They extended his contract four years for a sum amounting to upward of $12 million.

For such stakes, Sax makes the effort to live with the Yankees, whose recapture currently is the aim of Steinbrenner, claiming he is the victim of a bum rap, coerced unfairly to leave baseball.

Right now, George is permitted to sit in the stands, but he is barred from the clubhouse and the business office.

He also is barred from the owners’ box, even though George and his family still own 55% of the Yankees.

But if baseball finds him objectionable, the U.S. Olympic Committee doesn’t, studying George’s case judiciously and concluding he is fit to remain as vice president.

Facing both a winter and summer Olympics in ‘92, the USOC, George feels, needs his tactical artistry badly.

If, in New York, he changed managers 19 times in 17 years, he changed pitching coaches 32 times. George understands change.

Left to the devices of the USOC, the Yankees over 17 years would have studied the pitching situation and possibly brought in no more than a coach a year.