Boring Yankees Need Help for Image, by George

George Steinbrenner is either an American institution or belongs in one.

This baseball goofball gave the game everything he had, which wasn’t much, but today he is on the outside looking in, like a dead-end kid at a knothole. For so many seasons for so many reasons, this man was the designated bad guy whose name and actions were discussed and cussed on the sidewalks of New York until whatever the cranky Yankee did or said came to bear as much weight as anything uttered by Ed Koch or the Rev. Al Sharpton or Howard Stern or the other major thinkers in town.

Yet, now that he has been placed on the discarded list, cast adrift like Captain Bligh, I have come to appreciate how much the Yankee shipper meant to major league baseball, and why he positively should be penciled back into the lineup. Have I lost my marbles? Not at all. The national pastime needs George Steinbrenner because, without him, the New York Yankees have become baseball’s most crushing bore.

What is there about these Yankees now to separate them from any other team? How are they distinctive from, say, Milwaukee or Montreal? Do they have one player who interests you even slightly? There might not be even one remotely colorful character on the premises other than Bob Sheppard, the gent who introduces the players on the public-address system as though he is Alistair Cooke welcoming us to Part 32 of tonight’s episode of something or other starring British people drinking tea in tuxedoes.

How I loved to hate the New York Yankees! As a citizen and as a baseball fan, I always believed that it was my constitutional right and civic duty to detest those damn Yankees and everything for which they stood. To me, there were men wearing pinstripes in federal penitentiaries who were more worthy of understanding and forgiveness than anybody who wore the pinstripes of the New York bleeper-bleepin’ Yankees.

This was envy, of course, because the Yankees had everything. They had sluggers and hurlers and they had guys with names like Moose and Whitey and Yogi, and they had so many championship rings on their fingers that eventually they ran out of fingers. Who even knew who owned the team? Who even cared?

And then came the erosion--the great pain that took out the center fielder’s legs, the tiny plane that took away the catcher’s life, the steady regression of the New York Yankees into the inevitable but not incurable status of Just Another Team. For 10 seasons and more, that is what they have been--with one exception. One thing and one thing only that made the Yankees, if nothing else, unpredictable.

George.

What would he do next? Fire Reggie? Fire Billy? Sue Winfield? Rag Mattingly? Humiliate the third-base coach? Get cold-cocked in an elevator? Be goosed by Gossage? Apologize to the fans? Fire Billy? Give away Willie McGee for a nobody? Be suspended for a week for insulting umpires? Be fined $300,000 by the commissioner for remarks about the George Brett pine-tar ruling? Hire Roy Cohn as his attorney? Fire Billy? George did all this and more.

One day, after the pine-tar mess, Don Mattingly told a reporter: “Well, maybe now we can get back to normal around here.”

To which Rich Gossage, eavesdropping, turned and cried: “Normal? Oh, no! Not that!”

The fat man upstairs--that is the manner Gossage used in reference to the man who signed his paycheck. And Mattingly, too, who had epitomized the rare mind-my-own-business aspect of the Yankees for so long, gradually came to resent Steinbrenner’s interference. The man wore out everybody and eventually his welcome.

But now that his name has resurfaced and has, to some way of thinking, been vindicated, there is a movement afoot to restore Boss George to baseball’s good graces. Even Mattingly has relented, conceding that things have gone from bad to worse on the field, and acknowledging that Steinbrenner at least acted passionately in his Kurtz-like command of the Yankees.

It is up to Commissioner Fay Vincent and his colleagues as to whether the conviction of Howard Spira on five counts of extortion warrants a second chance for poor George, who was frightened enough or stupid enough to fork over $40,000 to Spira--a known gambler--for information regarding a pending legal action involving Dave Winfield and subsequent blackmail payment to guarantee Spira’s silence.

When Steinbrenner chose a permanent ban from active participation in Yankee business to a two-year suspension, some of us chuckled and kissed him goodby like a home run. Now that he is a goner, however, I, for one, miss the big lug terribly and would like to see George again, a gorilla in the mist.

Graig Nettles, when he played for New York, once said: “If George owned the team when Babe Ruth was playing, he’d bat him seventh and order him to lose weight.” Yes, he would have, bless him.