Boss Is Making Empty Threats

In a normal season, we get nearly five million fans to buy Yankee and Met tickets in this city. In real good seasons the number of tickets sold--not just the actual attendance--goes past six million. This happens in an area where we also have two pro football teams, two pro basketball teams, three hockey teams. New York--the whole tri-state area we think of as New York in sports--is busy, crowded and amazing and never seems to take a night off.

The baseball season starts in the basketball and hockey playoffs, ends with the first month of football. Always people find a way to pay their money and fight the traffic and find baseball.

It is why George Steinbrenner doesn’t get to deliver an ultimatum to Yankee fans, demand that three million buy Yankee tickets over this season, because nobody gets to deliver ultimatums like that. Not him, not Rudolph Giuliani, the mayor of Steinbrenner official Yankee team mascot.

Steinbrenner is apparently under the impression that Yankee fans work for him. They don’t. He yells at them the way he yells at all his employees anyway.

Steinbrenner spends a ton of money on the Yankees, always has. Good for him. He also acts as if he is the only owner in all of sports who spends on his team, and we should ride him through the Canyon of Heroes every time he brings in another expensive ballplayer. And you have to say, he’s sure got the money to spend. He parlayed an investment of about $2 million of his own money 25 years ago into a team that is conservatively worth $500 million. He has the greatest local television contract, from the Madison Square Garden network, in the history of the known universe.

The city of New York put $100 million into refurbishing Yankee Stadium once. Now Steinbrenner expects them to build him a new billion-dollar ballpark on the west side of Manhattan, for which he has never offered to put up a nickel of his own money. And he is going to tell his fans how to spend their money, backing that up with vague threats about New Jersey?

He sounds like some punk ballplayer threatening to leave one team for another.

If making one last score at the age of 70, or whatever he’ll be when he gets his new stadium, if he is that obsessed with the money, then let him be the Yankee owner who goes to New Jersey, let him be remembered that way. Maybe by the time he goes he can make Mr. Rudy team president. He’s had people in the job before who knows as little about baseball as the mayor.

Steinbrenner keeps talking about how he has to keep up with those big crowds they draw in Cleveland and Baltimore. As if Cleveland and Baltimore were somehow in New York City’s weight division, in anything. Cleveland has one baseball team, no pro football at the present time, no hockey, one basketball team. Baltimore has one pro football team, the baseball team and the rest of it for their fans is in downtown Washington, D.C. Still Steinbrenner and Giuliani keep comparing the other cities to New York, as if all of New York has suddenly turned sucker.

I’ve got to keep up with the Indians! Steinbrenner yells. Well how is that working out for the Yankees so far? Steinbrenner’s team competing pretty well this season. The Indians last won a World Series 50 years ago. The Orioles won in 1983 and haven’t made it to the Series since they started drawing those records crowds to the ballpark that makes Steinbrenner and the mayor so excited you have to throw cold water on them.

The Indians and Orioles outdraw the Yankees, Steinbrenner makes a ton more television money than they do.

This isn’t about the Yankees, or the future of the Yankees, or quality of life in New York. This is about Steinbrenner’s greed and Giuliani’s arrogance and has been from the start. They want what they want when they want it. They have pushed people around their whole lives and don’t stop now.