Steinbrenner Generates Buzz

With all the sports world in a gasp, the gravel-filled drawl of a baseball man fills the phone.

“You have good timing,” Buzzie Bavasi says. “I just wrote him a note.”

Him, meaning a man derided across the landscape today for supposedly smothering our national pastime with his oily wallet.

Him, being a man who supposedly just stole an October baseball championship days before the first suntan.

Him, meaning George Steinbrenner.

Whom Buzzie Bavasi loves.

“I wrote to him, ‘George, I don’t know why anybody complains about you,’ ” Bavasi relates. “ ‘Nobody gets mad when you come to play their teams. Nobody gets mad about selling all those extra tickets.’ ”

While many looked at a pinstriped Alex Rodriguez on Tuesday and saw greed, the former longtime Dodger general manager saw greatness.

“George Steinbrenner wants to win more than any other owner I’ve been around,” Bavasi said. “Walter [O’Malley] wanted to win, but he wouldn’t pay that money. George will do whatever it takes.”

Agreed, and today I will write whatever it takes to convince you.

George Steinbrenner is the greatest owner in baseball history.

He is bolder than Bill Veeck, more dogged than Tom Yawkey and, yes, more willing to spend big money than Walter O’Malley.

He can be a jerk, but he tries. He can be a bully, but he cares.

As his A-mazing-Rod acquisition of baseball’s best and most expensive player proved again this week, Steinbrenner answers to but one master.

It is not the commissioner’s office, nor other baseball owners, nor the union, nor the local politicians, nor the media.

It is the people forgotten by most other owners in this age of Selig sycophants, peer-pressured weaklings and empty-pocketed charlatans.

Steinbrenner answers only to his fans.

Should anyone else matter?

And in times like these, don’t you secretly wish you were one of them?

Thirty-one years ago, Steinbrenner purchased an overpriced, underachieving team that had finished higher than fifth place only once in the previous eight years.

A giant market, a great history, but business folks thought it was a bad deal.

Steinbrenner turned it into the $10-million sale of the century.

Since his purchase, the Yankees have been the best team in baseball, with nine pennants and six world championships.

Yes, he changed the Yankee manager 23 times in his first 20 years. But he finally got it right, didn’t he?

And, yes, he went through a drought in the 1980s and early 1990s where his team struggled and he acted like a dolt and he was even suspended from baseball for paying a gambler for information about former star Dave Winfield. But he adjusted, didn’t he?

Steinbrenner will begin this season having won seven division championships in the last nine years, with four world titles and two other World Series appearances during that time.

You think this makes him bad for baseball? Then don’t watch his team.

But of course you’ll watch his team.

With the addition of Rodriguez and Gary Sheffield this winter, the Yankees may have perhaps baseball’s best lineup in the last 25 years, which will account for strong summer nights from Anahbeim to St. Petersburg to guess where?

Indeed, the Yankees are coming to Dodger Stadium June 18, 19 and 20. The last time they played here in a game that counted was during the 1981 World Series.

The only major figure from then who still has the same job? George Steinbrenner.

If you can’t get tickets to those games, you can always stake out the elevators, and here’s hoping there’s still enough Dodger fans left who understand that joke.

“The same people who complain that George is ruining baseball, they complain when his team isn’t on their schedule,” Bavasi said.

Then there are those who complain that he only buys his championships, an equally specious argument.

Yes, the Yankees have a payroll around $190 million, more than $60 million higher than the next highest spenders. But the core of their recent titles was all home grown, a list featuring guys like Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera and Bernie Williams and Jorge Posada.

“Hey, everybody tries to buy a championship, but it’s not that easy,” said Bavasi. “Tom Yawkey [Boston] tried for 40 years to buy a championship and never did it. It takes hard work and baseball sense and George has all that.”

Steinbrenner is also full of bluster and bully, firing employees on the spot for not working Christmas, publicly questioning the great Joe Torre during the middle of a three-game losing streak, a legendarily awful boss.

To which I say, so what? His employees are free to leave, but many stick around for the Octobers.

His fans, meanwhile, aren’t paying to work for him. They’re paying to cheer for his team. And while they may occasionally shudder about his tactics, they are almost always applauding his results.

“You spend time around George and you realize, he’s all about baseball,” said Bavasi. “Not many owners are like that, I don’t think.”

This is where the argument usually turns to the likes of those poor owners of teams like the Kansas City Royals and Minnesota Twins, small-town folk who supposedly can’t play poker with a guy who they cannot possibly bluff.

Yet this certainly didn’t scare, or stop, the Angels and Florida Marlins.

It could be argued that the greatness of the Yankees actually increases the interest in the smaller-market teams.

To have a David, you must first have a Goliath, and nobody plays the latter role like a great Yankee team.

Would the Angels march to the world title in 2002 have been as sweet if they had not gone through Roger Clemens and Derek Jeter to get there?

From Murderers’ Row to the Big Red Machine, baseball’s glory days have always required glory teams.

Thanks to one created by George Steinbrenner, baseball has emerged from the labor-torn doldrums of the mid-1990s into a streak of rising popularity that has stretched recently from the best postseason ever into one delicious winter.

Damn Yankees?

Bless The Boss.

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Plaschke, go to latimes.com/plaschke.