How Hank Impacts The Yanks

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

The rise and fall of the Yankees’ fortunes over the years has had a direct relationship to how involved the owner was. The less anyone heard from George Steinbrenner, the more games the team won. The most consequential development of the Yankees’ absurdly overwrought offseason, then, may not be the resigning of Alex Rodriguez, but the newfound grandiloquence of Hank Steinbrenner, heir to his father’s throne and apparent inheritor of his mouth.

When George Steinbrenner was essentially acting as his own general manager, signing and trading players at whim, it made for great headlines, but the Yankees could never quite win no matter how much talent they had. They failed to win a single World Series in the 1980s, the first decade in which that had happened since the 1910s. When Steinbrenner was temporarily banished from baseball for hiring a shady gambler to trail around after star outfielder Dave Winfield, a group led by Gene Michael made the key signings, draft picks, and trades that led directly to the dynastic Joe Torre teams. When Steinbrenner began monkeying with the roster again, making brilliant moves such as signing Gary Sheffield rather than Vladimir Guerrero in 2003, little good came of it.

Most people have probably worked for a business owned by someone who knew about one tenth as much as he thought he did, and so know why an overbearing owner is inherently a problem. The difficulty is usually less that the boss makes actively terrible decisions than that he unknowingly makes decisions that conflict with those made by people who actually know what they’re doing, and wants everyone to listen to his harebrained ideas. Only a very stupid and very determined boss can wreck an otherwise soundly run concern, but it’s very easy for even a well-meaning owner to waste plenty of his employees’ time.

It’s too early to know whether Hank Steinbrenner will be an active impediment to the success of the Yankees, or whether he’ll just insist on making a public spectacle of himself. He may even wise up and learn that the only time an owner should ever be seen is when he’s accepting a trophy from the commissioner. Early returns, though, are not encouraging.

Steinbrenner has given the public every reason to deem him an obnoxious buffoon over the last few weeks. First came the debacle that was Joe Torre’s exit from New York. After tendering Torre an insulting offer that entailed a huge pay cut, Steinbrenner further insulted the beloved legend. “Where was Joe’s career in ’95 when my dad hired him?” he asked the New York Post, probably rhetorically. Then came the Rodriguez debacle, when Steinbrenner managed somehow to make his estranged third baseman a mildly sympathetic figure by bloviating like a drunk in the right field bleachers about the majesty of pinstripes. “He doesn’t understand the privilege of being a Yankee,” Steinbrenner huffed to the Daily News. He has also found time to publicly insult Mariano Rivera by calling him old ,and made clear that he thinks he will personally be setting the rotation next year by talking about how he wants Joba Chamberlain to start. When he’s not talking about money, he’s talking about his father, and when he’s not doing that, he’s talking about decisions that aren’t his to make. He betrays no awareness of the fact that he’s unqualified for his job by anything other than his DNA.

Perhaps his crowning moment came over the weekend, when an anonymous Yankees official let it be known that the team was closing in on a deal to keep Rodriguez in the Bronx for the rest of his career. The deal, it was said, would include incentives that would pay Rodriguez more if he broke Barry Bonds’s career home run record. This is in direct contravention of the sport’s collective bargaining agreement and constitution, both of which explicitly forbid such arrangements.

Steinbrenner’s response was to claim that “It’s a historical achievement bonus more than it is an incentive bonus,” an argument that will go over with no one who is capable of reading. Either he didn’t consult with anyone who knew this, or he did, and then ignored what he was told. Which do you imagine would be worse? And which would be worse for the future of the Yankees? If the past tells the future, Hank Steinbrenner will eventually learn to clam up and let this employees do their jobs without public lectures about what a privilege it is to work for him. Hopefully, it won’t take him doing something so awful he’s actually suspended from the game for several years to make it happen this time.

tmarchman@nysun.com


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