Opening Day in the Bronx was perhaps one of the last bows for one of the great old song and dance men, George Steinbrenner, and his brand of entertainment. Baseball teams often forget that they’re optional for the public, a source of entertainment — ironic because they’re the last of the oldtime movie studios, the only ones

that still have contract players. Every ballgame a team plays is a movie starring its personal stable of actors.

In the old Hollywood of the studio system, actors signed a contract with one studio and made films primarily for that company. That’s why just about all or Errol Flynn’s and Humphrey Bogart’s pictures were released by Warner Bros., all of Clark Gable’s and Gene Kelly’s were from MGM, all of Bing Crosby’s from Paramount, and so on. MGM’s motto was “more stars than there are in heaven,” and they had the signees to prove it. In theory, the public would over time come to equate the corporate label with the stars and vice-versa. If you heard something was a MGM picture you knew what you were getting — a certain level of stars, a certain kind of theme, a consistent level of production values.

Some teams can’t fill out the marquee with anything viable. A team like the Pittsburgh Pirates or the Baltimore Orioles will spend 10 years denigrating its own product, not just losing, which is a sure way to alienate your audience — nothing correlates to good attendance as much as a winning team — but giving its fans precious little to look at when they come to the ballpark. A night out at the local stadium becomes nothing more than a very expensive trip to the hot dog restaurant. No wonder, then, that so many express their apathy by staying home.

A fan’s love for a ballclub is irrational to begin with — so many people who are not stockholders in the Yankees or Mets insist on saying “We” (as in “We need a first baseman”) when talking about their favorite teams, but you can suppress or kill that love by showing, over a period of years, that it is unrequited, by proving that the team is just in it for the money — which is the surest way for a team to end up losing money.

It’s not clear whether George Steinbrenner has always understood this, but his compulsion to compete, to win, to dominate the back pages, often resulted in the Yankees being the best show in New York, on or off Broadway. In his raging glory days he often went about treating the marquee talent in a haphazard and destructive way and for all his frantic acquisitiveness with players, he often got between the team and putting together a coherent strategy for winning.

Yet, for all the man’s faults, his ownership has been a positive for the Yankees and for Yankees fans, something that is increasingly apparent in an age of corporate ownership of ballclubs.

Two recent ownership crises has cast the Steinbrenner legacy in

bold relief. First, the imminent excision of heir apparent Steve Swindal from the Steinbrenner family has put the succession in doubt. Meanwhile, in Chicago, Tribune Co., which has owned the Cubs since 1981, has agreed to sell itself to real estate investor Sam Zell. The Cubs will apparently not be joining the rest of Tribune’s assets in Zell’s portfolios and will be sold.

Corporate ownership failed to serve the Cubs well during the last 25 years. There was always the sense that the club served to fill a block of time on sister Tribune property WGN rather than to win anything. The club’s approach to team-building was always incoherent and seemingly without accountability. While all teams are businesses and are operated on the principle of dollars in and dollars out, Cubs ownership seemed happy to let it go at that. And if in the process the team sold its cable rights within the Tribune family at belowmarket rates, well, the money was ultimately going into the pockets of the same shareholders. All the Cubs would have done with that money is buy better players, whereas Tribune execs could use the dough to buy leather wingback chairs with vibrating cushions and built-in BlackBerries.

Corporations are run by MBAs, who are inherently hostile to winning if it interferes with set profit margins — unlike the old Hollywood execs, who understood that the audience had to see production values up on the screen that reflected the cost of their tickets. Because George Steinbrenner is “The Boss,” he has a flexibility that corporations lack, the latitude to say, “Profit margins be damned — I’m going to put on a better show and take home a little less this year.” Sometimes this has paid off in championships, sometimes not, but the exchange of dollars for entertainment was most often an equitable one.

The Yankees opened this season with a lineup of All-Stars. With the exception of the journeyman Josh Phelps, there is never a time where it’s safe to look away, no Adam Everett, Brad Ausmus, and the pitcher innings that some other clubs have. Last season, the Cubs went 66–96 because no one cared enough to make sure that they didn’t. The team’s next owner might be more attentive or the Cubs might have another distant corporate master. Someday the Yankees too will have to answer that question, especially now that Steinbrenner has no heir in place. It’s instructive to remember what happened to MGM after the studio era ended. The stars became free agents. The lot was sold for real estate, the props were sold at auction, the old scripts were burned, and the name was licensed to a Las Vegas hotel. We can enjoy the old movies on DVD, but there are no more of that kind coming — whatever ethos animated the brand has been lost. George Steinbrenner has an ethos, too. As we spend one more opening day under his baleful, owner’s box glare, it’s worth remembering that that ethos may not survive him.

Mr. Goldman writes the Pinstriped Bible for yesnetwork.comand is the author of “Forging Genius,” a biography of Casey Stengel.