Baseball Musings

It’s been a tough week for the Yankees. First Bob Sheppard died. For those unfamiliar, Sheppard was the voice of Yankee stadium from 1951 until 2008. Reggie Jackson called him “the voice of God.” Players knew they had made it when Bob Sheppard announced their name. I was at the last game where he made an appearance.

Then Tuesday we lost George Steinbrenner, the “boss”. Love him or hate him you could not ignore him, or what he did for baseball and sports in general. He is in many ways the face of free agency, because he was the first owner to really understand its potential not only for the team but for his pocketbook. He bought the team for 8.7 million in 1973, and most people value the Yankees at more than 1.5 billion today, and the YES network is valued even higher.

What he wanted most of all was to win, and win he did. The Yankees had the highest winning percentage, the most pennants and the most World Series titles, over those 37 years. Now some will claim that all he did was to buy those titles, but while he did prove the value of bringing in certain players to complete a team, he also proved that you cannot buy a championship. All you need to do is look at the drought without a title from 1979 to 1996, the longest since the Yankees began winning. He thought that all he needed to do was just get the best talent available and he would win, but he didn’t. Instead, it wasn’t until the started rebuilding their farm system, using that system to trade for key pieces and then promoting from within that they started winning again. The drought in this decade was also related to Steinbrenner forgetting this lesson, but when we started bringing up home grown talent again then we won again.

What makes the Yankees unusual is that they are willing to pay to keep the players they have, and they have the money to do it. Some of this is from the market they play in, but most of it is because Steinbrenner did not make money off of revenues from the team. All that money was plowed back into the team. Instead he made money off the Yankee brand, and he was the first to really understand this potential as well. And what no one wants to recognize is that the other teams that the Yankees play, and MLB in general, all benefited from this. In most years the Yankees are in the top three in attendance twice. That is, they are normally number one in home attendance, and usually number three in attendance for those who come to see them on the road. In addition, nationally televised games which include the Yankees routinely draw more than any other team, especially if they are in the World Series.

As a Yankee fan I can never say that I was a fan of Steinbrenner because what he didn’t understand was that I never paid to see him. I paid to see the players. But also as a Yankees fan I loved him because he wanted to win even more than I do, and he was going to try and field the best team possible in order to try and make that happen, and for that I am grateful.

One aspect that is more troublesome, which many people pointed out yesterday, was that this spate of angry/vicious reality television that we currently witness can be blamed on the Boss. The idea that you can yell, scream, berate, treat people rudely and just the total lack of civility that we witness on television and now are witnessing in more and more aspects of our lives, comes from people seeing how Steinbrenner ran his teams. But what makes him different from what we see today, was that after he was done ranting he moved on. There are lots of stories of him firing someone and then the next day being mad because they weren’t in their office. He also reached out and gave assistance to anyone he knew who needed help. He was even one of the major donors to the Jimmy Fund each year, and that was the side that people never heard about. As I said, love him or hate him you can’t ignore what he did for the game and he belongs in the Hall of Fame.

And as long as I’m on the baseball topic, the idea that the All-Star game “counts” is just ridiculous. No matter what Selig wants to say, it is just an exhibition game and last night was the perfect example. In the bottom of the ninth, down by two runs, David Ortiz singled to lead off the inning. In any other circumstance you would pinch run for Ortiz because he should not be on the bases. However, Girardi didn’t have anyone available off the bench to run for him except A-Rod, who he wanted to save for his bat. As a result Ortiz was thrown out at second on a great play in the outfield, and that was basically the ball game.

It’s an exhibition game mister commissioner, and you saying otherwise doesn’t change the reality. The players do not play any harder just because of what you put on it. They all still want to win. So let’s go back to having the game just exactly what it is, an exhibition game. And if you do want to make it a real game, then let’s make it a real game choosing the best players for the team, which would mean that not every time was represented, and have them play the whole game, rather than cycling every player in because when you do that you end up just like we did last night which makes a mockery of saying the game “counts.”