Keep George Out

This is not a posting about George W. Bush. This is about another George who tried to enforce his will on the world and is unbelievably stubborn in his ways. Another George who made the colossus he ran hated by millions and was summarily punished, and yet there are some people who love this George and say he deserves the highest of honors. By now you’ve guessed it – it’s George Steinbrenner, and I’ve heard some people from Goose Gossage to Tim McCarver calling for Steinbrenner to be enshrined in Baseball’s Hall of Fame.

If this happens, it would be the equivalent of carving George W. Bush’s head on Mt. Rushmore, and baseball will continue slipping into irrelevance and mediocrity. I can’t think of anyone less qualified to represent America’s pastime than Steinbrenner. Since Steinbrenner is now elderly, ailing and appears to have lost most of his marbles, there has been a recent tendency to overlook his decades of mistakes and virulence, and focus on the Yankee dynasties in the 70s and 90s that emerged while he was the team’s de facto owner and overlord. If baseball was like the NFL (where a candidate’s character is irrelevant to on-field performance) this may be valid. But Cooperstown maintains character as a prerequisite, which is why Pete Rose, Shoeless Joe Jackson, Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds will never enter the hall and why Steinbrenner should be excluded for the rest of his life and beyond.

For baseball and Yankee fans alike with long-term memory issues, here’s a review of Steinbrenner’s “accomplishments” that may have slipped their minds that gives plenty of insight on his character:

· Steinbrenner pled guilty to obstructing justice and making illegal campaign contributions to Nixon in 1974. He was suspended by MLB for 15 months. Ronald Reagan pardoned him in 1988.
· Was banned again for life by Commissioner Fay Vincent for hiring a thug to find dirt on Dave Winfield after Steinbrenner refused to make a charitable donation to Winfield’s charity. The payment was part of a 10-year, $23 million contract Steinbrenner signed that was the highest ever in baseball at the time. When this was announced to the hometown Yankee crowd, they responded with a standing ovation because Steinbrenner was so despised.
· The Yankee dynasty of the 70s was largely due to Steinbrenner’s dexterity in the new free agent era. He became the first to sign top players to huge contracts that teams without the Yankee war chest could never match. While this is now standard practice, it has led to the current overclass and underclass that exists in baseball with the same rich teams and poor teams perennially at the top and bottom of the standings year after year. Changing baseball to an oligarchic practice is one reason it has fallen from America’s top sport to number four in popularity, revenue and TV ratings.
· Much has been written about Steinbrenner’s martinet reputation and the continual and repeated annual firings of managers and general managers if the Yankees did not win a title (and let’s see what happens to Joe Girardi in October). When Steinbrenner finally stopped this practice with Joe Torre and Brian Cashman in the mid-90s, success returned to the ballclub.

You will never find a Yankee fan that disputes the team plays better when Steinbrenner stays out of the way and stops interfering. Is baseball considering putting him in the Hall of Fame because after 20 years he finally learned how to do his job? Is he being rewarded because he is less involved and the team succeeds when he has nothing to do with it? When Steinbrenner was involved in manager selection (Dallas Green, Clyde King, Stump Merill, Bucky Dent) the choices were either disasters or - in the case of Billy Martin and Lou Piniella - Steinbrenner kicked them to the curb if they failed to win the World Series. The players Steinbrenner insisted on getting (Ken Phelps, Ed Whitson, Steve Trout, Rick Rhoden, Dale Murray, Butch Wynegar, Danny Tartabull, Kevin Maas, Steve Howe and I’m forgetting at least 50 others) were either overpaid over the hill or both. Notice a pattern here?

Steinbrenner is not totally without merit. He did make the Yankees winners again in bursts (again, mainly when he was completely UNINVOLVED with baseball) and the Yankees are now worth more than most companies, let alone baseball teams. He did install an attitude of winning in the club, albeit with the subtleness of Mussolini. But forget this ridiculousness about putting him in the same pantheon as honorable men like Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio and Hank Aaron. If either of them was thrown out of baseball twice and did one-third of the things Steinbrenner did, they wouldn’t be Hall of Famers. Let’s hope voters subject owners to the same character criteria they do with players. If they’re fair, it shouldn’t even be close.