More on George

The thing is, people say, if you were a fan of the New York Yankees and you were a fan of winning, you didn’t necessarily care how George Steinbrenner treated his employees, or how George created a winner.

I’m not sure that’s true.

There was no bigger Yankee fan than me through 2001. We loved the Yankees in spite of George, and sometimes, perversely, because of George. We hated his antics. We loved his antics. I’d say losing played into how much we disliked Steinbrenner back then, but I’m not sure if winning brought us back into his fold in the late Nineties.

George’s rein from 1982 to around 1998 gave Yankee fans the rare chance to root for an underdog. Perhaps that’s why I gravitated to the Mets the last two years — except for around 1984 to 1989 when the Mets were dominant, they’ve been perennial underdogs in this two-team town.

Of course, “underdog” in the Yankees sense didn’t necessarily mean Steinbrenner had the lowest paid team. In fact, quite the opposite. And the Yankees used to be proud of pointing out that they had the highest winning percentage of any team in the Eighties (while also not pointing out that they reached one World Series in that decade, and that was because of a fluke caused by the 1981 strike).

No, my favorite Yankee teams were the ones I grew up with, the Eighties and early Nineties. Winning in 1996, and again in 1998, was like the culmination of those long (for the Yanks) dark years. After ’98, when they traded David Wells for the Texas accused-steroid meat-head, it started to become less fun. My wife and I were engaged at Yankee Stadium in July 2001. I never went to another game again. Though we gave out Yankee souvenirs (among other items) to our families at our wedding in 2002, my interest in baseball waned as my interest (and, eventually, my passion) for the Yankees waned. My interest in baseball was only reborn by two things: my son, who at a very early age, picked up on an intense interest in the sport; and my newfound rooting for the New York Mets.

Yes, George brought the winners back to the Bronx. I loved it at first in 1996 and 1998. I loved it retrospectively from 1977 and 1978. But perhaps I loved the craziness he brought with him even more.

One of my favorite books, which I know I have around the house somewhere but cannot locate, is Bill Madden’s and Moss Klein’s account of the Steinbrenner years up until around 1990 entitled Damned Yankees. It’s a recommended read for anyone who remembered those years, or who cared to remember those years, and how the good, the bad, and the ugly made for roller-coaster seasons as a fan.

One final point: for all his firings, Steinbernner had four managers in the Nineties (not including Don Zimmer’s interim stint in 1999), and only two from 1992-2007. That’s two managers in 15 years. Except for the Twins, that’s fewer managerial changes than most teams.

On Steinbrenner

I don’t know how to react to the news of George Steinbrenner’s death. As a child of the Eighties and a graduate of the Nineties, I remember most that he gave us Don Mattingly, the great 1995 playoff series with Seattle, the worthy 1996 championship, and the perfect year of 1998.

I remember less (because I was so young) the late Seventies’ championship. The 1980 to 1983 teams were the ones I remember most from my formative years — a 103-win season, a trip to the World Series in a strike-shortened year, an entirely lost and misguided campaign, and a third-place finish in a bizarre but impossible-to-look-away season with a July 4 no-hitter by Dave Righetti and the Pine-Tar Game in what was Billy Martin’s last full season as manager (though he came back for partial seasons twice more).

To root for the Yankees in those days was to root for chaos. Steinbrenner made it so, and I learned the worst sin a team could make, perhaps even worse than losing, was to be a boring team to follow.

He coveted certain stars on other teams too much, and was willing to spend to bring them in. Later examples included the execrable duo of Roger Clemens and Randy Johnson, perhaps two of the greatest pitchers of all time, and two of the hardest pitchers to root for (to say the least). I couldn’t bring myself to cheer for those guys. The craziness and fun of the earlier Steinbrenner teams was one thing. The abject surliness and joylessness of these two was something else.

He gave us Reggie Jackson, who was not immediately beloved at the time, but then proved himself in his first year with the “Bronx is Burning” Yankees in the 1977 World Series.

He also gave A-Rod to the new breed of Yankee fans, and believe me, they deserve each other, this new breed of fan and the smarmy slugger. A-Rod spent years preening before finally delivering in the 2009 World Series, costing over 45 times more per year than Reggie (in average annual salary), but taking six times longer to deliver in the Series.

Steinbrenner’s is a complicated legacy. He had his own level of dignity, particularly in later years when his health failed him and he seemed more a kindly benevolent uncle than a looming malevolent force. There were dignified players to go with that aspect of his personality, even before it manifested itself in the last few years, players like Mattingly, Bernie Williams, Willie Randolph, Ron Guidry, Mariano Rivera, Derek Jeter. There were class acts who came in who had limited success but limitless grace, and they made the team classier by their presence and occasional deeds, like Catfish Hunter and Jim Abbott. He had his gritty warriors, too, like Lou Piniella, Paul O’Neil, Thurman Munson.

His early years brought out the sarcasm and humor in players like Graig Nettles and Sparky Lyle, two of my favorites. Much as gallows humor can be pervasive among soldiers sharing a foxhole, it seems to me now that wry observers like Nettles and Sparky might have used their world-weary cynicism to shield themselves and allow a level of detachment from the off-field antics created by Steinbrenner’s ownership.

Nettles once famously observed: “Some kids dream of joining the circus, others of  becoming a major league baseball player. I have been doubly blessed. As a member of the New York Yankees, I have gotten to do both.”

But soldiers can hold the fort against wave after wave of a persistent force for only so long before being overwhelmed (or in Nettles’ and Lyle’s case, traded).

However, the damage in the Bronx came, after a time, not from the outside, but from within. After years of attention-grabbing headlines and firings and re-hirings of managers — dismissing Dick Howser after that 103-win season in 1980 and, through an emissary, the beloved Yogi Berra after only 16 games in 1985 — and years of bad trades and even worse free-agent signings, by the late Eighties, and perhaps sooner, the Big Top at the circus collapsed from the inside.

In the beginning, Steinbrenner brought us to four World Series in six years, winning two of them, the first in his fourth year of owning the franchise.

Then he brought us Melido Perez, Andy Hawkins, Pascual Perez, and, of course, Ed Whitson. He brought us teams under Dallas Green, Bucky Dent, and Stump Merrill.

He was suspended in the early Nineties, came back and, after firing Buck Showalter after the team lost in the 1995 playoffs, the fans began marching to the bombast he wrought. The fan attitude began to change after a few years of winning championships, especially after 1999 and 2000. To win it All still was the result of hard-earned work, crafting, sweat, dedication, and (in the back office) trading, signing, and scouting. But it also became something else: the expectation of a spoiled, petulant child. Those children became worse when they didn’t get their way, when someone else won the titles they came to expect (and demand) would always be theirs. And if the kid up the block had a bigger pony, then dammit, they wanted an even bigger one. Steinbrenner got what he wanted in more ways than one.

Rooting for the Mets — one year later

Was in Barnes & Noble the other day on my lunch break,and I flipped through Joe Benigno’s book Rules for New York Sports Fans. Well, hell, I’m almost 38 years old, and My Old Man had me reading the sports pages since I graduated from picture books (I grew up thinking that newspapers were read backwards, starting from the back page). So I hardly need to read about “rules” for being a fan. On the other hand, I live too far upstate to get WFAN’s signal, and Benigno is nothing if not a passionate sports radio host, so I gave the book a look-see.

Benigno writes that you can’t change fandom after you’re 13 years old, that there’s no divorce in fandom. I don’t think I saw it, but I suppose he might as well have added that there’s no converting religions (through marriage or otherwise) in sports fandom and no equivalent evolving of your politics as a fan, either (I’d probably agree on that one for professional politicians).

Well, I’m not divorced (despite my friends frequently referring to my wife as a Saint). I’m still a Catholic (though, to paraphrase Jake Barnes, I’m a rotten one). I’m still fairly Center-Left. And I changed the team I root for at the age of 36.

It’s been nearly a year since I came out with this, but let me explain and expand.

I was born into Yankee fandom — my father idolized Mickey Mantle, and my grandfather (from Italy by way of Yonkers, or is it Yonkers by way of Italy?) took me to my first ballgame, at age 7, at Yankee Stadium in 1979. I rooted for them until I was 11, became disillusioned at that impressionable age, came back within a few years, and slowly had that cynicism build up until I left the Yankees to root for the 2009 Mets. The Yankees won the World Series that year. The Mets won an early start to fall golf.

The year I turned 11 I rooted for the 1983 Yankees more than any team in my life, past or present. If you remember, that was the season that Billy Martin came back to manage the Yankees (Oh, right, that one? No, not that one. That one? No, that one.). The Yanks’ game program had a picture of Martin from behind pointing his thumb over his shoulder at his No. 1 with the words “Billy’s Back.” The team yearbook had a photo of Martin kicking dirt on an umpire, which surely did wonders for the Yanks getting any leeway on close calls that season.

My favorite player was Graig Nettles. I adored him. I modeled my batting stance on his. I sought out his model baseball glove, his model spikes, his model bat. I sought out his baseball cards. I bought his book. I loved Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days” music video (remember those?) because he mentions Nettles at the end of it (the end of the video, that is, not the song).

And the Yankees traded their two-year captain and Gold Glover in spring training 1984 and named Toby Harrah their third baseman.

I was crushed. A few days before the deal, I remember seeing the back page of one of the tabs with a story about the potential trade of my hero. I threw the paper down the stairs in my house in anger.

Nettles went to the Padres, and the Padres went to the World Series that year. I bought and wore a Padres hat that year.

Eleven is pretty young to become a budding jaded cynic, but hell, I experienced a strike shortened season when I was 9. No wonder my generation grew up jaded, for God’s sake. It’s one thing to have grown up a decade earlier, when your President leaves a season (or two) early. It’s only politics, government, and the future of the free world. It’s quite another to have your baseball heroes out for the summer. We’re talking about something much more important. (Though at least they came back that year. I wonder how fans who were 9 years old during the 1994 strike-canceled season feel today).

The neighborhood in the Citi

Beyond the obvious reasons of the on-field product producing soul-crushing five-game losing streaks, three-strikeout performances by their franchise third baseman, and expensive tickets made more expensive by surcharges and fees, I wonder if the problem of declining attendance at Citi Field is ingrained in some sort of original sin that was masked by lovable Shea Stadium, but has been laid bare by the not-quite-yet-beloved new Mets park.

Shea was indeed lovable, in some ways in spite of itself. Author and professor Dana Brand wrote a book that fondly remembered The Last Days of Shea. But as most Mets fans would admit, and as even Dr. Brand put it: “The line you often hear from Mets fans is ‘It’s a dump, but it’s our dump.’” It’s one of the many things I genuinely love about Mets fans over Yankee fans. Mets fans lost their oft-derided stadium (even oft-derided among themselves), and they still mourn it. It was built on land that inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s forsaken Valley of Ashes in The Great Gatsby. Yankee fans, meanwhile, lost a palace with an unmatched history of championships (albeit one with a ’70s disco make-over) and replaced it with a gray gaudy mall — and Yankee fans hardly shed a tear for the old place (except when bidding up pieces of it at Steiner’s Sports). There’s no similar poetry devoted to the final days of old Yankee Stadium, not in the same vein as in the book by Brand, who obviously speaks for a lot of Mets fans. It’s like the Yankees brass (with the help of The City) plowed over a community park to drop an exclusive baseball version of the Palisades Center into the South Bronx, and Yankee fans loved them for it, even if that mall hardly loves them back.

That said, could the Mets’ attendance problem lie in the real estate agent’s refrain of Location, Location, Location?

Michael Shapiro touched on Flushing in the epilogue of his 2003 book about the last days of the Dodgers era in Brooklyn, The Last Good Season. Shapiro’s book was cited recently in a New York Times-led discussion about Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs in response to a question about Moses and the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn.

Shapiro writes:

“There is talk about tearing the place (Shea) down and building a replacement in the parking lot. The new park would be called Jackie Robinson Stadium. It would, if it is ever built, have a retractable roof but otherwise look like a replica of Ebbets Field.”

OK, so prescience isn’t perfect for authors — A roof? Um, no (thank God). And Jackie Robinson got the rotunda, but not the naming rights to the entire place. But Shapiro was close enough (the book was published three years before they broke ground on the new field). He continues:

“The stadium, however, would sit at the confluence of highways, not city streets, which runs contrary to the idea of what Ebbets Field represented. It is an idea that other planners have incorporated in the new parks in Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Seattle, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, San Francisco, and other cities that had built and then torn down parks like Shea. It is the reason Chicagoans fill Wrigley Field even when the Cubs are dreadful. Ebbets Field was a city ballpark, a ballpark to which people could walk. They could pass it on their way to work, and hear the noise from inside when they were heading someplace else. It sat in the middle of a place where many people lived.”