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).