By choice, I’ve never had cable and I don’t follow sports but the name Steinbrenner pinged my radar thru the years. All I knew, however, was that he owned the Yankees and got rich pissing people off.
From the NYT. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/17/business/17nocera.html
A most enlightening business bio which raises the question
My hit, just the right man in the right place at the right time.
It helped that he was wealthy enough to buy the team in the first place. An average Joe on the street cannot buy a baseball team even back in 73. When you are in NYC there is so much money coming in that you can make mistakes and still do OK but in a smaller market 1 mistake can be a big problem.
You left out the most important part: …who made the right decision. Many a peson who was given such a chance would have decided it wasn’t worth the risk.
He won the sperm lottery!
His dad owned American Shipbuilding. When times got lean the company was kept afloat (sorry for the pun) with government contracts.
Self made? No way.
It’s only the right decision in retrospect.
CBS made the same decision to buy the Yankees. It was a bad one. Neither Steinbrenner nor CBS had any idea as to what the future of that decision would be when they made it.
Actually, as several articles pointed out recently, Steinbrenner didn’t even put up all of the money for the Yankees. Only about $188,000 of the original purchase money was his. Later on he was able to buy out the rest of his partners, but that came only after he was able to start making profits out of the franchise. I’d posit that there were quite a few people around, even in 1973, who had $188,000 available to invest.
Yes, Steinbrenner had a massive dose of luck. He was able to buy one of the most storied franchises in sports at a point when their fortunes were on a massive downturn. Most sports owners don’t get the opportunity to buy low.
But it’s undeniably true that Steinbrenner was one of the shrewdest owners sports has ever, or is likely to ever, see. Considering how many people before and since have tried to be “The Boss” and failed, I’m leaning heavily towards “good businessman”. His biggest innovation–the dedicated franchise TV network–is alone enough demonstrate his smarts. That catapulted the Yankees from “big franchise in baseball” to “one of the biggest franchises in the world.”
I vote for lucky. And it’s amazing to me that the Yankees sold for “only” $10 million (which per the article was what the owner of the Cleveland Indians wanted for that team). That seems like a low amount, even for 1973. But perhaps CBS was just desperate to be rid of it.
And it’s going…going…going…over the fence to the Game Room.
Nice hit.
The article mentions that the Red Sox did this first (with the New England Sports Network).
Sure, he was just lucky. ANYBODY who owned a sports franchise in New York could have done the same!
Well, except the Mets, of course.
But the fact remains, Steinbrenner was just extremely lucky, because ANYBODY who owned a marquis team in a huge metropolitan area was BOUND to win as many pennants and championships as he did.
Well, except the Dodgers, Cubs and White Sox.
Or the Knicks, Rangers, Giants, and Jets. In the years since Steinbrenner bought the Yankees, the Yankees have won seven championships and the Mets + Knicks + Rangers + Giants + Jets have won six.
Does anybody succeed without at least some luck? Steinbrenner had some for sure. Many of his baseball decisions did not work out well, but some did, including a few of the team’s first free agent signings. In between all the people he fired, he did hire some good baseball people. Those included Gene Michael, Brian Cashman, Buck Showalter, Joe Torre, and so I hear, Gabe Paul. He made some good business decisions that helped the team succeed and the baseball side. He seemed to do pretty well as a motivator even though his tactics drove a lot of people away or just drove them crazy. In the other thread about him I pointed out that a lot of the team’s successes happened during the periods when he was away from baseball - his suspension during the '90s helped pave the way for all the winning that followed, for one thing. But he won way too often for me to say he just got lucky.
You know, maybe Steinbrenner got lucky and maybe he didn’t. Probably a bit of both.
I’ll say two things, though:
Steinbrenner never demonstrated any real understanding of baseball at all. His manager hiring and firing fiascoes and public outbursts absolutely were distracting and might have cost the team the division in 1985, at least. The Yankees’ net free agent acquisitions were not, on the whole, all that brilliant; they made as many mistakes as they did good pickups, and free agency errors drove the team into the basement in the 1980s. In recent years they’re avoided the same trap essentially by being so insanely rich that they can make free agency errors without it really mattering. Steinbrenner never understood the value or mechanics of developing players and, again, the development of the young players who made them better in the 1990s started when he wasn’t involved with the team. Not a coincidence.
He added nothing positive to the game of baseball and served as an example of the worst kind of owner; the one who distracts attention from what’s happening on the field and directs it to a pampered millionaire jumping up and down screaming “look at me, look at me!” He disgraced himself and the game of baseball again and again, finally stooping to hiring criminals to spy on players before he was finally reined in - and THEN the Yankees got better.
Again, I’m not happy the man died; he seems to have been much beloved by his family. But he didn’t make baseball better and things improved once he left.
One baseball owner who was similar in behavior to Steinbrenner in his early years was Ted Turner of the Atlanta Braves. He once named himself as manager and was actually in the dugout in uniform for game before baseball dusted off an old rule from the 1920s saying you can’t own a team and manage it. He was suspended for tampering with free agent Gary Matthews. He mad nasty remarks about agent Jerry Kapstein being Jewish and wearing a fur coat. His teams was mostly a joke for about 15 years but ultimately he found a way to make the team a power and his UHF Atlanta TV station into a cable phenomenon.
Steinbrenner was helped by the fact that CBS had indifferently run the Yankees and was looking to get out. Not unusual for a media company to do that: FOX did a bad job with the LA Dodgers and Disney was only marginally better with the Angels: they did better when they stopped interfering and ultimately selling. But as others have said the other New York team, the Mets, was far more popular in 1973 and while they are are the second highest value (according to Forbes). on the field they are far behind the Yankees with one World Series win in the last 40 years. In the NBA and NHL the Rangers and Knicks are the same.
If you look at baseball history history you will find a number of loud, often boorish but successful owners: Chris von der Ahe in the 1880s, Larry MacPhail in the 1930s and 1940s, Charlie Finley in the 1970s. Sometimes their “I don’t give a damn what others think” allows them to find success where others would have stayed with conventional, safe, mediocre thinking.
I don’t know how Steinbrenner would have done if he bought the Indians in 1971. Joe Posnarski of “Sports Illustrated” suggests he would have gotten frustrated like Charlie Finley and quit. Which ignores the fact Finley owned the A’s for 20 years and won three straight World Championships, the only non Yankee team to do so. Perhaps Steinbrenner would have moved the Indians, getting frustrated in an old building in a decaying rust belt city. Not sure where: in the early 1970s people where talking about the New Orleans Superdome (never happened), return to Washington (took over 30 years), Seattle and Toronto. The latter two got expansion franchises in 1977 with the SF Giants almost moving there two years earlier before the California courts stopped it. I guess Steinbrenner might have moved the city to his adoptive hometown of Tampa and try to cash in on the growing Florida market. Or perhaps move them to New Jersey and the Meadowlands complex if territorial rights could be worked out.
$10 million for the Yankees sounds awfully low but one of the business magazines of the day (Business Week? Fortune?) had a story on how it signaled “The Death of Baseball” and not as “What a great bargain”. But like my favorite politician of all time- George Washington Plunkitt- Steinbrenner saw his opportunities and he took them.
Speaking as a once-passionate-now-tepid Yankees fan who liked a lot of things about Steinbrenner…
Talk of the Hall of Fame is silly, and NOT just because Steinbrenner had so many character flaws. Those flaws are irrelevant, really, to whether he belongs in the Hall of Fame.
My take is, almost NO owner in baseball is worthy of the Hall of Fame, because almost no owner has made a real, tangible difference (positive OR negative) in the way the game is played. My feeling is, the ONLY owners worthy of consideration are
Those who helped get major league baseball established (the Connie Macks, Charlie Comiskeys and Clark Griffiths… many of whom are ALREADY enshrined as players and/or managers).
Those who acted as their own General Managers and built real dynasties.
In my opinion, Steinbrenner just doesn’t qualify, and and he still WOULDN’T qualify if he’d been a wholly nice guy (which, obviously, we know he wasn’t. Steinbrenner is no more deserving of the Hall of Fame than John Galbreath, Ewing Kaufmann or Gus Busch. On the other hand, there are already several owners in the Hall of Fame who are NO MORE QUALIFIED TO BE THERE than Steinbrenner. You want to argue that Steinbrenner doesn’t belong? I’m on your side. But there’s absolutely NO way to argue that he’s less deserving than Tom Yawkey (a contemptible racist who NEVER won a damn thing!), Bill Veeck (a very likable guy and a great showman with nothing special to his credit), or Walter O’Malley.
Beyond that, if Steinbrenner was just a lucky son of a gun, why weren’t there DOZENS of much SMARTER businessmen chomping at the bit to buy the Yankees for a much better price in 1973?
Because NOBODY thought the Yankees were a great investment at that time. Prospective owners you’d have thought much savvier wouldn’t have touched the Yankees with a ten foot pole. The Mets OWNED baseball in New York at the time, and the Yanks were an afterthought. Steinbrenner turned the Yanks into THE baseball team in New York. Don’t kid yourself that it was inevitable.
Nobody who’s been a Yankee fan as long as I have can try to whitewash things. Steinbrenner WASN’T always a nice guy. Sometimes, he was astonishingly kind and generous. Other times, he was a vindictive prick and a bully. As Ross Douthat (a biased Red Sox lover, of course) noted, he WAS a brilliant empire builder, but he destroyed as many promising Yankee squads as he built.
On the other hand, if you want to pretend that Gene Michael and Bob Watson and Brian Cashman built the most recent Yankee dynasty with NO input from Steinbrenner, you’re still left with a few big questions…
Who hired Gene Michel (repeatedly)? Who hired Watson? Who hired Cashman? Does Steinbrenner get NO credit for surrounding himself with good people? Is it pure “luck” that he had so many brilliant scouts and front office people on hand when he was suspended?
Yes, Steinbrenner could be a royal SOB, and he fired/cut/traded numerous good people on little more than a whim. And yet… Billy Martin, Bob Lemon, and Gene Michael (among others) kept coming BACK! If George was nothing BUT a bastard, why didn’t such good baseball men sell their talents to milder, mellower owners?
Because working for George WASN’T pure Hell. It was both wonderful AND painful. It had higher highs AND lower lows than you’d find in a front office job with ANY other team.
I think the Cowboys and Redskins show that you don’t need to be in a top-three market to be a dominant revenue producer. Now, whether Steinbrenner could have owned a successful team outside New York is a question, but it’s worth bearing in mind that his market has always been split in two.
Something else to consider- baseball certainly IS a business, but it’s NOT just like any other business.
Suppose that a town has both a CVS drugstore and a Walgreen’s. And, suppose that the CVS store closes up for some reason. You would EXPECT, would you not, that Walgreens would start getting MUCH more business?
Or, if the local Shell station shut down, you’d expect the nearby Chevron station to pick up a huge amount of the business, right?
Well, from 1957 through 1961, the Yankees had New York’s baseball fans all to themselves. The Dodgers and Giants had departed, and their fans naturally started going to Yankee games, right?
Wrong. The departure of the two NL teams made almost NO difference to attendance at Yankee Stadium. People simply DON’T switch sports allegiances quickly or easily. Only the most casual fans will start rooting for a team they once hated or were formely indifferent to.
So, for George Steinbrenner to turn New York from a Mets town to a Yankees town was no small accomplishment. It was HARD to pull that off. That’s something that people blithely advocating the addition of 2 or 3 more major league teams to the greater NYC metro area should remember. A Yankee fan in Hoboken probably ISN’T going to turn into a Newark Royals fan if David Glass decides to move to New Jersey. A Mets fan in Suffolk county probably ISN’T going to become an Islip Pirates fan, if the Bucs move out of Pittsburgh.
Even in a region as heavily populated as the NYC metro area, winning over millions of fans is tough. You DON’T have to like Steinbrenner to see that there was NOTHING inevitable about his success.