Essay: The Lessons of Steinbrennerism

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In The Joys of Yiddish, Leo Rosten records a joke about the Lipshitz Curse: a blond at a charity ball is wearing an enormous diamond. She boasts that there are three great diamonds in the world—the Hope, the Kohinoor and her own, the Lipshitz. But, unfortunately, she tells her friends, with the Lipshitz diamond comes the Lipshitz Curse. "The Lipshitz Curse? What is the Lipshitz Curse?" The blond sighs: "Lipshitz."

George Steinbrenner is the Lipshitz of the New York Yankees. He lavishes seven-figure, even eight-figure contracts on his players. But with the money comes the curse of George. Some Yankees wonder if the pay is adequate to cover the ordeal.

The story of Steinbrenner and his baseball team occasionally takes on odd, mythic dimensions, the quality of an American parable, like The Great Gatsby. Steinbrenner has invented an archetype for himself: Superowner, a primordial character, all barging and beefy dictatorial will, more famous than any of his players. He is a sort of celebrity despot; his enemies regard him as an oaf. But Steinbrenner is so thoroughly Steinbrenner, a kind of masterpiece of himself, that he invites a sneaking wonder of the kind we reserve sometimes for natural phenomena. He runs the team the way Don Vito Corleone ran the rackets. He dismisses managers the way Bluebeard ditched wives. Steinbrenner has gone through nine managers in the ten years he has been principal owner of the Yankees.

This year Steinbrenner is worse than usual, more restlessly peremptory. He is now on his third manager of the season. Off with their heads! But this manically impulsive policy toward personnel, including pogroms of player trading, has exacted a psychic cost. It has tended to reduce what could be the finest team in baseball (once called "the best team that money can buy") to a gang of anxious neurotics who wonder what each night's line-up card will look like. They speculate who the next target of George's wrathful attention will be. Once it was Reggie Jackson. Now Tommy John has fallen from grace. Wistful, disgusted, the players sit in the locker room and talk pre-emptively of getting the hell out, of following Reggie to Anaheim, or anywhere. And it is still only the middle of August.

Steinbrenner has a wonderfully representative American quality. In a way, he is that old American story, energetic money let loose in the world, shooting its cuffs, buying everything off, singing "I did it my way." It is the sort of money that purchases the restaurant to make sure that lamb chops stay on the menu, or to settle a grudge with the maitre d'. Steinbrenner's emotional, almost physical inability to leave the Yankees alone produces great psychodrama.