The Lessons of Steinbrennerism

By LANCE MORROW

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.

Leo Rosten casts Lipshitz as a husband. Steinbrenner is more like an archetypal father. When he is up for the role, he is a perfect family tyrant: overbearing, insufferable, unembarrassable, the kind of man who makes scenes in public and mortifies his children. The Pittsburgh Pirates used to describe themselves as "family." That was sentimentality. The Yankees are more like a grimly real family: sullen and bruised by grievances and quarrelsome and full of parricidal silences. Presiding over the drama is the militaristic alldaddy, Steinbrenner as the Great Santini. He thunders, and acquires a certain force of nature. He has the qualities of a local Aztec volcano. He behaves as if he expected the Yankees to sacrifice virgins to appease him.

There are many, of course, who say that the Yankees and Steinbrenner deserve each other. In any case, the Steinbrenner method sometimes works. When he bought the team from CBS in 1973, the Yankees were a second-division mediocrity living on memories, like faded aristocrats. With his fierce, admirable though slightly crazed will to win, Steinbrenner brought the Yankees out of their trance. In the new era of the free agent, he spent handsomely for Reggie Jackson and other stars. Steinbrenner's Yankees took five pennants and two world championships.

But Steinbrenner's money and methods have quickened a lot of the standard prejudices about the Yankees. They were always the Romans of baseball: triumphal, imperial. They were dynastic; they cherished a memory of the Ruth and the DiMaggio and the Mantle days. But there was rarely much charm or color or heart in rooting for them. The Yankees never appealed much to that side of the American character that likes to root for the underdog.

Do Steinbrenner's Yankees now display certain characteristics of Rome's later days? Does the owner rant like Caligula? Will he select his horse to be the next manager? One drives up the Major Deegan Expressway in The Bronx, and in the summer dusk one may see a few blazes set by arsonists burning down the ghetto for the insurance. There in the distance Yankee Stadium glows with its wonderful radioactive light: a gem in a slum. One comes early for the batting practice; Frank Sinatra sings New York, New York over the p.a. system. Up in the broadcast booth, Phil Rizzuto is exclaiming, "Holy cow!" and "Huckleberry!" It is momentarily lovely.

Baseball, as Bill Veeck said, is meant to be fun. The trouble with Steinbrenner is that he manages to turn it into an Oedipal brawl that reduces his athletes to twitching depressives. Baseball reflects the surrounding culture, of course. Americans may get the sport they deserve: corporate, grandiose, soulless. To say that, however, might be to say that we are all responsible for Steinbrenner. That is going much too far.

The beauty of baseball is essentially an illusion. It demands a suspension of certain disbeliefs. The love of baseball depends quite crucially, for example, upon the illusion of loyalty: of fans to their team, of players to their team, of the team to its city. All nonsense, of course. Franchises tear loose from Brooklyn or Philadelphia when the owners see money to be made in newer cities. Players show up in the uniform of last week's enemy. But to remain a baseball fan, one must drop a light green scrim of nostalgia across such details, the necessary treacheries. One must give oneself over to the illusion, the precisions and geometries and statistics and characters and lore of the game. In his autocratic passion, Steinbrenner, alas, exaggerates the worst traits of modern baseball: its crassness and faithlessness and shallow nastiness. He will not collaborate in the illusion, a form of American mysticism, really, that is baseball's most precious accomplishment. George is a regular walking sermon on the pointlessness of everything once the joy has vanished.

-- By Lance Morrow

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