George Steinbrenner

George Michael Steinbrenner III (born July 4, 1930 in Rocky River, Ohio), often known as "The Boss", is an American billionaire businessman and the principal owner of Major League Baseball's New York Yankees. George graduated from Culver Military Academy High School then got his B.A. from Williams College. Afterwards he did post graduate study at The Ohio State University (1954-55), where he met his wife, and served as a graduate assistant to legendary Buckeye football coach Woody Hayes.

His outspokenness and role in driving up player salaries have made him one of the sport's most controversial figures, though his willingness to spend to build the club (and its post-season success since 1976) have earned him grudging respect from some baseball executives, while at the same time earning him the contempt from some non-Yankee fans.

During Steinbrenner's ownership, the longest in Yankee history, the club has won 10 pennants and 6 World Series titles.

Buying the Yankees

The Yankees had been floundering during their years under CBS ownership, which had acquired the team in 1965. In 1972, CBS Chairman William S. Paley told team president Michael Burke the media company intended to sell the club. As Burke later told writer Roger Kahn, Paley offered to sell the franchise to Burke if he could find financial backing. Burke ran across Steinbrenner's name, and Gabe Paul, a Cleveland-area acquaintance of Steinbrenner, helped bring the two men together.

On January 3, 1973, a group of investors led by Steinbrenner and minority partner Burke bought the Yankees from CBS for $8.7 million.

The announced intention was that Burke would continue to run the team as club president. But Burke later became angry when he found out that Paul had been brought in as a senior Yankee executive, crowding his authority, and quit the team presidency on April 29, 1973. (Burke remained a minority owner of the club into the following decade.) It would be the first of many high-profile departures with employees who crossed paths with "The Boss." At the conclusion of the 1973 season, two more prominent names departed: manager Ralph Houk, who resigned and then signed to manage the Detroit Tigers; and general manager Lee MacPhail, who became president of the American League.

The 1973 off-season would continue to be controversial when Steinbrenner and Paul sought to hire former Oakland Athletics manager Dick Williams, who had resigned immediately after leading the team to its second straight World Series title. However, because Williams was still under contract to Oakland, the subsequent legal wrangling prevented the Yankees from hiring him. On the first anniversary of the team's ownership change, the Yankees hired former Pittsburgh Pirates manager Bill Virdon to lead the team on the field.

Controversies

Steinbrenner is famous for both his pursuit of high-priced free agents and, in some cases, infamous for feuding with them. In his first 23 seasons, he changed managers 20 times (including dismissing Billy Martin on five separate occasions) and general managers 11 times in 30 years. In July 1978, Martin said of Steinbrenner and his $3 million outfielder Reggie Jackson, "One's a born liar and the other's convicted." The comment resulted in Martin's first departure, though technically Martin resigned (tearfully) before Yankees President Al Rosen followed through on Steinbrenner's dictum to release the manager.

Campaign contributions to Nixon and Pardon

The "convicted" part of Martin's comment referred to Steinbrenner's connection to U.S. President Richard Nixon: he was indicted on 14 criminal counts on April 5, 1974, then pleaded guilty to making illegal contributions to Nixon's re-election campaign and obstruction of justice on August 23. Steinbrenner was personally fined $15,000, while his firm was assessed $20,000 for the offense. On November 27, Commissioner Bowie Kuhn suspended him for two years, but later reduced that amount to nine months, with Steinbrenner returning to the Yankees in 1976. U.S. President Ronald Reagan pardoned Steinbrenner on January 19, 1989, in one of the final acts of his presidency.

1981 World Series

During the 1981 World Series, Steinbrenner provided a colorful backdrop to the Yankees' loss of the series. After a Game 3 loss in Los Angeles, Steinbrenner called a press conference in his hotel room, showing off his left hand in a cast and various other injuries that he claimed were earned in a fight with two Dodgers fans in the hotel elevator. Nobody came forward about the fight, leading most to believe that he had made up the story of the fight in order to light a fire under the Yankees. Additionally, after the series, Steinbrenner publicly apologized to Yankee fans for the team's defeat.

Dave Winfield

After the 1980 season, Steinbrenner made headlines by signing Dave Winfield to a 10-year, $23 million contract, making Winfield baseball's highest-paid player. Steinbrenner later derisively referred to Winfield as "Mr. May" to local media, criticizing his failure to produce in the postseason as did Reggie Jackson, who was nicknamed "Mr. October."

On July 30, 1990, commissioner Fay Vincent banned Steinbrenner from baseball for life after he paid Howie Spira, a small-time gambler, $40,000 for "dirt" after Winfield sued him for failing to pay his foundation the $300,000 guaranteed in his contract. Subsequently Winfield chose to enter the Hall of Fame as a San Diego Padre. At Yankee Stadium, where a ballgame was being played, word of Steinbrenner's banishment filtering over the transistor radios resulted in a standing ovation from title-starved fans.

Reinstatement

Steinbrenner was reinstated in 1993, the same time the Yankees regained momentum as a quality sports franchise — helped by Steinbrenner's willingness to delegate authority to executives such as Gene Michael, and to let promising farm-system players such as Bernie Williams develop instead of trading them for established players. Steinbrenner's having "got religion" (in the words of New York Daily News reporter Bill Madden) paid off. After contending briefly two years earlier, the '93 Yankees were in the American League East race with the eventual champion Toronto Blue Jays until September.

Off the field

In addition to being an intense boss to his on-field employees, Steinbrenner is also known for pressuring and changing off-field employees (including various publicity directors), sometimes chewing them out in public. Longtime Cardinals announcer Jack Buck once quipped that he had seen Steinbrenner's yacht and that, "It was a beautiful thing to observe, with all 36 oars working in unison." Former sportscaster Hank Greenwald, who called Yankee games on WABC radio for two years, once said he knew when Steinbrenner was in town by how tense the office staff was.

He usually kept his complaints about the team broadcasters he approves (who, except for the YES Network crew, have generally not been his direct employees) out of the newspapers. However, he has been known to be upset with the sometimes blunt commentary of former broadcaster Jim Kaat and former analyst Tony Kubek.

Steinbrenner's one publicly aired gripe with a team announcer came when he accused respected Yankee broadcaster Bill White of low-keying his WMCA radio call of Chris Chambliss' pennant-winning home run in the 1976 American League Championship Series. The actual aircheck of the live broadcast (on the Major League Baseball website) finds an unusually emotional White calling the home run and its aftermath — so excited as the ball was in flight that his voice broke.

Steinbrenner has given to the Jimmy Fund and, his Silver Shield Foundation gives to widows and orphans of New York City police officers and firefighters who have died in the line of duty. Most recently, in March 2007 he paid for the funerals of at least 8 children who died in a house fire in the Bronx. These are gestures that he has repeated throughout his tenure as Yankees principal owner but are small slivers of his vast financial fortune. As an alumnus of the Culver Academies, he remains a major donor to the school.

He has appointed his son Hal his heir to the New York Yankees.

Success

The 1994 Yankees were the American League East leaders when a strike wiped out the rest of the season. The team returned to the playoffs in 1995 (their first visit since 1981) and won the World Series in 1996. The modern Yankee Dynasty was born during the 1996 World Series. The Yankees went on to win the World Series in 1998, 1999 and 2000. The Yankees lost to the Arizona Diamondbacks in 2001, ending their dynasty. Though they have not won a World Series since, the Yankees have made the playoffs in every subsequent year since 2001, most notably winning the AL Pennant in seven games from the 2003 Boston Red Sox (although they did suffer one of the worst collapses in post-season baseball history the following season, losing in seven games to Boston after having held a 3-0 game series advantage.) In 2003, their ALCS success was followed by losing the World Series to the Florida Marlins.

Steinbrenner has also been awarded The Flying Wedge Award, one of the NCAA’s highest honors.

George Steinbrenner estimated net worth is $1.3 billion USD in 2007 according to the Forbes 400 List in Forbes magazine issued in September 2007[3].

Baseball Innovation

George Steinbrenner helped to revolutionize the business of baseball by being the first owner to sell TV cable rights (to MSG [1]). In 1997 the Yankees signed a 10-year, $97 million deal with Adidas. A dispute with MSG over the cable rights fee ended with the creation of the Yankees' own YES Network. George Steinbrenner has been able to grow the Yankees from a $10 million franchise to a $1.2 billion heavyweight.

The Boss in the media

Despite Steinbrenner's controversial status (or perhaps, because of it) he does appear to poke fun at himself in the media. He hosted Saturday Night Live on October 20, 1990 at the same time his former outfielder and Yankee manager, Lou Piniella, led the Cincinnati Reds to a World Championship. In the opening sketch, he dreamt of a Yankees team managed, coached, and entirely played by himself. In other sketches, "he" chews out the SNL "writing staff" (notably including Al Franken) for featuring him in a mock Slim Fast commercial with pariahs such as Saddam Hussein, and plays a folksy convenience store manager whose business ethic is comically divergent from that of Steinbrenner.

He appeared as himself in the Albert Brooks comedy The Scout.

After a public chastising of Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter for "partying too much," the two appeared in a recent Visa commercial club-hopping. A 2004 Visa commercial depicted Steinbrenner in the trainer's room at Yankee Stadium, suffering from an arm injury (presumably from overuse), unable to sign any checks, including that of his then-current manager Joe Torre, who spends most of the commercial treating Steinbrenner as if he were an important player.

His frequent firings and rehirings of manager Billy Martin were lampooned in a '70's Miller Lite beer commercial in which Steinbrenner tells Martin "You're fired!" to which Martin replies "Oh, no, not again!" After one of Martin's real-life rehirings, the commercial was resurrected, only with Steinbrenner's line redubbed to say "You're hired!"

Steinbrenner also has a soft spot for professional wrestling. He wrote the foreword of the 2005 Dusty Rhodes autobiography and was a regular at old Tampa Armory cards in the 1970s and 1980s. In March 1989, he appeared in the front row of the WWF's Saturday Night's Main Event broadcast, even interacting with manager Bobby "The Brain" Heenan at one point (Heenan remarked about the guy he managed in the ring at the time to Steinbrenner "I've got a ring full of Winfield"). He was also present in the front row of an edition of WCW Monday Nitro in early 1998 when the event took place in Tampa.

At the funeral of his long time friend Otto Graham in December 2003, Steinbrenner fainted, leading to extensive media speculation that he was in ill health.

In the 1994 computer game Superhero League of Hoboken, one of the schemes of the primary antagonist, Dr. Entropy, is to resurrect George Steinbrenner.

In The Simpsons episode "Homer at the Bat", Mr. Burns fires Don Mattingly for refusing to shave sideburns only Burns could see. This was a parody of an argument Steinbrenner and Mattingly had in real life with regards to Mattingly's hair length. As Mattingly walks off the baseball field, he states, "I still like him (Burns) better than Steinbrenner."

New York Daily News cartoonist Bill Gallo often cites Steinbrenner's German heritage by drawing him in a Prussian military uniform, complete with spiked helmet, gold epaulets and medals, calling him "General von Steingrabber." Rather than being offended, Steinbrenner asked for, and received, Gallo's original of the cartoon, and the two men have remained friends. New York radio host Mike Francesa has called Steinbrenner as "General George M. Steinbrenner III" when reading his speeches on the radio.

In ESPN's miniseries The Bronx is Burning, he is portrayed by Oliver Platt.

Steinbrenner caricatured in Seinfeld

Steinbrenner appeared as a character in the situation comedy Seinfeld, when George Costanza worked with the Yankees for several seasons. Larry David voiced the character, who talked nonstop, regardless of whether anyone was listening, and sometimes referred to himself as "Big Stein." The character's face was never seen, and the character was always viewed from the back in scenes set in his office at Yankee Stadium. The Steinbrenner character was known for bad decisions, such as cooking jerseys, threatening to move the team to New Jersey "just to upset people", scalping his owner's box tickets, wearing Lou Gehrig's uniform pants (and panicking about his nerve problems in the leg) and trading several players, much to Frank Costanza's dismay. At one point George describes Steinbrenner by saying, "No one knows what this guy's capable of; he fires people like it's a bodily function!" Nevertheless, Steinbrenner maintains that he is a fan of the show and that "Costanza is always welcome back." In one episode ("The Wink"), the Steinbrenner character mentions all of the people he fired and mentions then-current manager Buck Showalter, quickly becoming quiet afterwards. Though intended as a joke, the comment proved prophetic: just weeks after the episode aired, Steinbrenner did not bring back Showalter as Yankees manager and replaced him with Joe Torre.

The Steinbrenner character appeared in the following episodes: "The Opposite", "The Secretary", "The Race", "The Jimmy", "The Wink", "The Hot Tub", "The Caddy", "The Calzone", "The Bottle Deposit, Part 2", "The Nap", "The Millennium", "The Muffin Tops", "The Finale, Part 1", "The Finale, Part 2." The real Steinbrenner had filmed two scenes for the Seinfeld season 7 finale, "The Invitations", but they were edited out when the plotline of the episode was changed (they can be seen in full on the Seinfeld season 7 DVD).

External links

• George Steinbrenner at IMDb
• The List: Steinbrenner's Worst ESPN
• George M. Steinbrenner III: #380 Richest American