I was listening to sports talk radio when I heard an interview with New York Post Sports Columnist Mike Vaccaro. He’s written a new book about George Steinbrenner. Being a life long Yankees fan, it caught my interest. I remembered there was a sports writer at the Post who was a St. Bonaventure University graduate. I looked Mike up and sure enough he was in the class of 1989. I was in the class of 1972. I knew he was doing a book tour and I thought I might get him for an interview. I played the Bonaventure card and Mike answered my email right away and we set up a Face Time interview. Once a Bonnie always a Bonnie.
When George Steinbrenner and a group of investors bought the New York Yankees in 1973 for just $8.8 million dollars, it changed baseball and the city of New York. Mike’s new book tells the story of the larger than life character called “The Bosses of the Bronx”. Vaccaro says the sale came at a critical moment and saved the Yankees.
“He saved the Yankees as a New York entity. When he and his partners bought the team in 1973, the Mets were a clear number one baseball team in town. The Yankees TV and radio deals were nothing. They played in a tough neighborhood. New Jersey was already making a play to try and drag the Yankees along. They wanted to bring the Yankees along with the Giants.”
The Yankees were owned by CBS and it wasn’t a good fit. The Yankees had been bad for eight years, including finishing last in 1966 something once impossible to contemplate. CBS Chairman William Paley did get higher bids for the team, but couldn’t get a commitment to keep the team in New York.
”William Paley…didn’t want to just be known as the guy who allowed the Yankees to crumble from a baseball standpoint, but he didn’t want his permanent legacy to be that he let the Yankees leave town.”
This was more than an average business deal. “George himself put up a grand total of $168,000 of his own money. And so that qualifies as somebody they’ll be teaching about in business schools for centuries …some of the greatest business deals that anybody’s ever made.” By the way, the Yankees are valued at $9 billion today.
Steinbrenner becomes the dominant figure in two years after he bought the team and free agency came to baseball. “Catfish Hunter was declared a free agent. Obviously, the biggest fish in the free agent class of “76-“77 was Reggie Jackson.” Steinbrenner signed them both. Reggie turned down bigger offers from the Padres and Expos because he wanted to be in New York.
Steinbrenner hired Bill Martin in 1976. The Yankees won the pennant but lost four straight to the Big Red Machine Cincinnati Reds in the World Series. The big guy on the Yankees that year was Thurman Munson who won the MVP award. Steinbrenner took him to dinner and talked to him about signing Reggie Jackson and Munson said if they got him they would win the World Series. But there was an issue.
“Munson was upset because George promised him he would be the highest paid Yankee for as long as George owned the team.” Munson got a raise but he wasn’t the highest paid player on the team anymore.
Reggie did an interview with Sport Magazine in 1977 that didn’t go over well with Munson or the rest of the team. Reggie was quoted as saying, “This team, it all flows from me. I’m the straw that stirs the drink. Maybe I should say me and Munson, but he can only stir it bad.” Munson took it personally and was mad at Reggie.
Then the craziest era in Yankees history began. Reggie’s became the superstar the Yankees hoped for. He hit three home runs on three consecutive pitches in a game in the 1977 World Series in which the Yankees beat the Dodgers. They won again in 1978 even they though they were fourteen games behind in the summer and Martin was fired. Bob Lemon took over as manager and turned everything around.
The Billy and Reggie drama continued. Billy famously pulled Reggie off the field in Fenway Park because Billy felt Reggie didn’t hustle after a ball. They went after each other in the dugout and had to be separated by the coaches.
The Reggie-Billy Yankees with some help from Bob Lemon and Gene Michael won three pennants and two World Series. The team was shaken when Thurman Munson was killed in small place crash while taking flying lessons in 1979. The 1980’s saw the most wins of any team in baseball, but no World Series. When Steinbrenner was suspended in the early 1990s Gene Michael and Buck Showalter built the team that won four championships in five years with Joe Torre as manager. Torre was greeted by the New York Daily News headline “Clueless Joe” when he was hired. Vaccaro said he knew the guy who wrote the headline and the column. He felt the writer meant, “Joe Torre is a great baseball man who has no idea what he’s in for.”
Mike Vaccaro said this about Steinbrenner,“As much as he loved the Yankees and wanted to be the best, he was his own worst enemy. A lot of times, he was his own greatest ally, for sure, but he was also his own worst enemy because he had absolute authority.”
Mike has written an engaging and inside story about one the most important figures in baseball history. He dominated the back sports pages of the New York tabloids. He was a complex character who seemed to make news everyday. Steinbrenner died in 2010 a year after the last Yankees Championship. His son Hal now runs the team. But there will never be anyone else like the Boss.
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