George Steinbrenner, the iconic, New York Yankee “boss,” is no longer bossing the Bronx Bombers. Failing health doesn’t permit his inimitable hands-on, sometimes heavy-handed, presence. That absence was most recently apparent in the aftermath of the dust-up between the Yankees and the Tampa Bay Rays over some rough spring training play.
Consensus is the Rays played rough, and the Yankees countered with dirty. The incipient feud has since faded.
But not if Yankees’ general partner Hank Steinbrenner, son of the “boss,” has anything to say about it. And he’s already said too much.
He recently intimated that low-budget outfits such as the Rays, who get financial help from teams such as the Yankees via Major League Baseball’s revenue-sharing scheme, should act accordingly. That is to say, play nice. Know your place. Sit in the back of the league bus and speak when spoken to.
“I don’t want these teams in general to forget who subsidizes a lot of them, and it’s the Yankees, the Red Sox, Dodgers,” Steinbrenner told the New York Post. “I would prefer if teams want to target the Yankees that they at least start giving some of that revenue sharing and luxury tax money back. From an owner’s point of view, that’s my point.”
In other words, a team’s financial status should dictate how it plays the game when the opposition is one of its revenue-sharing “benefactors.”
That doesn’t sound like anything George Steinbrenner would have said.
The Boss could be tough and he could be outrageous and he could be wrong, but there’s no way he could tell another team, especially one with a payroll one/sixth of his own team’s, that they’re supposed to pull their punches when playing their betters. Once you cross the white lines, Steinbrenner Sr. would have said in no uncertain terms, it’s game on. It’s not the Yankee way to demand deference because of a luxury tax. It’s the Yankee way to beat you because they’re better.
Hank Steinbrenner may be responsible for day-to-day operations, but he’s not the “boss.” Might never be.