Fuck George Steinbrenner.

Over the last week,  you would think someone deserving of sainthood had passed away instead of a petty, despotic, megalomaniac but that seems to be what has happened in the case of the late Yankee owner. If there was one man who did his level best to destroy the game of baseball it was George Steinbrenner and what is hilariously funny is watching the media bend over backwards to rewrite history in regard to George.

Over the weekend, I was out at a friend’s and they asked me what I thought about George...

I stopped being a Yankee fan because of George Steinbrenner and if you don’t believe me, I can point you in the direction of several people of long acquaintance who will verify it.

George was everything bad about baseball and it took a second banishment from the game for the Yankees to return to greatness because knowledgeable people finally got a chance to run the Yankees as a baseball team instead of the circus it had become.

Steinbrenner was like the bratty, overweight, silver spoon kid from one of those old Little Rascals shorts. A man born into privilege he would’ve liked you to believe he was a self made man who rose up to his lofty station through his own efforts but the facts show that was not at all the case. As much as they try to clean up things to make it look otherwise, here’s the truth: “The elder (George’s father) Steinbrenner later became a wealthy shipping  magnate who ran the family firm operating freight ships hauling ore and grain on the Great Lakes.” and “George was an average student who led an active extracurricular life.”

George talked about playing by the rules but the rules never applied to him as evidences by his two suspensions from the game - it took a PRESIDENTIAL PARDON and a pal GETTING INSTALLED AS THE COMMISSIONER OF BASEBALL to clean up George’s name. Does that sound like the champion of fair play?

But aside from Phil Mushnick, who seems to get a lot of things right:

Steinbrenner paid Spira $40,000 in exchange for all the dirt he could dig on Dave Winfield. Then, after Steinbrenner was caught, he relied on his milk-fed friendly forces in media and law enforcement (need tickets?) to get the word out that he, George Steinbrenner, had been the victim of a shake-down artist.

To this day, history identifies Spira as a “a gambler,” as if he was a hood, a sharp, tough street guy. An online archived Sports Illustrated story from October 1990 identifies Spira as “a gambler with mob connections.”

If he’d been connected to “the mob,” there would be no mob — a school crossing guard would have busted it up. He was a profoundly delusional and childlike misfit with folders of clinical diagnoses to prove it. Spira was no more a criminal threat to Steinbrenner than he was to steal home.

The best thing I read about Steinbrenner was by a writer from outside of the country who covered the Yankees as a wire service reporter back in the eighties:

George Steinbrenner was a loser. While insisting that nothing less than wining was acceptable, Steinbrenner owned the New York Yankees during the team’s longest World Series drought since its first appearance in 1921, a dry spell directly attributable to Steinbrenner’s insistent mismanagement.

Believe me, if Dante had written The Inferno today – George Steinbrenner would’ve had a starring role. The only question is which circle he would’ve landed in: the third, the fourth, the fifth, the eighth or the ninth. It wouldn’t have been surprising to see him in all of them.