George Steinbrenner RIP.

[gonzo]

Dead at age 80 from a massive heart attack.

Say what you will about the man but he loved baseball.

R.I.P.

[CSanto]

R.I.P

This was truly a passionate man.

[KingOfJericho]

I rode in an elevator with him at a hotel in Lake Placid, NY when I was a little kid. I remember it very clearly because as we were pulling out of the parking lot, my dad rolled down his window and screamed "YOU SHOULD NEVER HAVE TRADED REGGIE, ASSHOLE!"

[Feyd]

Originally Posted by KingOfJericho

I rode in an elevator with him at a hotel in Lake Placid, NY when I was a little kid. I remember it very clearly because as we were pulling out of the parking lot, my dad rolled down his window and screamed "YOU SHOULD NEVER HAVE TRADED REGGIE, ASSHOLE!"

LOL. Cool memory.

[LI E90]

I hate all things Yankees, mostly Yankee fans, but I have nothing but respect for Mr.Steinbrenner.

RIP George

[escobar929]

man, sad day for Yankee fans. Losing two Yankee greats in just a few days

RIP

[gonzo]

Originally Posted by KingOfJericho

I rode in an elevator with him at a hotel in Lake Placid, NY when I was a little kid. I remember it very clearly because as we were pulling out of the parking lot, my dad rolled down his window and screamed "YOU SHOULD NEVER HAVE TRADED REGGIE, ASSHOLE!"

I'm sorry, but it was a strong visual.

[Couch]

RIP

[choicez]

Hated and beloved maverick. RIP.

[CollinsE90]

Wow my eyes when i read the thread title. As much as i hate the yankee's any true baseball fan knows what the "Boss" did for that team, and i have the utmost respect for him.

RIP Boss

[Bimmer-Pilot]

Originally Posted by LI E90

I hate all things Yankees, mostly Yankee fans, but I have nothing but respect for Mr.Steinbrenner.

RIP George

Only a Met fan would say this........I think I'm the biggest Yankee's fan on this forum and I am very saddened by the passing of George Steinbrenner. He was an incredible and charitable man. He was a visionary and a giant in the world of sports. He took a great but struggling franchise and turned it into a champion again. He will be missed.........

[Comet]

Originally Posted by gonzo

I'm sorry, but it was a strong visual.

OMG
I had the exact same visual!!!!

eerie

[NYC6]

Originally Posted by Bimmer-Pilot

Only a Met fan would say this........I think I'm the biggest Yankee's fan on this forum and I am very saddened by the passing of George Steinbrenner. He was an incredible and charitable man. He was a visionary and a giant in the world of sports. He took a great but struggling franchise and turned it into a champion again. He will be missed.........

Just bitter fans of other teams who are sent into rage looking at 27 World Series Banners that ring the top of "The House that George Built" that use the word "hate" when talking about a rival Sports team.

As to your remark about being the biggest Yankee fan, I'll make a case for myself. The first pic is from my seat of last years W.S. Game VI and the second from our regular seats Opening Day of this year. Im also going to tomorrows game against Tampa. RIP BOSS.

Godzillas HR landed about 20ft in front of us. Excuse the blurry shot, the Stadium was "rockin" and I was pretty buzzed at this point.


Matsui recieving his ring Opening Day.

[BTM]

Steinbrenner, while a successful owner, was an insufferable human being. If you choose to be blind to this fact because of the championships won under his "reign" then so be it. I, along with many others, will not miss him.

One of the more public examples of his darker deeds:

in 1974 Steinbrenner pleaded guilty to making illegal contributions to Nixon's re-election campaign, and to a felony charge of obstruction of justice. He was personally fined $15,000 and his company was assessed an additional $20,000. On November 27, Commissioner Bowie Kuhn suspended him for two years, but later reduced it to fifteen months.

Yesterday: (aside from the anti-American jabs typical of the seemingly prevalent British inferiority complex, I tend to find this article quite accurate)

Originally Posted by Muhammad Cohen, The Guardian

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.

Steinbrenner, who died on Tuesday at age 80, was a bully and a brat, devoid of humility, class, and civility, born on third base, deluded that he'd hit a triple, and convinced he had to tell the whole world how he'd done it. Famed for his bombast and for making himself bigger than his players and team, tolerated only because he had money and power, this Yankee Doodle Dandy born on the Fourth of July paved the way for America to become a loser by his example.

Just about every bit of praise eulogising Steinbrenner is 180 degrees wrong. The city's mayor, Michael Bloomberg, called him "a quintessential New Yorker" despite Steinbrenner hailing from Cleveland (Bloomberg's from Boston, weekends in Bermuda), living in Tampa, and blackmailing New Yorkers with threats to move the Yankees out of town to get a new $1.5bn (£1m) stadium that embodies his penchant for vulgar excess. He was a terrific businessman, a daring capitalist who insisted he needed public handouts for his billion-dollar family company; taxpayers underwrote the bonds for that new Yankee stadium and renovated the previous one, and have been rewarded with ticket prices that top out at $2,500.

Steinbrenner was a laughable figure in the comedy series Seinfeld with nothing funny about him. He was a generous man whose many donations we never heard about – as anyone who follows baseball has heard about constantly for the past 35 years – who was breathtakingly cruel and petty. He was a great sportsman, suspended twice from baseball for breaking the rules and convicted for breaking the law. He was a great Yankee who infuriated and alienated the team's players and fans and insulted the Yankees' traditions and greatest legends.

Days before Steinbrenner, the beloved Yankee Stadium announcer Bob Sheppard died. Yankee fan websites are abuzz with variants on the theme that Steinbrenner had clung to life to wait for Sheppard to announce his arrival in heaven. Believe me, if there is a heaven, George Steinbrenner won't be there.

I covered the Yankees as a wire service reporter during the 1980s at the height – or depth – of Steinbrenner's reign of error. He spent lavishly, as always thanks to lavish team income, to assemble the best team money could buy, but the Yankees didn't win any titles.

With his American football mentality – if he hadn't gotten rich from the family business, he would have become an itinerant assistant coach, wearing out his welcome at high schools across America after a year or two – Steinbrenner couldn't understand that baseball is a marathon, with a season of 162 games, not 16, and that no team can win every day.

Steinbrenner's impatience led to bad choices, and his megalomania forbade him from taking responsibility for them. So he fired managers, general managers and even public relations directors, with comic frequency. He dismissed the Yankees Hall of Famer Yogi Berra 16 games into the 1985 season, breaking an explicit promise that Berra had demanded before accepting the thankless manager's job. Berra, who played on a record 10 Yankee championship teams, refused to associate with the team until Steinbrenner apologised. He did – 14 years later.

Leading baseball's salary explosion, Steinbrenner believed that paying players like supermen would make them play that way. When they failed – and even the best hitters fail more than 60% of the time – Steinbrenner assumed the right to berate and humiliate them. One late afternoon in the Yankee clubhouse in 1988, the captain, Don Mattingly, the quiet centre of team turbulence, launched a spontaneous outburst against Steinbrenner. "All they give you here is money," he said, bemoaning the lack of respect, courtesy and dignity on offer.

The best player on those 1980s teams was Dave Winfield, signed to a record 10-year, $18m contract. Winfield was a superbly gifted athlete, drafted in three professional sports, and a classy, handsome, personable individual, among the first athletes to establish his own charitable foundation. I was convinced he'd be America's first black president.

Winfield compiled most of his Hall of Fame credentials as a Yankee, but Steinbrenner had signed him to replace Reggie Jackson, the self-styled Mr October (October being the month for the World Series). Winfield failed to get a hit in the Yankees' 1981 World Series loss to the Los Angeles Dodgers. Steinbrenner took it as a person insult. He derided Winfield as "Mr May". In 1988, Winfield set a record for driving in runs during April and told reporters: "Now it's on to May, and you know about me and May."

To get even with Winfield, and perhaps void his contract, Steinbrenner hired a lowlife named Howard Spira to spy on the player, hoping to find some dirt, particularly financial malfeasance, at the Dave Winfield Foundation. Spira got nothing on Winfield but lowered the boom on Steinbrenner.

Spira wasn't just any lowlife, he was a chronic gambler. Since bookmakers paid off the Chicago White Sox (thereafter the Black Sox) to lose the 1919 World Series, gambling has been baseball's cardinal sin. Steinbrenner's sleazy association earned him his second suspension from the game – the first followed his conviction for making illegal campaign contributions to fellow football fan Richard Nixon – and, ironically, set the stage for the Yankees to end their record post-season drought and create the dynasty that had eluded them under Steinbrenner's misrule.

With Steinbrenner out of the way, the Yankees were able to develop young players rather than trade them away for veterans in hope of a quick fix. The core team that won four out of five straight World Series and reached the playoffs every year from 1995 through 2007, came together when real baseball professionals ran the franchise.

Yet Steinbrenner was there front and centre to take credit for success while blaming others for failure. In his last gasp of conceit before formally ceding control of the team to his son Hank, Steinbrenner orchestrated the dismissal of manager Joe Torre, who'd led the Yankees to the postseason for 12 consecutive years.

Over four decades, Steinbrenner embodied and popularised the values of America's culture of arrogance seen in the banishment of civility and fact from political discourse, the Iraq invasion – a US victory, according to much of the press – obscene executive pay, and the 2008 economic meltdown. Yes, George, you really were a Yankee Doodle Dandy.

[LI E90]

Originally Posted by Bimmer-Pilot

Only a Met fan would say this........I think I'm the biggest Yankee's fan on this forum and I am very saddened by the passing of George Steinbrenner. He was an incredible and charitable man. He was a visionary and a giant in the world of sports. He took a great but struggling franchise and turned it into a champion again. He will be missed.........

I am indeed a Met fan I was at game 6 in 1986 and I was at game seven when Beltran didn't take the bat off his shoulder in 2006. I was at game 162 in 2008 when the Marlins rubbed it in our faces on our field and we missed the post season by one game.

what I hate about Yankee fans are their sense of entitlement. All these young(20 and under fans) mostly.. I saw the funniest article on the Onion after the Yanks won last October. it said 8 year old Yankee fan can now die in piece, I thought it was so spot on.

what else gets me is where were all the Yankee fans in the 80's when they were a 4th place team? It took Steinbrenner getting banned for 2 years and giving day to day control to Stick Michales for an eventual winner to be built.

There is no deneying that George Mellowed at the end, he helped a lot of young kids out, he helped pay for college for many NYPD and NYFD offers kids, and never let it be know. and as an owner he was everything a fan could want, someone who was so passionate he would do anything to win.

[Bimmer-Pilot]

You are a lucky guy!!!!!!!Thats a cool Pics..I used to go to the games all the time but now that I'm in FL. I only go to 2 to 4 games a year. I been to 2 so far this year and I'll be at the Aug. 16th game and I can't wait......

Originally Posted by NYC6

Just bitter fans of other teams who are sent into rage looking at 27 World Series Banners that ring the top of "The House that George Built" that use the word "hate" when talking about a rival Sports team.

As to your remark about being the biggest Yankee fan, I'll make a case for myself. The first pic is from my seat of last years W.S. Game VI and the second from our regular seats Opening Day of this year. Im also going to tomorrows game against Tampa. RIP BOSS.

Godzillas HR landed about 20ft in front of us. Excuse the blurry shot, the Stadium was "rockin" and I was pretty buzzed at this point.


Matsui recieving his ring Opening Day.

[NYC6]

Aug 16th against Tigers.
At least your able to get to some games. I have tickets for tonites but Im not going to be able to make it. I hurt my leg in Vegas last week and its not good enough today to make the trek to the Stadium. Im really pissed. A game against the 2nd place Rays and they're doing a tribute for the Boss tonite.

I have tickets for Aug 7(Bos) Aug 18(Det) and Sep 24&26(Bos). Then hopefully Playoffs and W.S.
================================
Change of plans. I'll medicate and worry about the leg tomorrow. Game against 2nd place TB and tribute to The Boss and Bob Sheppard. Im going to the game tonite!

[Kroy]

RIP George

[roozie2001]

George was amazing at what he did. Theres a reason hes nicknamed the BOSS. RIP george

[Bimmer-Pilot]

Post some Pics

Originally Posted by NYC6

Aug 16th against Tigers.
At least your able to get to some games. I have tickets for tonites but Im not going to be able to make it. I hurt my leg in Vegas last week and its not good enough today to make the trek to the Stadium. Im really pissed. A game against the 2nd place Rays and they're doing a tribute for the Boss tonite.

I have tickets for Aug 7(Bos) Aug 18(Det) and Sep 24&26(Bos). Then hopefully Playoffs and W.S.
================================
Change of plans. I'll medicate and worry about the leg tomorrow. Game against 2nd place TB and tribute to The Boss and Bob Sheppard. Im going to the game tonite!

[NYC6]

Pics outside the Stadium and inside the VIP lobby.





winning run scores and PIE time!!!



RIP BOSS