REMINDER: There Are No Good Owners
Sports can confuse people. Fans spend so much time complaining about bad owners — owners who rob their cities or insult their fans or abuse their employees — that they can, understandably but mistakenly, conclude that there is such a thing as a Good Owner. The pursuit of this mythical Good Owner isn’t just an idle mistake. It’s a hope that fans cling to, which can be heard every time fans chant “Sell the team!” or talk themselves into the bright future promised to them by noted liar Steve Cohen.
Of course, the problem is not any particular owner; it’s with private ownership itself. As long as teams are privately owned, you are allowing the existence of someone who has near-total control over the operations of the team, and who has personal financial incentives that are directly at odds with the players, the fans, and often the community itself. It’s tempting to think that the reason John Fisher wants to move the Athletics out of Oakland, and the reason Robert Sarver oversaw an abusive workplace for decades, and the reason Dan Snyder clung to his team’s racist name, is just because they’re all bad guys.
And they ARE bad guys, certainly, but that’s not the real reason. After all, there are bad guys everywhere. The reason these guys are allowed to do so much harm is that private ownership encourages and incentivizes bad behavior. Fisher is moving his team because he got a better deal; Sarver got away with bullying employees because he was the boss; Snyder resisted changing the name because being the owner means nobody can tell you what to do. These guys may be particularly odious, but it is the nature of the role they occupy — of their relationship to the means of production — that makes them harmful.
This is pretty bleak. After all, if the problem for fans is their owner, then that can be fixed. Owners change: people die, teams get sold, etc. But if it’s the nature of ownership itself, then what hope do we have? And so we talk ourselves into the idea of a Good Owner, even if we have to tell lies to convince ourselves.
One lie you may have encountered a lot this year, at least if you know any Yankee fans, is: George Steinbrenner…. Now that was a good owner! He never would have stood for what this team is going through now!
To be clear, this is very untrue. Steinbrenner was decidedly NOT a good owner. This was well-understood while he was still alive. He fought openly with his employees, interfered recklessly with the management of the team, hired and fired people based on whims and personal grudges, imposed arbitrary and absurd grooming rules on his players, and just generally created an unpleasant atmosphere that hurt the team. Steinbrenner presided over the Yankees’ longest stretch without a postseason berth and World Series title since the team changed its name from the Highlanders in 1913.
Famously, Ken Griffey, Jr. said he would never play for the Yankees because of how he was treated by Steinbrenner as a kid. Steinbrenner’s negative impact on the team was so well-understood that when he was suspended from baseball in 1990, fans cheered the news:
It was actually while he was suspended, and his harmful influence on the team was mitigated, that the team managed to lay the foundation for the late 1990s dynasty. They drafted players like Andy Pettitte, Jorge Posada, and Derek Jeter, and developed other young talent like Mariano Rivera and Bernie Williams — guys who, when Steinbrenner was in charge, would likely have been traded for more established players. Indeed, a few years after Steinbrenner was reinstated, when the team was ready to give Jeter a shot, The Boss instead pushed to trade Rivera for Tony Fernandez so they could start the veteran at shortstop over the future Hall of Famer. Luckily for the team, others talked him out of it…
So why have so many fans talked themselves into the idea that George Steinbrenner was some great owner? That if the Yankees could only reanimate him, he would turn the whole franchise around?
Well, as idiosyncratic as Steinbrenner was, I think the story of how Steinbrenner became seen as a Good Owner is not that different from how owners in general propagate the myths of their value.
For one, Steinbrenner was great at getting attention. He was a tabloid fixture throughout his time running the Yankees, feeding content to journalists before anyone ever dreamt of the word “Twitter.” He hosted Saturday Night Live, he cameoed in movies, he “appeared” on Seinfeld… he was so ubiquitous that, eventually, he forged an association between himself and the Yankees. People saw him so often on TV or in the newspaper, and thought, Oh yeah, that’s the guy who owns the Yankees. And eventually they saw the Yankees and thought, Oh yeah, that’s the team that guy owns. So when the Yankees eventually had their success in the late 1990s, people attributed it to Steinbrenner just through the strength of that association.
After all, that’s the main reason Yankee fans long for the days of George — it’s just nostalgia. Because they so strongly associate him with better times, they conclude he must have caused those better times, even though that is empirically untrue.
Owners and executives do this all the time. They cultivate a public persona that is strongly associated with some brand or innovation, such that people think they are responsible for those things. Think of the iPhone and you think of Steve Jobs. Think of electric cars and you think of Elon Musk. Think of two-day delivery and you think of Jeff Bezos. Nevermind that those things are ACTUALLY the result of thousands of people toiling underneath them — we don’t know the names of those people, and so we give credit to the CEO dancing on stage or getting photographed for magazines.
It’s a little weird, then, that the failures don’t stick to the owners. Yankee fans remember the late 1970s and the late 1990s, and give Steinbrenner credit for those years, but they don’t seem to hold the stretch from 1982 through 1994 against him (even though he was much more directly responsible for the team in those years).* Some of this is just positivity bias — we hold on to the good memories — but it’s also a consequence of Steinbrenner’s erratic behavior.
*The late 1990s dynasty was largely built during Steinbrenner’s suspension, as mentioned above, and the ‘70s dynasty was built largely with the help of one of his partners, Gabe Paul, who was the Cleveland General Manager when Steinbrenner tried to buy the Indians and then conveniently traded a bunch of players (Graig Nettles, Chris Chambliss, Oscar Gamble, and Dick Tidrow) from his old team to his new team when he went with Steinbrenner to the Yankees.
When Steinbrenner did crazy things — when he fired Billy Martin five times, when he called one of his players “a fat pussy toad” in the press, when he criticized Derek Jeter for going out too much — it was often to create an image of himself as a Demanding BossTM. This is a classic owner strategy, to throw tantrums, fire people arbitrarily,* and loudly demand perfection from your underlings like a child forced to leave a toy store without a new treat. You’ve likely heard such stories about Jobs or Musk or any “business genius” of the last 50 years; some people find them very impressive. He’s a perfectionist! He hates losing! He demands results!
*Arbitrary firings seem like a bad idea if your goal is to create an effective workplace. After all, why would an owner want to fire people who are good at their jobs? But they are actually crucial to creating the image of a Demanding BossTM. See, anyone can fire someone who is bad at their job. But if you fire someone who is perfectly good, then people think, “Wow, he wants workers who are EVEN BETTER!” It doesn’t matter if the person you replace them with is any better, or even if you have to end up bringing back the original person (as Steinbrenner did with Martin four times). The dramatic firing is the whole point, because it’s about image over reality.
Of course, as any rational adult knows, you don’t get results just by loudly whining about it, and most people don’t actually do their best work when their boss is insulting them and making unreasonable demands. But it IS a good strategy for deflecting blame when things go bad, while still claiming credit for the good. If you’re a Demanding BossTM and it works, then people go “Some might not like it, but it gets results”; if you’re a Demanding BossTM and it fails, then people go “He was right to complain.”
Which brings us to the last major reason people are nostalgic for Steinbrenner: money. Because when Steinbrenner was making his unreasonable demands, he liked to throw his money around, using his spending to justify his constant whining. A classic Steinbrenner move was to work aggressively to sign some prized free agent — Reggie Jackson or Dave Winfield or Hideki Irabu or Gary Sheffield — and then, once they were signed, criticize him mercilessly and complain he wasn’t worth the money.
Fans can, admittedly, relate to this. What is fandom, really, besides constantly complaining about the team you love? And it’s hard for fans to fault an owner for doing the one thing all fans want their team’s owner to do: spend money. The main way an owner is bad for his team is by limiting the team’s budget so he can extract more profit out of the revenue guaranteed to him by virtue of league revenue sharing and local monopolies. Steinbrenner didn’t really do this, and so fans remember him fondly.
And indeed, it can be tempting, in any industry, to greet the arrival of some free spending owner with great enthusiasm. When Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post, for example, people were hopeful that he would invest in journalism. And often owners like this DO make a bunch of flashy, and potentially valuable, investments. But, over the long run, an owner wants to see a return on his investment. The nature of ownership is to protect the bottom line, to maximize the profit he is entitled to. In other words, owners take value from what they own; they don’t bring value to what they buy. This is true in every industry, including sports.
So we shouldn’t overstate Steinbrenner’s influence here. He spent money when it was convenient for him to spend. After all, in the collusion era of the 1980s, he happily sided with his class over his team, refusing to spend when the owners pushed back against free agency. It’s true that the Yankees were among the league’s highest payrolls for nearly all George’s tenure running the team. But that is still true now! The Yankees’ ability to outpace the rest of the league in its payroll is not really a function of the owner — it’s a function of the Yankees’ position within the sport.* They are baseball’s premiere franchise in the largest city in the country. They have the most revenue, and so they can have the largest budget.
*Two things have changed in recent years, creating the perception that the Yankees are pinching pennies: First, the league has increased the progressive penalties for going over the luxury tax, so teams that repeatedly go over the threshold pay even more. This was never true under George’s tenure, and motivated the 2018 “reset” where the Yankees fell out of the top five in MLB payroll for the first time since the early 1990s. Second, a couple other teams around the league, specifically the Dodgers and Mets, changed owners. The Dodgers and Mets have similar structural advantages to the Yankees, but had previously been held back by deadbeat owners (the McCourts in LA, the Wilpons in Queens) who were essentially robbing the teams, using the revenues generated to subsidize lifestyles they could not otherwise afford. Without those owners in place, those teams have been able to compete with the Yankees in terms of payroll. It is certainly conceivable that the Yankees could be owned by someone like this. Many teams still are, most notably the Chicago White Sox. But the fact that some owners are worse doesn’t make George Steinbrenner good.
To the degree that Steinbrenner’s influence on spending WAS personal, it was often negative. In 2003, for example, he pushed the team to sign Gary Sheffield to play right field instead of Vladimir Guerrero. Guerrero was younger and clearly the better overall player, but Sheffield was the bigger star, and George had been coveting him for years. When owners treat free agents like shiny new toys, then those things take precedence, so the team signed Sheffield, and suffered for it.
In reality, the best that can be said about George Steinbrenner is that he could have been a lot worse. And a lot of the ways he was bad — publicly complaining about losses, wanting to be involved in every decision, getting enamored with specific free agents — are relatable to fans. In some ways, I think that’s the biggest part of this. Yankee fans miss George Steinbrenner because they’re mad right now, and they know that, if George were alive, he would be pissed off too. And they think that would fix something, because, as I said, sports confuses people. It’s tempting to think the problem is the owner as opposed to ownership, and to think it could be solved by changing the person in charge. If only we had someone like me who owned the team, who cared about winning more than money, then things would be better. But if you owned the team, then you too would care about money more than winning… The solution isn’t new owners — it’s no owners at all.