Pajiba

You just know that George is going to give Satan a 5 year, 100 million contract to play on his rec slo-pitch team.

As a Yankee fan I can't say I cared much for the man, considering he and his ilk are greatly responsible for making baseball about money and nothing else.

Steinbrenner didn't "nearly" destroy parity. He DID destroy parity. Ask the Pirates and the Royals if they think there's parity in baseball.

"America loves a superteam (and so does Lebron), and a system was in place for a big, bold market to create such a team, and so he did"

So true and so appropriate an analogy although not for the reasons you think.

RE "He was an evil asshole, but he was an evil asshole with passion."

I don't know about "evil." He certainly seems to have been an asshole, but as I don't care about baseball, I don't really care about him or his team.

However, I would like to see an end to the "passion makes anything OK" thing. I know that's not what you meant, but...

I could say Hitler had a passion for getting rid of all the Jews. And Jeffrey Dahmer had a passion for murdering people, then storing pieces of them in his freezer. And various assholes on Wall Street have a passion for fucking people over to make millions of dollars, then gloating about it. I don't agree that passion+something = who are we to say whether they were right or wrong?

I'll say it: Being an asshole with passion just makes you a bigger, more persistent asshole than most people. Not a good thing. Steinbrenner never did anything to me, but I'm not gonna lose any sleep over his passing, either. I'm sure he wouldn't give a shit what I think. So that makes us even.

"Exploded in popularity"? Baseball is at best the #2 sport in the U.S. behind the NFL. If the NBA wasn't run by fuckheads, baseball would be a clear #3. Baseball is far less popular than it was when Steinbrenner bought the team.

The hosts were talking about Steinbrenner on the radio today. They made the comment that it went unreported about his philanthropy.

Oh, and just so you know, parity blows. There is no glamor in mediocrity. It's like playing the game and not keeping score. If you've got it, flaunt it!

Steinbrenner may have destroyed parity in baseball, but NO baseball player would make nearly as much without him kicking off the "let's pay this player an ungodly amount of money" era of baseball.
Parity may be gone but would it really have been better if he just sat on the explosion of income baseball began money instead of paying the players a decent sized share of the earnings?
This is why the NFL should be uncapped too.
That said I'm from NY so my market will almost always buy the rings if it's an uncapped sport.

The complements Steinbrenner has posthumously received are largely from two camps- Yankee fans, and idiots who are sometimes one and the same. I know people as a rule do not speak il of the dead, but if you had nothing nice to say of someone when they were alive, it's pointless to say so when they've died; they can't hear you and you sound like a hypocrite. So with that said, I will continue to speak of George Steinbrenner the same way I did while he was alive, the fact he's dead changes nothing.

Steinbrenner by most accounts was a bully. He had mountains of cash and was therefor able to push his agenda around whether people liked it or not- and not just in baseball either, business, friends, Hell even his children felt George's wrath. That's not to say he wasn't right sometimes or even didn't know what he was doing, but clearly he took the Charles Foster Kane school of thought where if people didn't agree with him, he'd often either pay them off or otherwise force them until they did. Steinbrenner, most people forget was suspended by MLB for employing rather thuggish tactics when "negotiating" with one of his players and there have been many stories that that was far from an isolated incident.

As for baseball, I'd be rather curious how things might have turned out if he had successfully acquired his hometown Cleveland Indians a year before he got the Yankees. Would the Indians have been a dominate team? Or being in a smaller market with a far less money and prestigious history, would the Indians have been more like they always were? Money might not always buy you success- but damn if it doesn't make things easier.

If one thinks parity is making all teams perfectly equal, let me dispel with that fantasy right now, because it doesn't. It does however attempt to make the financial playing field a bit more level. Instead the same few teams consistently make the playoffs every year because the have salary budgets that dwarf the combined budgets of the rest of the league. It's really easy to buy up all the best players (another Kane tactic) when you reside in the largest market and have no limit to your spending. There are teams who every year know they haven't a chance in Hell anymore of being successful, and if they do defy the odds, they know they'll be decimated again as soon as their players can be signed away. Steinbrenner destroyed what little equality there might have been, and now other teams either had to spend similar types of money to keep up (and keep their rosters intact) or be left in the dust. And because there was no governor on spending limits some teams have no chance of being successful short of just signing a talented rookie. Even then many teams have been reduced to a minor league team on a major league level. You can thank George for that too, but you can also thank the rest of baseball for allowing him to become this juggernaut instead of actually telling him "no" every now and again.

The Yankees (and by extension a few other teams who distantly try to do the same) are less about a team developed and more about a collection of All-Stars built from other teams' rosters with an an ungodly amount of cash. Yes, one could argue he was doing it so his team would win, but at what cost to the overall game? Players salaries shot through the roof, ticket prices making it harder for people to go, and a game where for many teams the regular season is just a formality- their post-season fate all but predetermined.

Perhaps baseball like all professional sports was always about the money. Perhaps and a handful of the same teams being dominate versus everyone having a shot was inevitable. And maybe the image of baseball is now largely romanticized over reality. So if nothing else Steinbrenner's legacy is that he destroyed that illusion. By extension, he did not leave the game better than when he came onto it. Now granted most Yankee fans seem to be happy with that results, but I wonder if they'd be so agreeable with his tactics, if it was their team that was left out in the cold every year.

Regarding parity--there may be a disparity in the amount of money that MLB teams spend, but in terms of wins the MLB actually has more parity than the other major sports (I'm too lazy to look it up now, but about every stathead baseball site has done a statistical analysis on this in the past year). And as for Steinbrenner keeping the financial disparity going, I'd bet the Yankees and Red Sox would agree to a salary cap (with luxury tax like the NBA) well before the Pirates/Royals/Twins (at least while Pohlad was alive) would agree to a salary floor.

Yeah, the luxury tax is spread around the league to create the "parity" all the fans of teams with losing records are bemoaning. Steinbrenner quipped about maybe instead of complaining that the Brewers couldn't afford the 50 million a year contracts the yankees could, they could use the 50 million they received from them in the luxury tax (and revenue sharing all teams participate in) to pay those contracts instead of pocketing the cash like most teams do.