PUTTING THE MONUMENT ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE FENCE:

How Hank Impacts The Yanks (TIM MARCHMAN, November 19, 2007, NY Sun)

The rise and fall of the Yankees' fortunes over the years has had a direct relationship to how involved the owner was. The less anyone heard from George Steinbrenner, the more games the team won. The most consequential development of the Yankees' absurdly overwrought offseason, then, may not be the resigning of Alex Rodriguez, but the newfound grandiloquence of Hank Steinbrenner, heir to his father's throne and apparent inheritor of his mouth.

When George Steinbrenner was essentially acting as his own general manager, signing and trading players at whim, it made for great headlines, but the Yankees could never quite win no matter how much talent they had. They failed to win a single World Series in the 1980s, the first decade in which that had happened since the 1910s. When Steinbrenner was temporarily banished from baseball for hiring a shady gambler to trail around after star outfielder Dave Winfield, a group led by Gene Michael made the key signings, draft picks, and trades that led directly to the dynastic Joe Torre teams. When Steinbrenner began monkeying with the roster again, making brilliant moves such as signing Gary Sheffield rather than Vladimir Guerrero in 2003, little good came of it.

Most people have probably worked for a business owned by someone who knew about one tenth as much as he thought he did, and so know why an overbearing owner is inherently a problem. The difficulty is usually less that the boss makes actively terrible decisions than that he unknowingly makes decisions that conflict with those made by people who actually know what they're doing, and wants everyone to listen to his harebrained ideas. Only a very stupid and very determined boss can wreck an otherwise soundly run concern, but it's very easy for even a well-meaning owner to waste plenty of his employees' time.

It's too early to know whether Hank Steinbrenner will be an active impediment to the success of the Yankees, or whether he'll just insist on making a public spectacle of himself.

The money he's spending to keep his Dad's Yankees together is insignificant, but the length of the contracts they've just handed to A-Rod, Posada and Rivera are insane. Consider that none of them is likely to be capable of staying at his current position as long as half way through the deal.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 19, 2007 7:15 AM