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August 02, 2007

Another Report On The Yankees After Life

From Conde Nast/Porfolio.com - with a hat tip to WasWatching.com reader Evan N. - - a must read on all things "Big Stein" entitled "Baseball After The Boss." Some of the big points therein, in my opinion:

He [Geroge] doesn’t look all right. In fact, he looks dreadful. His body is bloated; his jawline has slackened into a triple chin; his skin looks as if a dry-cleaner bag has been stretched over it. Steinbrenner’s face, pale and swollen, has a curiously undefined look. His features seem frozen in a permanent rictus of careworn disbelief.

Despite his reputation, it has been years since Steinbrenner micromanaged the Yankees. Team president Randy Levine and chief operating officer Lonn Trost have autonomy over business decisions, as does Brian Cashman, the general manager, on the baseball end. “George still calls the shots,” says a prominent baseball agent, “but his passion for the game seems to have faded along with his health, and no one is quite sure who’s got his ear anymore.” Steinbrenner, he notes, loves aphorisms, and one of his favorites is “The speed of the pack is determined by the pace of the leader.” “In the past few years, George’s pace has slowed considerably. He’s been so detached this season that I wonder if he’s still in the hunt.”

Some Yankees insiders believe that once the Boss is gone, his family will sell its stake to an outsider. Donald Trump has expressed interest, and assuming Rudy Giuliani doesn’t land in the White House, the former mayor would be a likely candidate to front a consortium of buyers. But Trump is thought to have too much debt and not enough ready cash. And any billionaire who could afford the Yankees wouldn’t appoint someone else to run them—that would be the equivalent of producing a Broadway show and not sitting front-row center on opening night. At a cost of more than a billion dollars, everyone agrees, this would not be about making money. It would strictly be an ego buy.

If the team is sold, the next Big Ego probably would be someone like Cablevision chief executive James Dolan—overlord of the New York Knicks, the New York Rangers, and Madison Square Garden—assuming he has no financial ties to the Cleveland Indians, which are owned by his brother Larry. (Dolan would not comment for this story.) Or it could be a relatively unknown hedge fund manager with a forest of performance fees to burn.

A hedge fund manager? Yikes. I hate teams owned by hedge fund managers.

Posted by Steve Lombardi at August 2, 2007 11:35 PM

Comments

Anybody but Dolan!

I know we'll have to get used to a monumental ego, and there are a lot of insufferable ones out there. But Dolan has shown through his "leadership" at the Garden that he would need an answer key to rise to the level of clueless.

Posted by: The Scout [TypeKey Profile Page] at August 3, 2007 11:06 AM

Lidz disgusts me. McEwen too. Michael Kay bugs the shit out of me most of the time, but he was spot on today on his radio show. It was completely unethical how Lidz gained access to Steinbrenner. I wanted to punch him through my radio when he was being interviewed.

Posted by: Jen [TypeKey Profile Page] at August 4, 2007 02:16 AM