George Steinbrenner

I love a good parody, and they're hard to find. When I heard that Steinbrenner had died, I remembered this piece from The Cubs Brickyard, published back in April 2008.

“Eccentric” Owner George Steinbrenner Leaving Yankees to Become Crazy Old F*ck

(New York, NY) – Change is in the New York air after another abrupt Yankee exit from the playoffs. Was it Joe Torre’s last as manager of the Yankees? Will Alex Rodriguez opt out of his contract and become a free agent? Such changes will have to wait, because perhaps the biggest change possible has already happened: George Steinbrenner will no longer be running the team.

Steinbrenner, who will continue to serve in a nominal role, has owned the team for decades, and has run the team with what some have euphemistically dubbed a pleasant eccentricty. Whether it was publicly threatening to trade players or fire managers, or requiring players to honor rigorous grooming standards, Steinbrenner has always been a bit strange.

And now that he’s leaving the Yankees, that’s really all he’s going to be.

Steinbrenner was caught Tuesday trying to eat his own armpit.

“When he was running the team, it made a little more sense to do whatever Mr. Steinbrenner told me,” General Manager Brian Cashman said. “But now that he’s just a regular old guy, it’s a little strange when he asks me to pop out of a giant birthday cake in a diaper and sing ‘Happy Birthday, Mr. President.’”

Yankees coach Don Mattingly agreed. “Before, when he told me to shave something, I figured fine, whatever, he’s the boss, you know? But now it just feels weird. And frankly, there’s only so much I can shave.”

“I am not crazy!” an indignant Steinbrenner shouted at a parking meter last Friday. “I’m eccentric, rich, smelly, crazy, and ruggedly bow-legged. But I am not a haberdasher!”

Steinbrenner plans to retire to a bench by his favorite lake where he can feed/thumb-wrestle the ducks, and debate the merits of hip hop music versus the color green with other special members of the New York community.

Steinbrenner deserves something of a more elegiac nature, I suppose, so here is an offering from Ken Burns, assuming that he wrote the copy for John Chancellor, the narrator of his documentary Baseball. It might also have been Geoffrey Ward, of course.

And the elegy? It's more for the game than for The Boss, which is as it should be.

It measures just 9 inches in circumference, weighs only about 5 ounces, and it made of cork wound with woolen yarn, covered with two layers of cowhide, and stiched by hand precisely 216 times.

It travels 60 feet 6 inches from the pitcher's mound to home--and it can cover that distance at nearly 100 miles an hour. Along the way it can be made to twist, spin, curve, wobble, rise, or fall away.

The bat is made of turned ash, less than 42 inches long, not more than 2 3/4 inches in diameter. The batter has only a few thousandths of a second to decide to hit the ball. And yet the men who fail seven times out of ten are considered the game's greatest heroes.

It is played everywhere. In parks and playground and prison yards. In back alleys and farmers fields. By small children and by old men. By raw amateurs and millionare professionals. It is a leisurely game that demands blinding speed. The only game where the defense has the ball. It follows the seasons, beginning each year with the fond expectancy of springtime and ending with the hard facts of autumn.

Americans have played baseball for more than 200 years, while they conquered a continent, warred with one another and with enemies abroad, struggled over labor and civil rights and the meaning of freedom.

At the games's heart lie mythic contradictions: a pastoral game, born in crowded cities; an exhilarating democratic sport that tolerates cheating and has excluded as many as it has included; a profoundly conservative game that sometimes manages to be years ahead of its time.

It is an American odyssey that links sons and daughters to father and grandfathers. And it reflects a host of age-old American tensions: between workers and owners, scandal and reform, the individual and the collective.

It is a haunted game, where each player is measured by the ghosts of those who have gone before. Most of all, it is about time and timelessness, speed and grace, failure and loss, imperishable hope, and coming home.