Brooks on Books: Steinbrenner: The Last Lion of Baseball by Bill Madden

OK, Yankees owner George Steinbrenner did a lot of nice things for people, and he built a huge empire out of what had been practically a moribund (if storied) franchise when he bought the team in the seventies. But the guy could still be a massive jerk, and I think some of that was conveniently forgotten when he passed away earlier this year. Bill Madden's addictive, entertaining biography of the larger-than-life figure reminds us that the legendary Boss caused a lot of pain in his life.

Madden has covered the Yankees for decades, written several previous books on the team, and is well connected enough to deliver an insightful biography. One thing that distinguishes this work from previous efforts is Madden's use of audiotapes recorded by former exec Gabe Paul. It's a great read, not least because the bad aspects of ol' George are just so darned amusing. There are tons of "George is nuts" and "George is evil" stories in here, but Madden doesn't write a hatchet job. He does attempt to provide some balance where it's necessary. For example, the account of how former commissioner Fay Vincent suspended Steinbrenner from baseball is an eye-opener to anyone who buys into the image of Vincent as humble caretaker of the game's best interests; Madden does a solid job of reporting what a snow job Steinbrenner got in this particular instance and is clearly sympathetic to his side of things.

But when you read the text, what jumps out are those anecdotes. My favorite "George is nuts" story: In 1978, then-GM Al Rosen was in the AL offices to do a coin flip with the Red Sox to determine where a possible one-game playoff would be if the teams tied atop the East. Rosen called heads, the coin came up tails, and so Fenway would host the playoff. When Rosen called the Boss, Steinbrenner asked how he could have lost and what he called. Rosen said, "Heads," drawing this reply:

"Heads? You f------ imbecile! How in the hell could you call heads when any dummy knows tails comes up 70% of the time? I can't believe it! I've got the dumbest f------ people in baseball working for me!"

He then hung up, leaving Rosen to contemplate whether the owner was in fact crazy.

Perhaps my "favorite" George is evil tale comes when Yankee team counsel Ed Broderick lost a salary arbitration case to catcher Rick Cerone, generating a predictable response from the Boss, who called the poor attorney a "f------ idiot," before hanging up, then calling back with this:

"OK, Broderick, you lost and it's your fault, so this is what we're going to do. Monday is the Presidents Day holiday, and everybody up there was planning to have the day off, right? Well, you tell each and every one person in the office that, because you lost the Cerone case, they all have to work a full day Monday. You got that?"

Steinbrenner eventually "showed some heart" by letting everyone go home at 1pm--except Broderick.

The book is loaded with this stuff, and it's great fun to consume it. Even the stories that are familiar--the numerous scuffles with Billy Martin and Reggie, the constant badgering of employees, and so on--are worth reliving. Baseball may need the Yankees to be prominent, and it may even have benefited from the presence of an easy villain figure like Steinbrenner, but...jeez.

Madden does not do a lot of psychoanalysis. He makes clear the difficult relationship Steinbrenner had with his hard-ass father and provides evidence that it was the number one driving force in the son's life, but he doesn't dig too deeply into speculation and armchair psychiatry. The man himself kept his private life private, and there isn't a whole lot of insight into what makes him "tick" or what he did outside of baseball, for that matter.

The book is subtitled "The Last Lion of Baseball," and it really is the saga of Steinbrenner in baseball. There is enough material about the shipbuilding and some other aspects, but there are some areas left relatively unexplored. For example, Madden writes, "people close to him believed that the Olympics were always his first love, even more than the Yankees." Yet there is little in this bio about his work on the U.S. Olympic Committee.

But the reason we read this book is for the Yankees material, all those great stories from the glory years when the Boss was a cartoonish figure looming over his team and the entire sport. Madden's fine biography is a fair look at a notorious man, but it's hard to come away from it thinking anything but that the guy was at best a real piece of work and at worst a pretty bad guy.