Yankee Owner Hasn’t Changed

George Steinbrenner dropped his guard Thursday and let you know that he never really changes, no matter how many games his team wins.

Steinbrenner can give you four-hanky crying in accepting the World Series trophy, acting as if he were watching the last five minutes of “Life Is Beautiful.” He can kiss and make up with Yogi Berra. Then he loses his head because Hideki Irabu doesn’t cover first base fast enough at the end of spring training and calls Irabu a “fat toad.”

You used to hear that kind of talk around the Yankees all the time in the old days, only they were talking about the owner, before he lost the weight.

The funniest idea in town, proposed all the time by Steinbrenner’s cheerleaders, is that he has changed. That he has mellowed with age. That he worries how he will be remembered, as if there is some question about that. There isn’t. Steinbrenner will be remembered as a Barnum and a bully who twice had the best baseball team in the world, first at the end of the ‘70s, now again at the end of the ‘90s.

He has been brilliant as a businessman if not always as a baseball man. He has promoted himself endlessly, around getting kicked out of his sport twice, a world’s record for any owner in any sport.

After all that, he called one of his pitchers a fat toad. This from the old Williams College wordsmith. The material was much sharper in the old days, when he would call somebody like Dave Winfield “Mr. May,” or talk about one of his young pitchers “spitting the bit.”

And this is what can happen when Joe Torre isn’t in the dugout every day, when he doesn’t have hands-on control of the Yankees every day. Torre, recovering from cancer surgery, was at the ballpark Thursday and watched some of the game with Steinbrenner, then was gone by the time the clown act came on. It will be interesting to see how many more of these episodes we might have to endure before Torre is back on the job fulltime.

The ballclub will be fine, of course. It is too deep, too talented, too professional to let Steinbrenner be any kind of permanent distraction. But since Torre was diagnosed with prostate cancer, you have gotten the idea that Steinbrenner thinks he is the star of everything again.

He likes it, too.

He has paid all this money. He had the best team in the world last season, one of the best of all time. He is back on top. And this apparently is supposed to clear up his permanent record, make everybody forget the old days, when there would always be a whipping boy like Irabu, starting with the late Billy Martin, when he would abuse people for sport, and another back page.

Steinbrenner hasn’t suddenly acquired class after all this time. The class here is his team. It is Torre, as classy as anyone to ever sit in the dugout for a New York team. It is Paul O’Neill, one of the first to come along in the early ‘90s and make Yankee fans start to feel proud about their team again. And Derek Jeter and Bernie Williams and Tino Martinez.

They have made everything all right around the Yankees again, and not just in the standings. Along the way, they have cleaned up the owner.

Irabu has committed the crime that a lot of Yankee free agents did, especially throughout the ‘80s: He is not the player Steinbrenner wanted him to be. He was the trophy pitching hire before Roger Clemens. He was advertised as the Japanese Nolan Ryan. He has been somewhat less than that. He has shown brilliance at times. He can show you amazing stuff. But he never became the star that Steinbrenner paid him to be. He did not put on pinstripes and become an immortal.

Finally, Steinbrenner blew his top Thursday, did everything in his suite except threaten to hold his breath. The reporters came running. Then he really showed Irabu who is boss around here and started calling Irabu names. That ought to teach him a lesson.

Steinbrenner has a great baseball team. It didn’t make him great company 20 years ago, and it doesn’t now. He just doesn’t lose his head nearly as often as he once did. For the most part, he has behaved himself since Torre became the manager. He can’t hurt the Yankees with meddling the way he once did because of the talent in the room, and the character.

But he can be a nuisance if you give him an opening. Why? Because he hasn’t changed, that’s why. The Yankees have changed.

Steinbrenner has just gotten older.

And sometimes, he is the old Steinbrenner. If you’re born round, even round as one of his pitchers, you don’t die square.