Mr May Makes Good Big Time

The sporting world lost a pair of giants in the last few days. First Yankees announcer Bob Sheppard's passing over the weekend, and then this morning the many sided King George departed as well. I am by no means a Yankees fan, but as a fan of baseball and a fan of the city where the Yankees call home, I had to ponder the mixed legacy of "the Boss". As a New York transplant with a heart still in Ohio, a football man with a passion for baseball, a shipping magnate with an aggressive drive to restore glory to the nation's premier club, Big George's place in history shouldn't be in doubt. He bought the Yankees at a bargain and turned them into a billion dollar business. He loved the fans and did all he could to bring them wins, but his reckless pursuit of high price free agent players helped to drive up ticket costs. A Rod and Big George knew that money didn't grow on trees, but twenty dollar beers at Yankee Stadium made sure that at least it found fertile soil near home turf. And as for the players? He didn't make it easy to work for him and he had a revolving door system with farm team prospects, not to mention managers. At the same time, he did a great deal to take care of those close to him, and quite a few he never met.
Was he the Idi Amin of baseball? Nah, not really. But he wasn't Lincoln either. Or even Woodrow Wilson. I think he was a man of voracious ambition, moderate intellectualism, spare patience, and a remarkable sense of self effacing humor. When Ted Kennedy departed last summer, I felt a shift, a knowledge of loss that went beyond the hour to hour news coverage, the sense of knowing that a true leader and pioneer was gone and with that vacancy an era was soon to fade as well. I think the same thing of King George's passing. There won't be another like him for quite a while because there can't be. He has left us but the era he embodied left long before he did.
Much was made back in the day about King George's dissatisfaction with Dave Winfield in the lean mid eighties years of the Yankees saga. About an ocean of water has passed under pretty much every bridge to Manhattan since then but for some reason I wanted to post something from a happy moment in Winfield's career. He finally won a World Series with the Toronto Blue Jays in 1992, the one he couldn't clinch during his stormy tenure with the Yankees. Based on the bridge mending Winfield and Steinbrenner made in recent years, I feel like it's a greater tribute to the man and the game to remember just that, the game.