Born on the Fourth of July

In George Vecsey’s excellent 2006 book Baseball: A History of America’s Favorite Game, he devotes a chapter to the New York Yankees titled Why the Yankees Exist. He wrote, “Quite like America itself, the Yankees were either classic champions, envied and admired all over the world, or else they were haughty oppressors, resented down the downtrodden masses.”

Writing about George Steinbrenner (again, this is 2006), Vecsey added: “New York in the mid-1970s encouraged more flamboyant magnates. A builder with eccentric orange hair and equally flaming ego, Donald Trump, openly boasted about his real estate prowess.

“The Boss (Steinbrenner) seemed to take his cue from being born on the Fourth of July, surrounding the Yankees with patriotic rituals involving flags, anthems, military choruses, and, for playoff games, trained American eagles soaring over Yankee Stadium.

This is the same Steinbrenner who was convicted of making illegal contributions to Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign (with no prison time) and was suspended from baseball at one point for paying a known gambler to dig up dirt about Dave Winfield, with whom he was feuding.

He was quotable and stole headlines, particularly in the back pages of New York City’s tabloids, then hijacked national sports pages on the morning of the 2010 All-Star Game by dying.

Gee, all this seems strangely familiar. 

Factoring in their separate relationships with Rudy Giuliani and this sentence – frightening in so many ways – from Wikipedia: "In 1989, after seeing Donald Trump on The Morton Downey Jr. Show, he wrote a letter to Trump suggesting he should run for president," the public lives of Steinbrenner and Trump seemed truly intertwined.

Yankee fans of a certain age learned that if they squinted hard enough, Steinbrenner’s lording over their favorite team could fade into the background. Same way that some New York Giants fans are learning to compartmentalize Jaxson Dart’s apparent admiration for Trump. Or in choosing to look past all that embarrassing commentary by several NBA players a decade ago that the earth was flat.

Living in America today, it’s much more difficult to see things through that set of lenses.

P.S.

George Vecsey turns 86 on July 4. As a reporter for Newsday and The New York Times he covered the New York Mets from their inception; his 1970 book Joy in Mudville is the franchise’s origin story. Vecsey also wrote Coal Miner’s Daughter, about Loretta Lynn and was one of 25 Newsday journalists who contributed to the 1969 novel Naked Came the Stranger, a satire of current American literary culture about sex in suburbia. There’s some Metsiana in the name of the main character in Vecsey’s contribution, Morton Earbrow, inspired by Casey Stengel who said Gil Hodges was so strong that he could "squeeze your earbrows off."