Boss would be proud of this gift of Cole
Hal took care of family business by landing Yankee ace
George M. Steinbrenner would have turned 90 on Saturday. I asked Larry David about that the day before. David is a lifelong Yankee fan and it was his voice we heard as Steinbrenner on “Seinfeld,” even though all we ever saw was the back of the character’s head. By then Steinbrenner had been famous as the owner of the Yankees for two decades, and was already the most famous owner in sports, well on his way to being the most famous in modern sports history.
“He was becoming mellower with age,” David said in a text. “I think it’s possible by 90 I would have liked him. So happy birthday, George!”
Steinbrenner had first announced he was a player himself when he signed Catfish Hunter to a contract that made Hunter the highest paid player in baseball history at the time, with a five-year contract worth $3.75 million, ending a bidding war that involved just about every team in the sport. Hunter won 23 games for the Yankees in ’75 and 17 more in ’76, by which time the Yankees were back in the World Series for the first time in 12 years, an even longer Series drought than Hal Steinbrenner’s Yankees are currently experiencing.
The Yankees got swept by the Reds in ’76. Then Steinbrenner hauled off and signed Reggie Jackson, Catfish’s teammate when the Oakland A’s were winning three World Series in a row, when Reggie was the free agent everybody wanted. Reggie’s contract was $3 million for five years. His first season in New York, in 1977, the Yankees won the World Series, then did it again the next season. Steinbrenner would later sign Dave Winfield for more money and more years, but Winfield was never as much of a star as Reggie was. Or as George Steinbrenner himself.
Over time, though, the idea that the Yankees and New York was the place that all the big free agents wanted to play became the same kind of tired myth that we still get about Madison Square Garden being the mecca of basketball. There have been exceptions over the years, for sure. The Mets signed Carlos Beltran as a free agent, for $119 million, when everybody was sure he was going to the Yankees. The Yankees spent a ton of money to get both CC Sabathia and Mark Teixeira after the ’08 season, and both of them helped the Yankees win a
World Series in 2009, the last in which they’ve played.
None was the kind of star that Catfish and Reggie were in the middle of the 1970s, when free agency was exploding and the Yankees became the Yankeees again, if Steinbrenner’s Yankees.
Now Hal Steinbrenner has done a George Steinbrenner thing with Gerrit Cole, not just paying to get him to the Yankees, but overpaying: Nine years and $324 million for a starting pitcher. Him being a Yankee is the way the old man used to do business. So it is Cole who is supposed to deliver now, put the Yankees back in the World Series the way Catfish helped put them back in the Series, and win them one a couple the way Reggie Jackson did. It is Cole who has made the only myths about the best guys wanting to come to New York a reality again.
Before there was trouble between the great Thurman Munson and Reggie because of a Sport magazine piece about Reggie in which he said he was “the straw that stirs the drink,” and was further quoted as saying that Thurman could only stir it “bad,” it was Munson who famously said this to Steinbrenner when Reggie became a free agent after one year with the Orioles: “Go get the big man.” Cole was the big man in free agency last winter. Even in this time when Jacob deGrom has won two straight Cy Young Awards and Scherzer and Strasburg just pitched the Nationals to the World Series and Justin Verlander, Cole’s teammate in Houston, has continued to pitch like a future Hall of Famer, Cole was as dominant as any of them last season as he helped Verlander pitch the Astros all the way to Game 7 of the World Series, beating the Yankees in the American League Championship Series along the way.
Everybody knows that the Yankees haven’t had a true ace since CC. And when one is available, you can’t let him go