Like Him or Not...

Either way, George Steinbrenner had a huge impact on modern sport, not just baseball. You could argue that the whole LeBron James-Cleveland-Miami fracas traces back to his actions. Charlie Finley may have been one of the first owners to start spending big money on free agents, but Steinbrenner perfected the method: Offer the best players the most money, as having the best players on your team represents the best chances for winning ballgames and titles. Reward success, replace continued failure with new blood.

Not everybody liked Steinbrenner. Not everybody likes the Yankees (hand raised). Not everybody liked this method. And because it wasn't foolproof, it offered enough chances for failure to let those who disliked the method, the owner or the team plenty of chances for schadenfreude parties.

But Steinbrenner also had a feel for what made the game of baseball appealing and could demonstrate it, as this post by a National Review writer illustrates.

Then there's this story by the Associated Press, which seems more than a little ghoulish, hanging as it does on Steinbrenner's death during a year in which the lack of a federal estate tax means his heirs will keep quite a bit more of his bequests to them than they would have if he had died in 2011. But I've got a feeling that Steinbrenner himself would get quite a bit of a kick over the idea that he got one over on the feds, especially when it came to taxes.

The only question now, I guess, is how he and Billy Martin greeted one another in the afterlife. Some of the words they used to refer to each other are probably not welcome in their new neighborhood.