Mike Celizic

Baseball without George M. Steinbrenner III is like trailer parks without tornadoes, bayous without alligators, talk radio without Rush Limbaugh. It might be safer for some, but it won’t be the same.

Love him or hate him, the man who has variously called “The Boss,” “The Mad Shipbuilder,” “George III” and any number of things that can’t be printed in a family website has left an indelible mark on the game.

He hasn’t been seen in public for months. The last time he really said anything was more than two years ago at the groundbreaking ceremony for the New Yankee Stadium.

Now, all we can hope is that the 78-year-old who left such a mark on the game hangs in there to see his new baseball palace open next spring. He deserves that much. Baseball deserves that much.

Steinbrenner changed the game's landscape. He didn’t do it with shovels and rakes, but with a bulldozer, burying old ways of doing things and leaving in their place a new and vastly more expensive financial reality. He invented the idea of building through the free-agent market, and his willingness to dig deep into the team’s overstuffed coffers created an arms race fought with checkbooks.

He may be gone, but his impact will never be erased.

He didn’t do everything right — far from it. After winning back-to-back World Series in 1977-78, the Yankees didn’t win another title until 1996, the longest title-free stretch since Babe Ruth arrived from Boston in 1919. It was only when he was on forced leave from the game — serving his second suspension for crimes first against campaign finance laws and then against human decency — that the Yankees returned to prominence in the mid-1990s. In 1995, the team made the first of 13 straight trips to the postseason and the following year won the first of what would be four World Series in five years.

The second coming of his dynasty had little of the turmoil of the first, but what it lacked in controversy — he went 12 seasons, 1996-2007, with the same manager — it made up for in extravagant spending.

The Brothers Steinbrenner, Hank and Hal, will maintain that legacy of big spending. And Hal, the brother who oversees baseball operations, has shown a Steinbrennerian knack for inflammatory rhetoric. But without George, it won’t be the same.

Steinbrenner was an unknown from Cleveland when he and a group of partners bought the Yankees from CBS in 1973 for the bargain-basement price of $10 million, the game’s most fabled franchise had endured nearly a decade of futility. The team hadn’t won the World Series since 1962 and hadn’t been there since 1964. He restored the Yankee dynasty, returning to the World Series in 1976 and winning it in 1977 and '78.

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In the process of creating a winner, he also created a legend — the Bronx Zoo. He went through managers like George Clooney goes through girlfriends, hiring and firing Billy Martin with metronomic regularity. Whatever the Yankees were, they were never dull. And if Steinbrenner made life miserable for players, executives and team employees, he also made sure the team was always in the headlines.

The success came at a price, though.

The man who stormed into the headlines in the mid-1970s with big free-agent purchases and stayed there with his love of turmoil hasn’t been the Steinbrenner we remember for years. Last year, he gave over control of the team to his sons, Hal and Hank. But Thursday's announcement that majority ownership has been transferred to Hal is still a blow. As long as The Boss’ name was on top of the corporate letterhead, we could still imagine that on any day, Mount St. Steinbrenner could erupt again.

And now we know it will never happen again. It’s Helmsman Hal and designated bully Hank now.

It’s the end of an era that wasn’t consistently good or great, but was always entertaining. The game, and the columnists, are going to miss him.

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