For owners, bronze is the new black

Like Bud Selig, George is getting one. Lifesize. Immortality.

Bronze statue.

Ridiculous.

Don't worry. Bronze statues aren't proliferating wildly. You won't see one of Derek Jeter soon. He'll get a plaque and jersey. Same with Mariano. They'll get cars.

And the soldiers, the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan? Don't expect to see them full-sized in bronze. Nope. That's how it used to be. That's not how it is today.

These days, to get immortalized in bronze, top to toes, you gotta sign checks. Like George, you have to have inherited vast wealth, or like Bud Selig, you have to have been good at selling cars. Like both, you have to have been in the right place at the right time. Forget leading an army or inventing a cure. You have to have employed publicists, broken unions and been on TV a lot to talk about the integrity of the sport you somehow got to embody, without ever throwing a pitch.

Bronze statues. That's all they were when alive.

Listen folks: George Steinbrenner was a nutjob. But he was our nutjob. We went through the best of times with him. We went through the worst of times with him. This notion that we bronze him, pretend he was some great leader, some giant of courage or truth -- it's bullshit. They're trying to make kids think George was a great man. He wasn't. That's OK. He was our nutjob. We needed one.

The problem here? Somehow, the Yankee corporate has assumed a mindset of seriously patholigical brown-nosing -- make that bronze-nosing. Somebody in the offices are playing to the Steinbrenner family's egotism, which is genetic and has no bounds. They're spending money on bronze statues instead of players.

If this is Cashman's work, we're in deep trouble.