Hal Steinbrenner does not understand the town where his family has done business for 50 years.

 

Gee willikers, boys and girls! After all that boring winning, now comes the very bestest part of the season, when your New York Yankees struggle desperately just to hang on to a wild-card slot! (Spoiler alert: they ain't gonna make it.)

I know that's what you always want. A close race, carefully played out within the bounds of MLB's parity rules. Right? How exciting!

Somehow, even after half-a-century, Hal Steinbrenner doesn't get it.

He still thinks his family is doing business in Cleveland, or maybe in Tampa: one more marginal, big-league city, where it's a BFD just to make the playoffs once in a while—never mind actually winning a division or a pennant.

New York isn't that town.

You've heard it said that rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for U.S. Steel? That was said by a Dodger fan. Or some Red Sox mutt. The response to that from any and every Yankees fan worth his salt was always, Yeah, whatzit to ya? Whattaya got your money on in the market?

This isn't Pittsburgh, or Cincinnati, or Jacksonville, or any of those other places where they hand out medals just for competing. Where merely being close once in a great while is good enough. 

This isn't Dallas, where last year the Texas Rangers had the fourth-best record in the AL, but managed to win their very first World Series in their 63 years of existence.

Uh-huh. Sixty-three years into their existence, the New York Yankees had already completed the greatest dynasty in North American sports history.  

Our reaction? When do we get the next one?

The glow of nostalgia sheds too rosy a light on our memory of Hal's dad, Mad Old George. We should remind ourselves that NO Steinbrenner has won so much as a single pennant...without a team whose core was built when George was banned from the room.

Left to his own devices, George Steinbrenner wanted to trade Mariano Rivera for Felix Fermin, and throw Ron Guidry into the Bucky Dent deal—just for starters. He came within a hairsbreadth of wrecking the franchise altogether—or selling it to the Dolans, not sure just what fate would've been worse.

But at least George wanted to win, bad as he was at doing so. At least he got New York, the full Barnum of it all. The pulsing desire here to see the brightest stars, and the biggest show on earth.

Nobody comes here to see if their beloved, hometown team can maybe struggle into the playoffs every now and then. 

We deliberately left those hometowns and those teams to come here, to the biggest, toughest, most grandiose and awe-inspiring burg of them all.

We're not here for second best. As the song that George started playing incessantly goes, we want to be "A-number one, top of the heap"—not, "Good enough for the top 40 percent!"

Hal, so afraid of offending his fellow owners, has carefully built a team that can periodically win, but can never win it all. Of course this is on purpose. Why the hell else would he keep Brian Cashman around for year after year of incompetence and failure?

No, Hal doesn't get us. He doesn't understand what we live for, what we consider sustained excellence. 

He doesn't get it. That has to be it. Unless...he doesn't care.