Summer reading: The Boss' last hurrah

With all due respect to last April's edition of 30 baseball book reviews in 30 days (linked here), more light to heavyweight reading before the summer gloom burns off:

The book: "Steinbrenner: The Last Lion of Baseball"

The pitch:

It was released on May 11, about two months before Steinbrenner died on the morning of the MLB All Star Game. But many saw the end of Steinbrenner's life coming - several unauthorized bios of him had been released in the last couple of years.

But this one by Maddon has more blessing of Steinbrenner and family than anything else that preceded it. And for good reason.

Maddon, who in 1990 wrote with Moss Klein the book, "Damned Yankees: A No Holds Barred Account of Life With Boss Steinbrenner," and also did a bio with former Yankees coach Don Zimmer, apparently got Steinbrenner's final print interview (it says on the book jacket).

Maddon was also was asked by Steinbrenner's daughter, Jennifer, to work with him on an autobiography back in 2005, which really didn't happen. But Maddon took it as an endorsement to do it his way.

After interviewing more than 150 for the project, Maddon, who last month was inducted into the writer's wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame, says he's asked all the time if Steinbrenner deserves his own plaque in Cooperstown.

Maddon writes: "I guess it depends on your perspective. His peers on the Hall of Fame Board of Directors saw to it that he wasn't ever included on the executives ballot voted on by the Veterans Committee in 2007 and 2009. It is not my intent here to make the case for him one way or the other, but rather faithfully tell his story with the cooperation of all those who were there."

For what it's worth, Maddon does point out on page 23 that Steinbrenner had always said "the greatest pleasure of his youth was reading James Feinmore Cooper novels."

Anyone who lives in Cooperstown - named for the author's grandfather, and where he is burned - will surely make note of that circle of life when it's time to connect the dots of Steinbrenner's future induction.

How it goes down in the scorebook:

Although very New York centric, and more of a reporter's journey laying out all the incidents about how one may understand how egos work and get things done in that kind of climate, this provides insights into Steinbrenner for those of us who've only got to experience him through the media, and perhaps a few Miller Lite commercials.

"It's always better to be the hammer than the nail," Steinbrenner's dad once told him.

Maybe that says enough.

His conflicting desire to be bigger-than-life as well as a behind-the-scenes endorser of athletics on many levels gave all us the opinion from a distance that he was an arrogant force to be dealt with -- he, more than Reggie Jackson or Goose Gossage, was a great person to hate while the Dodgers and Yankees fought over World Championships in the 70s and 80s.

Whatever he did good, he also did stupid. Take the story starting on page 205 of how he handled getting "mugged" by two Dodger fans in a Hyatt Wilshire Hotel elevator after the Dodgers' Game 5 win in the 1981 World Series. It's a classic example of how Steinbrenner wanted the media to know his story about getting a broken hand as a result of it, but still insisted he could prevent it being a story that the rest of the world knew about.

The tale is told about Steinbrenner contacting the team's public relations man and telling him out how one fan "slugged me with a beer bottle. I hit back and knocked out a couple of his teeth. Then I got into it with the other guy. I left 'em both on the seven floor. I'm OK, but we're gonna have to round up the press. They'll need to know the story."

So the reporters were brought to his suite at 11 p.m. (or 2 a.m., East Coast time, past their print deadlines). As he told them his story, the New York Daily News' Dick Young got up, called his office from Steinbrenner's room and began to dictate a story - but not without Steinbrenner correcting him on the information from his side, sentence by sentence.

Wrote Maddon: "All of the sudden, Steinbrenner, who had insisted the story not be written, was now serving as Young's editor as the 63-year-old veteran baseball scribe continued to dictate details of the elevator incident to the Daily News."

The front page headline the next day: "Steinbrenner KOs 2 in Brawl." Even if, as Maddon points out, one of the fans supposedly called KABC radio in L.A. the next day to explain what happened, saying he thought Steinbrenner probably broke his hand when his punch landed on the elevator door as his friend ducked.

The bottom line: Maddon documents that in 2009, Forbes estimated the value of the New York Yankees at $1.5 billion, which Steinbrenner owned 60 percent. He paid $168,00 for his share in 1973. On top of owning 33 percent of the YES network and 33 percent of a concession company that the Yankees use, that would put Steinbrenner's wealth at $2 to $3 billion.

Not too shabby for someone who picked a team out of the doldrums of the 1970s and made them something bigger than even himself.

Post script:

Not to be confused with the Peter Golenbock biography of Steinbrenner, in spring, 2009, called "George: The Poor Little Rick Boy Who Built the Yankee Empire," where Golenbock's name actually took a higher billing on the cover. This came out in paperback last February ($16.95, Wiley, 384 pages).

Later this month, Phil Pepe has an updated paperback version coming out of his 2008 title, "The Ballad of Billy & George: The Tempestuous Baseball Marriage of Billy Martin and George Steinbrenner" ($14.95, Lyons Press, 272 pages)