Hal Steinbrenner’s loyalty shouldn’t cloud this Yankees reality: Sherman

At some point, we are going to stop asking, “What would George do?” Right?

What he would do — in his heyday — was often impetuous, mean and stupid. You can conveniently forget that, when he was suspended in 1990, Steinbrenner was so despised by his fan base that the Yankee Stadium crowd greeted news of the ban with a standing ovation. You can ignore that suspension permitted the patience for the cornerstones of a dynasty to form in his absence and that stability in manager and front office served his later ownership years well. You can whitewash that if you overlay his leadership behavior from then to now, he almost certainly would be suspended a record third time for the kind of workplace cruelty no longer tolerated. If you believe George would scream or fire or harangue these Yankees into better play, you have watched one too many episodes of “Yankeeography.” As Hal Steinbrenner noted: “I think what people forget [about all the various firings] is that oftentimes, it didn’t help, it didn’t work. And oftentimes, quite frankly, he was criticized for it.”