Happy birthday, George

Steinbrenner, that is. And with the Yankees baffled this afternoon by the Twinkies' best pitchers and with this article, I think you can expect "A STATEMENT" via Howard Rubenstein any day now.

Around this time two years ago, in a statement dictated to spokesman Howard Rubenstein, Steinbrenner said he was “losing patience” with the struggling Yankees. The statement said that the message was delivered while Steinbrenner was lifting weights. The image was clearly designed to show that this was still a virile, powerful man.“Until the day he’s in the grave, the Yankees want everyone to think he’s getting up in the morning and doing 100 pushups and that’s just not true,” said a person close to the team. “There was a time earlier in the season when he was walking down a concourse at Yankee Stadium and writers descended on him. In the old days, he would have just parted the seas and gone through or answered the questions but he looked very unsteady. Confused. Frightened. Hey, people get older.”

Even the boss.

The good ol' days

“It was fun,” Ron Guidry said. Then, looking down at the floor and opening his hands, he said it again. “It was fun.”Guidry, the Yankees' pitching coach, had a front-row seat to the halcyon days of Steinbrenner’s reign, pitching for New York from 1975-88. Guidry recalled the Steinbrenner everyone remembers.“(His presence) wasn’t something we didn’t like or were scared of, it didn’t bother us,” Guidry said. “We played the game anyway. That’s just the way he was at the time. He demanded a lot. He paid players a lot. He expected a lot from him. So if every once in a while he came into the clubhouse and started chewing up everybody, fine. Some of us didn’t even pay attention to it. I used to sit in my locker and put a towel on my head and just listen to him. You didn’t understand what he was saying, you just listened to him. And it was fun. It was part of the soap opera that was going along with us at the time.“And then, I guess, he got a little bit older,” Guidry continued. “He got a little bit … different. He mellowed out a little bit. He just said, ‘OK, you guys run it.’ You’d have to ask him why the change but I just think that, over time, you change. That’s all that happens. He is getting up there in age.”

[...]

If he wasn’t there in body, Steinbrenner’s presence was felt in spirit back then. Now?“I don’t think (his presence) is felt as much as it has been in the past,” Guidry said. “Whether that’s good or bad, I don’t know. I’m sure everything changes. I don’t see him around as much. Matter of fact, I don’t know if I’ve seen him around since I’ve been here in a year-and-a-half. I saw him in spring training. Whereas, before, every day you could run into him before. It’s just not like that anymore.”

I'll bet von Steinbrenner is bench pressing 200 pounds while on the speakerphone with Howard right now.