When the New York Yankees’ legendary, longtime owner George Steinbrenner bought the iconic franchise in 1973, the team had already won the World Series 20 times. From 1949 to 1953, the Yankees won the championship five years in a row, after winning four straight from 1936 to 1939.
But when Steinbrenner headed a group of investors who paid $10 million (about $73 million in today’s cash) to acquire the team from the CBS TV and radio network, the Yankees had gone eight years without even an appearance in the World Series, or the playoffs, which were instituted in the 1969 season. That was the franchise’s longest championship drought since the Yankees won their first one in 1923.
Steinbrenner, then 42 years old and a highly successful shipbuilder in his hometown of Cleveland, was determined to restore the team to its previous dominance, and it didn’t take long.
Taking advantage of baseball’s then-new free agency system, Steinbrenner opened the Yankees checkbook to sign star players away from competing teams, paying top dollar for slugger Reggie Jackson from the Oakland A’s (by way of a single season with the Baltimore Orioles), pitcher Jim “Catfish” Hunter from Oakland, and fireballing former Chicago White Sox relief pitcher Rich “Goose” Gossage.
The free-spending plan paid off. The Yankees returned to the World Series in 1976, though they lost in four straight to Cincinnati’s “Big Red Machine.” But Steinbrenner’s Bronx Bombers got back to the Fall Classic in 1977 and 1978, defeating the Los Angeles Dodgers both times to take championships Nos. 21 and 22.
Steinbrenner’s team returned to dominance from 1996 to 2000, winning the World Series each of those years except for 1997.
The Yankees won championship No. 27 in 2009, and Steinbrenner died the following year at age 80, leaving the team to his son Hal Steinbrenner, who had actually assumed control two years earlier. Since then, the Yankees have made just one World Series appearance, and lost it. That was in the 2024 season, when they fell in five games to the Dodgers. The Yankees have not won a title since.
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What happened?
On Tuesday, hours ahead of the Yankees’ division series elimination game against the Toronto Blue Jays, longtime ESPN MLB insider Buster Olney called out the younger Steinbrenner for abandoning his father’s ownership philosophy: the “Steinbrenner Doctrine.”
What is that “doctrine?” Simply stated, according to Olney, it is the principle that, “If you don’t win the World Series, your season is a complete failure.” And, Olney added, “generations of Yankees fans believe that.”
Olney said that the younger Steinbrenner has left his father’s win-at-all-costs philosophy behind in favor of “a more nuanced view of success.”
But not all Yankees fans saw it that way. In a reply to Olney’s post, one fan noted that “during the 17-year stretch from 1979 to 1995, the Yankees did not appear in a single World Series. Of note, when George was removed from running the Yankees Gene Michaels and Bob Watson led the 1996-2001 resurgence — NOT George.”
The fan was referring to Steinbrenner’s suspension from baseball in 1990 when commissioner Fay Vincent determined that the bombastic owner had paid a gambler to “dig up dirt” on Yankees superstar Dave Winfield. In Steinbrenner’s absence, general manager Michaels, followed by GM Watson, rebuilt the Yankees farm system and constructed the team that won four of five championships in the late 1990s and 2000.
Another online commenter noted that the Yankees won the World Series just seven times during the elder Steinbrenner’s 38-year reign, meaning that by the standards of the “Steinbrenner Doctrine,” Steinbrenner’s ownership was itself mostly a failure.
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