Ba$eball Whore$

 

Okay, I did watch some of the post-season baseball games, although truth be told, I didn’t have a team that I was rooting for, not National or American, or even the ‘Sox versus the Yankees. I have to insert this codicil for my biographers and anyone who knew me before I reached about thirty, during which earlier years I was a Yankee fan. This, even though I was brought up in Massachusetts.

Where we lived in the western third of The Bay State, New York City was only three hours away, and as my uncle and aunt lived in The City and my grandmother just outside, we trekked south a number of times during my earliest years. Being in The City was magic to this child. In fact, New York was nirvana for me until I approached my fourth decade, which explains my affinity for the Yankees.

My other grandmother, who had moved to Florida from The City back in 1950, and I would sit in front of her black-‘n-white television, watching the Bronx Bombers, me eating bon-bons while she sipped her manhattans. I sometimes scored the games, just because it was fun, and I can still name the players from one of the teams of the late Fifties.

Anyway, that’s why I was a Yankee fan. But when I was in my late twenties, producing Barbara Walters’ news interviews, one of the people she lined up was her pal, George Steinbrenner, the owner of the Yankees. In the process of producing the piece, I read up on ole George and discovered that he had a checkered past; he was something of a shady character.

I saw it for myself one night during a championship game, when I went up to the stadium to shoot cover footage of him in his skybox. The room was filled with a select garniture of power groupies, designed to make him look more powerful. One was a priest, trying not to look lost, who ambled about, smiling at everyone. I’ll never forget the impatience Steinbrenner showed when the man of the cloth inadvertently stepped into the path of the man with the money.

Steinbrenner changed the game of baseball forever, from a quasi-sport to a full-out business. Someone else would have, at some point, but it was he who ultimately corrupted America’s pastime. That’s one reason why I don’t care if someone beat the Yankees. Nor care who won. I mean, how ‘bout the whores who put up a Viagra banner behind home plate?

And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.

 

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