RIP George

[Jim VB]

Frank,

Regardless of what team I'm a fan of, you should probably stay off of public message boards until you know what you're talking about.

You said he was greedy and your proof is that he spends too much money. You're not smart enough to see that those two statements fly against each other.

You also don't seem to be able to distinguish between a bottom line profit and an increase in net value. I probably can't fix that for you here. Maybe you can find a fine Ivy League School to help you out.

You said he hasn't done anything for baseball. That's clearly wrong. Even Red Sox fans will tell you that he has inspired their ownership to be better. MLB has never been stronger, financially and fan-wise than it is right now. Teams that are doing poorly are their own worst enemy.

Yes, he benefited by being in the biggest sports market in the world. But they were in that same market for 10 years when CBS owned them and they were a disaster. George fixed that.

There are many, many, things that you could have hated Steinbrenner for. He was a jerk. He was a bully. He was an ass to work for. He dated Barbara Walters. But you didn't pick one of those. You picked greedy. Wanting to win isn't the definition of greedy. If he was greedy he would have sold the team. His group bought them for less than $10 million (As David pointed out, George's share was rumored to be around $160,000.) Today, estimates are they could be sold for over $1.5 billion. Now if he sold them, that would have been greedy.

Finally, the team is privately held, so they don't have to release their P&L to the public, butthey do have to release it to MLB. And yes, they lose money almost every year.