These current Yankees, these men in pinstripes who have eulogized George Steinbrenner this week with quiet elegance, they don’t have the slightest idea what it was like when The Boss roamed the Stadium and crashed the clubhouse to confront his teams during his original incarnation as a malevolent dictator.
They don’t know the way it was when Steinbrenner castigated players in front of their teammates and ridiculed them in the papers. They don’t know about the owner who didn’t only crave championships, didn’t only lust after championships, but demanded them, as if they could be ordered like take-out food.
“He was tougher back in our day than he was later on, over the last regime, the last decade-and-a-half,” Goose Gossage said before yesterday’s Old-Timers’ festivities that preceded the second game of the Yankees-Rays series. “As much as we won, the more we won, the crazier he got.
“That’s when George was George. It was crazy. He was off the charts.”
Ron Guidry, a charter member of the Bronx Zoo, talked yesterday about how Steinbrenner would “come into the clubhouse and get on you or drop a line in the paper about you.
“Whether it would be face-to-face or something I would read in the paper, it would get my dander up and motivate me for my next game,” The Gator said. “I always wanted to make him eat his words.
“Those days, we were the best soap opera in the country. You couldn’t wait to pick up the paper in the morning to see what happened last night, maybe even at 2 a.m. after the game, because you never knew.”
There were 15 managerial changes from 1978 to 1991. Buck Showalter, who got the job in 1992 while Steinbrenner was serving the second year of his second banishment from baseball, lasted three seasons following the return of a less impetuous, milder and gentler Boss.
But even if Steinbrenner had mellowed, he still demanded championships, forcing out Showalter by threatening to fire his coaches after the 1995 wild-card winners, the first Yankees’ club to reach the postseason in 14 years, blew a 2-0 edge in the first round to lose in five in Seattle.
Steinbrenner demanded championships and Joe Torre delivered them, four in the first five years of their partnership. It was Torre’s ability to win and Torre’s ability to act as a buffer between his players and his Boss that largely kept the owner out of the clubhouse.
And it was Torre’s ability to take the hits without firing back during the fallow years of 2001-07 — fallow as in two AL pennants, six division titles and a wild card berth — and his skill in diffusing all issues so that he and he alone would stand in the crosshairs without firing back, all the while insulating his players from the Boss’ withering criticisms.
It’s Torre more than any other individual in pinstripes, more even than the Core Four, more than Paul O’Neill, David Wells and David Cone, who created the environment that allowed Steinbrenner to age gracefully into the benevolent despot New York remembers and honors.
And it’s Torre, of course, who is not welcome at Yankee Stadium following his bitter break with the organization after 2007 that was exacerbated by the publication of his book last year. It’s Torre, who was absent from the video board on Friday when past and present Yankees offered recorded tributes to The Boss.
The players from this generation of champions, the ones who were given the best of everything by Steinbrenner, they don’t really know. They never really knew what it was like to play for the Boss when he was feared rather than revered.
“They got lucky,” said Bucky Dent.
They got Joe Torre.
larry.brooks@nypost.com