TAMPA — Everywhere you turn now at Steinbrenner Field you are instantly reminded of the man for whom the building is named.
As you walk into the main offices, there’s a large photograph of a smiling George — bedecked in red, white and blue, of course — arm in arm with his wife. Elsewhere is a photograph of Steinbrenner standing sentry next to the Babe Ruth memorial in old Yankee Stadium’s Monument Park, the leisure suit betraying the calendar.
And, of course, outside, looking out on all he once ruled (or at least the parking lot of the main stadium) is a life-sized statue of Steinbrenner, a 600-pound alloy of copper and tin, a duplicate of the one that already stands at new Stadium in The Bronx.
Statues rarely capture the people they were built to memorialize, but this one comes as close as possible, and paired with the photos scattered throughout the grounds they hearken to a time when Steinbrenner was — for better or worse — the most lively, the most vibrant, the most active and the most opinionated owner sports has ever seen.
Now that The Boss is gone, it’s as if the Yankees have deemed it OK to remember him as he was.
And The Boss That Was would have loved what will happen tonight at Steinbrenner Field.
And The Boss That Was would have hated what will happen tonight at Steinbrenner Field.
And The Boss That Was certainly would have fretted over what will happen tonight at Steinbrenner Field.
Tonight, after all, is when the Yankees and the Red Sox will share a baseball field for the first time in 2011, and you could make the argument that for the first time in what seems like modern times, the Sox will be the team that is almost universally acknowledged to be the superpower in the rivalry, the Yankees a few water pistols shy in the latest edition of baseball’s great arms race.
“It ought to be an interesting year because of that,” Derek Jeter said the other day, speaking of the latest chapter of Sox-Yankees.
“We’re always compared to one another,” Alex Rodriguez said. “People always speak about us and speak about them. It’s what that rivalry is all about.”
Yes, it’s only a spring game, and no, there are no real stakes in play unless you are one of the sad souls who bet on spring-training games, in which case you should proceed directly to a meeting after reading this column.
But that was never the point when Steinbrenner was truly The Boss, when he lorded over this empire in flesh and blood the way he does now in copper and tin.
It wasn’t the Red Sox that used to obsess Steinbrenner, but the Mets, even back in the ’70s, when the Yankees were champions and the Mets barely operational. Spring always was the time of year when Steinbrenner felt his oats most spiritedly anyway, when he would make his boldest proclamation and enter his darkest moods and offer his fiercest withering commentaries.
In those days, with the Mets and Yankees headquartered in essentially the opposite areas they occupy now (the Yankees in Fort Lauderdale, the Mets in St. Petersburg), their spring meetings were invariably beamed back to New York on Channel 9 or Channel 11, and Steinbrenner would fly into spasms of rage if the people back home weren’t given stark, televised evidence of who the superior New York team was — even if it was already obvious to anyone with a sports section in their lap, spying the daily baseball standings.
If you are old enough to remember those lively matchups — as close as we thought we’d ever get to a Subway Series back in the day — you remember Steinbrenner raging at the obscure likes of Tucker Ashford (“We’ve seen enough of Tucker Ashford!”) and Mike Griffin (“He’s fooled us long enough!”) and berating Billy Martin or Bob Lemon or Billy Martin or Dick Howser or Billy Martin for not trying hard enough to win meaningless games.
Yes. The Boss That Was would have been looking forward to tonight, to see if his lads could show a thing or two to the baseball cognoscenti. Sure, it’s only March 4. Good luck to you if you ever tried telling him that.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com