This Day in Yankee History (Steinbrenner Agrees on Cable Megadeal with MSG)

December 9, 1988—George Steinbrenner made a 12-year, $500 million pact with the Madison Square Garden (MSG) cable TV network that formed the bedrock of whatever financial stability has existed for the New York Yankees franchise—and left other major-league baseball owners figuring how they could create their own versions of this megadeal.

These days, speculation on The Boss is turning into Kremlinology in the late atherosclerotic era of the old Soviet Union: There’s not only endless if pointless curiosity about the leader’s health, but also an attempt to ferret out the true nature of the Yankees’ financial health as well.

Like any other fan, I’d prefer talking about what happens between the lines, the stuff that makes it into the Baseball Almanac (and gives me an interest in statistics that I never had on any other occasion through 20 years of elementary-through-graduate-school education, not to mention more than a quarter century in the workforce).

But the business aspect of sports can’t be ignored and, on occasion, can fascinate—particularly when it involves the New York Yankees, which still holds the record for most championships in professional sports. In 1964, for instance, CBS bought what seemed like a perennial champion—a harbinger of an era in which baseball passed from small, family-run operations into corporate ownership.

I would say that the deal that Steinbrenner inked with MSG formed one of two cornerstone events of the franchise’s return to glory in the 1990s. The agreement not only provided a source of revenue that would stay constant over the next decade, impervious to the inevitable ups-and-downs of even the best baseball teams (a fact of life that The Boss denied, in much the same way that some economists erroneously believed recently that this country had flattened out the possibility of a prolonged and severe recession), but also served as a milestone in creating professional sports’ most famous “brand.”

The other event, of course, was The Boss’s exile from the game in the early 1990s because of his sordid use of gambler Howie Spira to obtain intelligence that would discredit the slugger with whom he was feuding, Dave Winfield. That hiatus from the team forced the Yankee front office, by necessity, to rely on building up the farm team and trying out newcomers such as Bernie Williams, Mariano Rivera and Derek Jeter in the field, even if they made the occasional mistake.

With the conclusion of the MSG deal several years ago, the Yankees embarked on something new: the YES Network, which took the aforementioned branding efforts to its natural extension, including interviews with Yankee greats by Michael Kay, kid-friendly features featuring past, present, and soon-to-depart Bombers, and my favorite feature of all, the “Yankeeography” series on players and managers who played significant roles in the dynasty.