Fuck the Steinbrenners!

I hate most sports for several reasons, primarily that they're fucking boring and more than a little faggoty. There was a time when heavyweight boxing was beautiful to watch but now that sport has been overrun with whining pussies, with the possible exception of Tommy Morrison, who won't let a little AIDS get in the way of his dream of having his ass kicked well into his sunset years. And since there's little hope of my favorite sport, throwing Christians to lions coming back, there's almost nothing worth paying attention to.

Okay, that might not be entirely true. Athletes routinely find themselves in hilarious criminal situations and are sometimes given to sending pictures of their penises to unsuspecting women, and those stories are always good for a quick essay. And the business behind sports is fascinating because who doesn't like seeing millionaires striking against billionaires and those same billionaires sucking on the public teat just as hard as they can?

While athletes are not infrequently shameless criminal scumbags, the captains of industry that pay the bills are always parasitic cocksuckers that should be burned alive during the halftime show. Would you want to see The goddamned Who churn out "Baba O'Reilly" for the four millionth time if you have the chance to see the Steinbrenner family doused in gasoline as 100,000 spectators throw lit matches at them?

The preceding paragraph might sound as though as I hate capitalism and capitalists, which isn't true. As a matter of fact, I'd really be thrilled if dynasties of assholery like the fucking Steinbrenners started acting like capitalists instead of bitchy little princesses.

Yankees co-chairman Hank Steinbrenner [the other co-owner/co-chairman is Hank’s brother Hal] says baseball’s revenue sharing and luxury tax programs need changes.....

“We’ve got to do a little something about that, and I know Bud wants to correct it in some way,” Steinbrenner said. “Obviously, we’re very much allies with the Red Sox and the Mets, the Dodgers, the Cubs, whoever in that area.”

“At some point, if you don’t want to worry about teams in minor markets, don’t put teams in minor markets, or don’t leave teams in minor markets if they’re truly minor,” Steinbrenner said. “Socialism, communism, whatever you want to call it, is never the answer.“

First, few things are as uninteresting as baseball, particularly since Ty Cobb died. The fact that it makes the money it does makes me question the intelligence of virtually everybody.

Second, Hank inherited the goddamned fucking Yankees when his criminal father croaked last year. The last time I checked, that was hardly a Horatio Alger-esque way of pulling yourself up by the bootstraps. And the single biggest reason that Steinbrenner the Younger enjoys his bounty to the extent that he does is that George had the good sense to die during the year that the estate tax had lapsed.

Then, as Ilya Somin at The Volokh Conspiracy points out, there's the small matter of public subsidies for professional sports teams. As Somin points out, the Steinbrenners got $1.2 for their crazed and hubristic new Yankee Stadium. And that's hardly unusual. In city after city, middle class taxpayers foot the bill for Nuremberg-style stadiums where millionaires can play children's games thereby maximize the profit of billionaires. If that's not "socialism, communism, whatever you want to call it", I'd be hard pressed to figure out what in the fuck is.

By the way, Major League Baseball isn't what sane people would describe as capitalism. Capitalism, as most students of economics will tell you, is dependent on the concept of market competition and baseball isn't. It's a protected monopoly and one of the last vestiges of the Gilded Age.

In their wrongheaded and crazed 1922 decision Federal Baseball Club v. National League, the Supreme Court held that Major League Baseball is a local concern and not interstate commerce, despite the fact that the teams cross state lines as a professional necessity on a daily or weekly basis. Despite the fact that you'd need a truckload of drugs to figure out the rationale behind Justice Holmes' Federal Baseball Club ruling, it was later affirmed in Toolson v. New York Yankees (1952) and Flood v. Khun (1972).

Baseball isn't capitalism, for Christ's sake, it's an oligarchy! And that's overlooking the fact that it's barely a sport. But highlighting and mocking the frenzied and atavistic musings of monsters like the Steinbrenner clan is important because it highlights the demented sense of entitlement those cocksuckers express almost daily. Also, it's fun.