Politics & Power Quote by George Steinbrenner

Steinbrenner strips the romance off sports and shows you the wiring underneath: sentiment is just another input, and the only sacred metric is what moves product today. The brusque dismissal of “aesthetics or tradition” isn’t just impatience; it’s a power move. He’s positioning himself as the adult in the room, the guy who won’t let nostalgia overrule revenue. Coming from the owner of the Yankees - baseball’s most mythologized empire - the line lands with delicious tension: the steward of tradition openly treating tradition as expendable.

The shrewd twist is that he doesn’t reject story. He rejects the wrong kind of story. “What sells” isn’t merely winning; it’s the feeling of possibility. Steinbrenner recognizes that American fandom is built on a civic fairy tale: that hierarchies can be upset, that the little guy can matter, that money doesn’t decide everything even when it obviously does. He’s basically admitting the paradox modern sports runs on: the league is a business, and the business depends on fans believing it isn’t purely a business.

Contextually, this is late-20th-century sports capitalism speaking plainly: television, merchandising, and superstar economics reshaping what teams are. The underdog, in his framing, is less a moral cause than a market necessity - competitive hope as a renewable resource. It’s cynical, yes, but also clear-eyed: sell people a chance, and they’ll forgive you for the machine that manufactures it.