It has occasionally been true that the person with the official title of "general manager" has reported to someone higher up, who makes the final decision. On fewer occasions still, that person has been someone between the GM and the team's majority stockholder or "owner."
It's been 7 years. A new decade, and an unexpected break in the action due to the COVID-19 pandemic, makes this as good a time as any to update the lists.
So I'm going to start with the team owners. First the best, then the worst. Then the executives, the personnel decision guys. Finally, the in-game leaders, the managers and head coaches.
I'm going to limit this to the "Big Four": Major League Baseball, the National Football League (and, in the case of the 1960-69 Titans/Jets, the American Football League), the National Basketball Association (and, should I decide to include representatives of the 1967-77 Americans/Nets, the American Basketball Association), and the National Hockey League.
I'm also going to limit "History" to 1920 onward, with "The Golden Age of Sports" effectively beginning the modern age of sports. So, on the lists of worst owners and executives, this exempts, if not absolves, Andrew Freedman, the nutcase who owned the Giants at the turn of the 20th Century; and Frank Farrell and Big Bill Devery, the ex-police commissioner and current bootlegger (or was it the other way around? Didn't matter, whichever had been Commish was pretty damn corrupt) who owned the New York Highlanders/Yankees from their 1903 founding until 1915.
Honestly, picking the best team owners is harder than picking the worst. As William Shakespeare put it, "The evil that men do lives after them. The good is oft interred with their bones."
Honorable Mention to the following:
* Tim Mara, Giants, 1925-59.
* Del Webb and Dan Topping, Yankees, 1945-64.
* Ned Irish, Knicks, 1946-74.
* Joan Payson, Mets, 1962-75.
* Roy Boe, Nets, 1969-78, and Islanders, 1972-78.
* John Pickett, Islanders, 1978-96.
Because, for the most part, these guys hired the right GMs and head coaches, and then stayed out of the way. And, in the cases of Webb with the Yankees, Pickett with the Islanders, and, considerably more reluctantly, Boe with the Nets (but not with the Islanders), they also sowed the seeds of their teams' ruination.
10. Bill Jennings, Rangers, 1962-81. As President of the Madison Square Garden Corporation, he ran the Blueshirts into a new area that saw the building of the New Garden in 1968, and made them a Playoff perennial, including reaching the 1972 Stanley Cup Finals.
That team got old by 1975, and, despite considerably backlash from the fans, he retooled them into another Playoff perennial, reaching the Finals again in 1979. He died in 1981, but the team was more secure than most NHL teams at that point.
He hired Lester Patrick to run the team, and Patrick deserves most of the credit for the team's early success on the ice. But Rickard was a born promoter, and he made the Rangers the 2nd-most-popular sports team in the City, behind the Yankees.
Nevertheless, The Garden on a hockey night became the place to be. Rickard took the "Broadway" part seriously, and treated every home game like a show, billing the team as "the classiest team in hockey." Calling the Rangers that from the late 1970s onward would be laughable, but, in the late 1920s and the early 1930s, fans got the message: Men showed up at The Garden in suits, women in furs. It wasn't just a place to see hockey, it was a place to be seen.
Complications of an appendicitis attack killed him at age 59. There were no antibiotics in those days. To put this in perspective: At the same age, George Steinbrenner owned the Yankees for another 21 years; Wellington Mara owned the Giants for another 30 years; Leon Hess owned the Jets for another 26 years; Branch Rickey had not yet become a part-owner of the Dodgers; Charles Dolan had not yet bought the Knicks and the Rangers; and John McMullen had not yet bought the NHL's Colorado Rockies and made them the New Jersey Devils.
The Rangers would reach the Stanley Cup Finals 5 times, winning twice, in the 12 years following Rickard's death, on top of the Cup they had already won in 1928. Had he lived to be at least 76 -- and all of those guys I mentioned in the previous paragraph did -- he would have been in position to be the 1st owner of the Knicks, who reached 3 NBA Finals before what would have been his 84th birthday. Who knows what Tex could have lassoed for New York sports had he lived longer?
7. Nelson Doubleday, Mets, 1980-2002. You'll notice that I am not including co-owner Fred Wilpon, who bought Doubleday's half out in 2002, on this list. He'll be on the worst owners' list.
Doubleday didn't just revamp the team by hiring Frank Cashen as GM. He also revamped Shea Stadium, turning the dank, dreary football stadium that had been nicknamed "Grant's Tomb" into a colorful amphitheatre that seemed, at times, like a good home for baseball. Shea became a place for families again, instead of a place even the Corleone family wouldn't want to hang out at.
6. Larry MacPhail, Dodgers, 1938-41, and Yankees, 1945-47. He quickly wore out his welcome wherever he went, but not before turning his genius into the modernization of 3 franchises: The Cincinnati Reds, the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the New York Yankees.
5. Branch Rickey, Dodgers, 1942-50. He also wasn't in Brooklyn all that long, but while he was, he didn't just change one baseball team. He changed the world, by signing one player, and sticking with him no matter what. The name of that player was Jackie Robinson.
He was the operating part-owner, and his own general manager, but not the sole or even the majority owner. This led to the end of his tenure. There were 4 equal shares in the team. Rickey had one. A bank, the Brooklyn Trust Company, had another, and hired Walter O'Malley to operate it. O'Malley bought that share out. Then, when a 3rd part-owner died, O'Malley bought him out, and gained the loyalty of the 4th part-owner. Rickey, who loved money as much as O'Malley did, cashed out.
O'Malley took credit for the Dodgers' success thereafter, but it was Rickey who built it, and can be credited with 6 Pennants and the 1955 World Championship -- all with Jackie Robinson as a key member, not just a token member.
In 1982, he bought the NHL's Colorado Rockies, and moved them from Denver to the Meadowlands, making them the New Jersey Devils. He owned them until 2000, overseeing their rise from what Wayne Gretzky called "a Mickey Mouse operation" to a 2-time -- and, within his lifetime, a 3-time -- Stanley Cup winner.
3. Wellington Mara, Giants, 1965-2005. Nobody has owned a New York team longer -- and Knick and Ranger fans better hope that remains true, because if Charles Dolan is still the owner of those teams in 2034 (he'd be 107 years old, unlikely but not impossible), 40 years after buying them, it will mean that his son James is still running them.
Until 1978, Well Mara was one of the least successful owners in major league sports. He had taken over parts of the team after his father Tim's death in 1959 and his uncle Jack's death in 1965. But the Giants hadn't made the Playoffs since 1963, and "The Miracle of the Meadowlands" showed just how incompetent Giants management was.
His supporters could claim that he was responsible for the revenue-sharing plan that allowed smaller-market teams, even the Green Bay Packers, to survive, but that did Giant fans no good. His supporters could also claim that, by getting Giants Stadium built, he had given the team control over its own home field for the first time, but most fans didn't care about that, since the only way it had affected them had been starting the season with 3 road games due to the chance the Yankees would be in the World Series -- a chance that had fallen apart in the mid-1960s.
But he got the message. He hired George Young as GM, and Young made the personnel decisions that got the franchise back on its feet. It may not seem like it at the moment, but thanks to what Well did from 1978 to his death in 2005, the Giants have always had an aura of class and competence: No matter how bad things get on the field, there won't be any real scandals, and you have the sense that the team can snap out of it, if not this season, than next season.
Yes, he got suspended from operating the team due to making an illegal campaign contribution to President Richard Nixon. Yes, he got suspended again for hiring somebody to dig up dirt on one of his own players (unsuccessfully, it turned out). Yes, he was a raging egomaniac. Yes, he took the actions that led to the demolition of the original Yankee Stadium. And, yes, he seemed to fire, suspend and fine people for ridiculous reasons.
But, as he liked to say, "I never really fired anybody." Pretty much any manager, coach or executive he removed from a position, he either kept, or later welcomed back, putting him in a different position, and sometimes moving him back into the one he had previously held. And, as he frequently said, "I never ask anybody to work any harder than I do" -- and he did work hard to make the Yankees winners.
That work frequently didn't pay off, especially from 1982 to 1990, when he acted as pretty much his own GM. But when his work did pay off, the results were as follows: 20 Playoff berths, 16 American League Eastern Division titles, 13 trips to the AL Championship Series, 11 AL Pennants and 7 World Series wins. He also built the Yankees Entertainment & Sports (YES) Network and the new Yankee Stadium.
Say what you want about George Steinbrenner, and I've said plenty, and some of it has been rough, and most of that has been fair. But he loved the Yankees, and he loved New York City, and he loved Yankee Fans. He wanted to win for us as much as he wanted to win for himself. And he wanted to win as much as we did. That's what every fan of every team should expect from his team owner: Make the effort to bring success. George made the effort, and it succeeded more than anyone else over that time.
1. Jacob Ruppert, Yankees, 1915-39. He took the 3rd-most-popular team in The City and made it the greatest franchise in professional sports in the Western Hemisphere. And if you want to argue that Manchester United or Real Madrid are better, you'd better come with viable facts.
Put it this way: In 2012, Real Madrid played in Yankee Stadium, and it raised their profile in America. In 2019, the Yankees came to London, and it benefited the sport more than the team. Everybody in Europe already knows about the Yankees. The day that Arsenal clinched their unbeaten Premier League season, May 15, 2004, the camera panned the famous North Bank of Highbury, and there was a woman wearing a tank top, shades, and a Yankee cap.
In 1935, there was a tour of MLB players in Japan, and everybody in Japan wanted to see the man they, in their accents, called "Babu Rusu." All they knew about Babe Ruth was what they had seen in newsreels, but Japan knew who Babe Ruth was in 1935. America didn't know who Pelé was until the 1970 World Cup.
It was Jacob Ruppert who signed the 1st 2 great Yankee managers, Miller Huggins and Joe McCarthy. It was Ruppert who signed Ed Barrow, the 1st great personnel man in New York sports history. It was Ruppert whose ambition and money led to the building of the original Yankee Stadium, the greatest venue in the history of sports on planet Earth -- or, as it says on his Plaque in Monument Park, "this imposing edifice," even though the original edifice is gone now.
The work he did in building the Yankees led to the team's 1st 13 Pennants and 10 World Series wins. The last of each being in 1943. By the next one, in 1947, it was very much a different organization, never mind roster: Ruppert was a swinging bachelor, but never married, and had no children, so control of the team went to his brother George and his sister Amanda, and, while letting Barrow make the decisions, they sold the team in 1945 to the triumverate of Dan Topping, Del Webb and Larry MacPhail.
There are 37 people affiliated with the Yankee organization in Monument Park. Of these, 11, including Ruppert himself, are honored there. So why did it take until 2012 for Ruppert to be elected (2013 to be inducted) to the Baseball Hall of Fame, which opened the year of his death, 73 years earlier? The only thing I can think of is that it was an oversight, that people may have failed to consider him because they thought he was already in.
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