The Boss Returns: How Mike Vaccaro Chronicles George Steinbrenner and the Yankees Dynasty

Mike Vaccaro has seen it all from his perch along the third-base line of American sports journalism. Now the New York Post’s longtime lead columnist has turned his attention to one of baseball’s most outsized figures in a new book that traces the entire arc of George Steinbrenner’s reign over the Bronx.

The Bosses of the Bronx: The Endless Drama of the Yankees Under the House of Steinbrenner opens with one of the most unlikely phone calls in sports journalism history. It was 3:30 in the morning, January 2003, and Vaccaro was covering the Super Bowl in San Diego for the Post. Steinbrenner — thousands of miles away, driving to the Yankees’ spring training facility in Tampa — called directly. It was, Vaccaro recalls, a genuinely fun conversation, and a reminder of the老板’s relentless energy.

Steinbrenner bought the Yankees from CBS in January 1973 for $8.8 million. He was a Cleveland shipping magnate with no prior baseball experience, heading a partnership of investors that most of the sporting world had never heard of. What followed was one of the most remarkable transformations in professional sports history. Under his watch, the Yankees won seven World Series, backed by Hall of Famers like Reggie Jackson and Derek Jeter.

But Vaccaro is equally honest about Steinbrenner’s well-documented troubles. He was suspended from baseball twice — a two-year ouster in 1974 for illegal campaign contributions to Richard Nixon during the Watergate investigation, and a lifetime ban in 1990 for paying a gambler to smear star outfielder Dave Winfield. Both times, Steinbrenner found a way back.

The book details how key lieutenants Gabe Paul and Gene ‘Stick’ Michael kept the franchise alive during Steinbrenner’s self-imposed exiles. Paul navigated the franchise through the rocky early 1970s and secured the signing of Catfish Hunter as baseball’s first major free agent. Michael, building quietly in the early 1990s, resisted trading away a crop of prospects that would become the core of the late-90s dynasty — Derek Jeter, Andy Pettitte, Jorge Posada, and Mariano Rivera among them.

The Vaccaro account is particularly vivid on the fractious dynamic between Steinbrenner and manager Billy Martin, who served five separate stints in the Yankees’ dugout. “Both of them hated losing even more than they liked winning,” Vaccaro writes. “They were also incredibly stubborn.”

Vaccaro estimates the Yankees’ current valuation at $7 billion to $10 billion. Their modern stadium has cemented the franchise’s New York identity, and the YES Network brought the dynasty into the television age. Yet fissures remain. Boston’s 2004 comeback from a 3-0 ALCS deficit still stings, and the Yankees have not won a World Series since 2009.

Some fans wonder whether Hal Steinbrenner, who took over from his father, carries the same competitive fire. Vaccaro is diplomatic but clear-eyed: “Yankees fans are passionate — spoiled, maybe, too used to success.” Whether the old Boss would recognise today’s version of his franchise, the book suggests, is a question that may never fully be answered.