Where have you gone George Steinbrenner...o?

In another ho-hum interleague game in June, the Yankees lost, 2-1, to the Marlins.

Big deal, right? I mean, there's about 245 games in the baseball regular season to care about, what's one defeat?

How we yearn for the days when a June defeat would cause George Steinbrenner to go batty and start firing pitching coaches.

Let's face facts. Whether you love George or hate him, he has had a profound impact on the game of baseball and the Yankees, for better or worse. This is the man that bought the Yankees for a meager amount of $10 million and turned them into a money-making colossus. This is also the guy that approved the Jay Buhner-Ken Phelps trade. You take the good with the bad.

It sounds crazy now, but as an unabashed Yankees fan, I missed the days when King George would go nuts and rip an underperforming player a new one. Who can forget the time when he called Hideki Irabu "a fat pussy toad?" Or when he dubbed Dave Winfield "Mr. May"? At the time when he says these seemingly outlandish statements, you're probably thinking to yourself that ole George has been hitting the sauce a little too hard.

But now? Now, with the uber-corporate non-competitive Yankees, there's just not the same feeling that ownership cares as much as the fan does anymore. And that's what we loved about George. He cared about winning, wearing his heart on his sleeve like the stock brocker down on Wall Street or the waiter at Peter Luger's or the 10-year-old kid wearing his Derek Jeter pajamas to sleep (I don't have any direct knowledge that any child has this, but...if that is true, that kid probably gets beaten up everyday at school. I digress) about your team. He cared, whether it was for ego or for the fact that he really wanted to kick everyone's butt and dominate the sport of baseball. You adored that.

He wanted to win and he wasn't shy about expressing how much he wanted to win. He didn't care about how great the farm system was -- he was willing to give up anything to get that shiny ring on his finger. Really, if George was at his peak, is there any doubt that Johan Santana is wearing Yankee pinstripes instead of Mets ones? I know one thing. If George had all his marbles, there is no way the Yanks are 0-8 against the Sawx. He would have sent Robbie Cano down to Trenton, Phil Hughes would have been traded to Pittsburgh and would have hired Billy Martin's corpse to manager the team.

And that was one of the reasons Steinbrenner was money for the sports pages, whether be local or national. With the state of newspapers being about as good as General Motors' prospects are at the moment, they could use George screaming about why A.J. Burnett is getting paid a boatload of money and not coming through. It generated talk on the street -- "George is out of his mind" or "You know what, he's got a freaking point".

But like newspapers, it appears as if George is fading into the sunset. Strange, really. You'd almost expect this final blaze of glory from the old guy, just to remind everyone who is the Boss.