It's a guarantee, by George!

In his annual state of the union address, the Yankees esteemed owner decided to tell everyone that the team would definitely win the World Series this year. George is always good for a sound bite and I'm glad that he's confident enough in the team to make such a prediction. Of course, he makes that prediction every year. I really like having George as an owner. He's made his mistakes (The speed Yankees, the Winfield conspiracy, illegal contributions to the Nixon campaign), but for the most part he has made errors based on what he thought was for the good of the team.

It's nice to have an owner that's so committed to winning that he allows his other business to fall apart (He inherited his money from his father who created a ship building company which he drove into the ground). He bought the Yankees for $10 million, which seems like a paltry sum today, but was a major investment back in the 70's. The Yankees are worth upwards of $1 billion today, so I guess he made a sound investment. George can be over demanding, overbearing, over judgmental and basically a complete asshole, but he really just wants to win (that still doesn't explain paying a criminal to try and dig up dirt on Dave Winfield, but hey, we all make mistakes). I know that most fans in other cities look at George as something of a joke, but he's a joke with 9 American League Pennants and 6 World Championships to his name. I'm not sure there's a fan anywhere that wouldn't trade their ownership for that record.

So we endure George here in NY. We talk about him like the Boston folks talk about Manny. In their case it's Manny being Manny, and in ours it's just George being George.