The Boss of the Bronx: Mike Vaccaro Chronicles George Steinbrenner and the Yankees Dynasty

Nobody who ever sat across from George Steinbrenner in his office, or found themselves on the receiving end of one of his late-night phone calls, would describe the experience as boring. The shipping magnate from Cleveland who bought the New York Yankees in January 1973 for $8.8 million from CBS was many things: brilliant, volatile, generous, vindictive, and endlessly watchable. Now, sportswriter Mike Vaccaro puts all of that volatility on display in The Bosses of the Bronx: The Endless Drama of the Yankees Under the House of Steinbrenner.

Vaccaro, the New York Post's lead sports columnist for more than two decades, writes with the intimacy of someone who had a courtside seat to history. He recalls his first one-on-one phone conversation with Steinbrenner, which came at 3:30 in the morning while Vaccaro was covering the 2003 Super Bowl in San Diego. Steinbrenner was driving to spring training in Tampa. Despite the ungodly hour, Vaccaro describes the conversation as genuinely enjoyable. Steinbrenner even weighed in on Larry David's impression of him on Seinfeld, reportedly telling Vaccaro: I don't think it sounds like me. But my wife told me, George, that sounds more like you than you do.

The book is a portrait of two men who despised losing more than they loved winning. Steinbrenner and his manager Billy Martin, who held the Yankees managerial job five separate times, were locked in a perpetual war of ego and stubbornness. According to Vaccaro, Martin could never quite accept that Steinbrenner was the boss. Steinbrenner, from day one, made sure everyone knew exactly who was in charge.

That dominance came at a cost. Steinbrenner was banished from baseball twice: a two-year suspension in 1974 for illegal contributions to Richard Nixon's re-election campaign, and a lifetime ban in 1990 after paying gambler Howard Spira to dig up dirt on Yankees star Dave Winfield. Both times, Steinbrenner found his way back. Both times, the Yankees eventually won.

Seven World Series championships eventually followed under his watch, powered by stars like Reggie Jackson and Derek Jeter. The late 1990s brought four titles in five years under Joe Torre. What made it all possible, the book argues, was the work of two executives who operated in Steinbrenner's shadow during his absences: Gabe Paul in the 1970s and Gene Michael in the 1990s. Michael, particularly, shielded the Yankees' future core of Jeter, Pettitte, Posada, and Rivera from trade proposals while the Boss was out of the picture.

The book also offers glimpses of Hal Steinbrenner's business instincts even as a child, showing Steinbrenner spotting his son's potential through a Burger King promotion anomaly involving Lou Piniella baseball cards. Those early signs of sharp thinking served Hal well when he eventually took over the family business.

The Yankees are now valued between $7 billion and $10 billion, according to Vaccaro, and a new stadium has cemented their future in the Bronx. Yet Vaccaro acknowledges the tension in the present: the Dodgers have dominated the sport's financial landscape, and the Yankees have not won a championship since 2009. Some fans quietly wonder whether Hal Steinbrenner, now at the helm, carries the same winning fire as his father.

Yankees fans, Vaccaro writes, are passionate and sometimes spoiled by decades of success. They know what the franchise should be. Whether Hal can deliver that remains the open question hanging over a dynasty that George Steinbrenner built on sheer, relentless will.