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By dying in 2010, the billionaire and long-time New York Yankees owner's wealth avoids the federal estate tax, likely saving his heirs enough money to field an entire team of Alex Rodriguezes.

Steinbrenner's death Tuesday came during an unplanned year-long gap in the estate tax, the first since it was enacted in 1916. Political wrangling has stalemated efforts in Congress to replace the tax that expired in 2009.

That deprives the government of billions of dollars in annual revenue but represents an unexpected bonanza for those who inherit wealth.

"If you're super-wealthy, it's a good year to die," said Jack Nuckolls, an attorney and estate planner with the accounting firm BDO Seidman. "It really is."

The death of the 80-year-old Steinbrenner, who had been in poor health for years, highlights a quirky tax situation that has drawn much scrutiny among the moneyed but little on Main Street. Only those with estates valued at more than $3.5 million had to pay under the old law.

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But the boisterous and at times controversial owner had a contentious relationship with the media and many of those who worked for him. His win-at-all costs ethos helped shape not only a team and a sport but an entire city.

Salon spoke with Dave Zirin, sportswriter and author of the upcoming book "Bad Sports: How Owners Are Ruining the Games We Love," about his thoughts on the passing of an icon.

What will be George Steinbrenner's legacy? 

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It was, after all, his participation in a conspiracy to funnel corporate money to Richard Nixon's reelection campaign in 1972 that resulted in a felony conviction, a $15,000 fine, and a two-year ban from baseball (which was lifted nine months early by then-Commissioner Bowie Kuhn in 1976). And it was Ronald Reagan, another Republican president, who, in one of the final acts of his presidency in January 1989, formally pardoned Steinbrenner for that crime.

Not that "The Boss" thought of himself as a GOP party man. A decade after his Nixon involvement, one of his associates told the New York Times that, "More than the conviction and the suspension from baseball, George is bothered by being linked with Watergate. Politically, George has always been a Ted Kennedy Democrat. I mean, whenever you'd run into Kennedy, he'd ask, 'How is Gawge?' George has a real feeling for the little guy. He hates being seen as part of the Nixon team.''

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Steinbrenner had a heart attack, was taken to St. Joseph's Hospital in Tampa, Fla., and died at about 6:30 a.m, a person close to the owner told The Associated Press. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because the team had not disclosed those details.

For more than 30 years, Steinbrenner lived up to his billing as "the Boss," a nickname he earned and clearly enjoyed as he ruled with an iron fist. The Yankees won six World Series titles during his reign.

He was known for feuds, clashing with Yankees great Yogi Berra and firing manager Billy Martin twice. But as his health declined, Steinbrenner let sons Hal and Hank run more of the family business.

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The person spoke on condition of anonymity because the team had not yet made the announcement.

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The New York Yankees co-Prince Regent has delivered more boorish Boss-isms in the last year than his pops, George, had in the last decade, including his latest rant, when he told the New York Post's Kevin Kernan, "The bottom line is that the team is not playing the way it is capable of playing."

Steinbrenner addressed the fourth-place Yankees' 19-20 record before they went out and lost 2-1 in 11 innings to the Tampa Bay Rays. "These players are being paid a lot of money and they had better decide for themselves to earn that money," he said. And my favorite: "I'm not saying they are not giving the effort, but they need to be playing harder."

As long as you're not saying they're not giving the effort.

I think I speak for all members of the Fourth Estate, as well as all Yankees haters, when I say I love me some Hank Steinbrenner. His rantings sound like vintage George Steinbrenner.

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I haven't read such shocking revelations since the last biography of Babe Ruth. Just think about the things that these guys have in common: left-handed, drinking to excess, staying out all night, driving recklessly, playing 30 pounds overweight (at least). About the only thing these two couldn't agree on is whether to sneak back into the hotel at 5 or 6 a.m.

David Wells pitched a perfect game while suffering from a hangover? And someone in the Yankee front office thinks this is a bad thing? Perhaps they should follow Lincoln's lead and send a case of what Wells was drinking to everyone else on the pitching staff.

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Well, he was damned right.

A whining sacroiliac sent me to the chiropractor's last week and the X-rays proved my old boss literally correct. I am part of that hidden minority, the spinal mutants, who have six lumbar vertebrae instead of the customary five. I do have too much backbone.

This was the final sign that it was time to do something that for months has been crystallizing out of the gauzy haze of the unconsciousness that surrounds us all: I need to apologize to ESPN.

This began to become evident weeks ago when the deputy mayor of Indianapolis attacked Chris Mortensen, one of my reportorial role models. I once watched Mort protect a source who not only publicly denied what he'd told Mort in private but also questioned his ethics. Just this month, Mort went on the air and criticized the thoroughness of his own reporting on a story. Mortensen is the gold standard, and this hack politician slashed him and said ESPN was "a sports channel first and a news organization fifth." I was amazed to find my hackles rising and myself rushing to defend my old employers on my radio sportscast.

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His recalcitrant manager, a lifetime employee who had rocketed from backup outfielder for the Yankees farm team in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to the skipper at Yankee Stadium in just under 15 years, had fenced with The Boss once too often. After weeks of traded barbs worthy of the schoolyard -- "I'm not coming back"; "I didn't say you could come back" -- Steinbrenner had settled it: He'd hired Showalter's replacement, Joe Torre.

And New York howled with laughter.

Revisionist history has Steinbrenner making the most adept move of his extraordinarily varied three decades as Yankees owner, welcoming back into the city's bosom the Brooklyn boy who had gone off to star in Milwaukee and St. Louis, and who had earned respect if not championships as the manager of the Mets and Cardinals. In fact, Torre's hiring was greeted with the kind of disbelief and contempt last seen when the Yankees had selected as manager one of the game's greatest clowns, Casey Stengel, in 1949. The idea that Torre The Failed could succeed Buck, the man who had brought the Yankees back to the postseason for the first time in 14 seasons, seemed to confirm Steinbrenner's return to lunacy.

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Based on as many off-the-record temperature-takings as could be managed, which produced some hints, some deductions and an awful lot of confirmations, this is a road map of the likely events of the next two weeks, the crunchiest of crunch times in the baseball labor war.

I'm putting these pieces together early on the morning of Tuesday, Aug. 27, and many elements of this timeline could be delayed, hastened or knocked down by unforeseen events. But one critical source who has been a back-channel in the last four major baseball impasses says what follows matches his own expectations, if not precisely, then generally.

And the only unforeseen events either of us can guess at, even in a science-fiction sort of way, are: A) a bewildering outbreak of common sense; and B) an unreported, massive owners' strike slush fund that would inoculate them against a seasonal shutdown that the leading sports analyst at Lehman Brothers calculates would cost them $1.2 billion before the end of this October, and $5 billion by the end of October 2003.

What You Don't Know About What's Already Happened: It's clear that contrary to expectations, the hawks are not in complete control of management's side of bargaining.

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Though the economics-impaired writers and commentators covering the negotiations don't seem to understand it, so-called revenue sharing is not and never has been Bud Selig's primary motive. If the owners simply wanted to share more revenue, they'd have gone to the players and said: "Let us share X amount of dollars, and we will guarantee you that that money will go to players' salaries instead of into our pockets." But of course they haven't done that.

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This is double talk, the residue of attitudes coming from the commissioner's office as the baseball owners get ready to push their revenue-salary cap plans on the players and public.

First of all, the Yankees dominated the game in every one of the so-called golden eras, and that was always considered to be one of the things that made them golden. Second, back when baseball pretty much had the top of the sports pages to itself, the Yankees were generally in the World Series and ratings were just fine.

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I don't know about you, but what I saw was just about the ugliest 19 games of baseball in a row (I'm counting the first playoff game against the Oakland A's) that I've ever seen. They may be the 19 ugliest games I've ever seen, period. I'm really not old enough to have vivid memories of the '62 Mets, but I know that that team can at least plead that it didn't have Derek Jeter, Bernie Williams, Jorge Posada, Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte and Mariano Rivera. Some hustling statistician has come up with the information that no team has played so poorly for such a span since the Cleveland Spiders in 1898. This gives the Yankees the distinction of playing the worst baseball in three centuries.

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Only problem is, there are very few fellas on the wall. Sure, you've got
your baseball heroes of old -- Hank Greenberg and Sandy Koufax -- and
All-American poster boy Mark Spitz. But the rest of the mural space is
taken up by significantly lesser figures; indeed almost a third of the
names belong not to athletes but to coaches and local sportscasters,
like Len Berman and Bill Mazer. (There's also a hilariously defaced Marv
Albert, whose name has been scratched out.)

We Jews are not exactly renowned for our athletic prowess -- we're
usually better at the management side of things. The four major
professional sports leagues in North America know from what I'm talking
about, as three of them have Jewish commissioners (Major League
Baseball's Bud Selig, the NBA's David Stern and the NHL's Gary
Bettman).

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