Mark Bennett
The Tribune-Star
TERRE HAUTE —
Always leave room in your mind for a different view of something you think you know.
Most of us have a fixed image of George Steinbrenner. His smug glare, caught on TV cameras, as he watched from the owners box at Yankees Stadium. Or, “The Boss,” dressed in his trademark turtleneck sweater and Yankee blue jacket, hoisting one of seven World Series trophies won during his 37-year reign in New York. Those nose-to-nose feuds with Billy Martin, the manager he couldn’t live with or without.
As a lifelong Reds fan, I can’t forget the World Series in 1976 — three years after Steinbrenner bought the Yankees from CBS for a mind-boggling $8.8 million — when Cincinnati swept his Bronx Bombers in four games. And, like millions of “Seinfeld” fanatics, I remember George Costanza, driven to do the opposite of his perpetually wrong impulses, tried to get a job with the Yankees by lecturing Steinbrenner for reducing the fabled club “to a laughingstock, all for the glorification of your massive ego.” Impressed by Costanza’s gall, The Boss responds, “Hire this man.”
But Steinbrenner, who died Tuesday in Florida at age 80, was more than his public persona as a billionaire who bought championships and fueled the mega-pay for professional athletes.
John Baratto knew Steinbrenner as a loyal, giving friend.
Baratto met Steinbrenner in 1955. Baratto, a Vigo County native, was in the midst of a legendary basketball coaching career at East Chicago Washington High School. Steinbrenner was an assistant football coach at Northwestern University, who roomed at that Evanston, Ill., school with one of Barrato’s former players, Ray Ragelis, an assistant basketball coach at NU.
Steinbrenner and Ragelis spent weekends at the Arlington Park horse track. Baratto owned some racehorses on his family’s farm in Vigo County.
Steinbrenner and Ragelis decided to tap the coach’s racing savvy to get the most out of their modest $2 bets.
“Baratto was known as a good handicapper,” recalled Jim Mann, a longtime friend of Baratto. “And those guys didn’t have much money, being assistant coaches, so they’d look up Baratto.”
Winners impressed Steinbrenner, and Baratto was exactly that. From 1944 to ’68, his East Chicago teams won 484 of 654 games, including the 1960 state championship, earning him a spot in the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame. Baratto never married, but became a father figure to his inner-city players.
Steinbrenner was the son of a wealthy Ohio shipping magnate. Baratto overcame childhood polio that altered his face and left him with a limp. They came from two vastly different backgrounds. Yet their friendship lasted long after Baratto retired and Steinbrenner gave up his assistant coaching gigs to run the family business. Steinbrenner served as guest speaker at a 1980 fundraiser in East Chicago for Ragelis, who was dying of diabetes. Baratto attended, and Steinbrenner wrote a check on the spot to more than cover all of the event’s costs.
“It was just unbelievable how Mr. Steinbrenner took care of him,” Mann said of Baratto, who died in 1999.
Every May in the 1960s, the friends would cross paths at the Kentucky Derby. Then, in the early 1970s, Steinbrenner called Baratto to say he was thinking of buying the Yankees. “He said, ‘Coach, whenever you want to go see the Yankees, all you’ve got to do is call, and they’ll have four tickets waiting for you at the window, home or away.’”
Baratto took his offer, typically inviting along Terre Haute friends such as Mann, Armand Gottardi and others. They watched Yankees games in Kansas City, Tampa Bay and New York.
“It was a fun time,” said Gottardi, now 80.
Steinbrenner set up hotel deals for Baratto and his buddies. “We stayed next to Grand Central Station for $68,” Mann recalled. They ate at the exclusive Yankees Club restaurant, toured the Yankee Stadium offices, and caught a ride with Steinbrenner’s personal driver. “We had excellent seats wherever we went, stayed in excellent hotels and got great treatment,” said Mann, now 69 and retired after 30 years as West Vigo High School’s athletic director.
They even got invited to watch a game from the owner’s box once when Steinbrenner couldn’t attend.
Until something came up.
“We got bumped out by some guy named Joe DiMaggio,” Mann said. “Joe showed up at the last minute, and they said they’d better give the box to Joe because he didn’t like sitting out in the crowd, because people wouldn’t leave him alone. So we had to rough it, and sit in the second row behind the Yankees dugout.”
Early in the 1999 season, Mann drove Baratto and friends to Tampa to see the Yankees play the Devil Rays. In their last conversation, Steinbrenner told Baratto during that visit, “It looks like we’re going to make it to the World Series this year. You want to go, Coach?” Baratto didn’t have the heart to tell The Boss he was suffering from cancer, and surprised Steinbrenner by passing on the offer.
The Yankees won the series that fall. Baratto, in failing health, had to watch from his home in Florida. He died that December.
“We saw [Steinbrenner] in a completely different light,” Mann said. “We saw him as a very good guy.
“And it all started over going to the horse track in 1955,” he added. “A person couldn’t have a better friend in life than John Baratto had in George Steinbrenner.”
Mark Bennett can be reached at (812) 231-4377 or mark.bennett@tribstar.com.
