This is no longer about the surname — or at least, it shouldn’t be. George Steinbrenner has been dead since 2010. He ceased having everyday input into the Yankees at least five years before that. Yankees fans who scream and shout about “If only George was still alive …!” are forgetting two very important things. 

1. The version of George from around 1981 through 1990 not only culminated with his second suspension from baseball but featured the most ill will ever between owner and fan base. I told that once to James Dolan, and he laughed at the notion that anyone had ever disliked Steinbrenner as an owner, and roared, “So maybe they’ll love me when I’m dead!” 

2. Just because Hal Steinbrenner is George’s son, there should never have been any kind of assumption that he was anything like his father. It happens. There are probably a lot of people who have noticed that Robert Kennedy Jr. isn’t exactly a chip off the old block, in a lot of ways. 

And here’s the thing about Hal: 

You can (fairly) complain that maybe he’s taken his father’s famous impatience way too far in the other direction. You can (easily) bemoan that there seems to be a craven lack of urgency throughout the organization right now, top to bottom. You can (certainly) argue that somebody other than the hitting coach should have paid the price for a season that has run so improbably off the rails. 

But none of this should surprise you. 

This is who Hal Steinbrenner is. This is what he’s been from the moment he ascended to the top of the Yankees’ corporate flow chart. It isn’t just that Aaron Boone and/or Brian Cashman would’ve been given their walking papers Monday, a day after the Red Sox swept them, a day after their losing streak swelled to eight, longest since 1995, if we were talking about Vintage George instead of Vintage Hal. 

No, they would have been gone the minute after they were swept by the Astros last autumn. Or two minutes after they were humiliated in the 2021 wild-card game at Fenway. Or at about 15 different other lesser flashpoint moments when the old man simply couldn’t take it anymore. 

Hal is 53. When George was 53, in 1983, the Yankees had stopped winning and had entered into the surreal world of George’s Whims. That was Vintage George, even if that was scrubbed away by the kindly avuncular figure who enjoyed the final five titles of his ownership. That is most certainly not Vintage Hal. 

So stop waiting for an instant Dr. Bruce Banner/Incredible Hulk transformation. It’s not going to happen. 

That said? 

Boone and Cashman both have to understand that even given their owner’s genuinely tolerant nature, both of them need to hit the bell lap of this season at full speed, even if the idea of making a miracle run to defy their 1.5 percent playoff odds seems more and more fantastical. For Boone, it is a simple thing: If his easy-going manner and hey-we’ll-get-’em-next-time demeanor has worked in the past — and it has — it’s landing flat now. 

Even Hal has to be tempted to occasionally throw his guacamole tray at the TV when Boone starts playing his postgame greatest hits. Something has to change there. If Boone can’t do that, reconnecting with his team in the final five weeks, then something else will have to change. And it likely won’t be the assistant bullpen coach. 

Cashman’s status is trickier, if only because he’s been so dug in for so long, and everything about the Yankee operation has his fingerprints on it. To cashier the GM is to declare that everything has to be rebuilt from the ground up. 

But it’s a critical time to make that call. You can hope that this year is just an aberration, but then you’d be ignoring that the Orioles seem set up for a long ride at the front of the AL East, that the Rays keep losing players yet keep managing to win games, that the Red Sox and Blue Jays look in significantly better shape going forward, that the Astros are still the Astros and the Rangers are learning how to win with deep pockets. 

That, at the end, is what almost certainly pushed Steve Cohen to do what he did across town. He saw that the Braves are going to be a problem for a long, long time and decided to pounce by replenishing the farm system, by making it plainly clear that Billy Eppler is going to be recruited over, maybe for David Stearns, maybe for someone else. If Buck Showalter is safe now, it won’t take more than a 25-25 start next year to make that seem tenuous. 

Mets fans have mixed emotion about all of this, but what’s funny is that Yankees fans, a lot of them, have expressed some envy. Sure, it stinks to punt on a season. But at least the Mets showed some urgency. At least they had a plan. 

Pining for George accomplishes nothing. But for his heir, the time is rapidly approaching when he has to make some hard choices, ones that may not be in his comfort zone. For better or worse, that kind of thing never bothered the old man. Is that, at least, hereditary?