TV Character Profile: George Steinbrenner

Name: George Steinbrenner
Show: Seinfeld


Steinbrenner appeared as a character in the situation comedy Seinfeld, when George Costanza worked for the Yankees for several seasons. Lee Bear portrayed the character, and Larry David provided voice-over performances whenever the character spoke. Steinbrenner's full face was never shown, and the character was always viewed from the back in scenes set in his office at Yankee Stadium. The character appeared in the following episodes: "The Opposite", "The Secretary", "The Race", "The Jimmy", "The Wink", "The Hot Tub", "The Caddy", "The Calzone", "The Bottle Deposit", "The Nap", "The Millennium", "The Muffin Tops", and "The Finale".

The fictional Steinbrenner talked nonstop, regardless of whether anyone was listening, and sometimes referred to himself as "Big Stein". The team owner was known for eccentric decisions, such as cooking jerseys, threatening to move the team to New Jersey "just to upset people", scalping his owner's box tickets, wearing Lou Gehrig's uniform pants (and panicking about "that nerve disease" being contagious), trading several players to Frank Costanza's dismay, and canceling a meeting because he wanted George Costanza to get him an eggplant calzone. In "The Wink", the Steinbrenner character mentions all of the people he fired, saying Billy Martin four times, and mentions then-current manager Buck Showalter, but then quickly swears Costanza to silence. Though intended as a joke, the comment proved prophetic: A few weeks after the episode aired, Steinbrenner replaced Showalter as manager with Joe Torre.

Steinbrenner's involvement with Seinfeld began when he refused a request to make a cameo appearance and permit a Yankees pennant to appear; the show nonetheless used the pennant. A year later, Steinbrenner was asked to permit a Yankees uniform to appear on the sixth-season "The Chaperone". The owner was still angry about the unauthorized pennant, and knew so little about the show that after reading the script he believed George Costanza had been named after him as an insult. He refused to permit the uniform's use unless the character was renamed. After watching the show and enjoying both it and the Costanza character, however, Steinbrenner approved the uniform,[40] and later maintained that he was a fan of the show and that "Costanza is always welcome back." He filmed three scenes for the Seinfeld season 7 finale, "The Invitations", but they were edited out when the time of the original episode ran longer than the allowed time. They are on the Seinfeld Season 7 DVD Disc 4.