It has long been a crying shame in sports that team owners get to do all the firing, and never face termination themselves. Owners love to say accountability starts at the top of an organization, at least until things go south and it is time to assign the blame. 

Last year, Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner publicly ripped his players for lack of performance. The son of the one and only Boss, George Steinbrenner, said he was aggravated, frustrated, and angry at the athletes assembled by GM Brian Cashman, and guided by manager Aaron Boone, for doing a lousy imitation of a cohesive and motivated team. 

“The majority of the responsibility, whether it’s inconsistent offense or bad baserunning, that responsibility lies with the players,” Steinbrenner said then. “They’re the ones on the field. They need to fix this problem … because everyone, including our fan base, rightfully so, has had enough quite frankly. It’s enough.” 

More than 15 months later, the fan base has still had enough. The same paying customers who booed Steinbrenner at ceremonies honoring Paul O’Neill and Derek Jeter are sick and tired of the Yankees saying they willingly signed up to be judged in October, only to repeatedly fail in October. Those fans are sick and tired of an organization that has spent as much time embracing excuses as it does seeking solutions. 

They are sick and tired of Hal Steinbrenner’s leadership. 

Truth is, after the Astros finished off their ALCS sweep in The Bronx on a rain-delayed Sunday night, making it 13 straight years that the Yankees have failed to reach the World Series, Steinbrenner deserves to be fired. He is lucky that there isn’t anyone in position to call him into the office and deliver the grim news. 

So the talk this week will be about Boone’s status, and Cashman’s status, and whether it’s time to bid farewell to both. Boone is a good guy and a decent manager who doesn’t inspire any visions of greatness. When a right-minded NFL team can no longer picture its starting quarterback someday holding the Lombardi Trophy in the air, that team immediately begins the search for a new quarterback. 

Can anyone at this point picture Boone holding high a World Series trophy and riding a float under a ticker-tape rain in the Canyon of Heroes? Does the manager inspire any kind of faith after his Game 3 bullpen decisions against the Guardians and Astros, and after he blamed the Game 2 loss at Minute Maid Park on an open roof? 

Cashman is a more complicated case, given his four championship rings in the early years and his ability to consistently put the Yankees in the playoffs over a quarter century on the job. But his employer is a black-and-white proposition. Steinbrenner deserves credit for the 2009 World Series title, and for all the maddening postseason failures that have followed it. 

This is about the tone he has set inside a franchise that was all about the postseasons and parades in his father’s day, and is now mostly about the balance sheet. Does Hal Steinbrenner want to win? Sure, everyone wants to win. 

But he doesn’t live to win like his old man did. He wants to play the game within the boundaries of financial restraint. 

“Look, it’s a consideration,” Steinbrenner said of luxury-tax thresholds before the season. “That’s my job every year, to make sure we’re financially responsible. We’ve got a lot of partners and banks and bond holders and things that I answer to. At the same time, it’s always our goal to field a championship team.” 

Read those words carefully. 

That’s my job every year, to make sure we’re financially responsible. 

I had many conversations with George Steinbrenner in his prime, and I never heard him define his chief objective that way. I never once heard him talk about partners and banks and bond holders, before referencing his title aspirations as a throw-in. 

Listen, George M. Steinbrenner III was a man with staggering flaws. He got himself suspended twice, he presided over a brutal period of franchise dysfunction from the ’80s into the ’90s, and the Yankees were rebuilt in his absence by Gene Michael and Buck Showalter. All of that stays on his record forever. 

But the Boss was also responsible for six World Series championships, and for creating a daily urgency that compelled everyone in his employ — players included — to embrace a win-or-else mentality. After a particularly painful postseason loss, one longtime aide told George Steinbrenner, “Well, you can’t win every year Boss.” 

His response: “Why the f— not?” 

Born on third base, and taking a conservative lead off the bag, Hal Steinbrenner doesn’t have the same hunger, the same stomach for the fight. He doesn’t have the same sweat equity in the family business. He is lording over an empire worth $6 billion, a greater valuation than any team in American sports outside of the Dallas Cowboys, and yet he doesn’t use his financial might to crush the competition. 

On the same day a superstar free agent he didn’t pursue, Bryce Harper, slugged the Phillies into the World Series, Steinbrenner, a barely visible presence around the Stadium, came up good and empty. Again. 

He has been given cover over the years by the likes of James Dolan, Fred Wilpon and, until very recently, Woody Johnson. But no longer. Hal Steinbrenner’s program is broken, and it’s too bad someone isn’t available to fire him for that.