Please, Lord, if I ever become as simultaneously wealthy, feeble and self-important as New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, I pray that someone will grow some guts, encourage me to leave the limelight and spend my final days on a booze and baccarat bender at Foxwoods.

Forever an eccentric, Steinbrenner has devolved into both a crotchety old man and the worst kind of boss. With rare exceptions, he rests in Howard Hughes-like seclusion in Tampa, manifests his obsessive-compulsive behavior in shopping sprees and fires off the occasional press release to comfort us all with the confirmation that he’s still alive.

Comparatively speaking, Steinbrenner’s faceless caricature on TV’s “Seinfeld” in the mid-1990s was the embodiment of sanity.

Could you work for this guy?

Confronted with the indignity of Monday night’s loss to the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim By Way of Inglewood Presented By Home Depot in the fifth and deciding game of the American League Division Series, and faced with the reality that his team will sit out the World Series for (egads!) the second October in a row, Steinbrenner couldn’t speak quickly enough to drown out the Halos’ thunder sticks.

His written statement dripped with delusions of grandeur. “Our team played hard, but we let our fans down,” it read. “Our fans are the greatest, and I want to thank them for their amazing support throughout the season.”

In an obvious dig at Joe Torre, the brilliant manager whom Steinbrenner hasn’t deserved during their decade-long relationship, Grumpy George added, “I congratulate the Angels and their manager on the great job they’ve done.”

Does any right-thinking baseball fan on the planet not believe Torre deserves consideration for AL Manager of the Year along with Ozzie Guillen of the White Sox and Eric Wedge of the Indians?

Based on the Yankees’ ill-advised offseason spending, even a see-no-evil Pinstripe worshipper shouldn’t have expected more than 90 wins out of that team. Thanks to injuries and underperformance (blame the manager for the latter if you like, but this is big league baseball, not babysitting), the Yankees looked and played like a .500 club for most of the season.

Juggling a pitching staff replete with has-beens and never-will-bes and a lineup littered with aging stars, Torre guided his gang to 97 victories, playoffs included. This would not “let down” the fans in roughly 25 of the 30 Major League cities. Unfortunately for the Yankees’ legion, their expectations are unfairly inflated by an owner who believes it’s his team’s divine right to win the pennant every autumn.

You see, I don’t hate the Yankees. In fact, I despise equally the way they and the Red Sox buy their way into contention year after year, and the way Commissioner Bud Selig and his minions allow it to continue. It is capitalism run amok.

It’s understandable that Steinbrenner’s memory might be failing at the bitter end of his career, but he’d only have to look back upon that five-year stretch from 1996 to 2000 to recall his franchise winning four world championships in five years with largely homegrown talent.

Rather than raiding the free agent market or foreign markets in his search for The Next Big Thing, maybe Steinbrenner should stop mortgaging his farm system. Instead of throwing his Hall of Fame skipper under the bus, perhaps it’s time to review the work of scouts and other front office staff.

That would take too much effort and foresight. Instead, Steinbrenner made it clear to his “great” and “loyal” fans, all of whom surely wore their Mike Pagliarulo jerseys with pride when the Bombers couldn’t dig themselves out of the cellar in the late 1980s, that they can expect the same band-aid buffoonery that has prevailed the last four winters.

So write this down, Yankees fans, and remember who told you so: You will never, ever celebrate another World Series victory until the Boss unloads the team or goes to the Great Free Agent Free-For-All In the Sky.

And yes, that day shall provide some interesting juxtaposition for Steinbrenner, who demonstrated once again Tuesday that he only thinks he’s God.

Kalle Oakes is a staff writer. His e-mail is [email protected].