Hank Steinbrenner was understandably upset. His Wang came up lame in a place it should have never been in the first place, leaving his team rather impotent for the rest of the campaign when Chien-Ming Wang hurt his foot during interleague play while running the bases.

Still, when he rattled on about how “(the National League) need to grow up and join the 21st century,” we couldn’t help but compare his latest bloviation against the actions yesterday of another son of an owner no longer able to run his team.

While Hank kicked the dirt and waved his arms wildly until someone gave him a microphone to suck on, Rocky Wirtz of the Chicago Blackhawks was deftly handling a delicate situation by not being anywhere near it.

‘Dollar Bill’ Wirtz’s passing last year left Rocky Wirtz in charge of a franchise so moribund that the AHL team in town, the Chicago Wolves, had become the de facto hockey team in town. One measure of that came when the wildly popular broadcaster Pat Foley shifted to the Wolves’ broadcast team in 2006.

Foley left the Blackhawks after the ‘Hawks organization had poisoned the ice irreparably under Dollar Bill’s watch. However, his passing changed nearly everything except the last name on the owner’s door last fall.

Rocky Wirtz, who wasn’t even the son first intended to take over the team, made over the entire organization by first hiring away John McDonough from the Cubs to be their president. After that, little steps and much larger ones came swiftly. Chicagoans were stunned to find a hockey team in their midst, as if it were ‘Hockey Brigadoon’.

Now that Foley’s done with this season’s AHL Champion Chicago Wolves, the Blackhawks swooped in to scoop him up because, as Foley himself put it, “… what happened, happened. It was done by different people, and they’re not around anymore. All they needed to do was say: ‘We’d love to have you back.’”

While Pat Foley was making that statement about Rocky’s father, Rocky himself was nowhere to be found. Other scions of sports industry might have insisted on being present to control the message and take the credit, but Rocky Wirtz stayed away from the awkward situation and let it be a happy day.

That’s how a grown-up would handle it.