Inside the Empire

by Bob Klapisch

  What was needed was a teardown, but the Yankees don’t do those; the cold gaze of their history forbids it. Instead, they’d have to try something so complex that no one had ever seen it before: a complete reinvention of their business model while doing business as usual. No three-year tank jobs for a higher draft choice or fire sales of veteran assets—this team had to keep signing up stars even as it spent to grow its own. It was like running a Michelin three-star restaurant as you renovate the kitchen, except the guests aren’t supposed to taste the sawdust. You can pull it off only if you have great bags of money and an owner willing to wince and write huge checks.

  Over the next three seasons, Hal spent to patch the roster while funding Cashman’s overhaul of the innards. “Everything I asked for—a performance science department, a second academy in the DR—he said yes to,” says Cashman. Those “patches,” it’s worth noting, would have panicked other owners: in total, the signings of Tanaka, McCann, Carlos Beltrán, and Jacoby Ellsbury cost $458 million. What Hal got for all his lucre was a plausible hedge: teams that won eighty-something games a year and nosed around a wild card till September. “He felt an obligation to the folks who loved this team: we had to stay competitive till the kids came,” says Levine.

  Meanwhile, there were other fires for Hal to fight: a year-over-year crash in viewership on YES and a double-digit drop in home attendance. Middle-class fans—cops, firefighters, and the like—were melting away and weren’t being replaced by their kids. “We lost between seven and eight thousand season-ticket holders, the people buying thirty- or forty-game plans, and the generation behind them wasn’t buying,” says Levine. Hal paid for studies to see what millennials wanted when they came to a game. One of the things he learned was that, for many of them, the game was incidental. Instead, they went for the experience of watching a game and to document that experience on Snapchat and Facebook in the story they told friends about their lives. So informed, Hal spent millions resetting the stage. He converted the concourse overlooking Monument Park into an enormous outdoor bar and built selfie stations, with strategic backdrops, all around the park. He gave ticket-package buyers pregame access to the field, where they could take pictures of themselves posing with players. Lastly, Hal created a social media staff to blog each pitch of the game. Ten years ago, there were only writers in the press box. Now the beat writers are vastly outnumbered by twenty-something nerds posting the action.

  But set-dressing the park didn’t change the fact that the Yanks were a blah production. Tanaka and company were underperforming, Judge and Sánchez hadn’t arrived yet, and Cashman’s hands were tied by bloated contracts. Barring an act of God, they’d have to burn off those deals, be a team that didn’t contend for three years. They’d win eighty-plus games a season while working in some kids and keeping their powder dry for Machado and Harper. If all went according to plan, they’d be back in 2019 with a dynasty built of phenoms and free agents.

  Except, in 2016, fortune broke their way, jumping the development timeline. Two teams without a title in living memory were contenders in need of closers. Sensing irrational exuberance in the Indians and Cubs, Cashman approached Hal for permission to back the truck up. He wanted to sell more than just Chapman and Miller into the teeth of a red-hot market: he had three position players (McCann, Beltrán, and Castro) who could fetch a bounty of kids. But Hal put his hand up: McCann and Castro were off the table, and no deals for the relievers could be transacted unless they were replaced by veteran arms. Hal wasn’t about to scrub one season, let alone three; he had an ethical pact to honor with the fans.

  His temperance proved prescient. Cashman got his historic haul, including Torres, Clint Frazier, Dillon Tate, and Justus Sheffield—plus major league relievers in Adam Warren and Tyler Clippard. The Yankees brought up Sánchez and Judge, went on a tear that almost won them the wild card, and set the scene for their unexpected run in 2017. Cashman later peeled off Castro and McCann in subsequent winter deals. The net return for them: Giancarlo Stanton.

  To be sure, mistakes were made along the way. Three times the Yankees passed on great pitchers over the course of a calendar year. In the winter of ’16, they let Chris Sale go to the Red Sox without a fight. At the deadline in ’17, they left Justin Verlander to the clutches of the Houston Astros. That winter they let the Astros grab Gerrit Cole to pair with Verlander and Charlie Morton. Cashman, who has acquired one impact starter (Sabathia) since nicking Roger Clemens in ’99, buys off the rack when shopping for arms. Jeff Weaver, Cory Lidle, Nate Eovaldi—none of them were special when he picked them up, and none were any better as Yankees. Off history alone, he should have bucked his gut and made the play for Verlander; instead, he honored Hal’s directive to keep the payroll flat.

  Still, Hal’s rebuild was a smash success—and no one saw him do it. Rather, he deflected credit to Cashman when he spoke at the owners’ meetings, one of the only times all year Hal agrees to talk. In stealth mode, the product of old-boy Williams College had effectively launched a tech firm that played baseball. Every inch of his Yankees was newly digitized, from TrackMan guns that gauge a teenager’s spin rate to data on how the kid fields a ball thrown below his knees. He’d sunk millions into the A-ball complex in Tampa, financed the build-out of Cashman’s data staff, and hired the largest corps of pro and amateur scouts in all of major league baseball. Counterintuitively, his motive was cost containment.

  Since 2002, when baseball imposed levies on teams that overspent, New York had paid out $340 million to small-market clubs in luxury taxes. In 2014, the Yankees spent $260 million and missed the playoffs by four games. In 2018, they spent $190 million on the third-best record in baseball. For the first time in decades, they were under the limit—and making money faster than they could count it. Attendance was back where it was in 2012, up 18 percent in two years; the ratings on YES beat broadcast numbers and reversed the losses of the lean years; and Judge and Stanton jerseys, two of the top sellers in the sport, blanketed the grandstands.

  You could feel and hear the difference at the Stadium: the crowd was a verbal menace again. Back in the old joint, the noise and abuse punked even the grizzled Red Sox. Those old-school plumbers and welders came spoiling for fights, screaming their lungs out at players in road grays before brawling with the guys in the next row. That belligerence went missing when the new park opened and the lunch-pail types stayed away; millennials only fight on Instagram. But when the Baby Bombers showed up, so did the meatheads. “The hardened fans are back,” says Dave Robertson. “They’re rowdy, and it makes a difference.”

  Come the sixth or seventh inning of a one-run game, there’s a tremor in the home half of the frame. It starts beneath your feet—the concrete rumbles as though the D train were clattering by. If the Yankees get a man on, half the crowd stands; the other half rises if Judge is up. It is hard to think of a bond between a player and a park like the one Judge has forged in the Bronx. Walk the promenade, where fans mill before games underneath the giant bat. The firemen with farm tans driving F-150s with TRUMP/PENCE bumper stickers; the kids from the block rocking Boricua tats and something thin and shiny around their neck; the finance brahs in checked Bermudas squiring hot numbers from the office—they’re all draped in Judge regalia, and some of them (too many) wear the stupid wig. Their projections onto Judge are peculiar to their tribe. The Trumpsters prize his power and politeness as tokens of a team-first past. The kids from the suburbs see one of their own, a backpacker dude of indeterminate race who might have skated ramps with their older sibs. And for fans of color, he’s their everything: a multiethnic hero in a white man’s sport; a boundary-busting star like The Rock or Vin Diesel; and the first brother to give the Yanks some swag since the arrival of Reggie Jackson. When Stanton whiffs four times, fans boo him off the field. When Aaron Judge does it, they curse the ump for stretching the strike zone on him.

  But when Judge gets ahold of one—oh good Lord, better grab something firm for support. For the second or two it take
s the ball to leave his bat and complete its whip-crack ride to the seats, the whole place seems to lift off its pins, then drop back down with a thud. There’s a sound that follows, a great gust of joy that feels like the release of something caged. One moment you’re at a staid baseball game; the next you’re at a rave in Majorca. Everywhere you look, people are on their feet dancing, twirling, and bouncing with hands overhead and dapping up the stranger three seats down. It’s the damnedest thing to watch—and it happens all the time. In each of his full seasons, Judge clocked twice as many homers at home as on the road. A fair number of those shots either started or capped a comeback against their pennant rivals.

  Consider one seven-week sequence in ’18. On May 9, he crushed a two-run shot to key a rally against the Red Sox in the eighth; with the win, the Yankees tracked down Boston to land in a first-place tie. On May 12, he hit another two-run bomb to help flush a big deficit to the A’s. On May 29, it was Houston’s turn: his moon-launch to right brought the Yankees back in a game they’d steal in the tenth. On June 21, he iced down Seattle with a two-run blast off James Paxton. At the time, Paxton was pitching like a young Chris Sale for a Mariners team nipping at Houston’s heels. They left town in shambles after a three-game sweep and never seriously threatened the Astros again. Then, on July 1, Judge ambushed David Price with a shock-and-awe drive to dead-center. Price, the sometimes snowflake who’d pissed off all of Boston but whose left arm was critical to its chances, had finally gotten his act together and won eight of nine previous starts.

  So much for hope: Judge’s missile in the first snatched the heart out of Price’s chest. Three batters later, Torres crushed one out to right, scoring Stanton and Didi ahead of him. Before Price knew it, he was down 8–0 in front of a national audience on Sunday night. It was one of those beatdowns that either defines a pitcher or corroborates old suspicions. Since joining the Sox in ’16 as a max free agent, Price had been mugged for his lunch in the Bronx. Over five starts there, his aggregate line read: twenty-five innings pitched; forty-seven hits allowed; twenty-eight earned runs; ten homers. Judge’s bomb that day confirmed a hard truth for Boston: come the playoffs, someone else would have to pitch game 2 here. Their second-best starter wasn’t up to it.

  An interview with Judge during that stretch was essential—and next to impossible to land. As noted earlier, it’s increasingly hard to get one-on-ones with stars; with Judge, it’s well nigh impossible. He has no publicist, no booker, and no discernible interest in the mechanics of personal branding. Here’s a kid earning the minimum in the bigs who refuses to devote a minute to the swag chase that has convulsed other prodigies before him. There’s no building-size shrine to him by Nike in Times Square, as there once was of the young Doc Gooden; no Head and Shoulders spots pummeling cable viewers, as there was with Odell Beckham Jr. For the first time in memory, fans could get to know an icon at a pace that felt proper to both parties. That may be one of the reasons people love Judge so fiercely: they see that he isn’t in this for the fast buck and a cobranding hookup with Cardi B. In fact, if there’s any life or love in Aaron Judge’s love life, it really hasn’t turned up much on TMZ. Everybody wants to ask him about that too—not whom he’s dating, but how he’s kept it to himself. But Judge is monkish in his dealings with the press.

  On a steam-bath afternoon at Progressive Field in Cleveland, Klapisch sat with him in the dugout before a game. As with Stanton, it is hard to gauge the scale of Judge until he looms before you. In his nonchalant perfection, he seems to hail from a future where everyone has biceps as big as grapefruit and is drily indifferent to heat. Normal people sweat through their shirts in heat like this, but Judge was as smooth as a billiard ball, not a bead of moisture standing on his skin. He nodded and leaned in close. “All right, man: what’ve you got?”

  Time was tight, so the tough ones were asked first. It had been a tricky season for Judge—he led the team in homers and RBIs, but his numbers were down sharply from his rookie year, while his whiff rate was through the roof. He was probed about the strikeouts: Were they the cost of doing business, or did he hope to grow into Albert Pujols, a slugger who walked more often than he whiffed? Judge said that, as a kid, he’d studied Pujols and marvelled at his strict plate discipline. But now, as a professional hitter himself, he couldn’t afford to worry about the Ks. “An out is an out, in my opinion. The minute I start thinking about them, I strike out more.” Judge’s concern was rather with what led to the strikeouts: the “curveball he [the pitcher] hangs for me and I don’t swing at and now I’m down 0-1. If I don’t miss that pitch, I’m standing on second and getting things moving for my teammates.”

  What did perplex him were his subpar stats and the fact that he hadn’t got going for a prolonged stretch. “I feel like I’ve been grinding since spring training started, playing catch-up with everyone else,” he said. He’d had surgery on his shoulder the previous fall and hadn’t been able to swing the bat for months. “I’ve been a little behind, just trying to find that hot streak, trying to find that hot streak . . .” The stress on the word “trying” said more than its repetition: he was searching for himself in each at-bat. This was three days before the All-Star break, when most of his teammates would scatter to beaches the second their series ended that Sunday. (Stanton, for example, was at a table with models in South Beach very early Monday morning.) For Judge, who was starting in left for the AL, there would be no fun in the sun. He’d be haunting the batting cage before and after the game, simulating late-and-close spots. “First and third, one out, bases loaded; two outs, runner on second. Big situation, need a big hit. That’s what I live for, do all this extra stuff—I’ve always loved being in that position.”

  Which led to the next question: leadership. It is rare, if not unheard of, for a second-year player to declare his authority in the clubhouse. Even if he’s ready for it, his teammates aren’t: there’s a traditional pace and protocol to observe. But in Judge’s case, no: on this very young team, his voice carries beyond its years. “I want to lead by example, but I also want the best out of my teammates,” he said. “If I see something, I’m going to say it, but not on the field, when emotions are full.” Later, on the flight home, when everyone else is sleeping, “I’ll say, ‘Hey, what happened in the sixth, maybe we should handle it this way,’ or, ‘I saw what happened after the strikeout. That ain’t the right time to be doing that.’”

  It was abundantly clear that he was talking about Torres, the kid he’d been mentoring in the shadows. Judge, who was drafted in 2013, spent several spring camps around old-guard leaders like A-Rod and CC Sabathia. The former, for all his defects, was a tough-love tutor for kids like Cano and Melky Cabrera. He pulled them aside and taught them what a work ethic looked like—how to stretch and lift and get your swings in, while staying out of the clubs before a big series. As for CC, Judge couldn’t sing his praises enough; Sabathia’s was precisely the sort of strength he hoped to model. “After I was drafted, I got to take BP with the team in Oakland,” Judge recalled. “CC was starting for us that day, but he called out to me in the lunchroom, ‘Hey, Aaron, man, how ya doin’, sit over here.’ He’s probably thinking, ‘This kid’s never going to play with me,’ but he went out of his way to welcome me and see how I was doing.” CC’s warmth extended to everyone that day: “Whether you had ten years in or you were just called up, he’s gonna show you respect,” Judge marveled. “The way he treats people is amazing.”

  Judge could have been talking about himself; the Yanks rave about his tossed-off kindness. There was that moment between innings in Philadelphia when a child in the stands threw a ball to him. Judge caught it at the ankles, looked behind him to check the coast, and proceeded to play catch with the kid. Before batting practice in Baltimore, we saw him approach a kid whose father had driven him hundreds of miles to the game. Judge asked him how his school year was going, but the boy was dumbstruck by nerves. Instinctively, Judge handed him the bat he was carrying. “How’s that feel? Kinda heavy
, right?” Blushing, the boy half-swung the thirty-four-ouncer and said it felt just right. “I’m glad,” said Judge. “It’s yours, my guy. Take care of it now for me, huh?”

  It would have been nice to ask him where that well of sweetness sprang from, but the allotted time for the sit-down was over. With Judge, half an hour means half an hour. But before getting up, he ventured something revealing. He said that all his life he’d been stared at by people, and that “those weird looks” had prepared him for New York. “You can’t go anywhere in this city without people saying something, and being different got me ready for that. Now it’s just nothing to me. I say, ‘Hey, what’s going on?’ instead of ‘You guys got a problem or something?’”

  Hearing that, we harked to another too-tall import: the detestable Big Unit, Randy Johnson. Before his introductory presser to New York in 2005, Johnson barked at a guy who’d pointed a news camera at him. “Don’t get in my face, and don’t talk back to me!” he snapped at the Channel 2 lensman, Vinny Everett. Johnson, a Yankee for all of ten seconds, had somehow captured the essence of that team before he’d been fitted for a jersey. George’s brutes pushed around the little guy, be it the Tampa Bay Rays or that poor sod doing his job. If you weren’t opening your wallet, you were in the way, blocking their trip to the bank. These Yanks of Hal Steinbrenner’s don’t assault strangers; instead, they commit acts of grace. If you want to mark the difference between the reigns of George and Hal, just watch that twenty-second clip of Judge soft-tossing a ball to a ten-year-old boy in the bleachers.