Inside the Empire

by Bob Klapisch

  Not all of the 170 kids in Low-A ball need this sort of reboot. Roughly a quarter of that group are US prospects chosen in the amateur draft. Those kids arrive here in June, get fitted and kitted by the equipment squad, then ship out to short-season ball. The ones who stay in Tampa are the international signings, many of whom hail from countries or territories without academies (including Venezuela, Colombia, and Puerto Rico, among others). From April 23 to August 6, the Yanks hold intense remedial classes at their sprawling baseball campus in Tampa. Called the Himes Complex, it’s a half-mile down the road from George M. Steinbrenner Stadium. There are five adjoining diamonds for intrasquad games; a two-story watchtower from which Kevin Reese, the current director of player development, Eric Schmitt, his assistant director of development, and various scouts, trainers, coaches, and coordinators can track the players on all diamonds; and a newish field house that’s the rocket factory for assembling next-gen Yankees.

  On the first floor of the field house, which was refurbished two years ago, there’s a hangar-sized space that’s both a fitness center and a sports-performance clinic. One end of it looks like a flagship Gold’s: aisle after aisle of free weights, Smith machines, ellipticals, and climbers, plus devices whose functions no layman could fathom. At the other end is the science lab: indoor mounds and cages where a prospect’s every movement—his swing path, his windup, his first step out of the batter’s box—is taped and digitized and assessed in real time by analysts sitting at desktops. The Yankees weren’t the first club to spend many millions of dollars on biometric equipment and technicians; the Cubs, Dodgers, and Astros beat them to it. But no one has a setup as expansive as this one—or satellite installations at every farm club. That’s where Reese and Schmitt come in: from their offices upstairs, they and their six stat techs amass, crunch, and cross-check data from all nine teams in the Yankees’ minor league chain. Then Reese sends the data points up to Cashman. The two men talk or text almost every day.

  Interviews with Reese and Schmitt were set up separately as the Tampa season wound down. Reese, an ex-outfielder and Yankee product who played till ’07 in their organization, presents as a general-manager-in-waiting: polished, muscular, adroit in all departments. Schmitt, a taller man, has the build of a former pitcher; he and Reese were roommates in the minors. In their respective offices, which look exactly alike—all Yanks execs have Cashman’s battleship desk—they talked about the massive ramp-up in Tampa since the relaunch of 2014.

  “When I started here, I thought we had a big department—it was eighteen staffers,” said Reese, who coordinates everything from the mental-conditioning program to the hiring and firing of coaches. “Now it’s in the hundreds, and all the stuff you’re seeing is either new or from the last three years.” Like every young capo under Cashman, Reese, who’s forty, practically race-walked through the Yankees’ system. He started as a pro scout in 2008, quickly jumped to regional chief, then served as Denbo’s assistant of player development. That upward mobility is one of the charms of these new-age Yankees: if you’re good, there’s a fast lane to the top.

  “When I was a player, I’d look up north and see we’d traded for Gary Sheffield or signed Hideki Matsui, and here I am, a center fielder in Triple-A thinking, When am I gonna get my shot?” Now, says Reese, when he talks to the players down here, he tells them their opportunity is bright. “Just look at our parent club: all those good kids have broken through.” Even someone like Carlos Mendoza, who’d started as a coach with the Staten Island Yankees and managed the Gulf Coast affiliate, is now the Yankees’ infield coach.

  Each year Cashman sends a clear directive south: “We need to be better in every aspect.” Whatever Reese and Schmitt ask for—more scouts, more equipment, a quant embedded with each team—Cashman goes to Hal and gets the funding. Schmitt demurred when asked how much Hal had spent here, but offered that he’d “been over quite a bit.” Yes, the Invisible Owner—Hal Steinbrenner—visited the complex often to “watch games, ask about prospects, and about anything else we might need,” said Schmitt. Hal had bought hotels for two of the Low-A teams to live in during the season; paid for suites in the hotels he didn’t own so kids could cook meals, not eat fast food; hired nutritionists to personalize each player’s intake; and put out spa-style spreads three times a day. “I played with guys that the only thing they could do in English was order McDonald’s,” says Reese. As they climbed the system, “they continued to make questionable food choices because that’s what they knew how to do.”

  But with all their new hardware and content upgrades, the one thing Reese and Schmitt seemed proudest of was the work being done in the Yankee classrooms. There, on the first and second floors of the field house, is where the reformation happens: the morphing of unschooled, ballplaying teens into textbook Yankees. “It’s our focus and our goal, for the players who go north to be able to do their interviews in English,” says Reese.

  It begins where you least expect it to: with viewings of the old sitcom Friends. Watching on a projection screen at the front of the room, a dozen or so men with a fledgling grasp of English try to find the levity in six neurotic New Yorkers seeking romance without commitments (or STDs). Though it surely wasn’t intended to, the series could have been scripted for the purpose of teaching young players civics. The actors talk slowly, enunciate clearly, and speak the sort of flat-earth English you’re never going to hear in the Bronx. For the players’ benefit, the show is subtitled—in English. That way, they learn to read what they’re hearing, and to think in cadenced phrases. Most importantly, the show transmits the values these new-age Yanks espouse: friendship, teamwork, and living in peace with buddies who badly out-earn you.

  That, at least, was the theme of the episode being shown to them that day. Three of the friends had money and three didn’t; tensions, if not hilarity, ensued. When it ended, Melissa Hernandez clicked on the lights and asked, “How much did you guys understand?”

  Several of the players rubbed their eyes; it was the end of another long workday. They’d been playing or training since 8:00 a.m., and here it was going on dusk. They responded to her questions in fractured English, then filled in two-page quizzes on what they’d watched. The general tenor of the quiz guided their answers: When you’re broke, be honest. Tell your friends you can’t go party. Don’t lie and spend money you don’t have. Afterwards, they trooped to the culinary classroom to watch a staff chef prepare linguine. The roasted chicken and sautéed veggies over the pasta was dull but healthy fare. They jotted down instructions, sampled the finished dish, then grabbed prepacked dinners and bottled water from a giant fridge.

  As they waited for the shuttles to their nearby hotels, Klapisch stopped Argelis Herrera, a six-foot-six Dominican from a flyspeck town called Tenares. Or at least that’s what he tells foreigners. Tenares is the only town near him in the DR that’s searchable on Google Earth. He actually lives in Arriba, a dirt-floor village where GPS is useless. Nor will you find it by driving around the outskirts. There are no roads in those hills. “It’s a humble place,” he says in Spanish. “You have to walk the last two miles to my house.”

  Herrera is nineteen, humps it up there at 94, and is working on a slider and change. But he’s in his first year at Tampa, and with only a first-grade education when the Yankees signed him, he’s far behind his teammates. His father grows fruit to sell at a stall, and if it weren’t for baseball, Argelis would be slaving alongside him. He spent his two years at the Yanks’ academy in Boca Chica just learning proper Spanish; this is his first real dalliance with English. The good news is that he’ll have an honest chance here to refine both his syntax and his slider: the Yankees are extra-patient with these kids. They pay them standard wages for low-A players—about $1,200 a month, in addition to whatever bonus they earned at signing. But the Herreras are given several years to leap to the next level—the Yanks’ full-season A-ball team in Charleston, South Carolina.

  The numbers, in full candor, are stacked against them.
Of the 170 prospects playing Rookie ball, only a quarter or so will make the jump to the middle rungs of A-ball. And in private conversations, a Yankees official admitted that most of these imports are fodder. “We sign five or ten kids who are stars in their country, and forty or fifty others so they’ll have someone to play against once they get here,” he says.

  The odds of those “other” players having a future in baseball are somewhere between slim and adios. Of the almost three hundred prospects in the Yankees system, maybe 10 percent will reach the majors, and only a fraction of those will stick around long enough to get vested in its pension plan. But for as long as they’re in the Yankees’ chain, these kids are well served for their time. The Tampa life skills classes are repeated at every level of the minors, prepping players for baseball and beyond. And for all the kids who don’t make the bigs, the Yankees have a bonus clause: they offer a college scholarship to every prospect who washes out of their system. No matter where they’re from or where they pursue a future, the Yankees will pick up the tab for their college degree.

  “I’m in touch with thirty or forty guys who went home, and most of them do go on to college,” says Hernandez. From there they open their own businesses or go into teaching or other middle-class professions. What they don’t do is go back to their fathers’ farms.

  “When I came here, I didn’t speak any English—none of us did,” says Miggy Andújar, the sensational rookie who carried the Yanks through their doldrums for much of August. Signed at sixteen from one of the DR’s larger cities, Andújar spent a couple of summers in Tampa before making the jump to Charleston. “But the classes helped me learn, little by little, and I kept learning as I moved up the system. I wouldn’t be speaking English today if it weren’t for the Yankees.” Asked to rate his fluency now, he laughs and says, “So-so.” But he insists on speaking English, as does Severino, whose command of the language is superb. “It was hard,” says Severino, recounting his time in Tampa. “You’re hot, you’re tired, you just want something to eat. But the program gets you started so you can have a conversation with your American teammates. That’s really where you learn English: in the clubhouse. You take what you learn in class and you speak to the American kids. And you don’t have to feel embarrassed about making a mistake because no one judges you here.”

  Typically, class time is two hours long and consists of two subjects a day. Banking and personal finance is taught in a room down the hall, with laptops at every station. There, players learn about budgeting, practice tracking expenses on debit cards, and calculate what they hope to save on their modest incomes. There’s a course in nutrition that’s reinforced daily by the food choices offered downstairs. Let other clubs serve their kids chicken tenders and whatever’s on sale at Sam’s Club. The Yankees feed their prospects like Olympic hopefuls. That’s part of the retooled culture under Cashman: eating, like fitness, is a year-round sport—so don’t even think of reporting back here next spring with 20 percent body fat. And then, of course, there are the mock media sessions where the players are grilled under pressure. “We know these guys are gonna have to deal with that, so we put them in situations, see how they handle it, then talk about how they can improve,” says Reese.

  Finally, there’s a class in certain hard-knock facts—but one that isn’t taught by team instructors. “We have Tampa police officers come in once a month to tell these guys what they can and cannot do,” said Hernandez. “Number one, you can’t do things on a date here that might happen if you were back home—there’s laws against that here.” Forcible touching, drunken advances, anything over the line can mean jail time and deportation. Other career-killers: drinking beer on porches, driving while impaired, and throwing punches in bars. “I don’t know how it was before I got here,” says Hernandez, “but in my four years, not one kid’s been in trouble. So I guess it’s working.”

  As for Herrera, the six-six righty, he’s clearly gotten the message. On the mound, he’s as raw as a prospect can be (seventeen walks in seven relief innings pitched), but he’s such a physical standout that Reese and Schmitt will give him all the time he needs. He’s built like Dellin Betances and, like most big pitchers, will need longer to perfect his mechanics. Where he’s making his surest strides is in the classroom: he pays close attention, asks pointed questions, and preps like his future depends on it.

  “He has such an eagerness to succeed—you just have to teach him how,” says Hernandez, who doesn’t hide her rooting interest in Herrera. Every day he shows her that “he wants to be someone,” and what more can you ask from a kid? He has the body, the arm, and the mind-set to win, and the Yankees grade all of those things. There’s a reason their phenoms who do make the majors don’t flip bats like José Bautista and big-league it around the bases after homers. They’re taught at every rung to be dignified adults who happen to wear pinstripes to work. These Yanks don’t flame opponents, don’t bring out TMZ, and don’t down-talk teammates in the press. The Yankees scout like crazy, sign kids of good character, then give them every chance to become their best selves. And that’s how you build a killer franchise these days: you grow it from the subsoil up.

  8

  * * *

  * * *

  Nothing Personal, It’s Strictly Business

  Randy Levine has a favorite George Steinbrenner story, or at least one that makes him laugh each time he tells it. Understand that Levine still loves the man and misses him every time he comes to mind. But you don’t get to where he’s gotten in life without doing right by a good yarn. Those stories are Levine’s war pay for being president of the New York Yankees, a job that makes him feared and, in some parts, loathed—and utterly indispensable to his team.

  However you feel about him—and your view of Levine will vary, depending on whether he’s crushed you in a deal—there’s no half-stepping his achievements. He is the Zelig of baseball’s power elite, a man who’s been in at the birth of many of its biggest milestones since 1991. He was the chief negotiator for MLB during the strike years of ’94–’95, when he brokered the collective bargaining agreement that brought the sport into the twentieth century. He struck the notorious deal with then-commissioner Fay Vincent to let Steinbrenner back into baseball. (Google it—it’s well worth your time.) He got the new Stadium built over hellacious resistance; put the YES Network, the first team-owned regional sports net, on the air to earn billions for the Yankees; and cofounded a company called Legends Hospitality to sell food and drink at the ballpark. In its ninth year of business, Legends is now valued at $1 billion and services dozens of stadiums and convention sites. Not a bad obit, haters and all.

  But Levine, who’s sixty-three, is talking about George—his boss, best buddy, and chief tormentor. “I was the first call he made almost every day, and often the last one too,” he says, getting a little tight in the throat. “But there were days when he wouldn’t speak to me, or called me everything under the sun: a ‘dope,’ a ‘failure,’ ‘you’re on the bubble, Levine!’ Which was fine, ’cause those weren’t one-way conversations. I’d fucking unload on him too.”

  And so the story begins. “I was in Los Angeles on business, 1991, and they didn’t have beepers in those days. So I’m at LAX to take the red-eye back, and I hear over the speaker, ‘Randy Levine, come to the courtesy phone.’ That was George: he could reach out and find you wherever you were in the world. He says, ‘Hey, buddy, where are you?’ I said, ‘Where am I? You just called me at LAX!’ He says, ‘Right, right—hey, look, I gotta see you, what time you landing? Come straight to my hotel, 8:00 a.m.’”

  At the time, Levine was a partner at a prestige law firm and had no business ties to the Yanks. But he’d been friends with George since the early ’80s, when the two men met in New York’s power circles. He showed up at the Regency, where George kept a luxe apartment, to entertain an offer he couldn’t refuse. One year prior, George had been suspended from baseball for his payoffs to a sad-sack gambler named Howie Spira. But what George hadn’t graspe
d then was that his expulsion by Vincent was permanent, unlike the two-year whack he got in the 1970s for funneling dark money to Richard Nixon. “So George says, ‘I made a bad mistake and you gotta help me. I think I got screwed on that deal,’” says Levine.

  Levine accepted, but extracted harsh conditions, only one of which is printable here. “I told George, ‘If I get you back, I want to be your outside counsel and charge you a lot of money.’” George agreed to all terms, and Levine and his law firm partner, Arnie Burns, went to work on Vincent. First, they filed a motion with MLB’s executive council, alleging that Vincent had denied George due process. Then they recruited other team owners who were furious at Vincent for various reasons (among them, Jerry Reinsdorf, who owned the White Sox, and Bud Selig, who owned the Brewers). “So anyway, long story short, pressure was building from the other owners, and Vincent was forced to make a deal with us,” says Levine.

  That, at any rate, is Levine’s recollection. Vincent’s is somewhat different. “Horseshit,” he harrumphs over the phone from Vero Beach, Florida, where he and his wife keep a winter home. “George was dead in the water; he had no legal recourse. But I decided [on further reflection] that the proper punishment was two years.”

  However that compromise came to pass, Levine was eager to convey it to his client. “By this point, it’s July and the [1992] Olympics in Barcelona, and George was there with the USOC,” Levine continues.

  At the time, Steinbrenner was vice chairman of the US Olympic Committee. “But no one knows where to find him, so I leave a message with the committee to have George call me back. Now, it’s 2:00 a.m., and George calls me, screaming: ‘What the fuck are you chasing me all over Spain for!’ I said, ‘I got great news. The commissioner is announcing tomorrow that you’re gonna be reinstated March 1!’ ‘March 1!’ he says. ‘Fuck you, Levine! It shoulda been January 1!’ and hangs up.”