Inside the Empire

by Bob Klapisch

  Still, you may be asking: Why a chapter on Randy Levine? Because, in every sense that matters, these new-age Yankees are as much his baby as Hal’s and Cashman’s. There is no massive build-out of the team’s infrastructure without the cash he brings in each year. Though the Yankees are privately held and don’t release public records, Forbes magazine put their revenue at $619 million last year, roughly double the league average of $315 million. According to Mike Ozanian, a managing editor at Forbes and the cohost of the magazine’s SportsMoney Show on YES, those figures do not reflect the “upstream earnings” from their ownership stakes in YES, Legends Hospitality, and the New York City Football Club, which they co-own with Manchester City, the English Premier League champions. “Since the Yanks don’t report what they make to the press,” Ozanian says, “we have to do a lot of private-detective work, using many different sources to compile a number.”

  Ozanian’s staff sifts through documents the team files with New York State’s bond authority. “Those tell us what they grossed in Stadium ticket sales, merchandise, and food-and-drink concessions.” (Legends Hospitality, their spin-off company, handles the ballpark’s catering business and services its sixty-seven luxury suites.) Ozanian also talks to sports lawyers and investment bankers and with MLB itself to get hold of the Yankees’ data streams. In conclusion, says Ozanian, who goes to one game a year and sits in the Forbes suite at the Stadium, the Yankees “are the most incredibly lucrative property in the history of sports-entertainment content.”

  He also points out that George fronted an investors’ group that bought the team for $8.8 million—and that “CBS sold it to him [in 1973] for less than they’d actually paid.” (One Yanks executive, who never speaks to the press, showed us the original bill of sale between George and CBS. Sitting in a cabinet in the executive’s office, the typed-by-hand contract has yellowed badly and should probably be displayed in a hermetically sealed case in the Yankees Museum down the hall. The best detail—by far—in that document is what George actually put down for his stake. It wasn’t a million dollars, or even the $800,000 that’s been widely bandied about. No, the check he wrote was for $80,000. That was somehow enough to buy Steinbrenner 10 percent of the team and to make him its general managing partner.) Says Ozanian, “This is a classic case study of not only understanding your brand but using that brand to buy and enhance new Yankee-related businesses.”

  By Ozanian’s reckoning, there are four social classes in baseball. There are the filthy rich (the Dodgers, Cubs, Giants, and Red Sox); the middling rich (eleven teams, including the Angels, the Astros, and—somehow—the New York Mets); and the merely rich (everyone else in the game). Then there are the New York Yankees in a bracket all their own. They earn 20 percent more than the second-wealthiest team, have a market value nearly three times the average of the other clubs ($4 billion versus $1.6 billion), and have the second-richest TV deal of any team in baseball, earning $125 million a year. (Additionally, they earn about $100 million a year from the game’s national TV deals with FOX, ESPN, and TBS.)

  Even after the Yankees sold YES to FOX for almost $4 billion in 2014, they held back 20 percent of it for themselves. YES is now valued at $5 billion, so each year their stake in that lucrative network pays them tens of millions of dollars in dividends. And then there’s Legends, the hospitality firm that sells concessions and premium goods for dozens of professional and college teams. Like other Yankees properties, Legends has surged and merged. It partnered first with the Dallas Cowboys, then barreled into the business-convention trade by partnering with New Mountain Capital, a private equity firm. Legends posts annual sales in excess of $700 million, brokers personal-seat licenses for NFL teams, and conducts feasibility studies for new arenas, to name just some of its services.

  So, to review the punch list George handed Levine when he joined the team as president in 2000. New stadium? Check. Ticket revenues have more than doubled in year-over-year comparisons with the old park, which was actually 20 percent larger. New network? Check. YES is a cash cow on steroids (like most cows these days, come to think of it). New revenue sources? Check and double-check. Aaron Judge’s jersey is the biggest seller of the last two years, even excluding those bootleg shirts on River Avenue. (Note to consumers: Most of that stuff isn’t licensed, so read the label on the garment closely. Then read it again.) But the best part of all the Yankees’ off-site income, including the proceeds from Legends, their dividends from YES, and the New York City Football Club, of which the Yanks own 20 percent? Most of that money isn’t subject to revenue-sharing, so the team keeps ninety cents of every dollar those streams deliver.

  George Steinbrenner cared only about winning titles and plowed most of his profits back into player contracts. But these aren’t his Yankees, and that isn’t their only motive. Hal’s focus, besides winning, is fielding a durable contender that reaches the playoffs every season, growing his gross revenues on and off the field, and paying robust dividends every quarter to his family and minority partners in the team. Cashman’s motives closely mirror Hal’s. Though he burns to win a title, Cash is patient about the process. “Did I do everything in my power to give this team a chance?” he says. “If so, I have to be able to live with what happens, which, let’s face it, is partly about luck. Who’s healthy in October? Who gets hot at the right time? All that stuff matters, and I can’t control it.”

  During the second phase of Joe Torre’s tenure, 2001–2007, the Yanks won an average of ninety-eight games a year and finished first in their division six of those seven seasons—but made it to the World Series only twice. (They lost both times: in ’01 to Arizona on Mo Rivera’s blown save in Game 7, and in ’03 to the upstart Marlins in Game 6.) Those other five years were a bitches’ brew of bad luck (Joba Chamberlain versus midges in Cleveland), bad karma (the loss in the ’04 championship series to Boston’s lovable “idiots”), and bad timing. (Alex Rodríguez was the league’s Most Valuable Player in the ’05 and ’07 seasons. His combined playoff record those years: .200 batting average, zero home runs, and one solitary run batted in.)

  Cashman built teams that should’ve won more titles during the Core Four’s prime. To this day, he is bothered by that fact. In private, he blames neither A-Rod nor Sheffield, who were mostly awful in those playoffs. Nor does he whine about karma or timing or any of the other vagaries of the game. To the extent that he points a finger, it’s at Torre himself, whose leadership in those late years seemed to flag. Cashman won’t add to the record on that subject, beyond what he said earlier in this book. But the source of his rancor is clear enough: Torre’s 2009 memoir, The Yankee Years. In the best-selling book, cowritten by Tom Verducci, Torre called out a number of ex-Yankees, saying, for instance: “The difference between Kevin Brown and David Wells is that both make your life miserable, but David Wells meant to.” Of Carl Pavano, a gifted righty who didn’t pitch much for the Yanks after they signed him to a four-year deal (he missed half the ’06 season complaining of “bruised buttocks” and the other half recouping from broken ribs sustained when he crashed his Porsche into a truck), Torre wrote: “The players all hated him. It was no secret.”

  Joe saved his strongest medicine, however, for Cashman. In the book, he complained about the “lack of trust” between them, saying that it spiked after Cashman re-upped in ’05 and was granted greater latitude by George. Per Torre, Cashman became overreliant on stats, staffed up his own analytics crew, and discounted Torre’s take on roster decisions. But it’s Torre’s final zinger that stung the worst: his claim that Cashman “betrayed” him “on several fronts” during his last contract sit-down with George. He accused Cash of remaining “neutral” during the session, which was attended by a number of top-line executives. When asked, several of those executives gave a very different take on what transpired at that meeting—and in the years before it.

  Per Levine, whose account was seconded by others who bore witness: “Cash was incredibly loyal to Joe. He stood up for Joe’s job at least twi
ce. George wanted to fire Joe in ’06 and ’07, after we lost to the Tigers and Indians [in the ALDS]. But Cash and Steve [Swindal] talked George out of it—and remember, Steve was gonna be George’s successor as managing partner of the Yanks.” Per another source who was at the meeting in Tampa, “Brian flew down there a day ahead to ask George to give Joe a hearing. Then he took a late flight back to New York, told Joe he’d gotten him the face-to-face with George, and sat next to him on the plane ride down there.”

  There were conflicting reports about that meeting. The media said that Torre had been asked to take a pay cut. Several people who were there in Tampa and who heard the terms that Torre turned down said otherwise. Truth was, Torre faced a 33 percent reduction in guaranteed pay, to $5 million, but it was attached to an important clause. “Yes, George offered him $5 million, but with easy incentives that could bring it to $8 million and earn him a second-year extension,” says one person who was present. (In 2007, Torre made $7.5 million; his closest competitor was Lou Piniella, who earned $3.5 million to run the Cubs.) “George’s pitch was, ‘We paid you a premium when you won all those titles, but you haven’t won a title in seven years. Still, we don’t want you to leave, so we’re making you a fair offer here.’”

  Torre wanted two years with a stipulation that if he got fired during the 2008 season, his 2009 salary would be paid in full. If he was dismissed after 2008, however, he would receive a buyout for ’09. The Yankee hierarchy almost immediately declined. Torre left Tampa and signed a deal with the Dodgers for just over $4 million a year. LA dropped out of the playoffs each of his three seasons, and Torre quit managing in 2010, having finished out his term. One side note worth inserting: Torre managed three teams before the Yanks’ job came along. He ran the Mets for five seasons, the Braves for three, and the St. Louis Cardinals for six. In those fourteen seasons, he won zero pennants, finished 107 games below .500, and was fired by all those clubs.

  Most managers with losing records don’t get a fourth chance, let alone one with the resurgent Yanks. In his twelve years in the Bronx, Torre brought home six pennants and those four World Series in his first five seasons. But it wasn’t Torre who drafted and groomed the Core Four or signed their All-Star subalterns. It was a litany of whip-smart people who came before him—Cashman and Brian Sabean and Stick Michael and many others—and it was George (and Levine) who made the money available to bulk up the lineup with “big boppers,” as Torre called Sheffield, A-Rod, Giambi, et al. Nevertheless, says Levine, “Torre thought he made George Steinbrenner, when it was George who made Joe Torre.”

  Levine, who admits to a certain fondness for Torre while conceding that he didn’t finish Joe’s book (“You know, it just felt like . . . this is Joe, and Joe was always about Joe”), says that George didn’t mind the credit Torre claimed for managing those title teams. What George resented was “Joe cutting him out of the credit, along with everyone else. George was always a ‘we’ guy, not a ‘me’ guy, and Torre thought he’d grown bigger than George.”

  One last note on the fallout from Torre’s book. In January of ’09, days before its publication, a bootleg copy was obtained by the Post, where it made a very big splash. That was the week of the annual Baseball Writers’ Association dinner. Cashman showed up to it and was ambushed by the press about the charges Torre levied in the book. Cashman told reporters that he didn’t know anything about a rift and hadn’t yet read the book. Then he left the event and rang up Torre, who was vacationing in Hawaii with his family.

  Cashman asked Joe, Is it true what the writers are saying?

  Torre said, simply, No.

  9

  * * *

  * * *

  Hal Steinbrenner:

  The Anti-Boss

  Every team kicks off its season in April with a full tank of gas in the car. But energy derives from hope, and hope derives from wins; by July, you can often tell the winners from the losers by how they take the field between innings. If players still jog to their positions with purpose, they’re probably running ahead in their division (or close behind) and expecting resupplies at the trade deadline. Watch them in the dugout when their team is up. Do they track at-bats and the pitcher’s move to home, or do they sit there with their arms splayed across the bench, idly chatting up the guys beside them? Those are easy checks for a fan to perform; writers have other ways to read the meter. How many players are at their lockers before games, not hiding in their lounge or the video room? Are the monitors in the clubhouse tuned to other games, and if so, are the players watching with real interest?

  But the surest tell of a team’s direction is its manager’s body language. For four and a half months, Boone sat up straight and met your gaze while taking questions. Accompanied by media relations director Jason Zillo, Boone whistled or hum-sang as he strode from his office to the pregame press conference. He then set up shop behind the batting cage, chanting encouragement to his guys. But bit by bit, the lassitude and losses of August set in, and by September Boone looked wrung dry.

  On the West Coast road trip that began the final month, he plopped down in the press room after a loss to Oakland looking as pale as he had in March. The circles under his eyes had gathered mass, and for the first time you really felt him wearing these games at three or four in the morning. That was the night Severino was shelled for four runs before he broke a sweat in the first. Everything he threw got barreled up by the A’s, just rope after rope to the gaps. Compounding his nightmare was Sánchez’s performance: two passed balls and two wild pitches, all in one ungodly half-inning. The passed balls, by the way, were on heaters, not sliders. How on earth does a major league catcher muff a couple of fastballs?

  It was as inexcusable as it was inexplicable, considering that Sánchez and Severino had been battery-mates since their late teens. “I have to do a better job than that,” said Sánchez, but this latest mea culpa was roundly ignored. He’d been blowing the same smoke for a year and a half, and all he ever got was worse. In just fifty-nine games, he led the majors in passed balls and was costing his starters wins behind the plate. Boone barely touched on the matter after the loss, leaving it to his predecessor, Joe Girardi, to explain what the problem was. An analyst on MLB Network these days, Girardi went strong to the rack on Sánchez, rattling the rim with his comments. “His left knee collapses and he’s not in position to catch and block some of these balls. You gotta fix that base,” he said on national TV. “Until it’s fixed, he’s going to struggle.”

  But back to Boone, who bore the weight of those mistakes and seemed powerless to either fix or address them. After a game in Seattle that weekend, Boone went somewhere he hadn’t gone before: he used the team’s injuries as a shield. “Look how beat up we are,” he groaned. “People say, ‘I know you’re missing so-and-so here and fill-in-the-blank there, but . . .’ No: that’s the point. We are missing those guys, and it really makes a difference for us.”

  He paused, took a breath to register what he’d said, then quickly tried to reel it back in. “Look, I walk through that clubhouse every day, and I know what we’re made of here. We’re going to be fine when we get some guys back. We’re still a beast, and we know it.”

  It wasn’t clear whom he hoped to convince. The division had slipped away, the A’s were closing fast, and some lever seemed to have been thrown in Boone. For two-thirds of the season, he thought he had a handle on who his Yankees were. They were the Legion of Boom for opposing pitchers, a cast of heavy hitters with comic-book strength and more swag than a Drake-and-Yeezy tour. Only now they scared no one, not even the Twins, to whom they’d drop a series six days later. It’s a terrible feeling to be running a team in September and have no idea what its nature is. Were these Yanks the same bullies who’d prevailed over the Astros, Sawx, and Indians in the first three months of the season? Or were they clueless meatheads whom the league had figured out and who were now presenting as a wild-card loser? Anyone claiming to know the answer to that question was lying through their teeth, and
Boone wouldn’t go there. Like everyone involved, he’d have to wait and see. But that’s baseball, as someone—oh, yes, Boone himself—has said. It’ll break your heart in half every time.

  Back at the Stadium, the beatings continued, and morale did not improve. The Yanks dropped two of three to the fourth-place Blue Jays, who were clearly phoning the month in. Their manager, John Gibbons, had let it be known that he’d be stepping down at season’s end. Meantime, he put across a lineup in the Bronx of not-yets and never-will-bes, including a starter in the middle game whose ERA neared seven. So naturally, that starter, Sean Reid-Foley, stonewalled the Yanks for five innings, departing with ten Ks and a shutout going. The story of the day, though, was CC Sabathia, who seemed to have finally run out of magic. As was first the case in Boston and then in Oakland, CC was blown out early. It was painful to watch the proud Samurai battle with nothing left in his scabbard. His cutter was suddenly a cookie that crumbled in the zone, dawdling up there at 87, not 90. A nonentity named Randal Grichuk crushed him for two homers, and the Blue Jays ran him out of there in the third. If you were looking for a marker on where the season was trending, here was as good a gloss as any. Till August, the Yanks had been counting on CC to pitch meaningful postseason innings. He’d been money in the 2017 playoffs, particularly the championship series, and a guy they’d leaned on heavily after losses. But in the course of the long summer, Sabathia’s knee had worn down and he was essentially left naked out there. He wasn’t ready to admit it—“I just have to make better pitches,” he reflected, after the Blue Jays’ shellacking—but minus his cutter, he couldn’t command the corners with just a changeup and a lazy two-seamer.