Inside the Empire
Page 21
Or does he stand on his brand as a one-man wrecking crew and dare the fans, and the media, to come after him? Because, as day follows night, there’ll be hell to pay if he has a couple more postseasons like this one. This town isn’t Miami, and those folks in the stands aren’t kindly old widows and snow-bird golfers. Just ask Alex Rodríguez what life can be like when the crowd turns against you in the Bronx.
Big Stein had it wrong, you see: This town doesn’t love stars. It only loves the ones who actually deliver.
Some playoff losses hurt worse than others. After the Yankees’ game 5 heartbreak against the Seattle Mariners in the ’95 ALDS, their then-manager, Buck Showalter, wept quietly in his office. George Steinbrenner had stormed down into the clubhouse to blast him for blowing a two-games-to-none lead. But when he saw Showalter’s head pressed against the desk, his shoulders heaving with sobs, Steinbrenner gently closed the door behind him and left the players to mediate their pain.
Then there was the fallout from this loss to the Sox, in which the response in the room was—roughly nothing. No tears or gnashed teeth, no brooding in stunned silence. Instead, what you heard was the rip-and-tear krrrrrrich of clubhouse guys taping up cartons. There used to be something called Garbage Bag Day, in which the players straggled in after a season-ending loss to collect their stuff and give a final comment. Not anymore, and certainly not this time. No one wanted to relitigate what just happened. The better team had won—end of story.
“What a year they had—congrats to them,” said a somber (but not morose) Aaron Judge. He didn’t get an argument from the guys around him. In tone and in spirit, the clubhouse felt like the last day of a community college school year. There were a few meaningful hugs: Judge saying good-bye to Luke Voit; CC wishing Gray a good winter. What you didn’t hear was a single Yankee say, “We’ll get those sonsofbitches next year.” Instead, just two words: “next year.”
One by one, they stopped to trade farewells with the writers with whom they’d spent the last half-year. Happ stuck around to give his number to reporters, who’d be calling to check on his contract talks. “I was praying for another shot in game 5,” he said, but that would have to wait till next October. Someone mentioned that the Yanks would be smart to sign him fast. “That would be nice,” he said, and quietly slipped away.
As for Boone, he waited for most of the press to clear out, then toured the locker room to hug his players. “See you in a couple months,” he said to Stanton. Stanton gave a pained smile that said, I’m sorry. There were more such exchanges as Boone made his rounds: an embrace and a couple of mumbled words. The last Yankee to leave was Sabathia. He stood before his cubby, signed a pair of new cleats, then placed them in Sonny Gray’s locker.
Epilogue
NOVEMBER 2018
After a season ends, Yankee Stadium is a graveyard, or must surely feel like one to some of its neighbors. For five months, it looms there, darkly, in their midst, sending out nothing but ghostly emanations of the season, or seasons, past. Only the employee gate, at the butt end of the ballpark, stays open during the winter. After the early-morning arrivals of Cashman and his staff, nothing stirs there except Jerome Avenue stragglers en route to the IRT. In a community so reliant on the fortunes of the team for the jobs and retail traffic it provides, there is, in its annual closing, something distinctly funereal, as if the whole ’hood has entered a state of grief.
The morning we met with Cashman—five days after the loss to Boston—was appropriately wreathed in drab. A gray, steady rain, blown by fits and starts of wind, surged as press cards were presented to the guard. But once upstairs, in the executive suites on the second floor of the building, there was no sign of sadness or obsolescence. The band was back together as if it had never broken up: quants and scouts and senior vice presidents bustled past on their way to meetings. If anyone was still in mourning, it wasn’t evident in their bearing. Instead, what they gave off was the usual beehive buzz. It was just another Monday at the office.
Cashman had been at his desk for hours already, but he wasn’t working furiously on redemption. Instead, he was doing what he always does: talking on his overburdened phones. Let other general managers take golf vacations or go fly-fishing with their kids; Cashman, the grinder, was plugging away at his weeks-long list of calls. After the season ends, he begins his ritualized version of baseball’s mating dance. He rings every other executive in the game and asks them what they’re looking to do that winter. “Are they trying to move salary while adding a bullpen arm? Maybe there’s a matchup down the road that works for both of us.” By the end of the World Series, he’s already finished doing recon on who’s available, for what, on thirty teams (including his own). That isn’t, for Cashman, a laborious drill: he lives for these weeks and stopless conversations.
How comfortable is Cashman with who he is and what he does? He greeted us wearing a French naval sweater that—pourquois pas?—had a hood attached. It says that he’s fifty-one in the team’s media guide, but the only indicator that the guy is middle-aged is the grudging surrender of his hairline. He never stops churning or lets his battery recharge, which is why he’ll hold this seat till the day he keels over—presumably at his desk, returning a call. Nowhere in sports is there a more entrenched executive: Cashman is arguably the most powerful chief in baseball because he loves—and is loved by—this franchise. He has never presided over a losing season and never had to dismantle a broken roster and build a new one from scratch. Along the way, he has helped make the Steinbrenners unimaginable sums of money while doing very nicely for himself.
Men with his kind of clout usually want something in return: a percentage of the team, say, and the cover of Sports Illustrated. But Cashman still conducts himself like the kid he surely was when he reluctantly took the job in ’98: as if he’s hanging on by the skin of his teeth. Maybe it’s just what happens when you’ve worked for Big Stein—your central nervous system never fully resets. Somewhere in your subconscious you still worry that the phone will ring and, when you answer it, screaming will commence.
What we learned in our final sit-down was that Cashman was done with 2018 and would spend zero time reviewing the tape. “We were good enough to win, but Boston played its ‘A’ game and we didn’t,” he said. He waited a beat, then gave an open-palm shrug whose meaning was, What, me worry? “Now, does that make the season a failure? Objectively, no. We won nine more games than we did last year and broke the home run record. But we missed an opportunity with a very talented team, and there’s no second chances or looking back. The season’s over, and now we’re trying to figure out how to make what we have better.”
He acknowledged the failures of several stars in the playoffs, Stanton, Sánchez, and Sevy chief among them. “G did everything we asked of him, outside of perform when it counted, but when he’s on, he’s unstoppable. And then, when he’s off, he’s so off, it’s horrific—swinging at a curve seven feet in front of the plate. But, I mean, he’s one of the better players in the game today. He just happened to get off track at the wrong time.”
It’s a reasonable view of Stanton, one echoed by Cashman’s peers. “He’s a certain type of hitter, and what he does, he does well,” said Billy Beane, speaking of Stanton after the ALDS. “He’s not Miguel Cabrera, but who is? He’s going to hit thirty to forty homers and drive in a hundred in an average season, and there’s tremendous value in that.” Still, Cashman was pressed about Stanton’s yearlong lapses with runners in scoring position and reminded that Stanton had spent a month in Tampa working specifically on his stroke to right. “Well, all these guys have characteristics of hitting to right, and without question, we preach using the whole field. But when someone goes out there and wants to do damage, they can get ahead of themselves.”
Apropos of that, he added: “I don’t think Gary Sánchez was trying to pull as much as he did, but in the second half, he lost confidence. So now we have to try and get him untracked, be the kraken he was for two years.”
And so it went for a lively couple of hours as Cashman stood firm that his team had the goods and would bust its tail making those goods better. Regarding “Miggy and Gleyber expanding the zone” down the stretch and “showing some warts on defense,” the solution was to “get out the Compound W [over the winter] and get rid of those.” Both were “high-ceiling guys” whose growth would boost the lineup, as would the return of Clint Frazier, “an A-level talent” who could be a star in left, assuming he was past his concussion problems. Cashman was proud to have added a guy like Voit to the “talent matrix” and said he’d go into Tampa as the presumptive starter at first. He also heaped praise on McCutchen and Britton, both of whom he’d clearly re-sign if talks with their people worked out. But no less clear was Cashman’s hunger for more—“more talent, more leadership, more everything”—as he trawled the winter market. “Remember: we won 125 games in ’98, then went out and traded for Clemens. Same thing now: we’re not sitting back. We want to push deep into October.”
About the futures of Gardy and CC, Cashman wouldn’t comment, even to speculate off the record. The team’s organizational meetings were to be held in a week, and he wasn’t about to tip his hand on decisions the assembled brass would make. (As it turned out, Gardner and Sabathia both re-signed for one year, the opening volleys of what would surely be a busy and noisy winter.) Indeed, if any news emerged from our final meeting, it concerned the power of the quants. Per Cashman’s directive, that department had equal say when it came to roster additions and subtractions. He even hinted that the quants could overrule him about player acquisitions. When the list of prominent free agents was put in front of him, Cashman gave an unprintable pan to several names at the top. “I don’t like his act—at all,” he said of one of them. Of another, he jeered, “He takes games off. You could tell in the first at-bat if he showed up.”
However, “the analytics guys will have a different position because they’re sharks,” he went on. “They swim, they feed, they have no emotion. Is a guy better than what we have now? Then they’re in.” If Cashman ever expected to have his opinions echoed by the quant staff he created, he’d certainly been disabused of it by now. “Their thing is, hey, that fish has swum beside me for the last five miles and he’s my buddy and stuff, but right now, I’m hungry, so fuck him.” In short, the numbers do all the talking at the Yankees’ year-end meetings. Cashman’s reluctance notwithstanding, the quants (and Hal Steinbrenner) would dictate whether the team signed a max free agent. Fiscal restraint only gets you so far when you share a division with the spendthrift Red Sox.
In the end, Cashman wrestled us to a draw regarding his take on the season he’d just wrapped. He wouldn’t call it a disappointment, nor a cause for cheer, perhaps because he felt both emotions acutely. Or maybe he was telling the truth when he said that he “didn’t get emotional because it’s my job not to anymore. When you have a chair like I have, there’s an understanding that comes over time.” There were seasons when “we overperformed, like 1996, when we beat the Braves,” and other seasons when the Yanks were the darlings of Vegas and crapped out in four games. Still, it was hard to imagine not having your heart broken, after working so hard for so long. Maybe the fairest read was that, whatever he actually felt, Cashman wasn’t going to say it for public consumption.
If he’s had it with any aspect of his job, it’s the deathless media scrutiny of his moves. He refers to the hot-take spins as “narratives,” as in “the narrative we strike out too much. Well, we didn’t strike our way out of the Boston series. We hit too many grounders, which is unusual for us. We normally hit in the air and over the fence.” After twenty years, such irritants still get under his skin, in part because it’s a fight he’ll never win. He works in a city with two watch-dog dailies and a pair of sports-talk stations that do not sleep. At any hour, day and night, someone’s second-guessing his judgment—and his judgment is the thing for which he’s prized. He has troves of information that New York sportswriters and bloggers know absolutely nothing of, dozens of staffers spitting out data on decision-points, and an owner whose long-term financial agenda has ruled out some big deals. Still, outsiders depict Cash as the man with the golden calf, able to buy a superteam at a moment’s notice. That stuff got old for him a long time ago—specifically, back when it was true. All George’s star-searching ever accomplished was to block the next dynasty from being launched.
Cashman won that fight, and virtually all of the fights since, because his vision was simply better than everyone else’s. The basis of his big idea: spend on hard goods, not soft ones—on structure, scouting, player development, and analytics. There’s something humble in his construct: it acknowledges the human limits of even the most brilliant athletes. For the cost of one A-Rod, you can build academies in countries that will send you Gleyber Torreses by the bushel. Instead of Yoenis Céspedes, you can staff up strong in Tampa and spoon-feed all those kids in your Rookie Leagues. In short, you do best by doing all the right things, not just for your team but for your culture. You assemble a staff that works investment-banker hours and sweats each detail of the job. You sink resources into the assets that matter most: talent, character, supply chain. You promote those people who tell the truth to each other in the service of your product. And yes, you sell that product at an absolute premium and make no apologies for the markup. Quality costs more, and there’s a reason for that: it holds up its end over time. You want a Hermès bag, it’ll run you five grand—but you’ll pass it down to your daughter. You’d rather pay $250 for the Michael Kors knockoff? You’ll pass it to Goodwill in two seasons.
Because that’s, essentially, what Cashman and Co. peddle: a luxury brand that happens to be a ball club. What its millions of fans buy is a marquee of sustained excellence and a franchise that stands by its word. To be sure, people bitch about the price of Legends seats. But it’s probably a good bet that the people bitching loudest aren’t Yankee fans. For them, the money spent brings a sure return: seven months of crackling entertainment. They get good-guy protagonists like Judge and Didi to play their hearts out every day and never betray them. They get wunderkind rookies every spring to fall in love with as the season progresses. And they get a management staff that swings for the fences whenever the trade deadlines roll around.
In sum, then, full marks go to Cashman and his owner for crafting a team that lives up to its legend. Twenty years ago, Cash was made first mate on the Queen Mary and managed to keep the old girl shipshape. When at last he got the boat under his own command, he swapped it for one of those super-yachts with Rolls-Royce engines and a helipad. It’s lean, it’s mean, and it’ll get you where you’re going in the style to which you’ve grown accustomed. But—and there is always a but in this world—Cash knows just one way to travel. For the best part of a century, his team has stood for power, in all its brute expressions. Star power, slugging power, the power of the checkbook—power is what the Yanks do because they’ve always done it.
But power at the expense of everything else is a trap they’ve set for themselves. This team’s so overleveraged on one-trick sluggers that it has no option when they swing and miss. These Yankees don’t win, not because they can’t run, but because they don’t even bother pretending to try. The
bunt, the steal, the extra base taken—all those are affronts to their self-conception. Never mind that the Core Four rosters won four rings by doing those things better than everyone else. The current-day Yanks have doubled down on their bet that the three-run homer conquers all. Let the Red Sox devote an entire field to the art of hitting with two strikes. (As Sports Illustrated’s Tom Verducci reported, the Sox set up a station to teach their players how to extend, prolong, and win at-bats in spring training. Cora, their manager, credited that drill for the team’s move-the-line production.) Let the Sox purposely develop hitters who use all their tools to threaten and wear down pitchers, beginning with Betts, Benintendi, and Bogaerts. Let their manager have an inventory of cross-trained fielders he can plug in and play at several positions and starters who are game enough to come on in late innings and get three crucial outs in the World Series. The Sox are a team, and an organic culture, that gobbles up new ideas. If it’s smart and it works, it goes straight into the mix, and who cares if it isn’t on brand?
Early on in Cashman’s tenure, the Yankees fielded teams that were good enough to win rings but didn’t. Those groups that fell short from ’01 to ’07 might serve as an object lesson. You can put together a roster that has everything—except the extra gear today’s Red Sox have. Cashman has built a club that will win a boatload of games over the course of the next ten years. It’s young and it’s vibrant and has talent to burn—and that’s precisely what will happen if things don’t change. It takes courage to course-correct when you’re damn good already and making money hand over fist. It takes even more nerve to admit to yourself that your archrival does it better. But Cashman’s been here before, and he’s told himself that truth. The proof is in these next-gen Yankees.