Inside the Empire

by Bob Klapisch

  Games 1 and 2 of the four-game set were a rehash of October: the Yankees couldn’t sniff Houston’s starters. Charlie Morton cut them down as he did in the pennant clincher, K’ing ten in seven and two-thirds innings and sawing through the heart of the Yankees’ lineup. He, like Justin Verlander, who stoned them in game 2, is a reclamation project worth saluting: the kind of big-armed pitcher on the wrong side of thirty that the Astros have made a specialty of reviving. Morton had labored for three teams over nine blah seasons, lost chunks of three years to hip and shoulder woes, and never won more than ten games. Other teams mistook him for a busted valise: he made four starts for the Philadelphia Phillies before a hamstring cost him the rest of 2016.

  But Houston’s analytics people saw something in Morton and made him a modest offer. Five years recovered from Tommy John surgery, he threw harder at thirty-three than he did at twenty-eight, and he had a great natural sink on his two-seam fastball. They tweaked his delivery to reduce the stress on his hips and showed him how to back-door hitters with his slider to either side of the plate. Suddenly, he was dotting his fastball where he wanted—and throwing it 98, with heavy spin. So too his sinker, which bored in at 95 and was impossible to hit when he was on. It was filthy that night in April: of the twenty-seven outs the Yanks made, twenty-two were by strikeout or grounder.

  After the 2–1 loss, their clubhouse was silent; you could almost hear the click of throats tighten. As command pitchers do, Morton had exposed a weakness: the Yankees were clearly a hit-or-miss machine. They were patient, yes; they led the world in walks and had the highest on-base average in the league. But their run producers whiffed at an ungodly rate—once in three at-bats for Judge and Stanton, and one in four for Sánchez. That cost them, often dearly, in close games. Putting the ball in play lets you move along your runners and score manufactured runs when you need them. The Core Four Yankees were masters of the craft called “situational hitting.” They’d get a guy aboard, mix a bunt with a stolen base, and bring him home with a routine fly to center. A man on third with less than two out? Getting him home is classic situational hitting. But it’s become a lost art in this age of launch angles, and more’s the pity too. It’s a crucial tool to have when you’re locked in a pitchers’ duel—and it’s make-or-break important in the playoffs.

  That raised a second worry about these bulked-up Yankees: Were they built to storm the regular season but not to beat great pitching in the playoffs? What good would it do them to win a hundred or more games while breaking the season record for home runs if they tapped out in the divisional round? Their power and patience were limited virtues when it came to October. You can’t wait out the starter then: he’s only asked to go five innings. The last four innings are bullpen wars, a trick invented by the Kansas City Royals to win a title in 2015. Small matter that the Yankees have the deepest pen in baseball: at some point, you have to hand those guys a lead. And how, when your lineup whiffs fourteen times, are you supposed to jump in front of the Houston Astros?

  The following night, the Yankees struck out fifteen times and lost their starting pitcher early on. (Jordan Montgomery left with elbow tightness; he’d end up needing Tommy John surgery and would be lost for the year.) Fourteen of those punch-outs were against Verlander, who’d returned to peak form at thirty-five. For most of his thirties, the former Cy Young winner seemed to be losing an argument with his body. He’d thrown more pitches than anyone in baseball since his rookie year (2006), and the wear and tear of those 2,400 innings told on his soft tissue. He had core muscle surgery in 2014, then missed a chunk of 2015 with a triceps strain. His fastball velocity dipped to the low 90s; hitters ignored it and ambushed his slider. He got some arm strength back in 2016 and was once again a good, if not great, starter. Then the Astros acquired him in the summer of ’17 and performed their data magic.

  They showed him high-speed film of a slider leaving his hand and pointed out that if he altered the angle at which he released it, he’d get a bigger sweep to left-hand hitters. The Astros also changed the grip on his bread-and-butter pitch: a high-spin fastball that stayed up. Suddenly, Verlander was untouchable—no one could get on top of his four-seamer. Everything he threw now was a strike until it wasn’t; his K-to-walk ratio tripled. He was throwing as hard as he ever had, dialing up 100 in late innings. He could have been a Yankee, but his salary of $28 million had scared off Cashman and his staff. (Instead, they dealt for Sonny Gray, who earns a quarter of Verlander’s money—and pitches like it.) That frugality cost the Yankees in the ALCS of ’17. Verlander beat them twice, won series MVP, and was exactly the kind of star Big Stein would have leapt at: a knock-you-down ace who was as tough as East Texas. Somewhere, the old man was surely spinning.

  But in the regular season at least, you can outlast Verlander. The Yankees forced him to throw 105 pitches, then jumped the Astros’ closer, Ken Giles. They scored four runs off him to break a scoreless tie—and dispelled the building’s hex on their bats. The next night, they beat their arch-nemesis, Dallas Keuchel; Stanton scorched him for a pair of homers and drove in the game’s four runs. Playing loosey-goosey in the series finale, they got out to a fast lead, fell behind in the seventh, then broke the Astros’ backs with a three-run ninth. It was a breathless end to a crackerjack month—and a glimpse of the wonders to come. Their big three hitters went oh-for-the-day, but the kids did all the damage at the end. Gleyber Torres drove in two in the ninth, and Miggy Andújar had two hits and the tying run.

  Didi had carried this team as far as he could haul it; it was time for someone else to take the weight. It wouldn’t be Judge, who was hitting homers but couldn’t get a hot streak going. It wouldn’t be Stanton, who raised his average thirty points but still looked lost at the plate. And it surely wasn’t Sánchez, the sour enigma languishing at .200. No, the heroes were the kids at the bottom of the order: Torres, who’d lead the team in homers in May and win the Rookie of the Month Award at twenty-one, and Andújar, a doubles-hitting machine of twenty-three who always seemed to be standing on second base. Though neither player started the season in the bigs, they’d become the steadiest hitters on the sport’s most potent offense. They earned about a million bucks, total, between them and showed up their betters by doing the simplest act in baseball: putting bat solidly to ball. Watching them do the small stuff—shortening their stride with two strikes, laying off splitters in the dirt—you wondered when the big guys would get the message: swing-and-miss icons don’t win titles.

  After their last game in Houston, the Yankees’ clubhouse was Latin Quarter loud. Judge is the deejay, home and away: his iPhone starts the party when the Yankees win. (Rule number one in their locker room: No tunes after losses. Ever.) His playlist starts with Drake, but jumps to reggaeton: Bad Bunny, Nicky Jam, and—of course—Daddy Yankee. Ozuna was blasting over the PA system, and Severino, who’d thrown a shutout the night before, was shimmying at his locker to “Criminal.” On a very young team with a bachata beat, everyone seemed to know the words. Aaron Boone was making the rounds, giving hugs and daps. Finding Andújar, he thumped him on the chest. “Great read!” he exclaimed of Miggy’s decision to score from second on a shallow single. “That’s what I’m talking about!” Andújar beamed like a travel-ball kid as Boone moved on to the next locker.

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  The Little Genius

  Reporters who’ve gotten to know him learn that Brian Cashman has two modes of speech. The first, in front of cameras or with the pregame press, is intentionally void of content. If it isn’t the dead-fish-gray prose that writers used to get from Jeter, it’s about an hour from going stale at the gills. Gazing at the mike, Cashman will arbitrage your question, hedging both sides to come out clean. Close Cashman readers can occasionally catch flecks of gold, but nothing you’d really take to the bank. He doesn’t speak through proxies on the tabloid pages or feed ammo to his friends in the broadcast booth. Those were Steinbrenner ploys when Cashman and Torre were t
argets, reading about themselves in blind quotes. However incensed that stuff made him, Cashman never fired back. He knew you don’t win arguments with a foghorn.

  But Steinbrenner is gone now, dead for almost a decade, and Cashman did more than just survive him. While no one was looking, he created a team in his own image that looks and sounds nothing like George. His players take in data but give none of it out: they all speak the tongue of blank proverbs. Boone is a charmer who engages reporters while stiffing them for back-page fodder. There’s a vast apparatus undergirding the team, but Cashman, who built that internal structure to his specifications, cloaks it in fuzzy math and vague descriptors. Out with King George and his cult of Trumpian carnage. In with organization and the strength of machine learning. These Yankees are a future that keeps arriving.

  While he gradually grew power, Cashman found his second voice—and as those who’ve heard it know, it’s a doozy. With no change of affect or a look to see who’s listening, he’ll toss a live grenade into casual conversation, jolt you with a story or a barbed aside. When Cashman’s off the clock, he’s a killer raconteur, telling tales on everyone, himself included. It’s the last thing you look for from a monochrome guy who seems to have scrubbed his DNA of melatonin.

  Everything about Cashman reeks of caution: the size of his desk, which is so expansive, it’s like holding a conversation across a moat; his uniform of polos, dad-slacks, and boat shoes, which would place him comfortably behind a service desk at Best Buy; and his discomfort watching a game around other people, particularly at Yankee Stadium. As part of his deal, he gets a luxury suite that seats ten and is fully catered. But instead of sitting there, he hunkers in his office, catching the YES broadcast on TV. So situated, he can text to his heart’s delight, trading squibs with scouts and quants around the country. The effect is of someone who is felt, not seen—a man who makes his mark, then disappears.

  “Brian has the Colombo act down to a T, but he’s got a dorsal fin under the water,” says Oakland’s Billy Beane, a longtime pal and admirer of Cashman’s. “His mind is like a steel trap—the little bastard keeps notes on every conversation he’s ever had, including with his friends. He’ll say, ‘You told me this in 2007’—and of course he’s right.”

  When you earn Cashman’s trust, you get treated to both his voices—occasionally in the same sentence. He’ll be speaking in the first one, playing prevent defense, then suddenly drop into the second. One day you’re asking about the build-out of his staff and getting nowhere fast on the subject. He can’t (or won’t) recall how many people he’s hired, or how sharply he’s grown his overhead. And then, without a blink, he’ll tell you two stories, both of them decades old. The first concerns his own hiring in 1998 as the thirty-year-old GM of the New York Yankees. Per Cashman, the whole thing came as a rude shock: he’d nursed no aspirations to run the team. “If you’d worked for the Yankees and saw what I saw,” he says, “the last thing you’d want is to be GM.”

  Bob Watson, the then-GM, had just stepped down and strongly recommended Cashman as his successor. Cashman begged Watson to reconsider, but no luck: a meeting with George was booked the next day. Cashman went home to his then-wife Mary and said, “This is the first day of my last days as a Yankee.” Why? she asked, perplexed by his tone. “Because the next step is out the door,” he said. “There’s no other spot for me left.”

  Since joining the Yankees as a college intern in 1986, he’d watched George take apart powerful men who’d dared to fill the seat. “He brought in Syd Thrift from Pittsburgh and Bob Watson from Houston, guys who came with, I saw him do that to others; he won’t do it to me,” says Cashman. “But I didn’t go in there thinking, How dare he do this to me? I’d seen him do it to everyone.”

  George wasted no time wooing Cashman at their Regency Hotel lunch. He told him he’d pay him a salary of $300,000—a gross insult, even then—and said, “I could recycle someone who’s done this before, but I’ve been told by too many people that you’re capable.” If nothing else, at least George’s timing was rich. The Yankees were making their dynasty run, and ’98 would be the jewel in their crown. They’d sweep the Padres for their second title in three years, smash the all-time mark for most wins in a season (125, including the playoffs), and spin the turnstiles at the old Yankee Stadium, drawing nearly three million for the first time. But Cashman, a compulsive praise-deflector, shuns any authorship of that team. “Gene Michael gets most of the credit, but he had nothing to do with the draft. The talent acquisition part was Brian Sabean and Bill Livesey: they’re the reason we got Mariano, Jeter, and Pettitte and converted Posada from an infielder to catcher.” The farm system they’d stocked was loaded with next-wave prospects, but “George whacked the guys” who drafted them. Sabean, Livesey, Kevin Elfering, Mitch Lukevics—“he took them all out because he had people in his ear saying they weren’t any good.” Sabean, of course, would go on to build his empire as the GM of the San Francisco Giants, but “he deserves a plaque here and some of Stick’s credit,” Cashman insists, for drafting and keeping the Core Four together.

  The second story concerned Cashman’s working conditions when George was running the show. In 1996, the Yankees finally broke through after decades in the baseball desert. They’d done nothing of interest since 1978, missed the playoffs outright for fourteen years, and become second-class citizens in their own town, losing New York to those brazen Mets teams of the 1980s. But now they were back, riding the star-child wave of Jeter, Pettitte, and Mo. That year they won the Eastern Division, beat the Orioles for the pennant (with a little divine intervention from a teenage fan named Jeffrey Maier), and stunned the lordly Braves in the World Series. It was bedlam the next morning in the Canyon of Heroes: seemingly half the city’s census turned up on Lower Broadway to throw kisses and confetti at the Yanks. Even the Mets bent a knee in praise, buying an ad in the Daily News to congratulate the team and George himself. “I thought, Wow, he must be on, like, cloud fucking nine if even the owner of the Mets is throwing bouquets,” says Cashman. Then Cashman rode downtown and found out different.

  “As we pull into Battery Park and start getting off the bus, I hear just like this . . . screaming from George. He’s red as a tomato, veins popping out of his neck, because the players are getting on floats with their wives.” For Steinbrenner, wives were beneath contempt: they belonged on the bottom deck of the double-decker trolley that was driving behind the floats. “He’s screaming at [Jim] Leyritz and [John] Wetteland, ‘Get your fucking wives off the float!’ The players are looking at their wives and looking at The Boss, and the wives are like, ‘I’m going with my husband!’” So on the floats they went, and George turned his mortal wrath on poor Debbie Tymon, the team’s event planner. “I was like, ah, fugging ay,” groans Cashman, reliving the moment. “If he’s not happy after winning the World Championship, then there’s nothing that will keep him happy—and I mean nothing.”

  For a while, you wonder why Cashman tells these stories. But by and by, a sense of a strategy looms: he’s actually guarding the safe while seeming to crack it. His talking out of school about George and the past keeps listeners from drilling down in the present. Proud and proprietary toward this team, he won’t let you look below the waterline. He raves, for instance, about his performance-science staff, then says, “Oh, by the way, they’ll never talk to you, so don’t even bother to ask.” When asked about his mental-skills department, he pivots to the story of Chad Bohling.

  Bohling is the creator and director of that staff, but Cashman’s story about him is a smokescreen. Back in ’98, when Cashman got the GM job, he interviewed Mark Shapiro to be his assistant. Shapiro, who’s currently the president of the Jays, was a bright young thing then with the Cleveland Indians and was intrigued by the thought of joining the Yanks. As Cashman tells it, they were having lunch in Tampa when Shapiro asked if the Yanks had a mental-skills group. Cashman, who didn’t, sorely wanted to start one, but knew better than to ask George for the money to do so.
Then Shapiro asked the next question: Does George hand you a budget and let you spend it as you see fit? No, said Cashman, “Everything runs through George. He may green-light it one day, but if Billy Connors gets in his ear, then the program’s done.” Connors was a member of the Tampa mob, a gifted pitching coach whom George had canned, then later hired as vice president. He reported to Mark Newman, then the director of player development, who ran the Yanks’ fallow farm system. Together, they largely functioned to thwart the New York office, blocking all attempts to modernize. Hire additional scouts in the minors? No. Teach life skills to foreign-born prospects? No. Find Ivy League analysts to boost performance? No, and stop asking, goddamnit!

  Though he desperately wanted to hire Shapiro as his ally, Cashman leveled with him. Shapiro declined the job but thanked Cashman for his candor. He would go on to become the two-time Executive of the Year as the builder of a title-winner in Cleveland. It was a bruising loss for Cashman that turned out to be a win: it confirmed his reputation as a truth-teller. “No one in this industry is closer to Brian than me, and one of the reasons he’s so successful is, he’s stand-up,” says Omar Minaya, the ex-GM who built those vibrant Mets teams of the mid-2000s. Under George, “Cash wasn’t able to make the moves he wanted, but he was always honest about it. For some guys, the word ‘yes’ never really meant ‘yes.’ Brian wasn’t like that, and other GMs appreciated it.”

  With Shapiro, the reward was tangible: he wound up steering Cashman to Bohling. In 2005, “I almost left the Yankees,” says Cashman, over the power struggle with Tampa. “But George says, ‘I want you to stay. What will it take you to stay?’ I said, ‘I want to bring us into the new world order, starting with a mental-skills program.’ He said, ‘Fine, whatever you need, you’ll do.’”