by Bob Klapisch
Alomar and Torres met informally in the theater district one Saturday evening in June, just before Torres and his wife were about to enter the Minskoff Theatre to see The Lion King. Alomar had other plans that night, but arranged for a few critical minutes outside the box office. There, he and Torres, speaking in Spanish, broke down the slump. More importantly, Alomar sought to restore Torres’s wavering confidence.
“I knew Gleyber was struggling. I’d watched enough Yankees games to see that,” Alomar said by telephone one day this past November. “I made two points to him. The first was about concentration and dedication. I said, ‘Anyone can be good, but to be great you have to be married to this game.’”
Alomar then paused to make a second salient point to Torres, who listened in rapt attention. “I told him, ‘Hitting is a lot like throwing a ball: your hands have to go back before you can throw to first base. You have to wind up. It works the same way in hitting. Your front knee has to go back towards your bat, and then you go forward. That’s where your power comes from.’”
What Alomar had been seeing from Torres was markedly different.
“Gleyber’s front leg was going straight up, not back,” Alomar said. “He was straight and narrow, which meant he was going forward without power. He was worried about getting jammed, but I said, ‘You’re beating yourself, you’re slow in the zone. If you have confidence in your legs, you’ll come back.’ And he did.”
Despite a minor hip injury, Torres raised his average in each of the next two months. But few in the clubhouse ever knew about the meeting with Alomar; Torres shields his privacy fiercely. He never gossips, especially about himself. His personal bio line in the Yankees’ media guide is eight words long. Each night he goes home and double-bolts the door, never joining teammates for an evening out. When he was DL’ed last year, he worked so diligently on his English that he now declines an interpreter when he speaks. Still, he talks only to a handful of teammates. One of them is Didi, who brought him under his wing and counseled him on the importance of on-field conduct. Torres plays with an edge that verges on arrogance: he has a habit of challenging home-plate umps over borderline ball/strike calls. These Yankees don’t do stare-downs, least of all by rookies. Politeness matters to a patient team that takes as many pitches as they do. “I was a very young player like him once,” Didi tells us when we ask about his advice to Torres. “He doesn’t need me to take care of him—he’s pretty confident already—but I’m there if he wants it.”
Time was—like, three years ago—a rookie came up and said nothing to the umps till he’d earned his bones. Not anymore. In the post-juice era, the game’s swung so hard in the direction of youth that rookies now have leverage, and they use it. It’s common to see Juan Soto, the twenty-year-old man-child, linger at the plate to admire his bombs, or Ronald Acuña, the swag-a-licious slugger, spurn a $30 million extension before his call-up. If they incense their veteran teammates, well, hey, whatevs—they’ll be around long after those sourpuss geezers are gone. The upshot is that it’s dicey for a manager to draw the line with player decorum: he can easily freeze relations with a rising star by overplaying his hand.
One day in the summer of 2018, Willie Randolph, the great ex-Yankee who managed the Mets to the brink of the World Series in ’06, was talking about a run-in he’d had with José Reyes that presaged the coming shift in power relations. On the eve of their NLCS against the Cardinals that fall, Randolph held an informal workout at Shea Stadium. Reyes, wearing a do-rag in lieu of his cap, was waiting to take his turn in the batting cage. It was a small thing, but Randolph pulled him aside and told him to go in and get his hat. “I was trying to build camaraderie, instill the idea that we’re one and do everything as a team.” Reyes, then twenty-three but already an All-Star shortstop, gave his manager “that look” before heading in. “He was pouting and didn’t like it,” said Randolph, adding that if “I had it to do over, I wouldn’t’ve done it that way. I didn’t take into account how the younger guys react; it’s a different generation these days.”
As the Yankees learned the hard way with Gary Sánchez last year, you don’t go at a sensitive kid head-on. Instead, you dispatch your biggest star to quietly have a word with him. At the start of June, Torres’s great run ended. He got homer-happy and began leaving the zone, chasing high heat and sliders away. The strikeouts began to gnaw at him; for the first time in the bigs, he was flailing. One day, as he was coming off back-to-back oh-fers, Aaron Judge put an arm around his waist. Bending slightly to be heard above the clatter of their cleats, Judge did all the talking in a terse half-whisper while they walked from the dugout to the clubhouse.
Through no accident whatsoever, the Yankees gave Torres the stall beside Judge’s on the left-hand wall. Looking around to make sure that he wasn’t being spied on, Judge kept talking sotto voce. He made a gesture with his palms, the yogic injunction to Relax; stay the course; let it go. Torres’s shoulders softened as he listened, nodding. For the first time in weeks, he looked like what he was: a kid barely old enough for a beer. Behind his reserve, there’s a sweetness in Torres that comes through when he feels acknowledged. You can see it on the field after he’s had a big hit: he casts a shy grin in the direction of the dugout, as if searching for his parents in the stands. Those are the kinds of moments when baseball rings heroic: a young man making his mark, and his new tribe taking him in. That’s why the game still matters to adults who fell for it early in life. At bottom, it’s always about coming home, wherever the road wound after you left.
For Judge too, that moment was a kind of arrival. He didn’t ask to be the leader of the world’s most lustrous team; rather, it was thrust upon him by his stature. For longer than it knows, baseball has yearned for Aaron Judge, a star whose unfakeable, bone-deep goodness resonates through the screen. He is that rarest thing in sports: a gentleman-soldier committed to the men in his ranks. Endorsements? Very few. Cover stories? Sorry, no time now, he tells everyone—through Zillo, who handles the requests for him.
In the summer of Judge’s rookie season, Bob Klapisch got an hour alone with him and found him puzzled by his fame. At the time, he was leading the world in homers, the Stadium was packed with girls in peek-a-boo ALL RISE tops, and there was a line of reporters waiting for a word with him. He answered Bob’s questions with gracious evasions, weighing the right to ask them against his right to self-concealment. He didn’t resent the attention exactly, but saw no point in fanning it. One exchange during that chat was telling: when asked if he noticed the MARRY ME! signs being flashed in the right-field stands, Judge flushed slightly and gave his gap-toothed grin. “I’m twenty-five,” he said, “and I’ve got ten years to accomplish what I want to in this game. When I’m thirty-five, maybe I’ll give that stuff some thought, but . . .”
And here he was now, almost exactly a year later, giving life advice to a lonely, fretful kid. Asked a week or so later what he’d said to Torres to help him through his slump, Judge fixed Klapisch with a measuring gaze. He has a habit of filing away little surprises for further contemplation. “Nothing much, you know: ‘Just keep your head up,’” he said. “‘Everyone goes through it, but you’re great and we’re gonna need you, so, you know, hang with it.’”
Several weeks later, there was another notch moment in the ascension of Aaron Judge. The Yankees had just rallied for a rousing win against a red-hot Mariners team. Down 5–0 to old friend Félix Hernández, they came all the way back to tie it in the bottom of the eighth on a two-run homer by Sánchez. The game seemed ticketed for extra innings when Stanton came up in the ninth. Looking for a two-out pitch to end it, he caught an 0-2 hanger and bludgeoned it off the facing of the center-field bleachers. It was one of those Stanton blasts that felt like an unpacking—a purge of expectations, and the weirdness of playing second fiddle to Judge.
They lockered at opposite ends of a wall: Judge in a cubicle close to the front door, Stanton on the far side by the exit. Stanton, the new guy nervous around writers, c
ould quietly slip out after a game without having to take extra questions. Judge, on the other hand, had to walk a gauntlet to get to the parking lot. Every five feet, he was stopped by a reporter with “one last thing” to ask. (Judge being Judge, he always obliged.) And style-wise, the two stars were planets apart. Stanton, an extremely active bachelor, dressed like a James Bond villain. He wore exquisite blazers of complex fabrics over silk-and-viscose V-necks snugged to fit. Judge, the don’t-care hunk, rocked hoodies and jeans, as if headed for a slice-and-a-beer across the street. If they ever stopped to chat, you didn’t see it at the park. Their clubhouse is the size of a hotel lobby, and they seemed content to give each other space and let time and opportunity bring them closer.
On this particular night, though—after his homer beat the Mariners—Stanton was the last one dressed, so mobbed was he by reporters. Almost unseen, Judge hung at his locker, waiting for the writers to leave. When they finally cleared the room, he ambled by Stanton’s locker. As they walked out together, he clapped him on the back and did a little shimmy in celebration. It wasn’t much to look at, but he let out a war whoop as he did it. Stanton cracked up, one of those full-body laughs that’s equal parts levity and relief. Thank you, his grin seemed to say to Judge. Thank you, man. And yes: I’m home.
4
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An Audience in the Judge’s Chambers
Two months into the season, the book on these Yankees was that they were going to grind you down. Series after series, they’d beaten the best clubs in baseball by methodically crushing their will. Their hallmark trait was relentlessness: they followed long at-bat with long at-bat till they sapped the strength of opposing staffs. Expected to throw bombs like an early Tyson, their lineup proved much more vintage Ali—probing and patient as it tracked its foe, waiting for an opening to present. Often, they spent the first five innings hunting for a hanger. If they didn’t get it, they were fine taking a called strike three after a seven- or eight-pitch stare-down.
The toll that ploy took was mental as much as anything. An opposing starter knew he was being stalked by pursuers who could smell his exhaustion from sixty feet. The second he flagged, the Yankees were on him in numbers, busting open games with late rallies. The Yanks didn’t panic if they trailed after five or if their starter tossed a clunker; they led the world in wins in their last at-bat. No other team in baseball could make a nine-inning game feel like the Thrilla in Manila.
That’s a terrific way to operate in the regular season, when the weeks come at you in a deathless blur and you don’t get to catch your breath until October. But October is a whole different game. There are two days off in a playoff series, when starters are only tasked to throw five innings, then turn things over to rested pens. Inversely, each start is magnified: if you fall behind early against a team with strong relief, you can watch your season end in five days. The Yankees, of course, had the bullpen covered; what they lacked, after Severino, was a second ace. So it didn’t feel presumptuous, a third of the way into the season, to ask Cashman how he hoped to redress that.
Sitting in his office at the end of May, he was asked—and asked again—how much he was prepared to pay for a Jacob deGrom or a Blake Snell. They’d be freakishly dear in terms of talent surrendered, costing, at minimum, three blue chips apiece and probably a major leaguer tossed in. Still, the Yanks had such a glut of riches that they could afford to overpay. They had the stock, for instance, to revive the rudderless Mets by sending them three or four players who, come 2020, would be the drive train of a compelling team. And for deGrom at least, no surcharge seemed unreasonable: by the All-Star break, he was the best arm in baseball. An exceptionally young thirty in terms of wear and tear, he’d never pitched a day of competitive ball until his junior year of college. Almost twenty-six when he reached the bigs, he’d just now rounded into his prime and would be under Mets’ control through 2020. If the price for him was Andújar and three strong prospects, well, the return was a live chance to win a couple of titles before deGrom hit the free-agent market.
But as forthcoming as he was about the past, Cashman would give up nothing about the future. He parried questions by praising his own starters, then grudgingly mused that he might deal for Madison Bumgarner if he could live with the price. “I mean, if it’s Bumgarner for Gleyber, we’re not doing it.” On deGrom, though, he squashed the notion fast. Relations were so bad with the Mets’ ownership group that Cashman wouldn’t discuss it off the record. Clearly, nothing was going to happen between the Yanks and deGrom until he hit free agency in 2020.
Regarding talks for other teams’ pitchers, Cashman had one limit from his owner: he couldn’t add a salary that put the Yankees over the luxury tax threshold of $197 million in 2018. No news there: he’d been under the same restriction since at least the ’15 season. The news was that there was no friction there: about budgets, Cashman and Hal are in full alignment. They loathe throwing good money after bad at players. Doing so is an affront to both men’s values. “I used to tease Cash about it—that he secretly wanted to run the Yankees the way we run the A’s,” says Beane. “Deep down, he hated George’s business model. He knew there was no way to outspend teams forever and just wanted to be efficient.”
Efficiency, to men like Cashman, means dealing with anyone who offers the best return—even if that anyone is Boston. “I’d’ve traded Andrew Miller to the Red Sox [in ’16] if they’d sniffed on it,” says Cashman. “But they didn’t, and they needed bullpen help. The Mets too, but they didn’t sniff on it either, which I thought was odd.” How differently might the postseason have played that year had the Mets acquired Miller, the unhittable lefty? To be sure, they wouldn’t have sent out Jeurys Familia to torch their wild-card game against the Giants; he served up a three-run bomb in the ninth to wreck Noah Syndergaard’s two-hit gem. In fact, the fates of four teams seemed to turn on two trades: Chapman to the Cubs, not the Washington Nationals, and Miller to the Indians, not the Mets. The Cubs and Indians played a Series for the ages, with Chapman and Miller pitching their hearts out in that immortal Game 7 seesaw. The Mets and Nationals were sent home early, having missed their main chance at a title. Both teams are now in deep decline, passed in their division by the Braves and threatened by the Phillies, who looked in the mirror and started over. There’s a lesson in their rebirth: know thyself. Winning teams grasp and own their failures; losing teams are owned by their failures.
But if you’re going to talk efficiency with these Yankees, the conversation begins with Hal Steinbrenner. In 2008, when Hal was approved as the general managing partner of the New York Yankees, no one foresaw the paradigm shift he’d implement as team leader. To the extent that anyone had a read on him, he was viewed, at thirty-nine, as a reluctant heir, the son who didn’t appear to love the game or have his father’s fire in the belly. His brother Hank was thought to be the inevitable choice: he was loud and somewhat crude and liked regaling the press. Hank briefly became the voice of the team when George took ill in 2007. Hal, meanwhile, tended to the hotel chain that he’d built with a partner in Florida and spent his free time practicing takeoffs and landings in his Cessna high-wing. With his master’s in business and abhorrence of bunkum, he was perfectly happy being the Steinbrenner no one heard from outside of boardroom meetings.
In 2008, Randy Levine was summoned to Tampa to help Big Stein settle on a successor. Levine, the team president and George’s consigliere, had done much of the heavy lifting in creating the YES Network and wrangling tax breaks to build the new Stadium. “George told me, ‘Talk to everyone in the family. See who they think should do this, then get back to me.’” Levine sat with George’s children and his wife, Joan; the unanimous choice was Hal. “I went back to George, who said, ‘That’s where I would’ve gone too,’” says Levine.
Hal set himself the task of learning the baseball business from the gatehouse up. For much of the ’09 season, he stayed out of his office, studying each department and its staff. �
��He put his arms around the guts of the organization, listening to everyone in the building and the booth,” says Levine. Hal went to the owners’ meetings and cultivated Bud Selig, the then-commissioner with whom his dad had once done battle. Struck by his seriousness, Selig put him on the committee that handled collective bargaining with the players. (Selig’s successor, Rob Manfred, would later promote Hal to baseball’s executive council.) An incrementalist, Hal wasn’t ready to make bold changes or quash the Yanks’ pursuit of pricey stars. They were winning their division and printing money at the gate, even after their flameouts in the playoffs. But he was a businessman who believed in data sets and the efficiencies of thrift. When he ran the numbers at season’s end, he saw nothing to suggest that spending $200 million was a passkey to a title. After the Yankees won their rings in 2009, the next three champions had an average payroll of approximately $106 million.
Then, in 2013, the bottom fell out of his $230 million team. That group of brittle stars and scrap-yard fill-ins suddenly hit the rocks and missed the playoffs. As the Red Sox romped to a third title in ten years, the Yanks limped in with a weak finish, fielding immortals like David Adams and Zoilo Almonte. It wasn’t quite the capsize of the Horace Clarke years, but it was clear that the Big Stein model had run aground. With wealth redistribution and random drug-testing of players, you could no longer rig a winner with your wallet. Between luxury taxes and revenue-sharing, the Yankees were paying more than $100 million a year to scrappy young comers like the Royals. Meanwhile, the teams Hal sent out there now were all but unwatchable. They weren’t just dull and unathletic—they were irrelevant, the jock version of Cats. “It felt like we were playing in front of tourists,” says David Robertson, the good-guy veteran reliever. “They were visitors who were told, ‘You must see Yankee Stadium,’ but weren’t even baseball fans.”
