Inside the Empire
Page 17
There’s a short list of great ones who knew they were done before life came knocking with the news. Jim Brown and Barry Sanders, Sandy Koufax and Mike Mussina, Björn Borg and Eric Cantona spring to mind. Somewhat more common are the legends who thrashed against the dying of the light. Michael Jordan and Johnny Unitas, Muhammad Ali and Jimmy Connors—none of them did their legacy any favors by squeezing out an extra couple of comebacks. The vast majority of legends learn the truth like most of us do: through a succession of pummeling blows. Their used-to-be homers now die before the wall, or their once-filthy cutter goes out for long rides and exits with a very loud bang.
So it was for CC, the seventh-inning sure thing who now couldn’t muddle through the third. If his fall hurt more to witness than the aging of Brett Gardner, well, that’s because it was supposed to hurt more. Both are fine men, both played their hearts out, and both did their fans and teammates honor. But CC, when great, was very nearly immortal and may have been the last of his kind. After he, and perhaps Verlander, have thrown their final heater, who will ever again get close to 250 wins and 3,000 strikeouts in a career? (Please, don’t even mention 300 wins. That mark might as well be Mars now.) Who, in this age of gas-blasters and launch angles, will ever last long enough to pitch 3,500 innings and make 530-plus starts? If the Tampa Bays, Oaklands, and Milwaukees have their way, we may be chasing daylight on the traditional ace, the horse who eats 230 innings a year and pitches deep enough to approach twenty wins. Perhaps the game is headed toward a handful of guys who’ll endure as unicorn starters—the Blake Snells and Gerrit Coles whom teams can count on thirty times to give them six or seven innings—while filling in around them with long men and bridge guys and short-term loaners from Triple-A. We’re not there yet, thank God, and accursed be the day when the word “opener” replaces “starter” in our syntax.
Alas, the Yanks’ pitching staff, like their lineup, was on fumes, and they had no choice but to ride Sabathia through season’s end. Severino was all over the map in his starts, getting blasted by the A’s, losing a messy one to the Twins, then dominating the Red Sox at home. From outing to outing, no one had a fix on which Severino would show up: the free-and-easy ace with the disappearing fastball who’d been the best pitcher in baseball for three months, or the confused and flustered kid who’d lose the feel for both his pitches and couldn’t course-correct on the mound. “You just have to keep in mind how young he is, and that these fluctuations are normal at his stage,” Cashman noted. “Because he’s so talented, his sine curve goes straight up and straight down. For us, it’s a matter of riding out his slumps.”
But because Severino had been such a cipher in the second half—fourteen starts, a 6-6 record, and an ERA in the mid-sixes—he’d jacked up the stakes on his fellow starters. Sonny Gray was serving out his exile in the pen, from whence he’d make occasional cameos in blowout wins and losses. The Lance Lynn experiment had proved a wash: four solid starts mixed in with four stinkers and a couple of five-and-flys. At thirty-one, he was long past his frontline days and would most likely be pitching for someone else come the spring. And CC, for all his first-half heroics, had nine wins to show for his apparent swan-song season. That left the Yanks with two defensible options to start the wild-card game against Oakland: Masahiro Tanaka and J. A. Happ.
Both had pitched superbly for the bulk of their season, though Happ, of course, began his in Toronto. As a Yankee, he’d been the second coming of Jimmy Key: a master practitioner of hitting his spots and never giving an inch with runners on. (His regular-season numbers with the Yanks: eleven starts, a 7-0 record, and an ERA of 2.69.) Granted, won-loss records have shrunk in value: Jacob deGrom would earn the Cy Young Award with the lowest win total ever for a starting pitcher. Still, Happ’s seventeen wins in ’18 were a fair reflection of his worth. He never had wipeout stuff as a kid, and now, at thirty-six, he had just enough life on his four-seam fastball to keep it off the barrel of the bat. Happ, too, is something of a vanishing breed: the tai chi wizard who wins by deception and by keeping fastball hitters off balance. He throws his hard stuff about 75 percent of the time, a remarkably high use rate at any age, and averages a velocity of 92, which scares no one in these days of 101. But it’s the illusionist things he does with his 92 that makes him so uncomfortable to face.
First, he commands the four quadrants of the plate—down and in, up and away, etc.—so he’s constantly changing eye level for a hitter. Second, he adds and subtracts a couple of miles, inducing weak swings and late decisions. Third, he throws his heater with so much spin that it gains perceived velocity at the plate. Several Red Sox and Yanks spoke about Happ’s fastball, all giving variants of the same answer: “The scoreboard gun might say 92, but it looks more like 96 when you’re in the box,” said Andrew Benintendi, the stellar Red Sox left fielder. “His fastball plays up big time.” Mookie Betts and Aaron Judge said the pitch seems to rise, or in hitters’ parlance, “take off.” “It’s a gift, man,” said Betts, the year’s runaway MVP. “He keeps the ball up in the hitting zone, and it never comes down.” Said Judge, who struck out six of the ten times he faced Happ when Happ was with the Jays: “It looks like it’s coming in belt-high, and I’d think, I got this, and swing, then be like, How’d I miss that pitch?” Stanton gave a more concise assessment: “He messes with your depth perception.”
Hitting is all about timing and balance, which is why major leaguers crush pitching machines when they step into the cage. You can set that bad boy at 100 if you want: when a hitter knows what’s coming and from which angle it will issue, he can gin up his hand speed to pound it. But Happ, like Greg Maddux and many virtuosi before him, constantly spoils their stride by throwing gas at different speeds and pitching to different spots. Those high pitch counts he always seems to run, which reduce him to a six-inning pitcher? He gets foul ball after foul ball on emergency hacks as guys barely make contact to stay alive. Fun fact: Happ had the sixth-highest foul ball/foul tip percentage (22 percent) in MLB, just behind Verlander, Cole, and Scherzer in 2018. Generally, the hardest throwers get the most late swings. That Happ is on that list is a testament to his skill—and a beacon of hope to lesser arms.
Happ, as mild a man as you’re ever going to meet in the setting of a major league clubhouse, has the demeanor of an FM deejay. He’s tall and bald and bewildered to hear his praises sung, particularly from the mouths of superstars. “Believe me, I’m not perfect,” he says. “I’ve made my share of mistakes.”
And learned from them it seems. As a young pitcher, he’d get enraged at himself each time he threw a bad inning. “I was the kind of guy who thought he should never make a mistake,” he says, and the hitters could always tell. They would take more pitches and make him work harder, then watch him unravel in games. Finally, approaching thirty, he looked in the mirror and decided to change things. “I wasn’t going to give them a competitive edge by letting them see me that way.”
On the mound, he affected a robotic calm that eventually worked down deep below the skin. Now it’s second nature—and contagious. The Yanks seem much more relaxed behind him, less prone to jumpy plays and bad at-bats. Indeed, the only doubter since his arrival was Happ himself: the day he joined the team, he looked around the clubhouse and realized he knew no one in the room. “There’s a certain stress level after a trade—you’re trying to prove they made a good decision,” says Happ, who’s been traded five times. Then he went out and won five straight games before taking a no-decision against the Tigers. “The most important pick-up of our season,” Boone says. “We wouldn’t be where we are without J.A.”
Tanaka, who threw 97 when the Yankees first signed him as a widely sought free agent in 2014, has evolved and adapted from his days of thunder in the Nippon Professional League. (He once won twenty-five decisions in a row there, the most by a pitcher in any professional league, including MLB.) He was largely untouchable in his rookie season with the Yanks, starting 11-1 and making the All-Star team before partially tearing a ligame
nt in his pitching arm just before the break. (Almost exactly the same thing happened to Shohei Ohtani in his debut season with the Angels. It is a dicey proposition for men who throw as hard as they do to come to America from Japan. There, they make only one start a week and a couple of dozen, total, for the year. Here, of course, it’s every five days and three dozen starts, playoffs included.)
But Tanaka, a man of honor who happens to play baseball, chose rest and rehab over Tommy John surgery, which would have cost the Yanks his services for eighteen months. After a handful of starts at the end of 2014, Tanaka returned for good in 2015 and was, perforce, a transformed pitcher: he had to live now on his wits and precision. He throws basically two pitches: a slider that dives late and low to left-handed hitters, and a knee-high fastball that drops off the table a foot or so from the plate. That pitch is Tanaka’s notorious splitter, and when he’s throwing it for strikes—or almost-strikes—it’s nearly impossible to put the bat-head on it. It doesn’t just dive—it darts at the ankles of a hitter in the right-handed box. To be sure, he has a third pitch, but it’s just for show: a high four-seamer to keep the hitters honest.
Roughly three out of every four starts he makes, Tanaka is Tanaka, a ghost-face killer. He throws everything just below the hollow of the knee and gets a lot of weak contact and queasy at-bats. But then there’s that fourth start, where he can’t command the splitter and leaves it up around the thigh to get thrashed. (The joke in the press box among the beat writers is that the fourth game is ordered by the Yakuza, Japan’s organized crime syndicates, who make a fortune betting on his losses.)
The problem for the Yankees, and presumably Tanaka as well, is that they never know when that fourth start is coming. He’ll pitch superbly against the Indians, Angels, and Mariners, then get the stuffing beaten out of him by the Orioles. Nor could they know what Tanaka would give them come October, since they’d made exactly one playoff run in the four prior years they’d had him. He’d been terrific in the three starts he’d made in ’17 (2-1, twenty innings, and a 0.90 ERA), but none of those outings were in Fenway. There, he’d been fair to solid till 2018, when the Red Sox either lit him up or waited him out. No, their best option against Boston was Happ (lifetime: 7-4, 2.83 ERA), so they’d have to roll the dice on Sevy in the wild card and hope he’d pitch them through to the divisional round.
In the meantime, the Yankees needed to beat someone—anyone—just to hang on to home-field against Oakland. They’d begun September by losing eight of fourteen and barely hitting a lick in most of those games. After a particularly galling 3–2 loss to the Jays—they’d somehow been four-hit over seven innings by a kid named Tom Pannone—the question was put to Cashman: “What’s happened to your team? You had a great trade deadline: guessed right on Happ and Voit and Britton and McCutchen. So how do you try and understand this?”
Cashman has essentially two expressions: an upturned brow with a very slight grin when he’s amused by something you said, and—the other 98 percent of the time—the scrunched lips and fixed stare of someone hunched over a bomb, trying to guess which wire must be cut. “You’re right,” he said, “we got a bunch of good players, which is why I’m scratching my head now.” He paused, presumably not to scratch his head, then turned to a trope he’d used before. “We’re really missing Judge,” he said. “Not just his bat but his presence.”
Here, in one sentence, was the team’s self-diagnosis of what befell it in the second half of the season. What Cash meant by Judge’s presence was a panoply of things: his patience at the plate and the way it filtered down to the guys hitting behind him in the order; his energy in the dugout, which can’t be overvalued in a squad that lacks a fireball for a skipper; and his authority in the clubhouse among the younger guys, on whom the Yanks had come so dearly to depend. But above all, Cash meant that squishiest thing of all: a team’s core sense of who it is. With Judge, the Yankees are a very good team that firmly believes it is great. Without him, they are something more diffuse and less effective: a collection of very good players. Judge—like Jeter and the great Yanks before them—is the spiritual compound that binds his squad together and embodies its truest essence—when he plays.
That last clause is crucial, because his powers diminish in direct proportion to his presence. As Judge himself said during his two-month absence, his lack of impact “just kills me.” He couldn’t “get into guys” about their level of play when he was “sitting on the bench wearing a hoodie.” He couldn’t “tell ’em ‘LET’S GO!’” when he was on the DL and reduced to “just watching and chewing gum.” Then there was his disappearance off the field. Like Jeter was for Torre (at least in his prime), Judge is his manager’s first lieutenant. Torre never had to go police his clubhouse; Jeter did that for him for ten years. All it took was a look or a throat-clear from Jetes and Nick Johnson and Ricky Ledée snapped to attention.
So it is with Judge, who quietly cracks the whip when the cohort of Miggy and Gleyber gets sloppy. Boone’s specialty isn’t tough love, it’s consensus-building, so someone has to lean in for him. That’s what Judge does the second he suits up: he hardens his team’s resolve and dedication. It shouldn’t be that way, but it is always that way, at least on teams that are going places. When Judge walks into the room and suits up for a game, everyone’s heart beats quicker. You can’t put a price or a WAR tag on that. You just have to see it to know its worth.
Meanwhile, somewhere in the folds of Yankee Stadium, one man sat calmly at his desk, watching the seesaw season play out. Hal Steinbrenner isn’t an executive given to wild mood swings; he is every inch the cut of a contemporary chairman. He shows up for an interview in a pale-colored pullover and a pair of well-pressed khakis (is the entire Yankees staff sponsored by Ralph Lauren?) and has the bearing of a guy you’ve met for drinks after a gratifying round of golf. In tone and in gesture, he is made to measure for the culture of a modern corporation. He is handsome in a tousled, uncreased way and has a gentleness about him that is almost jarring, given his shrill genetics. You can hear George in his voice, but only faintly: it is there as a trace element and nothing more. Where his father talked intently, as if his words were under pressure, Hal speaks strictly in an indoor pitch that is somehow both relaxed and conserved. It isn’t a thing he’s practiced and gotten better at over the years. It is rather a manifesting of who he is: the prudent son of an imprudent father who resolved, at an early age, to be different.
That is explicitly who he’s become: the hyperefficient, if reticent, successor to one of the most charismatic owners in sports history. Hal did not in any way want the job or ask for it. There was something he liked better: the hotel trade. “I had my own group that I put together,” he begins, sitting in the office of his sister Jennifer. “We owned a couple of hotels in Sarasota and one in Jacksonville, and I oversaw George’s hotels in Ocala. I just loved everything about that business—finding a piece of dirt, convincing bankers this was a good place to build a building, then building the building and running it.”
But the team, and his obligation to it, kept calling, even before George took ill. “I had spent a lot of years in the [Tampa office] getting pulled into meetings with him, and I suddenly realized that this is not a job I’ve been in tune with for at least five years.” He’d always savored living in Florida, where he went home to his wife and kids at day’s end, instead of keeping a suite in mid-Manhattan. And he was “frankly intimidated by the team business, which had grown quite a lot while I was down there.” But as George declined and his succession plans shifted (the intent had been to hand the team to his son-in-law, Steve Swindal, until Steve’s divorce from Jenny Steinbrenner), Hal bowed to the wishes of his parents and siblings and stepped up in the mid-2000s. Despite his distance from it, the CEO role wasn’t a reach: “This was always in my blood—I grew up with this team. It was just trying to figure out, how will this go?”
Whether George meant to or not—and one can probably assume he didn’t—his youngest son shares both a
name and a disposition with another famous prince: Hal, the ambivalent son of Henry the Fourth. The focal point of one of William Shakespeare’s greatest plays, Prince Hal would, of course, become Henry the Fifth and miraculously defeat the French at Agincourt—but he too was yanked, if not kicking and screaming, to his predestined place on the throne. It bears noting that George’s Hal didn’t spend his pregame years carousing with the likes of Falstaff and Bardolph. Still, being placed atop the masthead of the New York Yankees needed some getting used to, and some time.
“There was a transition that . . . took a couple of years” is all he ventures on that head before shifting adroitly to other matters. In leadership, he acknowledges, he isn’t at all like his father, whom he refers to as “a micromanager.” “I hire and hold on to competent people so that they can make decisions that don’t involve me,” he says, adding that most of his executives “have been here twenty-plus years and take a tremendous amount of pride” in that. Hal’s job entails being the final decider on each of the key initiatives that Cashman brings him. On other teams, Cashman would probably be making those calls and “have a hell of a lot more ability to do the things he wanted without the owner being involved.” Still, Hal says, “90 percent of what Cash wants gets done because I trust him and his people. They know a lot more about this stuff than I do.” In the end, though, “those decisions are financial decisions that affect the capability of this team.”