Inside the Empire

by Bob Klapisch

  And there we quickly are, on Topic A: the team’s payroll and his mission to pare it. Hal leaps at the chance to explain his thinking, speaking in yards, not inches. “It’s just logical that you shouldn’t have to have a $250 million payroll to compete for a pennant,” he says. “Now, we struggled for years, because our development system was lacking and we had nobody to come up and help out. My dad tended, as you know, to trade away good young people to win now, now, now, now, now. I can’t tell you how many times, over the last five years, teams asked us for Judge and Sánchez and Severino and others, and year after year we refused. So now here we are, with all these young stars that we can promote to our fans on social media and a system where everybody still wants our minor leaguers now that these guys have come up. I don’t take credit for much, but I will take credit for that, and Cash was right on board with me.”

  He tacks to the subject of those prospects and their fans. “I think baseball has had a problem with millennials, and we, in the past, have had that too. Have you ever been to an NYCFC soccer game here? There’s a lot of millennials there. It’s two hours, in and out, and the action’s nonstop, except for the halftime break. We recognized that three years ago—that even millennial viewers on YES were down—and that we needed to address this problem. We met with advertising agencies that specialize in this generation and learned a lot from them. It became clear that millennials wanted to watch baseball standing up, with a beer in their hand, talking to their friends while Instagramming and Snapchatting.”

  Hal, an R-and-D geek, was now in his sweet spot: the harmonic convergence of knowledge and opportunity. “What we immediately did—it’s a $20 million investment, but one that was a no-brainer to me—was to go ahead and build gathering spots in the outfield decks, on either side of the batter’s eye. It’s really three different areas, and anybody can go out there, it’s not a club you [have to pay to get into]. What we’re finding is that it’s packed from beginning of game to end, and there are people of all ages out there. They’re Snapchatting and Instagramming, and it’s a great place to watch a game. Other clubs have done it now, the same type of concept. This is the second year we’ve had the decks.”

  We note that his attendance is up again this year, by about 330,000 fans, and that the team has jumped from sixth to second in MLB’s box-office ranks.

  “Well, what’s up is millennial attendance,” he notes, almost, but not quite, boasting. “Because of all the efforts we’ve made in social media, starting a department and hiring people to focus on this full-time, YES’s viewership in millennials is up too. That’s because they’re getting to know these young players, and the one thing I insisted on is that we have in-game spots for highlights of our minor league players. Get to know [Estevan] Florial, [Justus] Sheffield, they’re up and coming, and we did The Road to the Show [a reality TV series] on YES. We’re doing live Twitter with the players being interviewed by fans, and the millennials are excited about them and about what we’ve done to the stadium. It makes the experience for them more than just the game and what’s going on on the field.”

  He could go on in the experiential vein, but the Red Sox are in town, game time is nearing, and there’s an important line of inquiry left. When you get the most privacy-minded owner in baseball in front of you, you don’t want to waste the chance to empty your notebook.

  “I have to ask this,” says Klapisch, who began covering the team in the mid-’80s after graduating from Columbia. “My first job at the Post was to call George every day and wait by the phone for his callback. This was back before Steinbrenner Field or Yankee headquarters in Tampa, so I’d have to call American Shipbuilding in those days. Then the phone would ring [with his callback], and he would just start talking, wouldn’t even say it was George. And I’ve gotta say, your dad scared the hell out of me—”

  “You? He scared the hell out of all of us!” Hal puts in, and the four grown men around the table, Zillo included, roar with laughter—and relief.

  “So, I’m just wondering . . . what is it like for you to follow in those footsteps?” Klapisch continues. “You’re clearly not the person who wants to dominate New York, be the talk of the town. You don’t intimidate people, it’s not how you’re wired, and I’m curious what was it like to grow up with that, and to follow in those footsteps professionally?”

  Hal gives a laugh, as if to forewarn us that he won’t be diving deeply in those waters. “Yeah, look, growing up was tough, with what the kids said [to me] at school and him always [being] in the papers. Those weren’t easy years, there were some lousy teams, and also, our personalities are completely different. He was a coach. I wasn’t. He was a good athlete. I wasn’t. I’m an introvert. I love walking in the park for two hours and having no one recognize me. A few months ago, I ran into Billy Crystal there, and he had the hat on, the glasses, the beard. I thought, What an awful way to live. I can’t imagine it. It’s not my persona, and I don’t want that for my kids.”

  “So, at no time in these last two months have you been tempted to call the Post and yell, ‘Stanton’s hitting .240 since the break!’”

  Hal laughs again, a surprised little chuckle that’s like a lull in the regatta. “No. I have the greatest appreciation for your profession, and I hope you know that, but I’m not going to use the newspapers to accomplish something. I’m going to try to accomplish it in-house.”

  “And you’re telling us you never hear George whisper in your ear, ‘Go get those so-and-sos who aren’t hitting’?”

  “Actually, I get that from my mom,” he chortles. “No shit. She’s eighty-three, and she’s like, ‘You need to go down to that clubhouse and start yelling at them!’ And I’m like, ‘Mom! You say that all the time!’”

  “And did you go down there?”

  “No, I don’t do that. It’s not my personality, and I’m not convinced it’s effective. And yet somehow, they find a way to turn it around. Last year they went to Game 7 of the ALCS.”

  “I ask that because George loved going down there—it was part of who he was,” Klapisch prods. “Do you love what you’re doing? Love it the way he loved it?”

  Hal lets out a breath before answering. “Look, clearly, he loved it, it was his passion. Me? I find it . . . challenging. Yes, it’s a lot of fun, but a lot of tough times too, being in a family business. It’s a blessing, but also an added challenge that maybe other CEOs don’t have. Look, I wouldn’t be doing this if my name wasn’t Steinbrenner—I recognize and appreciate that. So I try to treat the job with respect, because I don’t deserve to be here, that’s just a fact. If my name wasn’t Steinbrenner, I wouldn’t be here.”

  We’re startled to hear that: he wears the crown jewels now like one to the manor born. But it’s almost first pitch for Severino versus Price, and everyone is glancing at his watch. So one last query is put to him: “We know how many times George almost sold the team. Have you ever considered selling it yourself?”

  Hal, the careful, self-disclaiming owner, pounces on the question like a hare. “Never,” he says flatly. “I’ve never considered it. We’re not selling and getting out.”

  And there, for just a moment, flits the old man’s ghost in the timbre of his son’s voice.

  That Shakespeare fellow: boy, did he know power. He would’ve been one hell of a Yankee fan.

  10

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  Number 99: Hello, Boys, I’m Baaack!

  At some point in the afternoon of September 14, word went out on all the arms of social media: Aaron Judge had been activated by the New York Yankees for their game against Toronto that evening. It was a Friday night affair, so the place would be good and jacked with that end-of-the-week jolt the city supplies. Though the transit authorities that service the Stadium explicitly ban beer-drinking on board, virtually every train that stops there on home-game Fridays is a block party of brown paper bags. Even some of the women wearing Aaron Judge jerseys pour out of the cars bellowing BOSTON SUCKS! So many cops i
n riot gear await you on the platform, you’d think you’d stumbled into some drunken conflation of St. Patty’s Day and SantaCon. But no, you’re in the Bronx, and it’s just another baseball weekend—and don’t be caught uptown in Blue Jays blue.

  This night, however, was different from all the others, and not because Yom Kippur was around the corner. Fans had come out early to get a glimpse of Their Lord and Savior, packing the outfield stands at 5:00 p.m. Alas, Judge didn’t come out for late BP, so they’d have to wait till game time for their fix. For eight weeks, the Stadium had been strangely mute, lacking its usual noise and nastiness. In Judge’s absence, the team had played average ball, and average baseball is dull—and death to ambience. Whatever else happened tonight, this crowd would be on tilt. All it needed was an on-field sighting of Judge to explode.

  In the clubhouse before the game, the room was electric and loud. Every player was at his locker, talking mess to the guys next to him. It felt like a football game was about to break out. Judge himself had been on edge all day, sprinting in the outfield, taking early BP, and just generally being a pain in the ass to Boone. “I’ve been voicing my opinion around here—a lot,” he confided to Klapisch, meaning he’d been lobbying his manager hard to return. Judge had hoped to see his name on the lineup card that night, but Boone wasn’t ready to write him in. The trainers were still erring on the side of caution, giving Judge a few more days before facing in-game pitching. Still, he started heating up in the tunnel, getting a sweat going by the third inning. Then the Yanks jumped out to a 9–0 lead, and every eye in the park was on their dugout.

  In the top of the eighth, the crowd’s patience was rewarded. The moment Judge got one of his cleats up on the cinders, the ballpark erupted. It takes a lot of hopping to make the new joint jump. It’s much stouter and better buttressed than the previous building, which sometimes swayed like a bridge in high winds. As Judge ran out to his spot in right field as a defensive replacement for Andrew McCutchen, the concrete underfoot pulsed and shook. Cutch, who’d been moved over to left by Boone, purposely lagged behind in the dugout to gauge the crowd’s reaction. “Unbelievable,” he said at his locker after the game. “I had no idea how much he meant here till I saw it happen. That was pretty impressive, man. Shows you what kind of leader that dude is.”

  McCutchen, a very old soul for thirty-one, has been a leader, and a dude, of the first rank. The five-time All-Star and former National League MVP, he was the franchise player in Pittsburgh for nine seasons before being dealt to the Giants. Now a quiet, watchful vet content to be in the chorus, he’d been enjoying his change of fortune since the Yanks acquired him in August. Each day for the previous week, he’d staked his spot behind the cage to watch Judge and Stanton take their rips. What he saw made him hang his jaw in amazement—and regret that he hadn’t been around for the full season. “To people who’ve been here all year, I guess that [BP] stuff is normal. Trust me, it’s not normal. You don’t hit balls that far.” He said it was a privilege to be on this team, and the feeling was clearly mutual. Cashman was already tinkering with the idea of re-signing McCutchen before free agency would commence in November.

  Judge got only two innings in right that night. Boone acknowledged after the game that if the Yanks had batted around, he would have pulled him rather than let him swing the bat. It took four more days, and a simulated game, for Judge to finally convince his skipper he was good to go. On September 18, a Tuesday, the Red Sox came to town, and there, on the lineup card posted outside the clubhouse, was Judge in his usual two-hole. That night the park was an adrenaline zoo, thrumming with pent-up energy—and fury. Nearly fifty thousand people showed up to the Stadium. Very few of them were school-age children.

  There are certain nights (and opponents) when almost every attendee knows it’s not wise to bring the kids. If they come, they’re going to watch grown men model behaviors that, once seen, can’t easily be unseen. They’re also going to witness something relatively new here: a fully weaponized fan base. At the old Yankee Stadium, the grandstands jutted out like the overbite of a very big shark. Opposing outfielders feared for their lives, and for good reason. In the past, folks in the bleachers threw beer cans and coins at them and rained down awful calumnies about the sex lives of their mothers. Then the new park went up, with its sveltely recessed stands and aggressively priced ticket-package plans, and so many of those beer-lunged welders and firefighters stayed home to watch the games on YES. For years they were replaced by the Vineyard Vines set, perfectly fine people from perfectly fine towns in Westchester and lower Connecticut. But the folks in blue blazers didn’t bring the same hatred that the goons in camo hats did, and the so-called stars the Yankees were fielding then (Jacoby Ellsbury, Carlos Beltrán, Brian McCann, et al.) didn’t evoke the same passions—or any passion at all, to be precise.

  Then the Baby Bombers arrived, and Hal Steinbrenner opened up those beer gardens in left and right field and—well, you don’t see a lot of guys in checked shirts and oxfords communing in the bleachers anymore. If those former frat boys are still attending in numbers, they’ve adopted the mufti of the working stiff: a team-licensed ball cap, a pair of cargo jeans, and either a replica jersey or a snarky T-shirt with a Yankee spin. In the bottom of the first, Judge walked to the plate for his first at-bat in two months. No description of the ovation is needed here, save to say it was long and loud. Nate Eovaldi, the ex-Yankee he was facing that night, can be a very tall order these days. Two years after his second Tommy John surgery, which submarined his New York tenure, he was back throwing 100 with a two-seam tilt, an equally filthy splitter, and an inhuman cutter he’d added that lit up the radar gun at 91. Eovaldi’s previous start against the Yankees was game 3 of the sweep in Fenway, when he’d badly overmatched the Bombers for eight shutout innings, allowing three hits and a walk. But on this night Judge stood in there like he hadn’t missed a moment and belted a 112-mile-an-hour rocket. Unfortunately, he hit it directly at J. D. Martinez. Five feet over in either direction, it would have gouged the wall in right for a double.

  His second at-bat, Judge scorched another cutter, this one to Bogaerts at short. Happy just to get his glove up in time, Bogaerts snared it and adroitly turned two. In his third AB, Judge was unluckier still: he just missed hitting a two-run homer when Martinez chased his drive down on the track. After striking out in the eighth, Judge took an oh-for-four collar and had to settle for some moral satisfaction.

  But the Yankees won the game that night, and the next night too, and then went on a vicious tear the last two weeks of the season. It is impossible to overstate the obvious with Judge: he is the New York Yankees, full stop, period. Didi and Sánchez had been back for weeks, the bullpen had filled in capably for Chapman, but the team was sub-.500 in September until their leader returned. Judge himself was circumspect about his impact: it hurt him still to swing, he confided privately, and you could see that pain reflected in his numbers. In the twelve games he started before the wild-card round, he hit .220 with just a single home run and several drives that died before the track. Part of that shortfall was due to timing: he was just a hair off with some swings, barely missing the barrel on crushable pitches. And part of it was human: it would have hurt him beyond measure if he aggravated the wrist and missed the playoffs.

  But his effect on the team’s morale, and on the players hitting behind him, was unmistakable: “He makes us feel better, especially us young guys,” said Gleyber Torres, who then added, sotto voce, “he’s like our captain.” “Just his presence is uplifting, and you don’t see that in young players,” noted Neil Walker. “He gets everyone in the lineup easier at-bats because they’re back hitting in spots where they belong.” “He commands your respect just by walking in the clubhouse,” said Austin Romine, the eagle-eyed catcher. “A player of that caliber who eats and sleeps baseball—hell, he makes you love it too.”

  And suddenly, the somnolent New York offense was awake, terrorizing pitchers again. Those last two weeks, the Yan
ks bashed homer after homer, easily breaking the major league mark of 264 in a season. They overwhelmed the teams left on their schedule, including two series with the Red Sox and a four-gamer down in Tampa, which had been the Yanks’ House of Horrors all year. Here, at long last, was the club we’d seen in June: the Wheel of Death lineup that never seemed to end, with assassin after assassin in a row. Except now it was even longer and more power-packed: they’d added another bruiser in Luke Voit, the strapping kid Cashman pickpocketed from the Cardinals at the trading deadline.

  Since joining the Yanks in August—a month when he played sparingly and was actually sent down to the minors for a bit—Voit had suddenly channeled the Jason Giambi who’d won an MVP trophy with the A’s. That Jason Giambi—whom the Yankees barely saw after George signed him to a massive contract after the ’01 season—was impossible to pitch to for his last four years in Oakland. He hit line to line with power, drew staggering numbers of walks, and struck out very rarely for a bodybuilder who bashed forty homers a year. So too with Voit, who had languished for several years in the Cardinals’ organization. A middle linebacker in high school and a devoted power-lifter built like a slightly shorter and leaner Roger Clemens, he’d bogged himself down by bringing a gladiator’s fury to the task of hitting a curveball. “I lost my temper a lot,” Voit says of his five-year quest for a proper mind-set in the minors. “It took me a long time to realize that baseball’s 90 percent mental and that brute strength alone will end your career.”

  Twenty-seven now, he’s a sweet, funny man-child who comes across like a goofy personal trainer. He packs the sort of short-strand, bunched-up mass you rarely see these days in double-knits—but on Voit, that muscle is pneumatic. His bat is quick to the ball, adjusts for late breaks, and covers the whole zone at the plate. Since he learned to harness his rage—a development for which he credits his fiancée, Tori Rigman, whom he planned to marry over the winter—the kid who’d hit five homers total in parts of two seasons with St. Louis had become a wrecking ball with the Yanks. In little more than a month since the club recalled him from its Triple-A team in Scranton, he’d hit fourteen homers, driven in better than a run a game, and posted an OPS of 1.069, which is Mookie Betts/Mike Trout good. More, he’d brought a kind of little kid’s glee into the batter’s box. Every time he got hold of a hanger, he hop-skipped his first step toward first base, the sort of thing you see in youth travel ball.