We have to stop saying “if George Steinbrenner were alive,” but if George Steinbrenner were alive, he’d be rolling over in his grave.
Imagine the New York Yankees, in Steinbrenner’s days, basing their future on Gleyber Torres and Clint Frazier. No, you can’t imagine that; it would never have happened.
But then if Steinbrenner were alive, he would have jettisoned Brian Cashman years ago. Cashman, now in his 19th year as general manager, initially lived off the work of wise baseball men who preceded him and continued living off the Steinbrenner fortunes that fueled outrageous payrolls.
Now, under Steinbrenner’s conservative son, Hal, Cashman is trying to make it the way most other teams have to do it. That’s where Torres and Frazier come in. They were the key parts of the trades the Yankees made for Aroldis Chapman and Andrew Miller, two-thirds of the celebrated bullpen troika the Yankees formed last winter.
Cashman made additional deals before the Monday deadline, shedding Carlos Beltran, an aging but productive outfielder, and Ivan Nova, an inconsistent member of a starting rotation full of inconsistent pitchers.
Given the Yankees’ struggles in recent years, the general manager has awakened a few years too late. He told The New York Times that the 2011 collective bargaining agreement changed the game, but the Times writer, Tyler Kepner, didn’t ask Cashman why it took him five years to react to the changes.
“Clearly there’s been a lot of changes in the game – access to talent is more restrictive; penalties obviously are in play,” Kepner quoted Cashman as saying.
“The industry’s completely different today, and the operating standards are completely different today, and there’s just a recognition of that. If you want to become a super team, there’s certain ways to go about that that you have to strongly consider. Although they may be tough decisions, the one thing the Yankees have always stood for, and do stand for, is the effort to try to become a super team.”
Again I ask what took Cashman so long to grasp the changes and react to them? A general manager in his position, consistently spending more than $200 million a year on player payroll and getting one post-season game in three years in return. I would ask Cashman that question myself if he ever returned my calls. He stopped talking to me when I began criticizing him and suggested it was time for the Yankees to get a new general manager.
The Tyler Kepners of the baseball-writing world don’t ask tough questions because they’re afraid the general manager will stop talking to them.
There is a fellow, obviously a Yankees’ fan, who raises tough questions. He peppers New York writers with e-mail comments severely critical of Cashman. Using names of former Yankees players and not his own, he often includes with his criticism mention of affairs that apparently caused Cashman’s wife to divorce him.
I hadn’t heard from said e-mail writer for many months but then received an e-mail this week from J. Collins (John) Ryan.
“The New York media (he wrote, unaware that the word media is plural, not singular) is dutifully repeating the spin that the New York Yankees front office and its general manager have done a great job in selling off top players at the trade deadline in 2016 – as if the years 2013-2015, or three (3) consecutive years of not making a postseason series appearance while having the highest payroll in the American League in each year, did not happen.
“’Having one of the best farm systems in baseball’ on paper for a year or two is now more important than winning only one (1) A.L. pennant and one (1) world championship for almost twenty years from 2005-2018, or longer.
“When it comes to Sandy Alderson, on the other hand, the same New York media said the Mets’ G.M. should not be allowed to have ‘more than a Presidential term’ to get the franchise back into the postseason while not having one of the highest payrolls in the National League in each year from 2011-2015.”
Cashman unquestionably has developed a relationship with the writers who cover the Yankees that makes him immune from criticism and difficult dealing. They have applauded him for his deadline deals and his heroic stance to go forward with a younger team. Apparently no one asked him what took him so long to do what was obvious to others.
Two weeks before the trading deadline an ESPN.com article reported a division within the Yankees’ hierarchy, Cashman wanting to be a seller before the deadline, Steinbrenner and President Randy Levine blocking him. The story quoted an anonymous baseball source, who my source believed was Cashman himself. My source also said Steinbrenner and Levine thought Cashman wanted to act prematurely.
As far as I was concerned, they were all blind. It was reported that Tampa Bay’s sweep of a pre-deadline series with the Yankees convinced Steinbrenner to be a seller. But what was he looking at the previous four months?
From opening day of the season Cashman put a mediocre team on the field, an aging team woefully short on hitting and overstocked with questionable pitching. The bullpen trio of Chapman, Miller and Betances would not get enough six-inning leads to do the job they were hired to do.
In an act of general manager malpractice, Cashman came to that conclusion belatedly but now is being hailed in the news media as a hero for making trades that have enabled him to amass a dozen prospects, some of whom will surely lead the Yankees back to the promised land known as the World Series. These were some of the many news media tributes paid to Cashman:
On the day the Yankees admitted defeat in 2016, it felt triumphant. They won the trade deadline with a bold vision for the future.
Yankees now have a top-three farm system.
And then there was the embarrassingly gushing ESPN.com article by Andrew Marchand, which said in part:
“At some point the run would be over, and the Yankees, teetering for a few years now, finally knew it was time to move on. They are most likely moving on up, because out of the wreckage of this middling 2016 season, Cashman has masterminded a plan that could very well lead to the next dynasty….
“Cashman has transformed a Yankees farm system that was once an eyesore into one envied in the game….on the day the Yankees admitted defeat in 2016, it felt triumphant. The selling Yankees won the deadline.”
George Steinbrenner used to mock statements like the last one when someone would proclaim another team the winner of a trading period, asking where the trophy was. But worse, Marchand went on to lay out the Yankees’ opening-day lineup for 2019. It included trade-acquired prospects Torres and Frazier as well as free agents Bryce Harper, Manny Machado and Jose Fernandez, the last three acquired with the money freed up by the expiring contracts.
In 1948, when the Pirates were having an unusually competitive season, my father sent a check around mid-season to Rosey Rowswell, the Pirates broadcaster, for World Series tickets. Rowswell returned the check, saying my father was too optimistic for him.
I would send a check to Marchand for 2019 World Series tickets, but I’ll just save a step by saying he’s too optimistic for me. Perhaps he could make that lineup his 2019 fantasy league lineup.
In anything he wrote, did Marchand indicate he asked Cashman where he had been the past few years when the Yankees clearly were crumbling with age and inability to hit and pitch productively? Did he ask Cashman why he allowed Mark Newman to oversee scouting and player development for 15 years while the farm system continued to be a disaster?
I have a question for Cashman and Marchand. Do they know that prospects can easily and often turn into suspects?
Cashman has never demonstrated skill as a talent evaluator. He has had Gene Michael for that purpose.
Cashman wasn’t responsible for Alex Rodriguez’s $275 million contract; Steinbrenner’s older brother, Hank, was. But Cashman signed the lengthy, ultra-expensive contracts for CC Sabathia, Mark Teixeira, A.J. Burnett, Jacoby Ellsbury, Masahiro Tanaka and Brian McCann, and the result has been one World Series championship and one wild-card game in the last three years, soon to be four.
The Yankees are paying Teixeira $22.5 million to hit .195 and Sabathia $25 million to win 6 games and lose 8, but the Cashman sycophants don’t write about Cashman’s wasted millions; they write about how much the Yankees will benefit for future payrolls when those squandered millions come off the payroll this year and next.
Cashman has never had to put together a team with money in mind. He has created more $200 million payrolls than any general manager in baseball history. No, make that more $200 million payrolls than all of the general managers in history combined.
He doesn’t know how to do what Dayton Moore did in Kansas City last year or what Billy Beane has done in Oakland or Neal Huntington in Pittsburgh or Jeff Luhnow in Houston or what Terry Ryan did in Minnesota or Andrew Friedman in Tampa Bay.
Michael Lewis wrote a book about what Beane did in Oakland. If someone wrote a book about Brian Cashman with the Yankees, the cover would have to be covered with a large dollar sign.