Inside the Empire Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Locked and Loaded: Welcome to the Bronx Power Station

  Déjà Vu: Hammer Time in Fenway

  The Little Genius

  An Audience in the Judge’s Chambers

  CC and the (chin) music factory

  “We Might Be a Little Short This Year”

  Night School

  Nothing Personal, It’s Strictly Business

  Hal Steinbrenner: The Anti-Boss

  Number 99: Hello, Boys, I’m Baaack!

  ALDS: Running Into an October Buzzsaw

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Sources

  Index

  About the Authors

  Connect with HMH

  Copyright © 2019 by Bob Klapisch and Paul Solotaroff

  Photographs copyright © 2018 by Anthony J. Causi

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Klapisch, Bob, author. | Solotaroff, Paul, author.

  Title: Inside the empire : the true power behind the New York Yankees / Bob Klapisch and Paul Solotaroff.

  Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018057177 (print) | LCCN 2018060027 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328589125 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328589354 (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: New York Yankees (Baseball team)—Management—History.

  Classification: LCC GV875.N4 (ebook) | LCC GV875.N4 K53 2019 (print) | DDC 796.357/64097471—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018057177

  Cover design by Brian Moore

  Cover image © Michael Heiman / Getty Images

  eISBN 978-1-328-58912-5

  v1.0319

  To the crew at Casa Klapisch: Kristy, Casey, Kaley, and Corky

  —Bob Klapisch

  For CC and Luke, who light the path and keep me firmly to it

  —Paul Solotaroff

  1

  * * *

  * * *

  Locked and Loaded:

  Welcome to the Bronx Power Station

  The General Manager Meetings each fall are baseball’s version of a buddies’ fishing junket to Belize. Executives harrowed by the grind of the season—six months of seven-day/eighty-hour weeks; back-page eruptions after three-game slumps; and side-eyed shade from their high school daughters over another pre-prom party not attended—disappear for four days in mid-November to a luxe hotel overlooking a golf course.

  None of the GMs can putt worth a damn, but the greens are beside the point. Their fixed destination is the lobby bar, where someone’s playing piano, the shades are drawn against the late-fall sun, and thirty men with the hardest jobs in the trade can let loose and get buzzed. Each man has his clique of whiskey pals—the ones he met while working his way up the organizational chart of his club, or the two or three peers he’s grown comfortable making deals with since he ascended the throne. Not a lot gets done at these boys’-club excursions, in part because of the calendar. The free-agent market is barely a week old, no one’s finalized his forty-man roster, and the needs of each team won’t fully manifest until the frenzy of Winter Meetings one month hence. Those events, held in mid-December at another Kubla Khan luxe resort, are a Ford Bronco chase of trades and desperation, capitalism on a four-day crack toot.

  In addition, supplicants by the thousands show up to try to make their luck there: vendors, beat writers, unemployed scouts and coaches, and moon-eyed fans and their kids. Such is the noise and traffic that GMs hole up in their suites, texting each other madly to find a right-handed bat or a couple of young pitchers with controllable years. The stakes couldn’t be higher for those concerned. Any executive who goes home empty this year may be back at next year’s Winter Meetings looking for work.

  Still, it’s not like nothing happens at the GM meetings one month prior. Over third and fourth cocktails, GMs pull each other’s strings for leads on what they hope they’ll get done later. At one point or another, most will pay homage to the guy or two holding all the cards: the lucky executives who happen to have deep wells of talent on their Double- and Triple-A rosters. In this, the Age of the Real-Deal Drug Test and the Can’t-Miss Hall of Famer Clogging the Lineup, nobody wants the fading superstar with the enormous contract. What the GMs want—overwhelmingly—is to get younger and cheaper: to trade a couple of peak seasons from their franchise left fielder for a pair of live-armed kids who are on the brink.

  It was precisely in that spirit of here-goes-nothing that Mike Hill, the director of baseball operations for the fire-sale Miami Marlins, tapped Brian Cashman on the shoulder in November 2017 in the hallway of the Waldorf Astoria in Orlando. After fifteen years of being a reluctant shopper—the one guy who showed up every winter with strict orders to overpay for back-nine players—Cashman, the general manager of the New York Yankees, was suddenly in the catbird seat. Through a series of canny drafts and quick-strike deals at the trading deadline a year or so back, he’d miraculously recast himself as a master builder, the cool kid with all the hot toys. He had seven of the hundred best prospects in the game (plus a wave of kids behind them who were almost as good) and a major league roster of newly minted mashers who’d bulled their way to within a game of the World Series.

  Cashman also had the one great luxury in the room: permission to do absolutely nothing. His Baby Bombers had come of age two years early and bought him a full season to sit tight. With a mix of pending superstars on minimum-salary deals (Aaron Judge, Gary Sánchez, Luis Severino), cut-rate acquisitions on the cusp of stardom (Didi Gregorius, Chad Green, Sonny Gray), and just the right garnish of graybeard leaders to run the locker room (Brett Gardner, CC Sabathia, David Robertson), he could bide his time for the auction to end all auctions: the 2019 free-agent class. Come November of the following year, he’d have a hundred million or more in luxury cap space to add the keystone blocks for a five-year run: perhaps Bryce Harper to bang dents in the second-deck facade, Manny Machado to anchor a world-class infield, or Clayton Kershaw to start Game 1 of the World Series.

  Still, you know: it never hurts to talk. “We were walking down the hall when either Hill or I broached the subject of Stanton,” Cashman says. Giancarlo Stanton was the circus-strongman slugger who’d pummeled the National League for eight years. Fresh off a fifty-nine-home-run season and a Most Valuable Player Award in 2017, he was a wild extravagance on the now-threadbare Marlins, a Ferrari at a drive-in showing The Florida Project. The Marlins franchise (and its many hundreds of millions in debt) had been sold months before, for $1.2 billion, to a baggy-suited rich guy by the name of Bruce Sherman and his new partner, Derek Jeter. Of the several entities that pursued the Marlins (among them, a consortium headed by Jeb Bush and another by Jared Kushner’s father, Charles), the Sherman-Jeter group seemed the least provisioned to ride out years of heavy losses. Sherman had walked away from Private Capital Management, his wealth management firm, after a string of big bets blew up in his face. Among them were sunk positions in Bear Stearns, the Great Crash failure, and newspaper chains like Knight Ridder and Gannett that chunked off billions of dollars in high-speed losses. Over four years’ time, PCM’s portfolio shrank by 90 percent. To be sure, Sherman owned a $70 million yacht, which he had humbly christened The Majestic, and he’d deftly repotted himself in old-growth Naples, where he chai
red a wine festival every winter. But in team-owner waters, he was plankton to sharks, a multimillionaire in a billionaire boys’ club.

  The Sherman-Jeter purchase of the Marlins was predicated on a promise that they’d made to the other owners in the game: that they’d instantly strip the team of homegrown stars and slash its obligations to the bone. Having overshot the market by about $200 million—their chief rival, a construction magnate named Jorge Mas, had stopped bidding at $1 billion—they told their fellow owners that they’d go the Houston Astros route: tank for four years while turning a modest profit and building back a core of young talent.

  But it’s hard to make a buck by wooing pissed-off fans, then playing them for suckers two months later. Pre-sale, Sherman and Jeter advertised a team built around assets like Stanton. After the deal closed, though, word leaked to the Miami Herald about a secret prospectus given to investors. It talked up scorched-earth payrolls, absurdly robust gate sales, and cash infusions from a phantom TV deal. This, after Jeter and Sherman botched the takeover by firing goodwill legends like Andre Dawson and Jeff Conine and dumping a longtime scout with colon cancer. As southern rollouts go, this was William Tecumseh Sherman burning down Atlanta. At a town hall meeting to assuage hurt feelings, Jeter kiddingly told a fan that he could throw out the first pitch, as long as he bought a ten-year ticket plan.

  The first big name Jeter put on the block? Giancarlo Stanton. Stanton, among the highest-paid position players in baseball, had ten years left on a thirteen-year deal worth $325 million. Alas for Jeter, Stanton also had leverage—veto rights over any proposed trade. For eight years, he’d played the good-egg soldier, hacking ninety-loss seasons in 100-degree heat to stand sweat-soaked and disheartened in right field. As his agent, Joel Wolfe, told USA Today, “he spends Octobers in Europe, unable to watch the playoffs because it kills him.” Now he’d earned the right to go to a sure winner: a team with deep pockets, a stocked pond of talent, and the guts to push all in for five years. Effectively, that ruled out all but four teams: the Yankees, Dodgers, Cubs, and Astros. Not for Stanton the midmarket clubs riding a short wave up—the Clevelands and Colorados with a three-year window if everything broke in their favor. And no as well to longtime contenders who’d come to the end of their run—the San Francisco Giants and St. Louis Cardinals. If Jeter, the team president, wanted Stanton to expand his list, he was going to have to do some high-class groveling with his franchise player. And that, thought anyone who’d ever met Jeter, would be must-watch entertainment through Thanksgiving.

  The courtship of a dejected superstar is one of the hardest dances in sports. Done right, it’s a whisper-quiet, three-step waltz among the GM, the player, and his agent. “I’ll give you an example,” says Cashman, a disciplined cardsharp whose default face is a neutral stare. “Last winter, when I was dealing with Brian McCann, I called his agent [B. B. Abbott] to set the stage.” McCann, a slugging catcher with a no-trade clause in his five-year, $85 million deal, had been ousted from his spot by Gary Sánchez, the first of the Baby Bombers to arrive. “I told [Abbott] to tell Mac, ‘There’s a place on this team for you. You can be the backup and we’ll have the DH open, so if you’re cool with that, then we’re good. But if you want me to [talk] trades, I’m not going to disrespect you. You’ve earned the right to go where you like, so let me know what you want.’” Abbott talked to his client and got back to Cashman fast. “He said, ‘We appreciate you handling it this way, Cash. But hey, on the down-low, Mac’s not going anywhere west.’”

  The Seattle Mariners were interested, but Cashman knew now not to engage them: the Braves and Astros were the only teams for whom McCann would waive his no-trade. Ever so softly, Cashman struck a deal with Houston: McCann (and most of his salary) for two green but electric starters pitching at the Single-A level. Both sides came up winners in the exchange—McCann earned a World Series ring in Houston, and Cashman moved most of his salary and used one of those kid pitchers in the trade he’d make for Stanton. His masterstroke: no one in the New York media got wind of the trade until it was almost done. “The last thing you want is Mac to hear from the papers, ‘the Yankees are shopping you,’” says Cashman. Then the “writers call and commentate on the deal, and suddenly, you’ve got choppy waters.” Instead, McCann left “throwing bouquets our way,” glad for the chance to have been a Yankee.

  Cashman, sitting at a Galleria lunch spot that passes for pan-Asian in Tampa, is a short, pale fellow with surprisingly broad shoulders and a thrumming disinterest in small talk. There is, in the fixity of his gaze and jawline, the set of a man taken lightly for too long. He’s one of those people who came to power fairly, on the strength of his smarts and sweat equity. To be sure, he used a family connection to land an internship with the Yanks while in college. But from the moment he got his foot in the door, there was no stopping Cashman on the come-up. He was a baseball gym rat in college: too small to play for a prime-time program, he started all four years at Catholic University as its leadoff hitter and second baseman. He broke the school’s record for hits in a season and batted .348 his junior year. Not bad for a guy who stood five-seven and swung at every first strike. “The first pitch of the game was almost always a fastball—that’s why my average was so high,” he says. “I took advantage of what I knew was coming.”

  Perhaps because he speaks in a colorless burr and likes the back of the pressroom, not the front, he’s long been viewed as a kind of permanent temp, a substitute teacher who stuck around. For years, New York mistook him for an errand boy, the sad-eyed apparatchik catching hell from George Steinbrenner after a meaningless loss in April. He was paid less money than most of his peers, had smart trades sabotaged by The Boss, and appeared to survive where his forebears hadn’t because he didn’t punch back when abused. That last part was false, but he never troubled to correct it. “He and George would have scream festivals for hours,” says Jean Afterman, the assistant GM of the Yankees, whose office at the new Stadium is next to Cashman’s. “I’d close my door but could hear them down the hall. Brian backs down from no one—that’s why George loved him.”

  Cashman, like the three or four masters of his craft, is one part diplomat to two parts pickpocket. He can politely boost your watch and wallet and leave you thinking the heist was your idea. Jeter’s style, by contrast, is to dictate terms and expect you to glumly accept them. His first act after buying the Marlins was to pointlessly freeze out Stanton. He didn’t book the obligatory get-to-know-you dinner with his star at a stuffy rooftop steakhouse in Miami. He declined to call Stanton and offer congratulations when he was named the league MVP. And he never phoned Wolfe, one of the powerhouse reps in baseball, to ask about his client’s choice of destinations. “I was ready for the worst, which it was,” Stanton confided, looming at his locker in a pair of gold spikes after a workout in spring training in 2018. Like Judge, Stanton is one of those physical freaks you can’t properly appreciate on TV. It isn’t only his mass or stone-cut proportions, but the taper of chest and back to a tiny waist. There’s a quality about him that you sometimes find in art: grace and violence merged in random gestures. “If that’s how you want to treat someone, then there’s no playing nice,” he said of Jeter. “I had had more than enough.”

  In late November 2017, he’d been given a diktat by Jeter. “It was, ‘Take this fucking deal with the Giants or the Cardinals, or I promise you I’m trading everybody around you and you’ll be stuck here forever,’” said someone who was privy to those talks. Stanton had seventy-two hours to agree. He didn’t, per our sources, need them. Replying through his agent, he was River Avenue terse: No, and HELL no, goddamnit.

  A thousand miles north, the Yankees looked on, appalled. “Derek’s done a good job of pissing everyone off,” said a member of the team’s administration. “I’m sure the guys at MLB now are scratching their heads, thinking, ‘What the fuck did we do by selecting him?’” Perhaps they looked at Jeter and mistook him for Magic Johnson, a hug-and-handshake natural who draws inves
tors in droves and grows the worth of everything he touches. Instead, baseball’s bosses got a celebrity who didn’t seem to understand how relationships work at the executive level. “The press asked if Jeter felt the need to talk to Stanton, and he said, ‘No, that’s what my GM’s for,’” said the Yankee staffer.

  While Cashman insists that he liked Jeter as a player, it isn’t entirely clear that he means it. Or maybe it’s fairer to say that there were two Derek Jeters—the happy-go-lucky kid from Kalamazoo who came up at twenty-one and seduced the sport with his cool-hand poise, that gift for the big play on the grand stage, and the thirty-something Jeter who became somewhat hardened by fame. Treated like a civic institution in New York—worshiped by the faithful in their Jumpman-branded garb, teenage fan-girls rocking RE2PECT tank tops, and adored and protected by the tabloid scolds who trolled other stars on Page Six—he somehow remembered every slight and provocation. Jeter grew distant from writers who dared to notice that he couldn’t get around on a good fastball. His initial coldness toward Alex Rodríguez was as stark as it was cruel: there was that graceless moment in 2006 when a routine pop fly somehow fell between them. Jeter, hands on hips, glared daggers at A-Rod, emasculating him on national TV. That Derek Jeter wasn’t fun to general-manage—or to have playing behind you when you pitched. “When Andy [Pettitte] came back from Houston, there was a ground ball up the middle, and Andy’s like, ‘All right, that’s an out,’” says Cashman. “Next thing you know, it goes through for a hit and he’s like, ‘Crap, Jetes can’t get to those anymore.’”

  Nonetheless, Jeter wanted to get paid like the player he’d been in his middle twenties. In the fall of 2010, he became a first-time free agent at the age of thirty-six. He’d had a bad year at the plate and a worse one in the field, but he demanded a max contract into his forties. Cashman pushed back, declining to bargain against himself. The terms he set and stuck to—$51 million for three years—pricked Jeter’s damaged pride. “Jetes sent messages through his agent that we were fucking him when no one was willing to pay what we offered,” says Cashman. “I’m like, ‘How much higher do we have to be than highest?’” He invited Jeter and his agent, Casey Close, to go out and shop the deal. Jeter returned to the table smarting; no one had come close to the Yankees’ bid. Close even suggested a stark concession for his client: a piece of either the YES Network or the team. “At the meeting, Derek said, ‘What other shortstop would you want playing here?’ and I started rolling off names,” says Cashman. “I got, like, three names down and Casey said, ‘Stop, this isn’t productive.’ Then Derek got up and goes, ‘You guys finish this! I don’t want to go anywhere else, but I don’t want to be in here either!’”