Inside the Empire Page 3

  The Yankees’ season ended on Saturday, October 21, when they were meekly blanked by the Astros. The following Monday, Cashman called Girardi: Come in one day this week and let’s talk this out. Girardi drove down to the Stadium that Tuesday, eager to share his plans for 2018. But Cashman cut him off at the knee. We’ve got young players and we need a leader who gets them, a messenger with a new message, he said. Girardi was gobsmacked. He could barely respond, sputtering about stability and foundation. He’d gone in expecting a long-term deal; half an hour later, he left in tears. The next day he rang Hal Steinbrenner on his cell and begged him to save his job. Hal was empathetic but firm with Joe: it’s Brian’s decision, and I stand by it.

  A month and a half later, the Yankees hired Aaron Boone after a methodical, drip-dry search. The fourth of six candidates they invited to New York, he was the guy with the shortest résumé in the room. Since retiring as a player in 2009, Boone had knocked around the airwaves for several years before landing a seat on ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball. He hadn’t coached, let alone managed, a team at any level, nor been known, like Carlos Beltrán, another finalist for the job, as a skipper-in-training while he played. But he was a third-generation pro baseball player who oozed the game’s texture and tradecraft. Since boyhood, he’d been a close student of the sport: as a five-year-old running around the Phillies’ clubhouse (his father, Bob Boone, caught for ten years there), he was famous for mimicking every hitter’s stance and every manager’s walk to the mound. Like his brother Bret, he grew up to be an All-Star, but Aaron would blow out a knee as he entered his prime, then have open-heart surgery at thirty-six.

  His move to the booth wasn’t a lateral step: it was where he discovered his calling. He had a gift for drawing out everyone he talked to, even when he wasn’t saying much. Wherever the Sunday Night crew went for games, he spent the two-day lead-up gathering intel and gossip, filing it for use on air. By the time he sat down with the Yankees last fall, he knew as much about the league as their pro scouts did—and some interpersonal things that they didn’t. “He’d seen which teams get along and what made their clubhouse click,” says a club insider. One factor those lucky teams had in common: a manager who knew how to get across to the new breed coming up.

  November 17 was an all-day grind for Boone. It began with a three-hour boardroom meeting, where he laid out his vision to Cashman and six officials, each of whom got a vote. Cashman was struck by how open Boone was, how adroitly he handled being challenged. The metrics guys grilled him about in-game adjustments, those data-driven calls in late or close spots. The development staff asked how he’d work with kids who hit the rookie wall. Each fractal of his worldview was poked and prodded during a second, break-out session after lunch. “It was the car wash of car washes,” says Tim Naehring, the Yankees’ vice president of operations.

  Boone ran a gauntlet of sit-downs that day; none was more important than the one with Jason Zillo, the Yankees’ media chief. Zillo is no mere herder of the press—he’s the man who teaches players to talk like Yankees. Since his promotion to the position in 2007, Zillo has become Cashman’s messaging partner, shaping perceptions of the brand. What Zillo wanted to hear was that he’d have an asset in Boone, a guy who was good in the room. “This is a really likable team, a mix of great kids and some older guys that get it,” says Zillo. “That didn’t happen by accident. It took tons of scouting and preparation, and we want the world to see what we’ve got here.”

  When the process ended and team officials ranked the entrants, Boone’s name was first on every ballot. If there was one thing that put him over the top it was the bracing air of freshness he exuded. He was young in a way that would translate to players, a forty-something guy in a backpack and hoodie who, if need be, could deejay the clubhouse. (Side note: Boone is a one-man karaoke bar. On elevators and treadmills, he’s constantly singing, crooning vinyl-era rock tunes to himself. It’s an endearing trait to players, if not his coaches, who can hear “Eye of the Tiger” only so much.) You didn’t have to tell Boone to spend time in the clubhouse—you couldn’t stop him from doing it if you tried. Nor was it a strain on him to care for his players: Boone cares about everyone he meets. “Aaron was always the kid who befriended kids with no friends,” says his father Bob in a long phoner. “He’s the likable Boone, a born entertainer,” says his brother Bret. Bret adds that Aaron’s health scare—a valve malfunction pinching blood flow to his heart required a complex operation that so spooked Boone that on the eve of surgery he wrote farewell letters beforehand to his kids—made him a “better person and better dad.”

  Boone, in short, was a paradigm shift: a guy who lived and breathed next-gen baseball and could convey that to the players. A new pecking order had emerged in the game: at the top of the table were bleeding-edge teams like the Astros, Cubs, Red Sox, and Dodgers. Beneath them was essentially everyone else—the clubs sitting behind the curve. Five years earlier, Cashman saw this future coming and scrambled full speed to catch up. Now he had the tech and the talent assembled; it was either go big or go backwards. In choosing Aaron Boone, he was making two statements. First, these Yankees would lead the revolution, not just rally from behind. And second, this was officially Cashman’s team now. In tone and direction and all the ways that mattered, it bore his palm-print on the chassis.

  In baseball—that temple of Talmudic rules that no one ever bothers to jot down—a newly hired manager usually waits till spring to address his players at large. To the extent that he reaches out, it’s a call to his frontline stars, or nudging emails to the player or two who underperformed last season. Not Aaron Boone: in his first week on the job, he texted every Yankee to say hello. They were short, upbeat squibs—Super-amped! Can’t wait for Tampa!—though his note to Gary Sánchez ran deeper. Sánchez, the brilliant but moody slugger, was brutal behind the plate in 2017. He posted league-worst stats in passed balls and errors and was out of synch with his starters, most notably Sonny Gray and Masahiro Tanaka. Never the best receiver, he nose-dived badly in the second half, after dialing back his pregame catching work. He especially hated doing the wild-pitch drill, in which he’d flop to his knees and block hundreds of balls that his coach bounced in the dirt. At some point, he announced that he was done with that annoyance; reluctantly, Girardi let it pass. If the manager put his foot down, he risked losing the kid’s bat, so prone was his catcher to long sulks.

  That decision backfired in a slew of passed balls and muffled complaints from the starters. By August, Girardi had had it with Sánchez, critiquing his defense to the press. What he said wasn’t harsh, even by baseball terms—“it needs to improve, bottom line”—but it was enough to blindside Cashman; he decided then and there that Joe was gone. “Cash hates that kind of stuff—it reminds him of the old days,” says a team executive. The reference, of course, is to Steinbrenner père. Big Stein chased the tabloids as hard as he did rings, feeding shills at the dailies blind quotes and backstabs that wound up getting bannered in ten-point type. For him, any attention was good attention, his daily required dose of vitamin Q. For Cashman, bad press had the bitter stench of a team gone off the rails. It reeked of desperation and internal chaos. He wasn’t about to tolerate needless drama.

  “I’d heard about that,” Boone says of the Sánchez beef, but he gave it no play in his text. Instead, he was looking ahead, “stressing the positive” with the catcher. “It’s important that I had a connection to Gary. That’s what I was focusing on.”

  Connecting with people is what Boone does; he seems to have no gear but ENGAGE. From the first day pitchers and catchers reported, he showed up in the clubhouse and made the rounds. He talked to each of the players as they dressed, putting eyes and ears on everyone. The exchanges weren’t profound—Hey, how are you? Get a good night’s rest?—but you sensed the collective relief among the guys. Under Girardi, they had to be in uniform and on the field by 9:30. Boone pushed those start times back by an hour, letting the players sleep in if they liked. He gave his
veterans semi-days off when the young guys bused to road games. They could show up at the park, get an hour of hitting in, then go home and hang with their family at the pool.

  Boone’s address to the team on the first day of full squads was less an invocation than a bro-hug. He told his players they were beyond a good team: they had the “stuff to be a powerhouse,” in his words. His talk lasted two minutes and finished mild—no raised voice or pumped fists. The players were nonetheless amped. “I was thinking, Wow, this is different: a positive take on what we have,” said Austin Romine, the backup catcher. “He spoke to our energy, our chemistry here. He’s someone who’s had big hits in big games and knew what it was like.” David Robertson, the stellar reliever of ten years, put it in veteran terms. “It’s just a younger vibe,” he said with a shrug. Somewhere in the Bronx, Cashman was smiling.

  Taken all around, Boone’s spring training was a success—and for writers, a crashing bore. There were none of the usual tropes to milk for plot lines—no homegrown veterans approaching their walk year, no holdover feud between manager and mulish star. Nor were there signs that the players felt burdened by the great expectations for this group. Instead, what came across was something subtle but essential: these guys really like each other. It is hard to overstate how important that is, and how rarely you find it in sports. Most teams are chains of tiny island-states that do, or don’t, align for seven months. The Latin guys hang and play cards in their corner, the white guys gossip in gaggles of three or four, while the black guys—a vanishing breed in the game—keep to themselves at their stalls. Other clubs divide along age or class lines, as happened with Yankee squads of the last decade: the stars in corner lockers with their coteries grouped around them, while the rest of the guys clump somewhere in the middle.

  But this bunch was different—radically so. It began with the veterans, who made it their business to take some weight off of the newbies. CC Sabathia, the sage of eighteen years, brought many of the young arms under his wing and fed them every morning at his locker. Justus Sheffield, Chance Adams, Dillon Tate, Ben Heller—they all sat around him and spooned up what he taught, some of which didn’t concern baseball. Three years removed from a dark night of the soul—the steep decline of his pitching prowess, the erosion of cartilage in both his knees, and a prolonged stint in rehab for alcohol addiction—Sabathia had become the guru of this team, a gregarious giant enjoying every second of his last days in the sun. He had recast himself as a precision pitcher, using movement and deception to get hitters out after a lifetime of power pitching. It was a stunning resurrection, and what came through him now was joy: a boom box of a laugh that bounced off walls and carried to the far side of the room.

  Laughter was also what you heard from Didi Gregorius’s locker; his stall should’ve been named The Comedy Store. Gregorius, the human emoji and chief tummler of the New York Yankees—he leads the team in dance steps, secret-society handshakes, and Gatorade buckets dumped on late-game heroes—is a running feed of jokes and online chirping. Every morning, he made a loud circuit of the room, spouting an Esperanto of infectious nonsense to anyone who would listen. This bunch of kids grew up together and developed a frisky bond; if there’s a word that describes this team it’s coltish. Though Didi wasn’t one of them (he arrived via trade), the vibe they play with is his. His smile and his energy are gravitational—no one in the room escapes their pull. Smartly, the Yankees gave their phenom, Gleyber Torres, the locker next to Gregorius’s. A sweet, eager kid with a tenuous grasp of English, Torres attached himself to Didi’s side; the two of them would chat for hours in fluent Spanglish. (Didi, from Curaçao, speaks four languages and has invented a fifth for Twitter. It’s largely indecipherable but runs heavy on fire signs and baby-bottle symbols.)

  His silliness notwithstanding, Didi leads by achievement. Over the last couple of years, he’s become a stealth assassin, a singles hitter who has learned to pull and use the lightning in his wrists. With a whipsaw swing that sprays liners to right and seems to square up every ball he strikes, he’s emerged as the Yankee you least want to face in late-and-close situations. In what passed for the surprise of an otherwise sleepy spring, Didi forced Boone to move him up in the order. He left Tampa as the three-hole hitter, wedged between Judge and Stanton. On a team with thunder at every position and enough talent to endure the coming bumps, Didi had made himself a unicorn, the one man in the room they couldn’t replace.

  But the truest tell of a happy team is what it does postgame. Day after day, this group would stick around for a half-hour longer than needed, lingering in their stalls to kibitz and joke and make plans to meet for dinner. (Many nights they piled out to Ruth’s Chris or Bern’s, sharing pitchers and filets and just the occasional jaunt to Thee DollHouse.) The guy who stayed the latest—and was often first to the park—was Giancarlo Stanton. “G,” as the players call him, could’ve phoned it in all spring. He was the reigning MVP and most lethal hitter in baseball; no one would have blinked if he’d coasted through March, then kicked it up a notch the last week down there. “G was here earlier than anyone else—that shows you how committed he is,” said Judge. “He didn’t have to prove anything to anyone; we all knew what a great hitter he was.”

  Stanton, for his part, was not convinced. “I’m way way off,” he said, sheathed in sweat, after a three-hour session in the batting cage. Like all great hitters, he’s obsessed with his hands and how they synch with his hips. The prior June, two months into the season, he’d drastically switched his stance. He’d moved his lead leg close to the plate and kicked his rear leg out; you could read the number on the back of his jersey as you toed the rubber. That severely closed stance is nearly extinct these days; hitters have opened up now to pull with power, not dump soft singles into right. Stanton, the contrarian, bucked the trend, pointing his left knee at the second baseman. That “kept my hips from leaking out and my bat in the zone longer,” he said. Suddenly, it was impossible to keep him in the park. In the ninety-three games after he made the change, he clubbed forty-two homers and hit .284; twenty of those bombs went the opposite way. Still, it’s a stroke that needs constant calibration. Stanton spent the month of March under the hood, taking hundreds of swings every morning.

  Stylistically, he’s mismatched with New York. Stanton is low key about his handlers, drives no sleek exotics, and has no strategic plan to grow his brand. He’s a reclusive star who, given his druthers, would field questions once a month from a pool reporter. He spent eight years in Miami, where he addressed three writers in the clubhouse after games. But at the Yankees camp in Tampa, he was affronted by fifty people roaming the room for quotes; often there were ten or twelve lined up at his stall. His savior was Brett Gardner, the wise old head whom the Yankees lockered beside him. Calling the writers over, Gardy talked for ten minutes so Stanton could get dressed and gather his thoughts. It was the team’s way of saying, We got your back, G.

  On his half-days off, when the kids bused a couple of hours to play the Pirates or Blue Jays, Stanton hung back at the ballpark alone, grinding down and sanding his swing. The Yankees do indoor hitting in a tunnel beside the clubhouse—four batting cages that are open to the players any time of the day or night. The sound of a bat as it barrels up a ball is a jolt to the ears outdoors; inside, the effect is like hearing an M-80 blow every fifteen seconds.

  BANG . . . BANG . . . BANG . . . BANG . . .

  It was 11:00 a.m. when Stanton got in the cage. Eleven turned to noon, then 1:00 p.m.

  BANG . . . BANG . . . BANG . . . BANG . . .

  1:00 p.m. became 1:30.

  “He almost done?” Woody, the lone guard, was asked.

  “Not yet,” Woody said.

  1:45.

  “Now?”

  “Almost.”

  Finally, at 2:00 p.m., Stanton came from the tunnel. His shorts and logo T-shirt were soaked. Even at rest, his face says, Back off, and his brows naturally flare in a frown. If Da Vinci had drawn Ares, he’d look like Stanton. Th
at bat of his could use planets for fungos.

  He was displeased with the way his morning’s swings had gone, and it didn’t lift his mood to answer questions. “This is how I’m wired,” he said of his session and the hell he’d unleashed for three hours. “There’s so much failure in this game: you’re supposed to fail seven out of ten.” He paused to mop his brow with the heel of his shirt. The veins in his arms stood up and saluted. “I can’t deal with that,” Stanton said sharply. “I’m here to get my mind and body right.”

  And with that, he marched off and clattered down the concourse, to have a stern word with his mind and body.

  2

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  Déjà Vu:

  Hammer Time in Fenway

  It’s always loony in Toronto.

  Fenway Park’s a freak show of frat-boy berserkers seated too close to the grass. Citi Field’s a bar brawl waiting to break out, Mets and Yanks fans mean-mugging each other the moment they park in Lot E. But the Rogers Centre in Toronto is a special slice of greasy: it’s what happens when you mix industrial vats of Molson with Canadian dislike of crowd control.