Inside the Empire Read online

  The Yanks are used to fielding people’s worst when they’re on the road. It’s the tax they pay on their power and privilege: getting jostled by stalkerazzi and eBay hounds in the lobby of their four-star lodging; hearing game-long airings of class resentments from the mutants on the third-base rail; and being heckled by people with all-purpose rage at anything New York–connected: A-Rod Sucks! . . . Hillary for Prison! . . . Make America Gay Again! The hating is so shameless that even a mensch like Aaron Judge occasionally takes the bait and fires back. Last summer, in US Cellular Field, he was showered with mama-jokes by a sociopath sitting in the right-field stands. (Judge, adopted by high school teachers, is fiercely protective of his parents.) He came up in the fifth and smoked a heat-seeking tracer in the vicinity of where the fan was screaming. As he rounded first base, Judge glared in his direction and mouthed something under his breath. When asked what he’d muttered to/about the fan, Judge, the soul of prudence, demurred. “If it’s all right, guys, I’ll keep that to myself.”

  Because the threat is real—and because they are the Yankees—the team always travels with a force contingent: two burly ex-cops who walk point for the players and an undercover detail to guard their flank. It’s a useful deterrent when they’re going to the park, but once they arrive, all bets are off. Then it’s on their hosts to patrol the Yankees’ clubhouse, to protect their relievers in the right-field pen, and to keep the hockey goons off the roof of their dugout. The Blue Jays fail badly at all three tasks. There’s a shocking dearth of Toronto cops in and around the tunnel, and no—as in zero—ushers or guards manning the bullpen grounds. (This is especially vexing because the Rogers Centre still sells beer in cans; it’s the last stadium in major league baseball to arm patrons with metal projectiles.) Worse, though, is the scene on the dugout roof. Drunkards crawl out there during batting practice, banging the steel sheath with their fists and feet and screaming at the players beneath them. If that happened in New York, they’d be handcuffed and booked; in Toronto, vendors sell them more beer.

  For these and other reasons, Toronto was the last place in baseball the Yankees wanted to start their season. In the fourth week of March, when the roof is closed and fans pack the party deck in center, it’s punishingly loud and day-drunk hostile: no one wearing road grays feels secure. Nor should they: for a decade, the Yanks have been bullied in Toronto, playing sub-.400 ball there since 2010. What this 2018 group needed, right from the jump, was a booster shot of fuck-you defiance: a statement-making blast from one of the three bulls stacked in the middle of their order. In the top of the first, with one out and one on against J. A. Happ, the Jays’ starter, Giancarlo Stanton stepped in. He watched a strike go by, then flicked his wrists at a pitch on the outer black.

  The ball vaporized off his barrel, a phosphorescent pea to the first-deck seats in right-center. Traveling 117 miles per hour in a blue-light hurry before scattering fans in the fourth row, it was the hardest-hit homer to the opposite field since baseball started tracking these things. The rollicking crowd fell back as if gut-punched, giving a collective groan. Even Stanton’s teammates lost their breath, grabbing the arm of the guy next to them in schoolboy glee as he calmly rounded third and headed home. When he crossed the plate and banged forearms with Sánchez, Stanton effectively told those forty-eight thousand people: WE’LL be the bullies from now on, thanks.

  Happ, a cerebral lefty who had given the Yankees fits, collected himself and kept the Jays around. He was pitching cautiously into the fifth, dotting his four-seamer in and his two-seamer just off the plate, when Judge worked a walk with two outs. Up stepped Stanton in a 2–0 game. He fell behind in the count, then pummeled a slider, booming it off the wall on a bounce. Judge scored easily from first base; Stanton would come around on a Sánchez double. Happ was yanked, and the Jays were cooked; they never made a peep in a 6–1 loss. But Stanton had a closing statement. In the top of the ninth, facing Tyler Clippard, the ex-Yankee with a funky changeup, Stanton reached out and golfed a three-two hanger off the end of his bat. This time the Toronto outfielders barely budged, craning to watch his space-shot in flight. The homer carried 434 feet to center, landing in the Flight Deck boxes.

  When Stanton got back to the dugout, his teammates ignored him, turning away and stanching their grins. “I was about to get up and give him a high-five, but everyone was like, no, no, no!” said Brandon Drury, the young third baseman whom Cashman had acquired in a trade with the Arizona Diamondbacks. Judge and Gardner, who’d ring-led the prank, hid by the bat rack, blank-faced. Stanton got the joke and high-fived air, a big, sweeping dap with ghost Yankees. Then everyone laughed, trading rump-smacks and pounds. It was baseball dumbshow for Welcome home, brother: from this day forth, you’re one of us.

  Nobody wins a pennant on opening day; by the end of week one, that first game’s a blur. But here was a team declaring itself, telling the league about its makeup and mission as it left the gate. The message, as propounded by Stanton’s stat line: You can’t pitch to us. If the lineup didn’t batter you, it would grind you up—force you, over and over, to make your pitch. Every hitter in the order was a deep-count worker, waiting for the slider without much tilt or a cutter leaking over the plate.

  “There’s gonna be lots of nights where they just beat the shit out of you, and there’s nothing you can do about it,” said a pro scout on hand to watch the series. “That lineup has power up and down. They can burn you at any time.”

  Cashman talks a lot to his staff in New York about the concept of redundancy. It isn’t geek-speak for the flow of the season or the effect of a four-hour game on bloodshot viewers. It’s in-house code for Cashman’s vision: a roster of players whose skill sets repeat and, where needed, can replace each other. “When we won in the ’90s, we weren’t built around stars, so we didn’t miss a beat when guys went down,” says Jean Afterman. “That’s Brian’s way: build a circular lineup that just rolls over and over.”

  Judge mirrored Stanton. Didi echoed Greg Bird. Gardner and Aaron Hicks swapped leadoff. So, too, the bullpen, where there were three legitimate closers if Aroldis Chapman got hurt. Chad Green and Dave Robertson owned the seventh inning; Dellin Betances had the eighth. Or at least that’s how it looked on paper in April. In the event of a tight series or one of those three-week stretches without a planned day off, the Yankees could keep trotting out power on top of power. To be sure, the rotation was iffy beyond Luis Severino, the opening day starter and winner. Masahiro Tanaka was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, toggling long stretches of mastery with funks when his splitter didn’t split. Sonny Gray had a wipeout curveball—and no idea where it was going. CC Sabathia was Andy Pettitte redux, owning the edges with a late-life cutter and a two-seamer that broke the opposite way. Alas, he had no cartilage in his landing knee and spent parts of every season on the DL. As for Jordan Montgomery, the marshmallow lefty who’d put up plausible numbers as a rookie, he hadn’t shown anyone he could last six innings—which is about what you expect from a fifth starter.

  But every powerhouse is a work in progress, prone to script revisions and late-night edits. Such was the case during an early April exchange with Cashman:

  “You looking for another starter?”

  Cashman: “Yup.”

  “Someone who can beat Verlander? You’ve got one in Severino.”

  Cashman: “Yup. I’d like to have two.”

  “Got anyone in mind?”

  “Nope. No one starts talking till after the amateur draft.”

  A promise was made to get back to him about starters in June. But first, there was a brand-new season to launch—and an overhang of winter that wouldn’t budge. The first month’s weather was like a Tough Mudder trial: cold and raw and wet underfoot, a damp that prunes the skin between your toes. Players took the field in hoodies and masks, as if dressed for a nor’easter—or biowar. “I was freezing,” said Stanton, who’d looked mummified in right during a twelve-inning loss to Baltimore in April. For the second time in a week, he’d wo
rn the platinum sombrero, striking out five times in a game. After starting off hot in Toronto’s room-temp dome, he’d come home to the Bronx and gone cryogenic. He flailed at sliders far off the plate, stared at strike three under his hands, and was booed by bridge-and-tunnel types who gave him the finger while wearing mittens. Those first several weeks, they seemed to blame him for everything: the Yankees’ lumbering 8-9 start; the cluster of injuries that cost them four players; and the track-signal problems that made the ride from Canarsie feel like a four-hour game against the Red Sox.

  But it wasn’t the cold rain and boos that iced Stanton. As he confided in a pensive sit-down at his locker, he “just felt lost in general.” He was lost in the field, where, after eight years in right, he’d been shunted to left. He was lost in the Bronx, where “I don’t know what street I’m on, what I’m wearing [for the weather],” or even “what I’m eating anymore.” It wasn’t an excuse, just a statement of fact: he was a creature of strict habits. Even switching spring training from the Marlins’ Jupiter, Florida, camp had rattled Stanton’s cage; he spent the weeks in Tampa groping for clues. “Look at my spring numbers—I shit the bed there too. I needed to settle in wherever I was.”

  Oddly, he had chosen to time-share his transition, splitting an apartment in Manhattan with A. J. Ramos, the ex-Marlins pitcher who’d become a Met over the previous summer. Any slack that might have bought Stanton went right out the window. The truck with his furniture got lost in transit and was weeks late arriving in New York. Between his sense of dislocation and the bitter Northeast spring, Stanton’s swing went missing in April.

  For beat writers hoping to get a sense of a new Yankee, the rules of engagement have changed. Twenty years ago, players sat at their lockers chatting, or they bantered in groups playing spades or poker at a card table off to the side. Nowadays, no one’s at their lockers before games: they’re in the trainer’s room or the players’ lounge or taking extra swings in the cage. If you buttonhole a guy en route to the tunnel, you feel the stares of thirty writers on your neck: Hey, give someone else a shot, man. It’s been a catastrophe for beat writers and the people who read them, but neither party started this war.

  Instead, put the blame in the lap of talk radio, which hijacked the conversation about the game. In the mid- to late ’90s, when sports-chat took off as a fast-and-dirty earner for AM stations, ballplayers dialed in on their drive to the park and heard themselves flamed by Bruce from Wantagh. The shows were loops of spit-flecked self-pity as shut-ins, celibates, and six-pack soliloquists pinned their unhappiness to, say, the tail of Carlos Beltrán, whose ninth-inning whiff with the bases loaded in ’06 cost callers their sacred birthright: a Mets World Series. (Poor Carlos, frozen in amber by that Adam Wainwright hammer. Never mind that he was the reason the Mets made it to the playoffs, posting heroic numbers all season.)

  These callers were egged on by their hosts: hot-take hucksters and CPAP breathers who often knew as little about the game as their listeners. Their job wasn’t to reflect and inform; it was to stir the pot. Any mistake a player made, or any quote he gave that smacked of me not we, would be picked to death on-air from noon to night. And so, sensibly, New York athletes learned to zip it. What they gave the writers now were decoupaged koans about “playing for each other” and taking it “one game at a time” while being “on the same page” “at the end of the day.” Nor was it only the players who were piping down now. Managers who’d always talked to writers before games suddenly shut the door to their office. Now they only spoke when required, doing pre- and postgame briefings in the pressroom. Some version of this has happened in every sport, but baseball is the game that’s been most impacted. Thirty years ago, it was like a brokered romance between the players and fans. The players played the game, then talked about it after, giving their candid takes to the writers. The fans watched the game and read the dailies over coffee, then kibitzed over details at work. They didn’t really know the players, but had a sense of them regardless, and that was good enough to grow affections. Now, thanks to Twitter, there’s less distance between the sides, but a mutual antipathy fills the space.

  Once in a while, however, you get lucky with a player—and if you press your luck, gold falls out of his mouth. Stanton is such a player: he normally has an armored bearing, but if you ask the right question at just the right time, his visor flips up for twenty minutes. After one of the five rainouts he weathered in the early going, he was cornered at his locker after a shower. He’d already addressed the media about his poor start in New York and, to his credit, answered every query. But no one had thought to ask him about the near-death experience of being struck in the face with a fastball. That question was put to him after the other writers left. Stanton flinched—then spoke for a solid half-hour.

  In September 2014, during a game in Milwaukee, Stanton took a heater flush in the face from the Brewers’ starting pitcher, Mike Fiers. When a strong-armed thrower releases a pitch, a major league batter has less than half a second to react to the ball in transit. Honest hitters talk about a vanishing point: that spot in a ball’s flight, about eight feet out, where they suddenly lose sight of it. It isn’t that they blink—the pitch literally disappears in those last milliseconds of travel. A good hitter’s swing path, framed by instinct and training, is still just guesswork on his part. So is his decision to duck a beanball. When he sees it leave the hand and bend toward his head, the batter must start his bailout well before arrival—and even that’s a guess about where the ball is going.

  Stanton was leading the league in homers that year, and the Brewers were buzzing him up and in, trying to move him off the plate. Fiers’s 0-1 two-seamer was a waste pitch inside—but it just kept biting and rising. Stanton didn’t budge as the pitch bore in; he lost sight of it near the plate. “From here to that couch—I never saw it after that,” he said, pointing to a sofa in the Yankees’ clubhouse. “All I felt was impact, and then falling on the ground. The whole side of my face was gone—I felt sharp pieces in my mouth. I was trying to be soft with them because I didn’t want to choke, but the pain was excruciating.”

  The fans at Miller Park fell silent. Trainers raced to the plate. They tried to roll Stanton onto his back, but he fought them, unable to speak. His mouth had filled with blood, and, in panic, he thought he’d drown if he didn’t stay down on his side. “I was afraid I’d swallow my teeth,” he said, patting the side of his face where a hole had been lanced by the impact of the ball. At the hospital, a doctor “put his finger right through it, like I was a fish he’d hooked.” Multiple bones were broken; shards of teeth lodged in his lips. That autumn, he underwent a string of operations to fuse the breaks in his lower jaw and cheekbone. When the swelling subsided, teeth were implanted, but there was nothing to be done for the nerves. A swath of his left cheek is permanently numb. “I can’t feel that,” he said, tracing a two-inch crescent from his lip to his cheek. “I’ve gotten used to it—sort of. But when I smile, that part won’t go up as high.”

  Stanton spent most of that winter healing—but the hard work was psychic, not physical. He now had to train his mind to wall off fear: his livelihood depended upon it. “I knew if I was scared, my career was over—I might as well find something else to do.” He wouldn’t say how he’d willed himself not to flinch; hitters who’ve been beaned and seriously injured are loath to deep-dive that process. All of them have heard of the tragedy of Tony Conigliaro. A generational talent and supernal slugger who’d hit a hundred home runs for the Boston Red Sox before he turned twenty-three, Tony C., as he was adoringly known at Fenway, took a Jack Hamilton fastball an inch below his eye in the summer of ’67. Rico Petrocelli, who was in the on-deck circle, described the sound of a face collapsing as a “squish . . . like a melon hitting the ground.” Conigliaro survived his crushed cheekbone and jaw, but the damage to his career was catastrophic. He returned a year and a half later, battling fear and blinkered vision to earn Comeback Player of the Year. The damage to the retina was prog
ressive, however, and he was forced out of baseball by thirty. Seven years later, he suffered a massive stroke. Conigliaro lay in a vegetative state till his merciful death at forty-five.

  Stanton, who has never watched a clip of his own beaning, didn’t need reminders of that day. But he got them, nonetheless: during his first months back, he was tested by pitchers trying to throw inside. “It happened every game in my first at-bat—and yes, that made me mad,” he said. “If you go that far in, then you’re doing it on purpose. And if you miss your spot and hit me, then that was on purpose too.” To protect himself, he added the C-flap extension that bolts to the side of the helmet. Still, it didn’t cover his amygdala, the lizard part of the brain that screams DUCK! Stanton somehow managed to mute that voice, standing up to his brushback hazers.

  Marcus Thames, the Yankees’ hitting coach, was asked what he’d said to Stanton during his early-season slump. Thames gave a laugh and shrugged. “Nothing,” he said. “The man knows his own swing. There’s nothing I could tell him he doesn’t know.”

  That take on Stanton tallied with what we saw: he has a dead-sure grasp of who he is. He was impeccably raised by mixed-race parents who opened the world to him. His father Mike and mother Jacinta were postal workers in the San Fernando Valley. They traveled ambitiously on vacation—to China and India and Africa—and anointed him at birth with names befitting an explorer: Giancarlo Cruz Michael. He went by “Mike” as a kid to honor his dad and was so known when he was drafted by the Marlins. But like his parents, he was stricken with the travel bug and spent his winters trekking Europe and the Middle East. In late 2011, he came back from Italy and decided to honor his birthright. From then on, he would be known as Giancarlo Stanton, and tough nails to any fans who found that boujee. As he told the New York Times at the time, he didn’t care what people thought: “You got something unique, you don’t run from it. You embrace it.”