Inside the Empire Read online

  Big leads being squandered by their middle relievers, head-scratching slumps for half their vaunted lineup (at one point or another Stanton, Sánchez, Gardner, and Neil Walker were all hitting below .200), and a string of sloppy starts from Tanaka and Gray—the Yankees played, for much of the month of April, like a team seeking shelter and strong drink. They’d just dropped three of four to the awful Orioles when they flew up to Boston in a funk. It was 37 degrees as they took the field for the annual recommencement of hostilities. As Yankees past and present will freely tell you, there’s nothing like setting foot in Fenway Park to shake your faith in human progress. The seats are so close that you hear every fuckyourmothah from the Cask ’n Flagon regulars in row C. “It’s the one place where, right after the Anthem, you want to get back in the dugout,” a retired star told us before the game. “They’re F-bombing you with ‘A-Rod this’ and ‘Jee-tah that!’ even before the song dies out.”

  Not that there’s any refuge in the dugout. It’s the smallest one in baseball, a pea-green foxhole at just a thin roof’s remove from the jolly stompers. Ditto the bullpen, where, in 2003, a security guard threw punches at Yankee players. That old joke about hockey gets echoed at Fenway: it’s a fight where a ball game breaks out. Thurman Munson versus Carlton Fisk. Bill Lee versus Graig Nettles. A-Rod versus Varitek for the heavyweight belt. And now here was a Yanks team run by Aaron FUCKING Boone, the same guy who, in ’03, crushed the spirit of New England with his series-ending bomb in the ALCS. True, each club had retooled its core ethos, building around princes like Judge and Mookie Betts, the best-behaved stars of their generation. And also true, all the heels were gone: without Papi and Pedro, Jeter and A-Rod, there were no goats on which to hang the horns.

  But for the first time in ages, both teams had peaked at once, posting hundred-win talent that was coming of age and would battle, chest to chest, for half a decade. Both had surplus power, striking arms-race deals to bring in big-time boppers over the winter. (We’ll see your Stanton and raise you J. D. Martinez . . .) And both teams had an ace, a shut-down closer, and sufficient stock to trade for a difference-maker. In the run-up to this series, there was more than a casual sense that the hate was hotting up again.

  Game 1 was a wipeout: the Sox raked Severino, and the Yankees gave their hosts six unearned runs. (This was something of a theme to start the season. The Yanks made twelve errors the first two weeks, as if, in their haste to bludgeon opponents, they forgot to pack their gloves.) Game 2 began as another dud. New York bolted to an 8–1 lead, Tanaka seemed to rediscover his splitter, and then, because these teams are incapable of prolonged dullness, the game went to hell in a handcart. Early on, Tyler Austin had nicked Brock Holt with a hard but legal slide at second. Both teams left their dugouts in a show of . . . well, something: there was a lot of milling around and mean-mugging. But gas had been poured in a park that’s pure accelerant, and in the seventh inning the bonfire erupted.

  Joe Kelly, a bespectacled, hard-throwing reliever who’s built like a kitchen match, tried twice to drill Austin with high heat. The second time he nailed him in the ribs. Austin slammed his bat down and went for Kelly, who ducked and threw a punch as bodies swarmed them. A lucky thing for Kelly: Austin is country strong, the country in question being Bulgaria. He’s shorter than Judge and Stanton but thicker than both combined, with a trunk and neck framed of poured cement. “He could shred anyone,” Judge said after the game, still burning off adrenaline from the brawl. If Austin had connected, said a second Yankee, “Kelly would’ve been in the hospital now.”

  Instead, Kelly found himself pinned against his dugout, with the rest of his overmatched squad. Entirely on their own, Judge and Stanton moved the pile, pushing the Red Sox roster up the first-base line in the most lopsided shoving match since Andy Kaufman. Backing up Judge and Stanton was Betances (six-foot-eight) and Sabathia (six-six); Sox combatants couldn’t clear out fast enough. “I’m not trying to get involved with any of those guys, not just Stanton and Judge,” said Holt, the second baseman who’d squawked at Austin. “They’ve got a pretty big team over there.”

  In the scrum, Judge had Kelly in a fierce half nelson and walked him from the mound as you would a child. He appeared to be keeping the peace, but was boiling mad, angrier than New York had ever seen him. “I wish someone had thrown a punch at me,” he said. “That would’ve given me an excuse.” Asked if he’d ever charged the mound himself, he said, “Not as a professional player.” How about high school, or travel ball? “Sure,” he said, curling a faint grin (or snarl). “There’s always someone who wants to take a run at the big guy.”

  The Yankees were a sub-.500 team as the brawl game began on April 11, and the Sox were off to their best start ever. A week later, they’d sit at 17-2 and hold a seven-and-a-half-game lead in the division. But baiting their rival was an unforced error that they’d quickly come to regret. The fight catalyzed the Yanks, got their temper up, banded them together for the battle. They should have sent the Sox a thank-you note.

  After flying to Detroit in a soaking rain that scrubbed most of a weekend series, the Yanks came home to their welcome wagon—better known as the Minnesota Twins. For years, the fat-cat Yanks have treated the Twins like undocumented labor living below-stairs. They typically outspend them two-to-one for talent, out-earn them three-to-one in regional TV money, and outdraw them by more than a million fans a year. True, the Twins are stable and smartly run, but the rules of sports capitalism still apply: big bank takes little bank over time.

  The Yankees have thrashed the Twins in the regular season (owning them 82–31 since 2002) and used them as their stepladder in the postseason, ousting them straight five times to advance. In the wild-card game that launched their run in ’17, the Yanks spotted the Twins three runs in the first, then snatched them right back in the bottom of the frame with a heartbreaker three-run homer. The man who golfed that homer—and may have saved the Yanks’ season—was their all-of-a-sudden slugger, Didi Gregorius.

  While New York fans were mooning over Sánchez and Judge and projecting the second coming of a Core Four cadre, Gregorius was quietly staking his claim as the indispensable Yankee. Set aside his value in the clubhouse a moment and consider his artistry in the field. He plays the best shortstop the Yankees have seen since Jeter in his mid- to late twenties. Didi eats up dribblers with a glide-step shuffle, spins in the hole to fire darts across his body, and vacuums bad hops with a matador’s flourish. Everything he does is baseball ballet, an airborne expression of joy. Even his swing is a thing to behold: that buggy-whip snap of the barrel through the zone and the crack of the ball off his bat. In April, he kept the Yanks afloat with key hits when they slumped for several weeks; posted career bests in every offensive stat that mattered; and slugged his way into the cleanup spot, slotting between Judge and Sánchez. In a year of grand theater and smash debuts, Didi pulled the biggest coup of all: he made everyone forget about Saint Derek.

  He was no one’s savior when he got to New York in an unremarked trade in 2015. With the Diamondbacks, Gregorius was a reckless chaser who didn’t hit lefties or drive the ball. He had the fast-twitch speed to steal bases and pressure pitchers but couldn’t get on enough to scare them. It was impossible to walk him, even if you tried: his base-on-balls rate ranked 219th out of 232 hitters with 1,000 at-bats. Forty percent of his swings were at balls outside the zone, which also ranked him 219th. “It’s not easy for me to lay off pitches,” he explained. “Even in the cage, I swing at everything because I know I can get my barrel on it.” To be sure, Gregorius was a glove guy growing into his power when Cashman swung the deal for him. If he ultimately topped out as a .260 hitter who, on occasion, reached the short seats in right, the Yankees would have settled for that. But Mike Fishman, the Yankees’ data analysis chief, saw more in Didi’s aerodynamic frame.

  Unlike Judge and Stanton, most baseball players are smaller now than they appear on camera. If you spend any time in the Yankees’ locker room, you’re distinctl
y underwhelmed by what you see. Sánchez, who reads as thickly muscled in pinstripes, is packing a soft paunch under his shirt; his chest and thighs are thick but undefined. So, too, Severino, who’s barely six feet and whose shirtless trunk will never make Men’s Fitness. Didi, on the other hand, is bigger and more pneumatic than you might suppose from your couch. At six-foot-three, he has a sprinter’s body: broad and coiled through the delts and quads, with long-strand muscle below the waist that’s quick to fire at a pitch. There’s power in that setup, but it hadn’t been unlocked: he’d hit thirteen homers, total, his first three years. What held Didi back was his intransigence: he refused to take instruction from his failures.

  Enter Fishman, a tall, recessive chap with the pallor of a basement sabermetrician. Though he speaks in a voice you have to strain to hear as you sit in his windowless office, his input rings as loud as any executive’s in the building. Indeed, these cloud-based Yankees are the creatures of Fishman’s metrics. He and his staff of fifteen—the biggest in the game—have built a data platform that spans the sport, covering every level from high school up. When Cashman hired him in 2005 at the suggestion of Billy Beane, Fishman founded the Yankees’ Analytics Department as a systems-ops staff of one. He was a midtwenties stat-head with a math degree from Yale and a passion for baseball’s fourth dimension, numbers.

  Growing up a Mets fan in Greenwich, Connecticut, Fishman had been one of those boys who saw the game as a science, learnable less through instinct than charted proofs. He and his friends spent entire weekends in Strat-O-Matic orgies; even then, before the advent of fantasy quantization, he penned handwritten reports on every player in baseball, tracking their swing rates and hot zones.

  Out of college, he took a job at an insurance company but never stopped pining for the game. Then, in ’03, Fishman read Moneyball and saw his future flash before his eyes. “I’d spent my whole life applying math and stats to baseball, but didn’t think I could make a career of it.” He threw himself into a pair of research projects and sent the findings to thirty major league teams. At the ’04 Winter Meetings, he was one of those pale lemmings hoping to land a sit-down with a club. Beane was the only GM who talked to him. He peppered the kid with questions about his research, but ultimately hired someone else for the position. (Fun fact: the aspirant who won out, Farhan Zaidi, general-managed the LA Dodgers and was subsequently hired by the SF Giants.) Still, the interview gave Fishman hope. A year later, he landed an audience with Cashman, who hired him a week after their meeting.

  Fishman, thirty-nine now, heads an exhaustive staff that functions as the Deep State of the Yankees. They’ve built an interface that can be accessed by anyone with the proper clearance. That includes the quants down the hall in their conference room (where a larger-than-life Darth Vader prop accosts you at the door), the baseball-ops guys in the Tampa office, the analysts embedded with each minor league team in the Yankees’ system, and their pro and amateur scouts around the world. On that global platform are stat-packs and video of every single player in organized ball anywhere, be it the backup catcher of the San Diego Padres or a high school sophomore reliever in Los Altos. “If you’re playing baseball somewhere, you’re in our system,” says Fishman, whose desk is as crowded as a commodity trader’s. There are four flat-panels nesting before him, though he’s careful to snap them off when hosting visitors. What isn’t in view are a sprawl of reports and color-coded spray charts of Yankee hitters. Paper has gone the way of ten-year deals these days; the front office speaks to its players via screens now.

  In the spring, each Yankees player is assigned an iPad Pro and then emailed daily updates to browse. Everything is on there: his lifetime at-bats against the day’s starter; pitch-over-pitch analysis of how that team attacks him; heat-maps reminding him where and what to swing at; and trend-line reviews of how he’s doing. Five years ago, players bristled at these pokes: how dare some geek who’d never played the game tell them how to break a four-day slump? But baseball has become a millennial’s sport, and millennials live entirely through their screens. When they aren’t on the field, players are on their phones and tablets, streaming Netflix or Fortnite or Statcast footage instead of living large at the clubs.

  From the day Didi arrived, Fishman pounded the obvious home: stop chasing hard stuff up and away—all you do is hand the pitcher a gift. And Didi got it, to a point: he cut back on his strikeouts and began to drive the ball with regularity. Each year his slugging percentage pushed up starkly. In ’17, when he lost a month to a shoulder strain and still hit twenty-seven homers, he trailed only Judge and Sánchez in power production. But Fishman mined the numbers at season’s end and spotted something subtle that alarmed him. Pitchers threw him “fewer balls in the zone,” said Fishman, hoping that Didi would grow impatient and help them out.

  And so, in the spring of ’18, Fishman sent one of his staffers to show Didi what was coming. Zac Fieroh, an analyst, played clip after clip of pitchers who teased him away. The session was Didi’s aha moment: he vowed then and there to buy in fully. Asked later to elaborate on that promise, Didi declined to go deeper. For a man as relaxed as he is around players, he’s decidedly less at ease with the press. He’s mastered the team’s tao of ten-word answers: a complete thought reduced to a single sentence, then a nod that ends it, full stop.

  “The game is about numbers, one way or the other,” he said in April.

  Hoping for more of that thesis, the questioner prodded. Yes?

  “Even if you say you’re not about that, you are.”

  So you were receptive to what the analyst showed you that day?

  “I was open to what he said. I kind of knew it already.”

  This was Didi-speak for, Are we done yet? His emphatic nod said, Yes, in fact, we are. Nor was there any luck to be had pulling details out of Fishman. But whatever Fieroh said to Gregorius in March, it clearly hit home with him. From the day he flew north to start the season, Didi was a different player. For a solid month, he led the Yankees in everything—batting average, homers, RBIs, and OPS. Actually, he led the world in most of those things: he was the runaway Player of the Month in the American League. When everyone but Judge was stymied at the plate, Didi put the team on his shoulders.

  The heavy lifting started in the home opener against Tampa: Didi had two homers, eight ribbies, and three runs scored. From that point, the hits just kept on coming. Over the first five weeks, he batted .476 on pitches to the inner half and smashed nine of those mistakes for homers. He was barreling more pitches than he had in the past: per Statcast, his ratio of hard-hit balls was the best of his career. Another gauge of his growth was pitch selection. He had as many walks as strikeouts for the month, and that prudence paid off in productive outs. His two sac flies in the brawl game against the Sox were one less than he totaled his first two seasons.

  But for all of Didi’s heroics, the Yanks were treading water when the Twins came to town in late April. In the first game, a 14–1, clear-the-pipes blowout, Didi capped the attack with a grand slam. He had another bomb the next night in an 8–3 laugher, and a third one in game 3, a 7–4 stroll. In the four-game massacre that jumped the Yankees’ season and sent them on a torrid three-week roll, Didi was the life of the party. He homered in four straight games to kick-start the spree, drove in thirteen runs over a seven-game stretch, and practically outscored opponents by himself, coming across nine times in those games.

  At last, the club was having fun and bashing people’s brains in. They scored sixty-four runs in a nine-game win streak, tapped the brakes in a 2–1 loss to Houston, then ripped off eight wins in a row. Over that three-week stint, they won seventeen of eighteen and beat the best in the West in their own parks—a three-game sweep of the Angels in Anaheim and three-of-four revenge wins in Houston.

  There’s a reason they put a roof on the former Enron Field when they opened it in the spring of 2000: without one, you’d baste in your own bacon fat as you watch a game in July. For anyone not raised in a convection
oven, the heat in Houston is unendurable after Memorial Day. Even April is a bad-hair month; you can wait all day for a breeze that never comes. But when they close the accordion roof, you trade heat stroke for tinnitus. The place is as loud as a jet propulsion lab.

  Years ago, when the Twins played their games in the Metrodome, someone metered the noise there during the playoffs. It reached 125 decibels, or about 40 more than needed to do lasting damage to your ears. It wasn’t quite that raucous when the Yankees returned to Houston to close the ALCS in October 2017, but the din was so piercing—and so persistent for nine innings—that it clearly unnerved their hitters. In games 3, 4, and 5, all wins in the Bronx, the Yankees scored nineteen runs. They scored a total of one in games 6 and 7—and three in the four games won by Houston there.

  It was bloody loud again on April 30, when the Yankees pulled in for the series opener. Unlike Boston, where the abuse feels personal, here it’s polyvalent, like the heat. The screaming is relentless, but there are assaults on other senses as well: the faint scent of cigarettes from the mezzanine level, where good old boys in Biggio jerseys watch on big TVs (Minute Maid Park is one of the last venues in sports to let fans smoke near the seating area); the sea of orange shirts distracting the batter’s eye; and the grease-pit plume of charred meat grilling on the concourse ringing the field. (The place is as much a ribs shack as it is a ballpark. They serve barbecue in the press box. To the bloggers.) Picture yourself at a football game between SEC blood rivals: a huge crowd tanked on tailgate beers and a truckload of rebel spirit. Now dome that field in and brush hot sauce on it: that’s what facing the Astros is like when you’re playing them in their yard.