Inside the Empire Page 7
Cashman called Shapiro, who gave him five candidates. At the top of the list was Bohling, who had worked for Tom Coughlin while he ran the Jacksonville Jaguars. Cashman had direct-line access to Coughlin: he’d roomed with Coughlin’s son Timmy when the two of them were young and just starting out in Manhattan. Coughlin confirmed that Bohling was brilliant, a sports-performance guru who gave raw prospects the psychic skills to advance. Beside teaching young players techniques to get through slumps, Bohling excelled at building team bonds—that gauzy but crucial thing called chemistry.
In the early to mid-2000s, the Yankees ruled the regular season but were bafflingly bad in October. They blew a ninth-inning lead in Game 7 against the D-backs in the 2001 World Series; lost the ’03 World Series to the badly overmatched Marlins; and were the first team in baseball to gag a three-games-to-none lead in a best-of-seven series, self-destructing against the Red Sox in the infamous ALCS of 2004. They had power and pitching and the greatest closer of all time—but none of the closeness of the title-winning squads.
Their clubhouse had the feel of an off-site at the Hyatt. It was an assembly of well-paid strangers who’d been hired to boost profits and—at their soonest convenience—win a ring. The Core Four kids were now famous adults with competing corporate interests off the field. Surrounding them, boardroom style, were brand ambassadors brought in from other teams. Alex Rodríguez, Randy Johnson, Gary Sheffield, Kevin Brown, Mike Mussina, Jason Giambi, Raúl Mondesi: all were high achievers at their prior place of business but bad—or worse—style fits on this team. Even Giambi, who idolized Mickey Mantle and had dreamed all his life of being a Yankee, was hopelessly lost in that room. “He was a long-haired, Harley-riding, whiskey-drinking dude that George tried to ram in a square hole,” says a team executive. “He made him cut his hair and get rid of the chopper—basically, made him someone that he wasn’t.” The close-cropped Giambi, a former AL MVP, struggled mightily at the plate in New York. He cranked a lot of homers his first two seasons, but was a .208 hitter by year three, when he was diagnosed with a pituitary tumor (which was subsequently treated without any complications). “We definitely messed him up, and I feel lousy about that; he was such a good guy,” says the exec. “We thought it would go like [the trade for] Tino did, but for whatever reason, it never really did.”
Tino, of course, is Tino Martinez, the previous star import at first base. As recounted earlier, he too was unnerved by the size of the town and the task. Then Torre took him aside, put an arm around his shoulder, and talked him through his bout of new-guy jitters. Those first five years—from 1996 to 2000—Father Joe was the great confessor. He radiated kindness and a feel for those with troubles, having weathered his own maelstrom as a boy. (Torre witnessed his mother’s beatings at the hands of his father, trauma he depicted in his memoir.) “He allowed you to work your way out of struggles—the fact that he had played made a difference,” says Darryl Strawberry, who salvaged his career and reputation with the Yanks, hitting homers that helped win three World Series off the bench. “We had so many different types on our roster, but he made everyone feel important, and put us in the best position to succeed.”
Alas, that Joe was all but gone by the time the Jason Giambi arrived. The extended triumph of the title years changed everyone on the club, Torre included. No longer was he managing twenty-five guys and making himself available to late arrivals. By then, “he didn’t relate to the new guys at all—and I know that for a fact ’cause they complained,” says a team official. “Torre had become Joe Corporate—he had Bigelow Tea and Chase in his office. He wasn’t accessible to the Sheffields.” For his part, Cashman hedged when asked if Torre’s aloofness had cost the Yankees pennants. He was frank, however, about his displeasure with the outcomes. From 2001 to 2006, “we had championship-caliber teams that failed to finish,” he says. “We entered the playoffs as odds-on favorites in Vegas, and for whatever reason didn’t play well.”
Those flameouts made Big Stein “extremely upset,” as he constantly told Torre through his touts. “He would have the YES Network embarrass Joe, ask him tough questions after losses,” Cashman explains. Or George would “leak to Bill Madden at the News that he was secretly meeting with Lou Piniella to replace Torre.” This was after the ’06 playoffs, when the top-seeded Yanks lost without a whimper to the wild-card Tigers. It was yet another ouster in the divisional round, and this one was particularly bitter. When his powerhouse lineup didn’t hit a lick, Torre seemed to single out Sheffield and A-Rod, benching one and batting the other eighth—or, “as Torre was saying then, ‘double-cleanup,’” Cashman groans.
Still, Cashman fought on Joe’s behalf when George tried to can Torre for Davey Johnson. “I remember going to bat to keep Joe here. I didn’t think he warranted termination. We still were making the playoffs, hadn’t bottomed out yet, which is generally what you do when you transition. Even in ’07, when George decided to part ways, I asked him again to reconsider. But the money Joe was making, and the credit he took from George? George resented the shit out of that.”
When asked to compare those late-Torre teams to the one in the locker room now, Cashman comes forward in his chair. “Oh, this team’s chemistry’s off the charts,” he says, beaming. “That’s a very unique group down there.”
He declines to make the case with chapter and verse; like most GMs, he stays out of the clubhouse, respecting the authority of the manager. But Cashman has his sources in the locker room, and none are more important than Jason Zillo. Twelve years ago, when he decided to change the culture, Cashman enlisted Zillo, then the assistant media director, to groom and polish a better breed of Yankee. It was a long-term project that took years to bear fruit, in part because the system sent up so few prospects between the Core Four era and this one. Over that twenty-year span, only three homegrown hitters had enough at-bats for a batting title, and exactly four starters had logged enough innings to win an ERA crown.
Still, those lean years gave Zillo a lot of runway to road-test his training program. “The idea was to take kids like [Phil] Hughes and [Robby] Cano and teach them how to do it the right way when they became elder statesmen,” says Zillo. Eventually, he hoped, they’d be his “feeder system,” “good clubhouse guys” whom young players took after, starting “a snowball effect.” Hughes and Cano were gone, of course, before they could spread the light, but by then Zillo had filled the pipeline with kids who behaved like Aaron Judge.
Zillo, forty-one now, runs a media shop that has doubled in size since he started. (Like Cashman, he joined the Yankees out of college and has worked for no one else as an adult.) A trim, affable chap who’s built a lot like Cashman and seems to share a wardrobe with him, he is himself a model for these good-guy Yanks: accommodating and genial within set limits, someone whose game face is always on. He’s set himself the task of bottling the Core Four’s ethos and diffusing it at every level from A-ball up. That starts in the first few days of spring training: at both the major league camp at Steinbrenner Field and the instructional camp across the street, Zillo shows the players proprietary videos of how—or more like it, how not—to handle the New York press. Not surprisingly, the Yankees guard these videos like they were nuclear launch codes. Though the details can’t be shared, the yield of seeing them can: The clips are surprisingly powerful. They’re hilarious and graphic and discomforting to watch. No kid could view them without being scared straight on the risks of speaking his mind.
Conversely, the two clips also extol the virtues of being accountable to the press. If you screw up on the field, just own it and move on; don’t deflect blame and make things worse. If asked a tough question about real-world matters, be polite but decline the invitation. (It happens. If you’re a public figure in this age of atrocities, someone’s going to ask you about mass shootings.) After the videos run, the Yankees turn the floor over to a different guest speaker every year. Last spring, it was A-Rod, whose media history reads like War and Peace. Yes, the same A-Rod who sued the c
ommissioner of baseball, then turned around and sued the Yankees’ team physician, was now fielding questions from impressionable kids on the right way to put out fires. Zillo notes about A-Rod: “He was honest with the guys about his own mistakes—and I promise you they were paying strict attention.”
These days every club does some kind of media training, but the Yankees, who got there first, work it harder. Apart from team sessions, they stage role-play workshops for kids with less than four years of service. “We’ll get three or four players to play media members, give them mikes and cameras” and a hot-button topic to pose to a chosen teammate. Gun rights, immigration—the reporters dig deep, making the players “super-nervous and sweaty.” In 2017, they pressed a Latino prospect for his feelings about Trump’s proposed wall. “Afterwards, we debriefed him,” says Zillo, “and he’s like, ‘My heartbeat was going—I cried so many nights, not having my family here.’” There aren’t a lot of clubs devoting off-days in March to live-fire media drills, but as Cashman said, it’s better to have guardrails at the top than an ambulance waiting at the bottom. The yield of all that training is a single-minded squad that speaks with one voice in public. Play back any postgame interview last year. No matter who the Yankee is, his tactic is the same: Talk about the team, not yourself.
Typically, the chink in a club’s messaging chain is the top-ranked prospect who’s been promoted. He’s had all eyes on him since he was drafted out of high school or signed overseas at sixteen, and that blend of jock swagger and peak naïveté can land him, wheels up, in a ditch. How often have you seen a kid come in and lose the locker room in an eyeblink? Whether it’s Gregg Jefferies, who was such a diva that he demanded the Mets ship his bats separately from the teams’, then wound up fishing them out of a trash can after Strawberry dumped them in a rage; or Noah Syndergaard, whose lunch was snatched by David Wright when he elected to eat it during a preseason game—you only get one chance to make a bad impression that follows you around the league. But not the Yankees—not anymore. One after another, they bring up polished products who say and do everything right.
On the fourth Sunday in April, when they were barely above water and floundering behind Boston and the Jays, the Yanks promoted Gleyber Torres, the Hope diamond of their vaunted system. A kid from Venezuela acquired from the Cubs in Cashman’s benchmark heist of 2016 (the reliever he gave up, Aroldis Chapman, signed back with the Yankees that fall), Torres was twenty-one and had half a season’s experience of high-minors ball for the Yanks. A born shortstop, he was also playing out of position: blocked by Gregorius, he’d been shunted to second, where he was still doing on-the-job training. But for a chunk of the ’18 season, he was the Yanks’ best all-around player, a kid with the advanced skill set and emotional savvy of a ten-year star.
Boone batted him ninth to break him in easy and add a little length to the lineup. Instead, Torres took the team off Didi’s shoulders and carried it for the next five weeks. Between April 24 and June 4, no one could get him out. He hit .336, drove in twenty-seven runs, and almost broke the record for fastest-to-ten-homers by a Yankees rookie. None of those shots were short-porch chippies: the kid who hadn’t hit for power in the minors was launching them to the black in dead-center. In a stretch when most of the run producers were mired in long funks (Stanton, Sánchez, and Gregorius hit .211 combined and were benched off and on by Boone), Torres and Miguel Andújar, the rookie costars, turned the batting order upside down.
Those five weeks made the Yankees’ season. They played .750 ball, overtook the Sox, and became the team everyone feared back in March. During a particularly grueling run against the league’s best clubs—from late April to May 10, the Yanks played thirteen games against the Angels, Astros, Indians, and Red Sox and won eleven of them—Torres was the difference-maker. One four-day span largely told the tale: the kid was a born killer in big spots. On May 3, against the Astros on the final lap of their Western trip, the Yankees were down 5–3 in the ninth, after a rare blown save by Chad Green. Torres, a marvelous two-strike hitter, short-stroked a 3-2 slider to deep left, tying the game and sending the go-ahead run to third; Judge delivered that runner, one out later, with a grounder.
The next night Torres sparked his dog-tired team with a three-run bomb to left, jumping them out to an early lead on Cleveland. Two days later, after another bullpen bobble, this one by Dellin Betances, the ice-cold Stanton was intentionally walked so the Indians could face Torres in the ninth. He fought off slider after slider to get to 3-2, then jumped at a changeup on the outer half. The ball leapt off his barrel, bound for right-center, but just kept going and going. By the time it fell to earth in the Yankees’ pen, 415 feet the opposite way, the huge Sunday crowd had gone berserk. As the Indians trudged off, wondering what had hit them, and the Yankees hopped the rail to dog-pile Torres, Didi grabbed the Gatorade bucket and drenched him not once but twice. Soaked to the skin, Torres calmly wiped his face and fielded questions from on-field reporters. In lilting but broken English, he chanted the catechism: I try stay focus and help the team.
Afterwards, in the deafening boom-bap! clubhouse, Marcus Thames, the hitting coach, talked about Torres, whom he’d mentored the prior off-season. Torres was in Tampa rehabbing his elbow, having torn it on a head-first slide at Triple-A. They were training in baseball’s dead-zone—that five-week stretch between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve—and Torres could have easily mailed it in, doing drills and some light lifting before flying home. Instead, he obsessed over every detail: weight shift and launch path and pitch recognition, endlessly pumping Thames for information. Out of nowhere one day he brought up Dallas Keuchel, the Astros’ lefty who’d owned the Yanks for years. “I study him in the World Series,” he said to Thames. “You gotta take what he give to you and go to right field on him.”
Thames was stunned. Most players don’t watch the Series: it’s too painful to bear if you’re not in it. But here was a twenty-year-old, four months postsurgery, who’d treated it like a night school course. He’d already gleaned that there were pitchers like Keuchel who never give in to a hitter, throwing him further and further away until he submits and rolls a grounder to short. “It said a lot about his maturity and awareness,” says Thames. “You don’t see that stuff in a rookie.” Six months later, in May, Torres went up against Keuchel and hunted for a pitch to drive. Ultimately, Keuchel hung a slider to him; Torres scorched it into the corner for a double. After the inning ended, he passed Thames in the dugout. “Remember what we talked about in Tampa?” he said, winking.
Torres was named Rookie of the Month for May and, through June, was the early runaway favorite to win the Rookie of the Year Award. His only competitors were the Angels’ Shohei Ohtani and Miggy Andújar, his lineup mate. But Andújar, who was promoted weeks earlier by the Yanks, ran a full length behind him in production. On the field, the two rookies played like twins; off it, they were nothing alike. Andújar, a kid from the Dominican tropics, walked around the clubhouse with an incandescent grin, as if he couldn’t quite credit his good luck. He played cards with his Latin teammates, shimmied to bachata, and dressed like he had a date with a ring-card girl.
Torres, on the other hand, was pensive to the point of silence, sitting and staring at his cell phone. He hails from Caracas, a city so sunk in dystopian chaos that even soldiers stay in after dark there. It’s the murder capital of the hemisphere, a place where killings go unreported and clans with any cash are kidnap targets. Every morning Torres texts his mother and father to see how they got through the night. Before and after games, he pings Elizabeth, his young wife, who came over in 2018 to join him in New York. “There is trouble there,” he tells us. “I ask, ‘Is everything all right?’ and they tell me they are fine, just focus on baseball.”
For Torres, that’s easier said than done. His country, like the Dominican Republic, is baseball-crazy, and his exploits make him back-page gold. More than 350 of his countrymen have gotten to the bigs; several are in the Hall of Fame, or bound there
soon enough, including Luis Aparicio, José Altuve, and Miguel Cabrera. “Everyone is paying attention to Gleyber, he’s on the news there every night,” says his teammate and countryman Ronald Torreyes. “People are proud of him, especially since he’s playing for the Yankees, who are very popular in my country.”
It wasn’t just Venezuelans who took notice. None other than Roberto Alomar, a native Puerto Rican and Hall of Fame second baseman, started making mental notes of Torres even when Gleyber was a low-level minor leaguer. Alomar, currently a Blue Jays adviser, was gathering data on Toronto’s prospects back in 2016 and began homing in on the Tampa Yankees’ fiery little infielder.
Torres, only nineteen at the time, had just been traded to the Yankees from the Cubs in the Aroldis Chapman deal. He was a stranger to the Florida State League and had no reason to believe a legend would be watching him from the stands. Nevertheless, he put on a show. “[Gleyber] reminded me a lot of myself in the way he played the game and carried himself,” Alomar said. “I mean, I was quicker than him, but he had more power. You could see he was smiling, he was happy. You could tell he loved baseball. I was thinking, ‘Gleyber is me when I was a kid.’”
The two finally met in 2018 in person, although under much different circumstances. By then Torres had crushed his audition in the Bronx, but June was exacting its toll on the rookie. Torres’s average fell eighty points; his OPS was down by almost a third. Opposing pitchers were beating him with inner-half heat, sensing Torres’s bat was a tick slower. That was the surcharge he was now paying for those early-season home runs. Torres was so conscious of maintaining that long-ball swing that he only managed to gum up his fast-twitch muscles.
Slumps are a near-prophecy for most hotshots. Typically, it’s the domain of the team’s hitting instructor and a wise veteran to help the kid work through the baggage. But Yankees president Randy Levine had another idea: he reached out to Ray Negron, the Yankees’ community relations adviser, knowing he and Alomar were close friends. Could Alomar help? Would he? It was a bold, back-channel request, a member of the Blue Jays’ organization performing triage on a Yankee, but Alomar was already saying “yes” before Negron had finished asking. He hadn’t forgotten the young star on Tampa’s back fields.