THE NEW YORK YANKEES ARE IN THE WORLD SERIES

The Yankees are back in the Fall Classic for the first time since 2009. How did this happen?

It was a month after the Texas Rangers won a World Series championship in a year where the New York Yankees did not qualify for the postseason, and Brian Cashman — the general manager of the Yankees — was startlingly frustrated, a mood that hasn’t been the norm in Yankees land. “There’s a lot of stuff that’s not accurate that is floating around about analytics, (with people) saying that’s why we didn’t make the playoffs”, Cashman said, with a burning intensity in his voice. “A lot of people have been unfairly portrayed.” At one point, in the twenty minute video, the curse word bullshit is said ten times. After engaging in a few direct conversations with beat writers like Joel Sherman — Joel’s question is truly excellent here, he asks Cashman whether he can remember the last time he thought the Yankees management did something wrong — Cashman says “I think we’re pretty fucking good, personally.” (Jason Zillo, the Yankees’s Vice President, and Director of Media Relations is directly behind Cashman, and he has a charming smirk on his face during parts of this — we’ll call it, motivational conferencing).

That was a slightly glaring example of what Cashman is like behind closed doors. He is direct, passionate, and notoriously witty; a veteran general manager in an organization that might as well be a family business he has infiltrated his way into, and not afraid of saying something that is unpopular or fiery. Fans tend to be cynical about Cashman, since he’s spent close to three decades as general manager, got a job as an intern in the 1980’s because his father was a friend of George Steinbrenner’s, and because the championship drought the Yankees find themselves in — but he’s incredibly competent. Billy Beane, the general manager who oversaw the creation of “moneyball” when he was with the Oakland Athletics, said “I would argue that Cashman is the greatest executive in sport’s history.” He’s someone who has risen up through the ranks in the front office through his unfiltered speech and fiery work ethic. Cashman has no problem playing the bad guy, when everyone in the Yankees organization tends to want to ease the egos of the starboys that roam the halls. When Derek Jeter was being told, or wasn’t being told, by team officials about his below average defense, Cashman said something to Jeter, forcing him to reckon with his eroding range, to train vigorously in the summer to improve upon it. In Andy Martino’s book The Yankee Way, Jeter eventually thanked Cashman before his hall of fame speech. “Hey, I just want to thank you for everything you did in my career”, Jeter told Cashman, a surprising comment from someone who is far more egocentric than people give him credit for. “As far as I’m concerned, things are cool between us.” This past offseason, Cashman, perhaps annoyingly so, spoke about Giancarlo Stanton’s availability issues, claiming that Stanton is “going to wind up getting hurt again more likely than not because it seems to be part of his game.” Like Theo Epstein, Cashman is as vocal as it gets for a general manager. As it is with the general manager, we don’t quite always think of them as people who have a relationship with the players that we watch. In fact, the Yankees historically have had the owner, the famous George Steinbrenner, get involved in uneasy schisms with the players — Dave Winfield, over money; Hideki Irabu, over weight; David Wells, over insubordination. Cashman, however, does get into minor verbal tussles, and always has. Cashman’s features are pronounced for a regular caucasian man: he’s got balding hair, a pointed nose, and sharp, delicate, blue eyes. The skin next to his ear is veiny shaped, and it felt like it was getting bigger during his rant to reporters in November. 

This past offseason was eventful for the Yankees. They traded Michael King, a talented pitcher, to the San Diego Padres, for Juan Soto, an unbelievable and already champion at age 25. Soto landed in New York before Spring Training started and the vibes were already fun; he smiles with a Yankee hat on, looking like a Dominican barber shop owner in a shop located on Broadway. It was a move that fans were accustomed to seeing most of their lives, but has been conspicuously missing in the Aaron Boone era, besides some small exceptions. The Soto move that Cashman executed revealed that the Yankees understood they had to change the ceiling of the organization. Their previous risk-adversed moves, that let players like Manny Machado and Bryce Harper go to other teams, felt like an counterfeit image of calculation. Soto has changed the Yankees’s swagger mightily throughout the season, allowing fans to puff their chests out again because of the braggadocio that describes the very essence of Yankee fandom. 

Presently, the New York Yankees are in the World Series, getting ready to face the Los Angeles Dodgers, in a matchup that will make your grandfather of any race or ethnicity, content. It’s been quite a postseason for the Bronx Bombers; they dispatched the scrappy Royals in four games, holding superstar striver Bobby Witt Jr to two hits in nineteen at-bats. The Royals and the Cleveland Guardians, formerly the Cleveland Indians, spent the entire playoffs mostly shutting down Aaron Judge, who only had two home runs in the ALCS, only to deal with Giancarlo Stanton’s heroics. Giancarlo Stanton has five home runs, including a game-tying one in the fifth game of the ALCS against the Guardians. 

At six foot five, with oak trees for arms, you can feel Stanton’s unassailable focus every time he comes up to bat. He has a death stare that presents itself through those dark eyes of his, not quite dead, but not sensual when he is at the plate. He carries an almost mechanical body to him, like his muscles have been developed through technical advances in the Soviet Union. There’s no flubber there; no droopiness; possibly no stretch marks. His forearms are so huge that it’s shocking; if baseball was a horror movie, his skin would fall off from his muscles being too big. His stance is tall, imposing, parallel to the plate at all times. If Judge is hitting a beach ball, then Stanton is chopping wood. The bat speed has improved from last season, when he was slightly too muscular — hulk sized — to turn around on fastballs. While Cashman was lamenting his injuries, Stanton was quietly getting to work by dropping pounds and getting leaner. Thus, whenever the ball is connected to his lumber, he is cracking the ball — providing fans with some of the most majestic home runs in the playoffs since the millennium. Game one against the Guardians is an excellent example. A 93 miles per hour fastball in the middle of the plate, towards the inside part but not enough inside, Stanton pummels it. (You can hear Jeff Francoeur say “oooh!” when the bat makes contact). I was at the park and the sound was a scream; it led me to scream. 

I’ve been thinking about Stanton’s career as a Yankee intently for the past couple of seasons, if only because he hasn’t been exactly what people might have imagined when the Yankees first got him. Perhaps it is how mundane baseball tends to be that confuses people, because Giancarlo Stanton is never boring. Sometimes, he looks terrible at a specific at-bat, or on one swing — purposefully so. He’s waiting for his pitch, judging the pitcher's angle, ready to sit back and launch one into the night. For Yankee fans, who are New Yorkers who tend to value players who are consistent robots nightly, Stanton felt like a science experiment that they didn’t understand. Does he care? Why did he just strike out on three pitches? Why does he run like a character in Bull Durham? For Stanton, baseball is about the month of October, he gets his timing straight during the regular season to be a maximum factor in the postseason. He’s not Aaron Judge, Drake, or Jay-Z, or Kanye West, these retail stalwarts that can give you classics that you buy at Best Buy when the album first comes out. Judge is a regular season giant; but Stanton, is an October hitter. He’s a great mixtape rapper like Gucci Mane or Lil Wayne, a little unwieldy, but full of the best freestyles of all-time, inspiring the kids — perfecting the weirdest flow — more than the ready-packaged stars can do. 

Stanton’s answers at postgame press conferences tend to tug at fans who bewail at players who fail to take responsibility for their play. Even the relatively fickle Yankee crowd can’t deny Stanton’s acts of attrition when he does not hit, and when the team does not reach their ultimate goal. He’s always taking the boos that he hears on his chest. There is no way you can last as a Yankee without thick skin, no way you can sit and play at a championship level without enduring some boos along the way. The fans were sold an entitled view of the world, this writer included. If we don’t win, it is a failure. There is a strong belief that every season, no matter how successful it was from the months of April to September, should not be accepted if it does not end with a title. Derek Jeter would repeatedly say so throughout his career, scaring midwest baseball fans who tend to be more whimsical with their thinking. So, when you hear that, and the team is not performing every minute of every game the way you want to, the feathers start to get ruffled, the boo comes out. Yet, these boos — which are embarrassing every time I hear them — are because of the slightly unfair expectations people put onto Stanton. Sure, he had a MVP season with 57 home runs with the Miami Marlins, but so far, with the Yankees, he’s been an eccentric superstar, not a type with institutional appreciation. Of all the Yankees players, his legacy is the most incomplete. He has over 400 home runs, but he is also no longer a complete all-around player. He’s a full-time designated hitter; only David Ortiz and Edgar Martinez are in Cooperstown at that position. How can a player as one dimensional as Stanton is now make it to the Hall of Fame? October is his answer to that interesting question. As long as he continues to hit, he’ll be there, perhaps it is wishful thinking for me to think that a vigorous Yankee fan base is making the trip to cheer him on.

It’s early to say this, since he is only at the age of 25, but another possible future Hall of Famer, Juan Soto, delivered some show-stopping highlights alongside Stanton. Have you seen a highlight of the at-bat that helped ensure that the state of Ohio will vote red? Soto fouled off pitches, while staring down the pitcher, Hunter Gaddis, with his trademark shuffle. The shuffle is infamous now; right up there with Nomar Garciaparra’s obsessive compulsive “re-velcroing” of his batting gloves. “It’s a fight, just the pitcher and me”, says Soto, when describing how he views hitting. When he shuffles, he smacks his hand down on his hip like a madman. On this particular at-bat against Gaddis, he kept licking his lips, whispering to himself, “I’m all over him.” When the count hit one-two, he had been fouling off pitches that most hitters would have struck out looking on, stalking the pitcher with his eyes, surely to intimidate him. Finally, he connected for a homerun, that seemed to be crushed while simultaneously staying in the air for, what seemed like, minutes, putting the Yankees up three in the tenth, in position to make it to their first World Series since 2009.

I imagine most fans laugh at Yankee fans for how they, and again, this writer included, continue to express how grateful they are to be back in the World Series. For some fanbases, they’d accept a fifteen year drought. However, they are wrong to accept that. Firstly, fifteen years is actually quite a while. I was a thirteen year old struggling with Mr. Farrell, my seventh grade math teacher, because he was a trite loser, when the Yankees last made it to the Fall Classic. I am now twenty-eight and writing for a living, struggling with capitalism and its chokehold that it has over New York and thus, over myself. (I am still thriving, though). Telling Yankee fans that fifteen years is not that long is more of a message to yourself, that you need to demand more from the rich pricks who are supposed to serve you. Secondly, the Yankees have had a large amount of heartbreaking playoff losses in my lifetime. I’m not quite old enough to truly remember the dynastic era; I live vicariously through my father, my brother, my aunty’s, my uncles, and my mentors. My memories are of Alex Rodriguez’s heroics in 2009, playing in front of Jay-Z — who was taking a kind of Eric Adams approach to his artistry at that point —  and a bunch of painful losses in the Aaron Boone era, especially Jose Altuve’s ALCS magic in 2019. The Yankees earned this; perhaps your team will sometime soon. 

All owners can pay for a title. Instead of owners thinking about how fat, or skinny, the margin will be, think about how much more fanfare and revenue you can achieve when your team is good and has free agent superstars. Fans are emotional beings, who value their unity and sensitive dogmas more than they can muster anger at their owners, but they should be focusing on their owner more than they should be focusing on how much they hate the fact the Yankees have an owner who does spend money — even if it is literally the bare minimum, as all Yankee fans can explain to you.

Hal Steinbrenner was asked what he was thinking when Soto crushed that home run. Hal, George’s son, is not unlike other sons of famous men in history — both fictional and non-fiction. He’s not the charming brute that his father is; not quite the loquacious charmer. The wealth has been inherited from George’s father, a wealthy shipping magnate, thus the passion is demure, and the deranged competitiveness isn’t quite as intense. When the YES Network’s Meredith Marakovits asked that question, Steinbrenner paused. Then, he slightly smiled, and said, “That’s a good question, Meredith. Uh, success; winning.”