The Yankee Way

March 25, 2024
Martino (Cheated), who covers Major League Baseball for SportsNet New York, delivers a winning chronicle of the recent history of the New York Yankees focused on the tenure of general manager Brian Cashman. Drawing on extensive interviews with his subject and other Yankee insiders, Martino recounts how Cashman first joined the team’s front office as a 19-year-old intern in 1986. The mercurial whims of owner George Steinbrenner caused no shortage of drama on and off the field, but Cashman was undeterred, rising to assistant general manager by 1992. After churning through six GMs in a little over a decade, Steinbrenner offered the position to Cashman, making him at age 30 the second-youngest GM in baseball history. In addition to charting Cashman’s leadership of the franchise through four World Series titles, Martino uses his subject’s reign to explore larger trends in the sport, detailing the transition from “gut feeling to analytics” by discussing how in the mid-aughts Cashman threatened to quit in order to force a reluctant Steinbrenner to hire an analyst. Martino also dishes out plenty of juicy behind-the-scenes details, describing the frequent ego clashes between Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez, as well as how Cashman fell out with skipper Joe Torre over the latter’s handling of the team’s pitching program. A colorful portrait of a transformative era, this should be required reading for Yankees fans. Agent: Esther Newberg, ICM Partners.

May 1, 2024
An in-depth look at Brian Cashman's stewardship of the New York Yankees. In 2022, notes sportswriter and SNY analyst Martino, Cashman "quietly achieved a significant milestone...he passed Ed Barrow as the longest-tenured general manager in the history of the world's most iconic sports franchise." That was no small accomplishment, given former owner George Steinbrenner's volatility. It hasn't helped that over the years, Cashman had to deal with both Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez, who figure here as prima donnas. Cashman isn't well known to general fans outside the Yankees orbit, though he's central to the club. As Martino relates, although Billy Beane is likely the best known of all GMs thanks to Michael Lewis' Moneyball, Beane himself has said that "Cashman is the best to ever do the job," calling him "the Tom Brady of GMs." Apart from the ups and downs of Cashman's career, which didn't always hit Steinbrenner's metric of success (namely, winning the World Series), Martino is very good at detailing the many things that a general manager does, from hand-holding players who need a little extra attention to kicking dirt on umpires' shoes � la Billy Martin. It's clear from his account that Cashman paid attention to his peers and predecessors in how he evaluated players not just by numbers but also by intangibles like character, where numerous championship-level players come up short. Cashman's player acquisitions, though sometimes at odds with the owners' wishes, have tended to be right, though they've entailed battles along the way--e.g., the decision not to re-sign Rodriguez, the fight to keep superstar Aaron Judge ("their icon, their marketable Ruth/DiMaggio/Mantle/Jeter") on the roster, and so forth--recounted in Martino's memorable set pieces. A must-read for Yankees fans, and even those who hate the Yankees will learn a thing or two about the game.

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