Hal Steinbrenner and Brian Cashman Fanned Fury of Yankees Fans

It took a little while for me to get to this - hey, I am a pretty busy right now covering the Bills - but as you probably expected, I had some thoughts about what went down last week when Brian Cashman and Hal Steinbrenner met with reporters and both came off looking like fools. Let’s get to it.

We are more than a month removed from the end of one of the most disappointing Yankees seasons in three-plus decades, and the wounds were just starting to heal when last week, Hal Steinbrenner and Brian Cashman gashed them back open.

I thought we were safe from this organization pissing us off at least until 2024 when they will in all likelihood take the field with a roster still bloated with aging, overpaid, un-athletic players who can’t hit, can’t score, and probably can’t win enough to get back to the postseason.

I was wrong.

One of the terms many, including yours truly, used to describe the Yankees’ hierarchy throughout 2023 was “tone deaf.” Last week, Steinbrenner on a Zoom call from his Florida home office, and then Cashman at the general manager meetings in Arizona, took turns redefining what tone deaf meant as it pertained to their leadership of this team.

Let me start with Cashman’s performance.

In defending not the play of the team in 2023, but rather the way the Yankees go about doing things, from analytics, to scouting, to strength and conditioning, to the way manager Aaron Boone - who both Cashman and Steinbrenner still think is the right man for the job - runs the on-field operation, this is what a combative Cashman said.

“I’m proud of our people and proud of our process,” Cashman said. “It doesn’t mean we’re firing on all cylinders. It doesn’t mean we’re the best in class. But I think we’re pretty fucking good, personally. I’m proud of our people and I’m also looking forward to ’24 being a better year than ’23.”

I saw a whole bunch of criticism about Cashman’s potty mouth, which also featured him using the word “bullshit” several times including once when describing some of the criticism that was levied at the team by fans, mainstream media, the blogosphere, and the lunatics spewing on social media. Sorry, but I don’t give two shits about the language that he used because those who know me know that my word choices often stray into blue territory. He’s a grown man, he swore in a highly public arena. Not ideal, but whatever.

What I care about are so many of the non-swear words Cashman used as he barked at the reporters who were interrogating him. It was such an oddly myopic defense of the organization on the heels of a season that even he himself had called “a disaster” shortly after it ended with the Yankees sitting at 82-80 and in fourth place in the AL East. The media was asking him perfectly reasonable questions, and for whatever reason Cashman went into a hissy fit during a rant that he won’t soon live down.

One topic that got Cashman riled up was, of course, analytics. The outside perception is that the Yankees rely too much on their numbers nerds and not enough on baseball people such as scouts and coaches to guide their decisions regarding roster construction and in-game strategy, a point Aaron Judge made when the season ended.

“We get a lot of numbers, but I think we might be looking at the wrong ones and maybe should value some other ones that some people might see as having no value,” Judge said, a subtle thumbing of his nose at the analytics community that has devalued the importance of batting average and RBIs.

Cashman’s argument that the Yankees aren’t completely analytics reliant was that their analytics staff is actually the smallest in the AL East and their scouting department is the largest.

“Is that a shocker to everybody?” Cashman said. “Shouldn’t be, but no one’s doing their deep dives. They’re just throwing ammunition and bullshit and accusing us of being run analytically. Analytics is an important spoke in our wheel but it should be in everybody’s wheel and it really is. It’s an important spoke in every operation that’s having success. There’s not one team that’s not using it. We’re no different. But to say we are guided by analytics as a driver, it’s a lie.”

No one is complaining about the number of people the Yankees employ in these areas. The issue is who has the most sway? If one analytics guy has more influence than three scouts, it doesn’t matter that he’s outnumbered 3-1, right? And if the nerds are focusing on the wrong things as Judge insinuated, things that led Cashman to make some of the worst trades and free agent signings of his career in the last few years - Joey Gallo, Andrew Benintendi, Frankie Montas, Josh Donaldson, Harrison Bader, and Carlos Rodon to name a few - that’s the issue.

Cashman got into a heated exchange with Joel Sherman of the New York Post who rightly called into question the viability of the offensive player development as we all saw players like Oswaldo Cabrera, Oswald Peraza, and Everson Perriera struggle mightily at the major league level. Even Anthony Volpe, who somehow won the Gold Glove at shortstop (honestly, that was a big surprise to me), hit 21 homers and stole 24 bases, but overall he was a poor offensive player with .209 average, a .283 on-base percentage and a team-high 167 strikeouts.

Sherman’s contention - and I agree with him - was that the Yankees continued to give meaningless at bats and playing time to the likes of Aaron Hicks (before he was released), Donaldson, Jake Bauers, Billy McKinney, Franchy Cordero, Willie Calhoun and others because they didn’t trust their prospects. And when those players were finally brought up for good when it was clear the Yankees weren’t going to make the postseason, indeed, they did not flourish at all.

Sherman put it to Cashman several times that if the kids were any good, they would have played more, especially when the season was still alive, and Cashman kept shutting him down without acknowledging the reality that Sherman was correct. “Whatever we say will be replayed and used as a weaponization if you can find a way to do it,” Cashman said.

The session with reporters carried on for about an hour, but the analytics debate and questioning about player development were the two most interesting things for me.

As for milquetoast Steinbrenner, there was no swearing or fireworks, but then again, there wasn’t really anything. As is so often the case when Hal speaks to reporters, he says nothing meaningful and that was the case in this Zoom call.

The most interesting thing he said was that the 2023 season “Was awful. We accomplished nothing.” We can all agree that was a dead on assessment, but after saying a month earlier that “big changes” would be coming, he had a chance to outline what those might be and he revealed almost nothing.

Oh, the Yankees will hire a new hitting coach, but we already knew that because interim coach Sean Casey decided returning to MLB Network was better than trying to draw blood from the stone that was the Yankees offense. Steinbrenner also professed his undying faith in Boone, and we already knew that because he didn’t fire him at season’s end.

Steinbrenner defended the medical and training staff, even though dating back to 2017 the Yankees have finished in the top 10 in injured list placements including the sixth-most in 2023. They made a big splash in 2020 by hiring highly-respected Eric Cressey as director of player and health performance and since then, the injury woes have worsened.

Yes, a lot of that is random, like Judge stubbing his toe in Los Angeles and missing two months, and Anthony Rizzo concussing himself on Fernando Tatis’ hip, but injuries have been a major storyline for this franchise and oh, Cashman went to great lengths to make that point.

“Injuries aren’t bullshit,” said Cashman, who then reeled a bunch of them off. “You could go on and on. You start adding all of those up, and what you expect from those guys and what you get from alternatives, it becomes a different ball team. Shit happens. That’s real. That’s not bullshit.”

To put a wrap on all this, how can we ignore perhaps the dumbest thing either of these two guys said, Steinbrenner’s revelation that the Yankees are going to have a renewed commitment to teaching their players how to bunt. Because bunting will get things turned around for this team.

Bunting is stupid about 99% of the time as far as I’m concerned, especially in this era of three-outcome baseball - strikeouts, walks and home runs. Back in the day, you could have a weak hitter bunt a man into scoring position, knowing you had a decent chance of getting that man home because batters could put the ball in play. Today, all you’re doing is wasting an out when you bunt, and chances are very likely that you aren’t going to get the runner home because two dudes will strike out.

If that’s one of the “big changes” coming that Steinbrenner was talking about, the Yankees - who were one of the slowest and fundamentally worst baserunning teams in MLB last year and therefore would not benefit from bunting - are doomed in 2024.