Month: June 2017

Wait For It

(Story originally appeared in the March 2017 edition of Yankees Magazine.)

When Tim Raines goes into Cooperstown next month, it will be — fittingly — as a member of the Montreal Expos (RIP). But he did play three seasons in New York, including the 1996 and ’98 world championship years. So in early January, just before the voting results were announced, I headed to Arizona to spend some time with a guy we were all very confident would be getting the good news. Thankfully, it turned out that we guessed correctly.

I loved getting to know Tim over the parts of two days that we spent together. He’s hilarious, and easy to laugh. He was perfectly willing to talk about the mistakes he made in his career and his life, and he did it all with the good cheer and confidence of a person who long ago came to terms with the entirety of his experiences.

I settled on my theme for the piece fairly quickly — he ran so fast in his career, but then he had to wait so long to get the reward he deserved. In my head, I was really just talking about the Hall of Fame and the World Series rings. But as we talked, a bunch of other examples of having to wait out unfair or upsetting circumstances. It all made for a pretty easy story to write, and I think I was able to do with it what I initially sought to. Enjoy.

http://m.mlb.com/news/article/215870536/tim-raines-yankees-hall-of-fame-cooperstown/

Small Ball, Big Time

(Story originally appeared in the March 2017 edition of Yankees Magazine.)

I had always wanted to see what the Arizona Fall League was like, and I picked a good year to do it. The Yankees sent a pretty remarkable contingent out west to play for the Scottsdale Scorpions, and I had a great time getting to see some of the top prospects in the organization. Plus, I also got to witness the Tim Tebow mania for the first time, which was a sight to see.

The headliner of the group was obviously Gleyber Torres (more on him in a future post), but there was talent all around. Greg Bird, James Kaprielian, Tyler Wade, J.P. Feyereisen, Dillon Tate, Miguel Andujar, Brody Koerner, Nestor Cortes … it was really great squad, with plenty for fans to get excited about. But mostly, I just enjoyed how free and open the Fall League is. We really had the full run of the place, hanging out on the field and doing whatever we wanted while the players were working out. I feel like I could have grabbed a bat and taken some swings if I had wanted to.

I hope I can get back there again sometime, maybe for a bit longer, but it was definitely a good first experience. It really made me miss getting to go to Cactus League games.

Here’s the story. Hope you’ll enjoy.

http://m.mlb.com/news/article/215898390/arizona-fall-league-top-yankees-prospects/

Legends Never Die

(Story originally appeared in the Home Run Commemorative Edition of Yankees Magazine.)

Weird confession here: Until I decided to write this story, I had somehow never seen The Sandlot. I don’t know how I had avoided it through the years, but it just never happened. But as I describe in the opening scene in the story (which was a pretty accurate chronology of my reporting), I didn’t have any choice once I started talking to some of the players about their first contact with the legend of Babe Ruth.

We were producing a special edition of Yankees Magazine that was celebrating home runs and home run hitters in Yankees history. I decided to write a story about the Babe Ruth Birthplace & Museum in Baltimore, and I was extremely fortunate to have the museum’s curator, Michael Gibbons, take me around the exhibits, then drive me and a photographer all over the Babe’s Baltimore, showing me other places he lived, the boarding school where he was discovered, and other places from his life. As I detail in the story, though, I didn’t end that day with any clear picture of what I wanted to write. Something about spending time around all these places from Ruth’s past made him smaller, in a way; it was diminishing. That’s not a knock on the museum at all — it does a wonderful job showing Ruth the human. But it’s hard to square that circle with the image of Ruth the superhero.

Confused as to how I should proceed, I posed the question to a bunch of players on the team — what was their first contact with the legend of the Babe. How did their shared experience of being Yankees color their perspectives. I was hoping that the players could help me bridge the gap that separated who I felt Ruth was, and how he was perceived. But the first three players I spoke to — Andrew Miller, Chase Headley and Aaron Hicks, literally the first three players! — all mentioned the same thing: The Sandlot. 

Well, I guess I had to watch the movie.

And it was great, of course. I reached out to the writer and director, David Mickey Evans, to see if maybe he could help me answer the question better. And then the inspiration hit, and the words started flowing. I’m really proud of this story, as I think it does a good job looking at the way that we create heroes, and the people that they really are. As the

We discuss this a lot more on this episode of the Yankees Magazine Podcast. Take a listen (and subscribe!).

Anyhow, enjoy the story.

http://m.mlb.com/news/article/209340058/legend-of-babe-ruth-lives-on/

Confidence Man

(Story originally appeared in the Derek Jeter Commemorative Edition of Yankees Magazine)

When Derek Jeter announced his retirement before the 2014 season, we knew that we needed to do something extra special to celebrate his career, so we put together a special edition of the magazine, looking back on the Captain’s entire career. It was an awesome project, with so much awesome material that we were able to unearth. We reran a bunch of old Yankees Magazine content and supplemented it with some great original pieces.

Obviously, there are only so many different ways to talk about Jeter on the field, particularly when you’re a house organ like Yankees Magazine. So it was really important to me that I find something a bit off-beat. I had always been intrigued by the story of Dick Groch, the scout who signed Jeter. The main is famous — trying to alleviate the concern in the Yankees’ war room that they were going to use the 6th pick in the Draft on a player who would spurn them to go play college ball at Michigan, Groch, the legend has it, insisted:

“He’s not going to the University of Michigan. The only place Derek Jeter is going is Cooperstown.”

That’s a lot of confidence, and as Groch says in the article, if he had been wrong, he probably wouldn’t have lasted much longer in the industry. But the belief paid off. Jeter became a generational player, a certain Hall of Famer and one of the most beloved Yankees of all time. Not a bad scouting job.

Here’s my attempt at putting Groch’s whole story together. Hope you’ll enjoy.

http://m.mlb.com/news/article/229038088/dick-groch-scouted-jeter-for-cooperstown-in-92/

On the Outside Looking In

(Story originally appeared in the October 2016 edition of Yankees Magazine)

This piece was almost a full year in the making, with any number of starts and stops along the way. It began in Denver, when Greg Bird agreed to let me and a video crew tag along with him for part of his offseason routine. We went to a clinic where he spoke to high school and college coaches, then we went to breakfast with his family and watched him work out the next morning — doing weights and hitting. After that, a few of his high school buddies joined us for an evening at Top Golf in Denver.

It was a pretty awesome time to be Greg Bird. He’d debuted the previous year, and had set New York ablaze with his immediate impact. He even started the team’s postseason game. But about two weeks after we parted ways in Denver, the word came out — Bird would be out for the season, forced to have his shoulder surgically repaired.

I was lucky that I didn’t have to publish the story immediately — honestly, I have no clue what I would have written. So I checked in with him a few times, then met him in Tampa in August to watch his rehab routine. Along the way, Greg couldn’t have been more accommodating. He really opened up about the mental strain of rehab — the way he couldn’t even bring himself to play video games. He had never not been able to play baseball, and nothing made sense to him for most of the year. When the team came to Tampa to play the Rays, Bird went to visit with his old teammates, but he found it too uncomfortable to stick around.

I really wasn’t used to a big leaguer letting himself be this vulnerable. I spoke with Chad Bohling, who heads the team’s mental conditioning department, and he did a good job walking me through all the hardships involved in what Bird was dealing with.

Anyhow, I did my best to convey what the year was really like. I’m very proud of this one.

http://m.mlb.com/news/article/207435348/greg-bird-new-york-yankees-rebound/

Man at the Top

(Story originally appeared in the September 2016 edition of Yankees Magazine)

Pretty simple one here — Joe Torre talking about the 1996 World Series champs, the moment when he turned from “Clueless Joe” into the guy who would be induced into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

This Q&A was part of our season-long retrospective on the ’96 world champs, so I had a lot of room to play with, and Torre was generous with his time. I had to massage my way into his confidence at the beginning — the first couple of minutes, he really didn’t want to dive too deep into any of my questions. But as time passed, he began to open up, and it definitely got emotional toward the end. There was so much on his mind during that World Series, with his brother in the hospital (another brother had passed away earlier that year), and he had such a total love for and devotion to the players on that team.

Anyway, there’s not too much fresh ground turned over in this one, but I think it ended up being a pretty good conversation. Hope you’ll read it.

http://m.mlb.com/news/article/199114972/joe-torre-recalls-1996-and-yankees-dynasty/

The Future Has Arrived

(Story originally published in the September 2016 edition of Yankees Magazine)

When Yankees general manager Brian Cashman got to show off some new muscles at the 2016 trade deadline, it was a landmark moment for the franchise. The Yankees — and Yankees fans, it was thought — simply wouldn’t accept rebuilding. Would they?

It turns out that they would — as long as Cashman nailed all the deals. And he did that, and more, rebuilding a farm system into one of the league’s best (in the offseason after the rebuild, MLB.com would rank the Yankees’ system the second-best in baseball). The club acquired Gleyber Torres and Clint Frazier as the new organizational cornerstones, but the rest of the players who came over — guys like Justus Sheffield, Ben Heller, J.P. Feyereisen, Dillon Tate, Billy McKinney, and a slew of others, as well — have fans in the Bronx hopeful for the future. Some will arrive sooner than others, but it should be interesting to see develop.

Soon after the deadline, Cashman and his top deputy, Jean Afterman, walked me through all the chaos of the day of the deadline, the way that the last-minute deals went down. I always wanted to get to see how the pieces all moved, how tight things got, what rumors were true. They really gave me the full run-down, and I tried to recreate that in the story.

I hope you’ll enjoy.

http://m.mlb.com/news/article/199119640/yankees-use-trade-deadline-to-rebuild/

The Ties That Bind

Originally published in the July 2016 issue of Yankees Magazine

This was a story that I wanted to write for a long time. When I arrived at the University of Michigan as a freshman in 1999, I was at most a passing college football fan. It just wasn’t something that I grew up with in New Jersey. So for my first game, against Notre Dame, I wasn’t entirely sure what I was walking into. It was the best kind of shock — I loved every second of that game, and I’ve been hooked ever since.

I also walked into a QB controversy that has remained somewhat legendary among football fans. On one side was Tom Brady, a workmanlike QB who could get the job done, but who wasn’t ever going to set the world on fire. The guy holding the clipboard (and therefore, the guy the fans wanted to see) was the hotshot sophomore Drew Henson.

The two split time — Brady would play the first quarter, Henson the second, then, supposedly, coach Lloyd Carr would choose the QB who had done better to play the second half. It was almost always Brady. And obviously, everyone knows what happened later for that guy. Seems he did OK for himself.

The next year, despite an early season injury, Henson was remarkable. He came back against Illinois and saved that game, and then was terrific the rest of the way, as the Wolverines went 9-3 and won the Citrus Bowl. The next year was setting up to be something truly special, but then — after saying he was going to stick around — Henson left to play baseball, taking Yankees owner George Steinbrenner’s money, and breaking every Michigan fan’s heart. It was unforgivable, and most people never forgave him.

Nothing at all came of his baseball career, and when I caught up with him, he was scouting for the Yankees, going around the country to see size up players who were doing considerably better than he ever did.

I pitched him the story — could I join him for a trip, being a fly on the wall as he went about his work. He seemed hesitant, but he agreed, and off I went to St. Louis, where I met up with him, then rode with him to Kansas City the next day. It was an amazing trip — I learned so much about the game, about how every single thing that happens on the field means something, about how many moving parts there are. I watch a lot of baseball, and I think I have a generally good handle on the sport, but I couldn’t believe the way that someone in Henson’s position saw things unfold.

For the story, I tried to combine the two pieces of my history with Drew — the college story and the professional experience. I hope it worked; I was really trying to paint my own obsessions as being pathetic, not in any way to judge him.

I hope you enjoy it.

http://m.mlb.com/news/article/189248494/former-yankees-prospect-drew-henson-now-scout/