Tag: Arizona

The Odds of Winning

(This story originally appeared in the April 2018 issue of Yankees Magazine.)

Man I loved writing this one.

I had never met or spoken to Jay Bell before we had dinner together in Scottsdale after he managed the Scorpions in an Arizona Fall League game, but I knew he had a reputation for being a great guy. That was an understatement. We sat for hours, Jay a photographer and me, as he told us all his best stories of a life in baseball. It was transfixing, and I did the best I could at using the best ones in the feature.

I was interesting in writing about Bell once the Yankees named him the Tampa manager before the previous season. Bell, famously, scored the winning run against the Yankees in the 2001 World Series, a moment low down the list of franchise highlights. Obviously, people trade sides in baseball all the time, and it’s not like Bell is Curt Schilling after the 2004 ALCS or anything, but still, it was a fun quirk, and I thought it would make a good story. Then Bell proceeded to win Manager of the Year with Tampa, and he managed the Yankees’ prospects in the AFL (as well as those of a few other teams, including the Reds, who sent along Bell’s son, Brantley, which was a fun touch).

There was one particularly funny part of the dinner, though. Just a few days earlier, the Yankees had parted ways with manager Joe Girardi, and Bell’s name was among those listed as being on the list of candidates. We’d scheduled our dinner before that news broke, though, and part of me wondered if Bell would cancel on me due to any potential awkwardness.

Quite the opposite. In fact, I’m nearly positive he thought that I was sent by Brian Cashman as some kind of envoy, charged with reporting back all my observations. So many questions I asked, Bell answered with some variation of, “This is Cash’s team, and he does such a great job, and I just do whatever they tell me to do.” Deep down, I’m sure he didn’t really think that it was a job interview under the guise of a magazine feature, but I do wonder if he was being extra cautious just in case. Anyhow, my photographer and I shared a few laughs after the fact.

Seriously, though, Jay couldn’t have been nicer or more interesting. I love the stories I got to share here, and I hope you’ll read them and get as much joy as I did.

https://www.mlb.com/news/jay-bell-uses-experience-guides-young-players/c-271786062

 

Back to the Future

(This story originally appeared in the Spring 2018 issue of Yankees Magazine.)

In the five months since I wrote this story, a few of the players have already been traded, so it was a bit funny to go back and read it last night. But I had a ton of fun reporting from the Arizona Fall League for the second straight year, and seeing some of the awesome prospects that are thriving in the Yankees’ system.

This year was a lot different from my 2016 visit, of course. In the course of that one year, the Yankees had gone from a team looking toward the future, to one very keenly aware of its arrival. Prospects are incredibly fun when you’re rebuilding, even if it’s a hyper-speed reload such as the one Brian Cashman put together during the 2016 season. But when I headed to Arizona this time, it was just a week after the Yankees’ season had ended in Game 7 of the ALCS. Times had changed, quickly.

Justus Sheffield (Photo Credit: New York Yankees)

And still, it was impossible not to be excited by some of the guys wearing the interlocking NY under the desert sun. Albert Abreu dazzled on the mound. Estevan Florial … the guy is special, and his talent screams out at you. Justus Sheffield sure seems like he’s going to be a star, and he took on something of an alpha-dog role mound the young future Yankees.

I did my best to highlight each guy out there, trying to show fans reading what they could look forward to in the months and years to follow. There was less immediacy than the year before, although Billy McKinney, one of the players out there this past year, would actually end up reaching the majors with the Yankees in the season’s first week, before a near-immediate injury cut down his time with the team. (He would then be traded at the deadline for J.A. Happ. Here’s hoping that he has a heck of a time in Toronto.

Their Estrada (Photo Credit: New York Yankees)

This is a light piece, a roundup, but I really loved checking in with these kids, and I’ll certainly be tracking their progress for years to come.

Hope you’ll read and enjoy.

https://www.mlb.com/yankees/news/yankees-prospect-base-stays-steady-in-2018/c-267272684?tid=163658034

In His Blood

(This story originally appeared in the April 2017 edition of Yankees Magazine)

So this one was weird. It basically started by sheer luck. I was trying to plan an offseason reporting trip, looking for ways that I could get a few things done in one swing. I knew that Jacoby Ellsbury — who is believed to be the first player of Navajo descent to reach the majors — ran a camp for Native American youth in Arizona every year, and I thought it would be a good thing to cover.

As I kept doing more research, though, I kept finding amazing things that drew me in even more. By the end, I think I had enough for a book.

Ellsbury’s mother is from Parker, a town on a little reservation in western Arizona which belongs to the Colorado River Indian Tribes, collection of the Mojave, Hopi, Chemehuevi and Navajo tribes. His mother, Margie, is full-blooded Navajo, and in my research, I learned that she actually designed the CRIT flag.

Well, that was interesting. I started making random phone calls to anyone number I could find for the tribe and the town. One of the first calls I made went to voicemail. “Hi,” it said, “You’ve reached Esther McCabe.” Another McCabe (sure enough, Esther is one of Margie’s sisters). The whole thing kept going like that. It kept pulling me in.

Ellsbury is generally extremely private, not the easiest person to track down in the clubhouse, so I wasn’t sure how he was going to feel about my picking around in his past. But obviously, with his holding the camp for the kids at the same time, he was fine talking to me about the heritage, what it meant to him, and the like. His eyes lit up a bit when he heard that I was going to Parker. And he encouraged me to meet up with anyone I could from his family. I was honestly surprised that he didn’t push back at all, but I was grateful.

The last thing that happened, about two months later, when I was still writing — I ran into Ellsbury in the clubhouse in spring training. And he mentioned something to me that made me know I wasn’t making a story out of nothing, that the story I was telling was one that was deeply important to him. He told me (unprompted, out of nowhere) that when his wife gave birth to a daughter a month earlier, they had given her the middle name Parker.

The story that I tell isn’t particularly happy. The tribes have had a rough go of it, which isn’t surprising. But everyone I spoke with was so open, so warm, so interesting. Two members of the tribal council actually sat me down for a PowerPoint presentation about the whole history of the reservation. It was really incredible.

I’m so glad that I got to tell this story. I hope you’ll read it.

http://m.yankees.mlb.com/news/article/222040346/ellsbury-honors-his-native-american-heritage/?topicid=163658034

Workingman’s Blues

(This story originally appeared in the Spring 2017 edition of Yankees Magazine)

When I visited Arizona in January of 2017, my plan was to come back with two stories. One on Tim Raines, who was up for election to the Hall of Fame, and I was pretty confident that he would get it. The other would be spending some time at Jacoby Ellsbury’s camp for Navajo youth (more on that in an upcoming post), then visiting the reservation in western Arizona where his family has deep roots.

The day we landed, though, Ellsbury’s agent called with a surprise offer. After telling us that our time with Jacoby would be extremely limited, the center fielder agreed to let us come out to watch him work out the next day at his offseason training facility.

EXOS, where Ellsbury and a host of professional athletes work, is an absolute factory of fitness and nutrition. Every single thing that happens there is carefully crafted to be perfect for each individual player. It’s really a sight to see. While we were there, there were a bunch of players from other sports, including players preparing for the NFL Combine. But Ellsbury’s group also had a handful of notable MLB players, such as Evan Longoria, Miguel Montero and others.

Because I was already writing an Ellsbury story, I wanted to make sure that I got some other players involved, so I decided to check out the spectrum of how different players — with different salaries and therefore different spending abilities — handle their offseasons. We met up with Rob Refsnyder for a workout of his (conveniently, he’s also in Arizona), then met with Chase Headley in New York later that month. I think the story does a good job of showing how different each player is, but how hard they all work. There really is no offseason anymore. That was definitely clear through the whole process of reporting this one.

I hope you’ll enjoy.

http://m.yankees.mlb.com/news/article/216825336/no-offseason-for-yankees-pre-spring-training/?topicid=163658034