(This story originally appeared in the June 2017 edition of Yankees Magazine.)
Spring Training is often a time when I go around fishing for stories. The clubhouses are filled with players, and there are fewer amenities off-limits to media, which means that the players are generally more accessible. And they’re usually in a good mood, so you can be a bit more playful in terms of what you’re looking for. Where I’ll head to a clubhouse during the regular season with a definite idea for what I need and who I want to speak to, I’ll often just seek to chat with anyone I see during spring training. You never know what can come up.
So this year, with Commissioner Rob Manfred showing a willingness to evaluate the game’s practices (see: the odd new intentional walk, which I’m still not used to), I felt like it would be cool to talk to basically every player on the team about the same subject: What would they change if they could do anything?
A couple of interesting things happened: One, the morning after my first day of question the guys on the team on the topic, The New York Times ran a big package on the same idea — what would baseball writers change? So that bummed me out a bit. But the more players I asked, the more interested I got in how different the answers were. Some guys were totally selfish and playful — make the strike zone bigger, a few pitchers said; let me get a strikeout with one strike. Other players were totally into the idea of developing the ideas beyond the superficial. For instance, Brett Gardner and I got into a back-and-forth about his idea of limited pickoff attempts. How could you do that practically in a way that wouldn’t just eventually give a runner a free base? It was an interesting chat.
There was one topic I wanted to pursue further that I wasn’t able to. I noticed, anecdotally, that almost all of the Latino players I spoke with weren’t at all willing to criticize the game. Not in any way. Their quotes were all “I’m so lucky, this game is so great.” I tried to push further — was it too simplistic to attribute that feeling to their culture? Was there some other connection that I was missing? In the end, I dropped it. No one wanted to help me get into their own psyches on the matter, and I didn’t want to go psychoanalyzing them. I wish I would have been able to.
Either way, there’s some stuff in here I really like. I think that the Chase Headley stuff was really intriguing — he is a great guy to talk to, in that he’s completely willing to break down his swing and his thinking on everything. And he was very frank on both sides of the argument he was making, even as I pointed out that he was contradicting himself. I think he didn’t care, and I kind of think that made it feel authentic.
Anyhow, I hope you’ll read and enjoy.
