Tag: DJ LeMahieu

Baby Steps

(This story originally appeared in the Official 2020 New York Yankees Yearbook.)

Part 3 of my Pandemic Baseball series picks up right where Part 2 left off, and by this point in the season, I’d gotten enough glimpses of the bizarre day-to-day absurdities that the story almost wrote itself. I loved getting to highlight the things that I had never seen before, and would never see again — how about walk-off homers by the Mets at Yankee Stadium, or Yankees relievers scoring the winning runs in games despite never batting, or sacrifice flies to lead off innings?

It was all so weird, and it allowed me to play with a version of a quote that I heard sometime like 400 times during the season: “It’s 2020, man …” I think I got that into the story three separate times, but it’s perfect in its way. The 2020 was real, and the Dodgers’ championship rings are plenty shiny, but everything felt just enough like fantasy to allow us to shake off some of the individual moments. “It’s 2020, man,” was the perfect shoulder shrug in word form.

There’s fun stuff in here. I loved getting to tell the story of Deivi García’s debut and his repertoire with Erik Kratz. I really enjoyed learning that the Yankees were worse in late-and-close situations at home in 2020 than they had been in any year since the new Yankee Stadium opened, which seemed like a fairly clear indication that the special sauce of Yankees fans might be even more important that we’ve thought all these years (and I really loved Tampa Bay’s Blake Snell saying that he would sometimes curse at himself in the bullpen to make up for the absence of fans’ creative vulgarities).

This was a fun series to write. I missed the clubhouse access, and I missed the ability to write about things behind the scenes that fans weren’t seeing. This year, I kind of felt like I was sitting in the same seats as my readers were, which was challenging. But it also allowed me to (and really forced me to) see the game differently. I felt that this year, I was analyzing more than I was unveiling. It was more storytelling than reporting. I had fun with it. That said, I can’t wait to get back into the clubhouse sometime soon.

https://www.mlb.com/yankees/news/yankees-magazine-2020-season-review?t=yankees-magazine

Known Unknown

(This story originally appeared in the August 2019 edition of Yankees Magazine.)

This must have been part of a masochistic streak, trying to get a real good sense of DJ LeMahieu, by far the most reticent and reluctant interview on the 2019 Yankees. But I actually had a ton of fun with this piece, and if I had to guess, I think LeMahieu even enjoyed a bit of the ping-pong match.

The story really began on my first day in spring training this year. Walking around the Yankees’ clubhouse in Tampa, I introduced myself to LeMahieu, one of the new guys, and tried to engage him in a “Quick Hits” interview — real lightning-round style questions that show a bit of personality, quirk, etc. He wanted absolutely nothing to do with it. He wasn’t rude, but he still answered “pass” about half the time. I walked away figuring I would never need to talk to him again.

But then LeMahieu turned into the Yankees’ best hitter, and found himself at the All-Star Game. And I kept trying to get to know him as best I could, and he kept demurring. Again, he wouldn’t blow me off, and he wouldn’t bristle or scowl. He just had very little to say. He’s a private guy, intense, but you can tell that he’s genuinely nice and probably pretty interesting.

In Cleveland during All-Star Week, I plopped myself down in front of him about four different times. Each time, he seemed to find the whole experience progressively funnier. It was a media circus, so it’s not like it was 1-on-1, but I still got in more questions in those settings than I did in pursuing the line of questioning for a few weeks around the Yankees’ clubhouse.

In the end, I think the story does a good job showing who LeMahieu is and why we shouldn’t be surprised to see him doing this well. The best thing I can say about it is that I don’t think that you can tell when you’re reading it how hard I had to work to get the quotes.

https://www.mlb.com/news/dj-lemahieu-rises-to-the-top-with-yankees