Tag: Yankee Stadium

The Head and the Heart

(This story originally appeared in the October 2021 edition of Yankees Magazine.)

The first thing I’ll say about this story is that it’s a real bummer that it ended up being somewhat regrettable. It was a piece for our October magazine about how dominant Gerrit Cole had historically proven to be in the biggest, most emotional moments. It dropped on Oct. 5, the morning of his AL Wild Card Game start in Boston.

Then Cole had nothing, the Yankees lost, and there was no reason ever to think about the story again.

That’s a shame, and not just because it would have been fun to see a long postseason run from this team (if only for more opportunities to watch Giancarlo Stanton crush balls to far off planets). But also, there’s a lot in here that I really like. Gerrit is a great interview subject. He is so open about the art of pitching, about how he approaches hitters and what he’s thinking. Yet ever since he got to New York, he’s been mostly relegated to Zoom pressers, where it’s hard to get real emotion and insight.

Talking to him in the Yankees’ dugout, I was really interested in one particular quirk, the way he totally clams up after his best starts. It’s easier to get him to talk after a middling effort than it is when he dominates Shohei Ohtani, and I wanted to know why that was. Over the course of this feature, I think you can see Gerrit kind of gaming it out in his head, trying to figure it out himself.

The other thing that I did here was I tried to get as many individual quotes as possible from people around the game, all of them answering the same question: What is it that Gerrit Cole does best? It’s a simple question, but I wanted a variety of answers, and I got them. I had one person tell me that it’s just that he gets the most strikeouts, another person who said that he’s the most prepared pitcher in the game, and finally, my favorite, a quote about him essentially being the smartest bully. I loved that part of the story, and the way that we designed the piece around those quotes in print.

Cole is signed in New York for years to come, and I have to think that we’ll see better postseason starts from him (we certainly saw some great outings in 2020). I think that eventually we’ll learn that his hamstring was much worse than he let on, and that it impacted him a great deal down the stretch in 2021. Either way, I can’t wait to get more chances to talk baseball with the Yankees’ ace, because he’s a true pitching genius.

https://www.mlb.com/news/yankees-magazine-gerrit-cole

Opening the Perfect Present

(This story originally appeared in the May 2021 edition of Yankees Magazine.)

Six months later, it’s weird to look back on Opening Day; I had already forgotten that there were just 10,000 fans at Yankee Stadium that day. But the thing is, even that was amazing at the time. After a deeply upsetting year, least of all for baseball reasons, it was completely amazing to be back at Yankee Stadium, listening to real fans have real conversations and real cheers. The “roll call” was incredible.

I chose to write this story backwards for two reasons: First, it’s not super fun to build up to an eventual loss in a publication like Yankees Magazine. It’s not that often I write about a single game for a long, 3,000-plus-word feature, but it’s even less common for me to write about a loss. So since I wasn’t going to climax with some sort of dramatic victory, it made sense to get rid of that fact early.

But I also loved the emotion from the line that I chose to end with, the idea of welcoming fans back to Yankee Stadium. I think that the was the 118th season in Yankees history, so there have been plenty of Opening Days. But I’m not sure there has ever been one like 2021. There certainly hasn’t been anything like a return to baseball after a year spent playing in front of empty seats. So this year’s curtain-raiser was always going to be special, no matter what happened on the field.

There’s baseball in here, sure. There’s a Gerrit Cole start, a Gary Sánchez rebirth, some fun during pregame introductions. But that’s stuff that we can get at any game. The truest joy in here is just writing about baseball, about baseball fans, and about a somewhat normal day at the ballpark.

https://www.mlb.com/news/yankees-magazine-2021-opening-day-recap

Open Season

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

While I do travel quite a bit for stories, it’s pretty rare for me to actually join the team on the road during the season. Off the top of my head, I can think of two times since I started at Yankees Magazine that I reported on actual road games — the first was for my feature on Joe Girardi at the end of 2017, and the other was Opening Day 2018.

Something about the start of this season just felt important to me. Obviously, the Yankees had come so close in 2017, falling one game short of the World Series. And this was to be the first game for new manager Aaron Boone, as well as Giancarlo Stanton’s debut with the team. Plus, in the back of my head there was this sense that in the event this season turned out to be as special as Yankees fans and players were hoping, we should be there to document its first breaths.

So I flew to Toronto for a couple of days to watch the team work out for a last time in the preseason, then get things started the next day. The first couple weeks of April didn’t go so according to plan, but that first game sure did. Two homers from Stanton. An exceptional start by Severino. Handshakes to close things out.

We had fun covering the newness all around us; at times, it seemed like Boone had no idea what to do with his hands. He was so fidgety, constantly holding a bat or a ball. I tried to get all of my observations into the piece.

To keep the opening theme going, I also wrote about the curtain raising in the Bronx, even as it was delayed by a day due to snow. Once they got to play, it was Didi Gregorius leading the way, with a team-record 8 RBI from the shortstop position. Quite a debut, the first moments of what everyone hoped would be a truly special season.

Hope you’ll read and enjoy.

60-70 OPENING DAY FEATURE

Up, Down and Back Again

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

I can’t say enough about how much I enjoyed writing this story, and how pleased I was with the outcome. I went down to Santo Domingo in January to spend some time with Luis Severino for this story, and with Estevan Florial for one that would run in May.

My goal was mainly to watch Severino work out, to see how what his life at home was like. I had never been to the Dominican Republic, so I really had no clue what to expect. But we all watched Sevy grow up before our eyes in 2017, then saw him crash head-first into a wall in the AL Wild Card Game. He lasted only a third of an inning that night, an utter disaster for a pitcher who would end up finishing third in AL Cy Young voting.

But when the Yankees came back to beat the Twins, Severino got another chance to show who he really was, and he was very effective the rest of the postseason. So the two of us spoke a lot about that whole roller-coaster experience, and how similar it was to what he experienced in 2016, when — after a brilliant 2015 debut — he was simply dreadful as a starting pitcher. He obviously came back in 2017 and showed what he could do, much as he did in the 2017 postseason. So what did he learn from that first turnaround? What was he applying? And how was he approaching his new role as the team’s ace, the eventual Opening Day starter?

I’m basically in awe of guys like Severino. So talented, so genuinely nice and interesting, such a bright future. One highlight of the trip was that we conducted our main interview with him at his apartment. All along, his wife and mother were in the kitchen cooking lunch. After we wrapped up, we shook hands and started to say goodbye, but he told us that we had to stay for lunch, that they were cooking for us, that we were their guests. I’ve been out to eat with players before during interviews, and it’s always a bit strange to share a meal under those circumstances. This was just a giant feast in the guy’s house, the food delicious and fresh. It was typical of the way that guests are treated in the culture, and my photographer was actually surprised that I had been so surprised. He had figured all along that they were cooking for us. Shows what I know.

That’s what the guy is like, though. I mentioned in a podcast recently that a lot of players, when they don’t want to deal with an interview, will say something like, “I’ve got to go run.” Severino will say that he has to go run, then he’ll go run, then he’ll come back and seek you out because he remembers that you needed him. He’s still so young, but he’s such a pro, a very easy guy to cheer for.

Hope you enjoy this one.

https://www.mlb.com/yankees/news/luis-severino-armed-with-2017-playoff-lessons/c-269277258?tid=163658034


Ain’t Life Grand


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

Just like we did for the 1996 team in 2016 and the 1977 team in 2017, we decided to run a year-long series of Q&A features with members of the 1998 Yankees for the entire 2018 season. We got things started pretty hot with Tino Martinez, whose unforgettable grand slam in Game 1 of the World Series set the Yankees on a course for a sweep over the San Diego Padres, a rout befitting one of the greatest teams in baseball history.

I caught Tino during an event in Florida, where he was speaking to students attending one of the Steinbrenner family’s annual holiday concerts, then reading “A Visit From St. Nicholas” (better known as  “Twas The Night Before Christmas …”) while accompanied by a symphony orchestra. We chatted in his green room before the performance, and it was easy to tell how much Martinez enjoyed getting to look back at such an incredible career highlight. It’s mostly well-known at this point that up to that point, even through the wild 1996 run, Martinez had struggled in the postseason, even getting benched when the ’96 World Series moved to the NL park so that Joe Torre could keep his regular DH, Cecil Fielder, in the lineup.

The World Series grand slam, besides being one of those moments that literally every baseball fan has dreamed of in his or her backyard, is shown on the video board at Yankee Stadium enough that I can pretty much close my eyes and recall the entire at-bat. The key pitch, obviously, was the 2-2 offering, somehow called a ball (there’s no way it wasn’t a strike, sorry Tino). I had fun going back and forth with him about it, allowing him to maintain that it was a ball. Whatever. Baseball players are funny.

Anyhow, I can’t say that this broke all that much new ground, but it was fun to talk about an iconic moment in baseball history, part of a run by a team that is rightly celebrated among the sport’s elite. Hope you’ll enjoy.

https://www.mlb.com/yankees/news/tino-martinez-recalls-yankees-dynasty/c-267270982?tid=163658034