What a strange season. Tuesday night at Yankee Stadium a man intended to propose marriage to his girlfriend. But he fumbled the ring like a knuckleball, with no one knowing where the thing would end up. The whole section looked for it. Fans used their cell phones as flashlights, parents sent their kids under the seats to search, and all the ballpark was invested in the drama. When the Jumbotron captured the woman’s face alight as she found it—for of course it is she who does the finding, which is why he was asking—the Bronx erupted in wild cheers. Naturally she accepted, and weirdly the Yanks beat the Red Sox 6-4 to keep their improbable wild card playoff hopes alive for one more day.
Monday night the Mets played the Marlins in the Miami club’s first game since the star pitcher 24-year-old Jose Fernandez was killed in a boating accident Sunday morning. Marlins second baseman Dee Gordon stepped to the plate in the bottom of the first and occupied the right-handed hitter’s batter’s box as a tribute in emulation of his late teammate and friend. Gordon took one pitch, and switched to the left-handed side, from where he won last year’s National League batting title with a .333 average. He took another pitch, and then on the 2-0 offering drilled his first home run of the year into the upper deck. Gordon was crying rounding the bases, and when he touched home, he saw that Mets catcher Travis d’Arnaud was, too.
It’s a strange season, and it’s still a few days before October begins. Yes, over the course of six months and 162 games there are always going to be strange events—and the schedule is intended to be a stage for such happenings—but this feels different. Among other things, the Yankees are rebuilding and the Cubs are the favorite to win the World Series.
After the Yankees dealt away much of their established big league talent (Aroldis Chapman, Andrew Miller, Carlos Beltran) for top minor league prospects, baseball experts welcomed the Bronx Bombers to the 21st century. “After years of paying big bucks,” wrote Fox Sports’s Dieter Kurtenbach, “and handing long terms to players that were on the tail-end of their peaks (or worse), the Yankees finally figured out what the best teams in baseball seemed to piece together more than half a decade ago: Building a team through free agency is a terribly inefficient way to win games.”
Brian Cashman has been the Yankees’ general manager since 1998, during which time he’s presided over one dynasty and built a 2009 World Series winner. The problem isn’t that the Yankees front office doesn’t understand the economics of baseball; rather, America’s most famous sports franchise operates on a different scale. A couple of years ago I asked a former Yankees player still employed by the organization if the club—with franchise cornerstones like Alex Rodriguez, Mark Texeira, and C.C. Sabathia all in obvious decline—was in a rebuilding phase. “I wish,” he said. “But the Yankees can’t afford to rebuild like that. They have to try to put a contender in the field every year.”
It’s not clear how precisely that translates into ticket sales or licensing, but much of it has to do with prestige, which is a function of winning and the club’s history of winning. It’s hard, then, to tell Yankees fans that this is the period when the team knows it’s not going to win but is focusing on the future. So why did that change late this summer?
First, there’s the matter of contracts. Texeira’s contract is up at the end of this year, and the club was willing to lose some money on A-Rod’s contract, which expires next year.
Further, Cashman explained that a late summer series with the Tampa Bay Rays helped make up his mind to deal veterans for prospects. “This team started to play better,” said Cashman, “started to impact that win column better, but then the inconsistency of this club reared its ugly head again when we went into Tampa Bay and lost all three games. A true playoff contender—not a playoff pretender—wouldn’t do that.”
And yet the reality is that the club is only four games out in the Wild Card race after dealing away starting pitching, relief pitching, and power, while starting rookies in key spots—at one point five rookies in one game. And that seems to be the point: It is because the Yankees have been able to stay relevant even with rookies that they were able to move veterans for prospects.
Call it the “Gary Sanchez Effect.” The 23-year-old catcher and rookie of the year candidate has 20 home runs and 42 RBI in 51 games. As the Yankees have marketed him, he’s one of the pillars of a future dynasty that the Yankees are building while the fans look on. Cashman’s sleight of hand is owing to the fact that the Yankees already have talented young players able to make a run at the playoffs so that it seems like the club is only half a season from contention. (Not, say, two or more years away, which is more likely the case.)
It was very different for the best team in baseball this year. Chicago Cubs fans fill Wrigley Field even though the team hasn’t won a World Series since 1908 or even appeared in one since 1945. Chicago expects an also-ran in the National League, so the Cubs could afford to stink it up for a while before blossoming as they have the last couple years. As a long ESPN The Magazine profile of Chicago Cubs “Mastermind” Theo Epstein explains:
The latest issue of ESPN is devoted to the Cubs, including a shorter profile of manager Joe Maddon, and a really fine article on how Cubs slugger Anthony Rizzo first met teammate Jon Lester and, at the urging of Epstein, received advice from him on how to deal with cancer. All three were part of the Red Sox at the time. (Here’s a video of Lester fielding a grounder back to the box and tossing his glove, the ball still trapped inside, to Rizzo at first base for the out. Note how Rizzo drops his glove, timed to the flight of Lester’s. More strange baseball magic …)
Former Obama adviser David Axelrod had a nice article in the New Yorker a few weeks ago describing how Epstein built this Cubs team:
As both the ESPN and the Axelrod articles elaborate, Epstein is a Hall of Fame executive, who built winning teams out of two emotionally challenged franchises. I’m certain I am not alone in having hated the Red Sox not for the club itself but for the maudlin portion of its fans—mostly intellectuals drawn from Boston-area colleges—who seemed to cherish their team more dearly for their near misses. A panorama shot of the Fenway Park faithful in autumn once again cheated by fate was a visual cliché deployed by a generation of TV sports cameramen.
That changed with the Red Sox 2004 World Series win. One of the heroes of that championship club was David Ortiz, now in his final year. In the Players’ Tribune, Ortiz thanks Yankees fans for inspiring him, writing, “Every time I get to play in Yankee Stadium, it’s just a different level.”
He adds why:
That is, the prize isn’t just the World Series, but world prestige. If the Cubs win this year, they’ll have the same. The challenges are hardly negligible, given that their first round opponents coming out of the Wild Card game may be the New York Mets, and there is no shortage of black cats in Queens this year or any other. Of course the Cubs might instead wind up facing the Giants—in an even year, when the Giants always have magic on their side.
Just be prepared. It’s a strange season.
