NEW YORK — Yankees fans may hate GM Brian Cashman right now, but he has a lot in common with them. Before the team tried to snap a nine-game losing streak on Wednesday night against the Nationals, Cashman slumped in a chair in Yankee Stadium’s press conference room and repeated much of what you can read on Twitter or in the New York tabloids these days.
He alternately described himself and the team as “embarrassed,” “not proud,” “disappointed,” “frustrated” and “angered.” He called the Yankees’ season “horrific,” a stretch he “wouldn’t wish on anybody” (except, presumably, the Red Sox) and “a disaster.”
He added, “Obviously, we’re in a bad spot. We’re losing sleep over it.”
The second most expensive team in the history of the sport has limped to a 60–65 record, good for last place in the division, 10 games out of the wild card, with—according to FanGraphs—a 0.1% chance to make the playoffs. (Depending on who you ask in the city, that might actually be a bargain: The Mets, who cost $343 million to the Yankees’ $279 million, are 58–68. But because the National League is more tightly bunched than the American League, that leaves them 7.5 games back with a 1.7% chance to see the postseason.)
Cashman has, for the first time in his 26 years as Yankees GM, fired a coach at midseason, hitting coach Dillon Lawson. (The bats have been just about as silent under his replacement, Sean Casey.) Cashman has tried promoting prospects to see if they can inject life into the team. (We’ll see.)
“I’ve done this job a long time,” he said. “I’ve been able to fix things on the run when broken. Everything I’ve been trying to do from my end, whether it’s promote from within, whether it’s make a coaching change, whatever it is, nothing’s worked. It’s failed. So we’ll keep trying.”
He declined to offer much of an argument in support of himself, except to say that he didn’t see this coming.
“I don’t think there’s anybody on this planet that felt that the New York Yankees as constructed entering spring training—entering or leaving spring training—wasn’t a playoff-contending team,” he said. “I wouldn’t say anybody on the roster, anybody on an opposing roster, or anybody in this room—the media—I doubt there’s anybody that predicted that we were not a playoff team. I certainly didn’t. But at the same time, s— happens and a lot of it has happened. And because of that, we have a mess on our hands.
“I’ll do everything I can to try to clean it up and fix what’s broken or what has broken along the way. Some of it will fix on its own, players getting healthy, but as we see with [righty Luis Severino, who returned in May from a strained lat muscle to post, through Tuesday, a 7.98 ERA], there’s no guarantee for that, too. So we’ve had a lot of hard lessons this year. Sports can bring you that. … We’ve invited a lot of scrutiny, a lot of questions. Some of them will be legitimate. Some of them will be bulls—. But we’ve got to be professional and deal with all of it and try to sift through what’s real and what’s fake. And I’m not looking forward to that because I’d rather be in a position of trying to prepare for advanced scouting on the postseason and seeing how far we can take this right now.”
Will he be the one who gets to decide what is real and what’s fake?
“I think we’re all going to be evaluated,” he said. “Including myself.”
