Mission 27, page 6
The Yankees had paid Pettitte $32 million for two steady seasons in 2007 and ’08, but with Sabathia and Burnett in place, the team didn’t intend to spend as lavishly. Cashman offered Pettitte a one-year, $10 million contract for 2009, to which the pitcher’s agent, Randy Hendricks, balked at the $6 million pay cut. Pettitte was an integral part of the clubhouse; would the Yankees really move into their new stadium without him? Pettitte hoped not. “It was like, man, you want to be a part of this,” Pettitte said. “I mean, just everything that I had done with the Yankees in the time that I spent there, and you got a new stadium being built. You definitely wanted to see that through also and be a part of the new ballpark. With the guys that were on the team, the guys that were with me all along—Mo and Jorgie and Jeet—everybody was coming back. I didn’t want to be the odd man out.”
Cashman was holding firm. Other teams had inquired about Pettitte’s availability, but the 36-year-old had let it be known that he wanted to return to New York. If that wasn’t in the cards, retirement was a legitimate option, and perhaps the only bargaining chip Pettitte had to play. “I think I told my agents, ‘If I’m not going back there, I may just go home,’” Pettitte said. “Things were dragging, and there was concern. At that point in my career, it was more just about: I want to be compensated fairly for what I felt like I could bring to the table. There were definitely stressful times there, wondering if I was going to be able to get a deal done.”
With the holidays rapidly approaching, it appeared the stalled negotiations would be pushed into the new year. Cashman could not sit back and wait for Pettitte. Circumstances had presented another option—not for the rotation but for the lineup. When Mark Teixeira’s expected deal with the Red Sox hit a snag, Cashman jumped at the opportunity, signing the first baseman to an eight-year, $180 million contract.
It had been more money than ownership had allotted for the winter, but Hal Steinbrenner gave his okay, having been convinced that this was an opportunity to add a Gold Glove first baseman with one of the best all-around bats in the game. The Yankees shelled out $423.5 million for the three biggest names on the free-agent market, but to Pettitte’s dismay, that left the coffers virtually empty. He was no longer in the team’s plans. “Andy called, wanting to know what the hell happened,” Cashman said. “I walked him through the experience that we had with the agency in this particular time frame. I think he was caught off guard and was unaware of some of the directions and the twists and turns that the failed negotiation had taken…He was crushed. We didn’t have his money anymore.”
Cashman had great fondness for the pitcher who had won 149 regular-season games, another 13 in the postseason, and four World Series rings with the Yankees and also Pettitte the person. There was no place for sentimentality. “You see the team they’re putting together and, when you have a championship in your eyes, that’s all you are concerned about,” Pettitte said. “You start seeing them bringing in CC Sabathia, you bring in A.J. Burnett, you bring in Mark Teixeira. It’s like, ‘Dude, are you kidding me? I’ve got to figure out a way to hopefully get me on this team.’”
While the $10 million offer was gone, Cashman had an idea to clear space for Pettitte. He presented a new offer with a base salary of $5.5 million, a shocking pay cut of more than $10 million from the previous season. Yet, as Cashman detailed, Pettitte could earn an additional $6.5 million in incentives based on innings pitched and days on the active roster. In other words, if he was able to stay healthy, take the ball every five days, and pitch the way he had in each of the previous four years, he would make $12 million.
Since Pettitte didn’t want to open bidding to the other 29 clubs, there was but one move to make. He agreed to the incentive-laden deal on January 27—less than three weeks before pitchers and catchers were set to report for spring training. It had been a long, strange winter for Pettitte and the Yankees, but when the new stadium opened in April, No. 46 would be part of the festivities. “The only way for him to fix that was to be open-minded to taking a different type of deal and unfortunately pitching for his contract,” Cashman said. “In the end Andy was important and wanted to be here. He got essentially his contract regardless. He just had to get it a different way.”
4. First Things First
The Yankees had addressed their rotation issues by adding CC Sabathia and A.J. Burnett, but despite claiming greats like Whitey Ford, Lefty Gomez, and Red Ruffing as their own, pitching had never been the franchise’s identity. The Bombers were known for their bats. From Babe Ruth to Joe DiMaggio to Mickey Mantle, offensive prowess was their trademark.
A lineup that featured Alex Rodriguez, Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada, Hideki Matsui, and rising star Robinson Cano possessed more than enough talent to contend even with the departures of free-agent sluggers Jason Giambi and Bobby Abreu. It wasn’t as prominent as the need for starting pitchers, but general manager Brian Cashman entered the offseason intending to address a hole at first base.
It had been less than three weeks since the Philadelphia Phillies won the World Series, defeating the upstart Tampa Bay Rays in a rain-soaked, five-game battle. While hot stove rumors began to swirl, the Yankees’ pro scouting meetings set the course for the team’s offseason plan. Landing Sabathia and Burnett was the top priority, but there was another name that intrigued Cashman and his lieutenants: Nick Swisher.
An emerging, slugger during his first three seasons with the Oakland A’s, Swisher had hit 78 home runs between 2005 and ’07. He was a prototypical A’s player out of the Moneyball mold, possessing the power to hit the ball out of the park while displaying great patience at the plate.
The A’s had locked up the switch-hitting slugger with an extension in the middle of the 2007 season, inking Swisher to a five-year, $26.75 million deal. It appeared that he would be a major part of Oakland’s future, but less than eight months after signing the new deal, Swisher was traded to the Chicago White Sox for a three-player package headed by left-hander Gio Gonzalez.
In Chicago, Swisher clashed with manager Ozzie Guillen and the coaching staff. Swisher hit 24 home runs, but his .219 batting average and .743 OPS in 153 games represented dramatic drops from his numbers in Oakland. He seemed to be miscast—both as a leadoff hitter and a center fielder. When the 2008 season ended, Swisher got to work with his father, former big league catcher Steve Swisher. “Literally one day after the season ended, we were in batting cages grinding, working, trying to figure out what went wrong,” Swisher said. “I feel like I got into a lot of bad habits in Chicago. I felt like I was trying to please a lot of people, and it just didn’t work out for me.”
Unbeknownst to Swisher, the silver lining in his White Sox tenure had been discovered in New York. The Yankees were in the early days of incorporating advanced analytics, and Michael Fishman had been appointed as the team’s director of quantitative analysis. It was a fancy title that looked great on a business card, but Fishman’s task was to unearth potential buy-low candidates for Cashman to pursue. “Fish walks in, and his exact words were: ‘How would you like to acquire the second most unlucky player in baseball?’” Cashman said. “I was like, ‘What?’ He proceeded for the next half hour to an hour to talk to me about Nick Swisher.”
The name was familiar to Cashman, who had tried to acquire Swisher from the A’s, but Chicago’s package blew away anything the Yankees were prepared to offer. Though Swisher’s season in Chicago had been a disaster, Fishman’s research suggested that it had more to do with bad luck than eroding skills or a change in approach. Swisher had the third lowest batting average on balls in play in the majors while his line drive and hard-hit percentages matched what he had done the previous three years in Oakland. “He proceeded to walk through every stat line that in his world proved this is the exact same player,” Cashman said. “The only thing that happened was the balls he did hit went at defenders or got converted into outs. Bad luck.”
Those numbers are more mainstream now, but a decade ago, Fishman was among the few investigating them regularly. Having graduated summa cum laude from Yale with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, Fishman was hired by the Yankees in 2005, two years after the release of Michael Lewis’ deep dive into the Oakland front office challenged the rest of the league to catch up on the analytics front.
Fishman’s introduction to baseball had come at age seven with Strat-O-Matic, a dice game that uses numbers to approximate players’ skills. In his view there was nothing wrong with Swisher’s card. He theorized that as long as Swisher stayed healthy, he would revert back into the same power threat he had been in Oakland. “I spent more time researching him than any other player,” Fishman said. “When you have a mystery like why his performance was down, you had to dig deeper to get the answer. Was it randomness and bad luck, or was it change in his skill level and true talent level? All the research we did at the time concluded that it was more of a bad luck season, and his underlying skills hadn’t changed. He still had the elite plate discipline and walk rate in Chicago. His strikeout rate was only up slightly, so it came down to: why did he not have as many hits? Why was his batting average of balls in play down? We looked at the studies on batted ball types, hit directions, ball distances; reviewed of all his batted balls; and just came to a conclusion that he was the same player that he was in Oakland. He just had bad stats.”
Cashman knew that following the recommendation would require a leap of faith. The pro scouting department did not share Fishman’s affinity for Swisher, but Fishman earned a gamble like this one. Cashman frequently referred to him as one of his “Knights of the Round Table.” “I was like, ‘Dude, that’s a big bet to be placing,’” Cashman said. “But Fish kept climbing that credibility tree with suggestions he made. You’re like, ‘What does he see here?’ I don’t want to label myself as King Arthur, but he was one of my knights and he had earned a seat.”
Cashman reached out to White Sox executive vice president Kenny Williams, who expressed no interest in keeping Swisher’s escalating contract on their books. In Williams’ view, there was also little reason to believe the relationship between Guillen and Swisher would improve in ’09. “Personality-wise, it didn’t fit,” Cashman said. “Swish is a very strong personality in a positive way, but in a losing environment—as well as with bad production, which he had that particular year—that can definitely rub people the wrong way.”
On November 13 the Yankees shipped utility infielder Wilson Betemit and pitchers Jeff Marquez and Jhonny Nunez to the White Sox for Swisher and pitcher Kanekoa Texeira, adding a powerful bat to the roster for a trio of expendable parts. Cashman dialed Swisher’s telephone number and welcomed him to the club, telling him to expect duty as the everyday first baseman. Time in the outfield seemed unlikely, as outfielders Melky Cabrera, Johnny Damon, Hideki Matsui, and Xavier Nady were all in place. “Holy shit,” Swisher said, recalling his thoughts at the time. “Why would these guys want me? I was literally going from having the worst season of my career professionally—and personally I had a tough year as well. He said, ‘I don’t care what kind of a season you had this past year. We know that you are going to have an amazing turnaround season. We know you are going to be successful.’”
In truth Cashman didn’t know that for sure, but New York had taken advantage of a similar buy-low opportunity more than a decade earlier. Scott Brosius was traded from the A’s to the Yankees following a subpar 1997 season in which he posted a woeful .576 OPS. At worst, Brosius would fill a utility infield role for the Yankees; at best, he would be their starting third baseman.
The Yankees sent right-hander Kenny Rogers to Oakland in exchange for Brosius, who produced an All-Star season in 1998, the team’s historic 114-win campaign. Brosius saved his best for last, hitting .471 in the World Series sweep of the San Diego Padres to secure MVP honors. “It reminded me of the Brosius deal, which was buy-low; there was some upside,” Cashman said. “In Swish’s case everything Fish said was true. Everything he forecasted happened.”
With a change of address, Swisher was about to have a new outlook on his baseball life. He had just gotten a new tattoo down the left side of his torso that read, “Persevere.” Now here he was, reclaiming a promising career that had been temporarily derailed by his Windy City detour. “That was a major turning point in my professional career,” Swisher said. “‘I am pretty good and I can get over this hump.’ To have the opportunity to come right over to the New York Yankees, to the team that everybody wants to play for, it completely changed my life from that day moving forward.”
While the Yankees worked toward deals with Sabathia, Burnett, and Andy Pettitte, Cashman had agreed to meet with Mark Teixeira and his agent, Scott Boras, at the Four Seasons hotel in Washington, D.C. Considering the money that Cashman was preparing to throw at pitching, breaking bread with another first baseman seemed to be a courtesy. “He was not someone that was a realistic option,” Cashman said. “But I know I was blown away with getting to know him in that environment, so it was impactful for me.”
Even so, the Boston Red Sox were considered to be the overwhelming favorites to sign the 28-year-old switch-hitter. The Washington Nationals, Baltimore Orioles, and Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim were also in the mix. Was there room for the Yankees to get involved?
A product of Severna Park, Maryland, Teixeira was said to prefer a team on the East Coast, which was bad news for the Angels. Teixeira had enjoyed his two-month stint in Anaheim, but unless their offer was of The Godfather variety—one he couldn’t refuse—it was going to be difficult for the SoCal team to sign him to a long-term deal.
Teixeira had grown up attending games at Baltimore’s Camden Yards, counting Cal Ripken Jr. among his favorite players, and there was significant clamor from the fanbase to add Teixeira to an Orioles club that hadn’t finished better than third in the American League East since 1997. The Orioles made Teixeira a seven-year offer in the $140-150 million range; it wasn’t close to enough. “The Orioles basically made me an offer just to say, ‘Hey, you’re a hometown kid; we have to offer you something,’” Teixeira said. “But it wasn’t competitive.”
The other area team, the Nationals, extended an eight-year offer worth about $160 million. That was in line with what the Angels had offered, and while those stood as the most lucrative deals on the table, Teixeira continued to wait for a formal offer from the Red Sox.
He’d nearly landed in Boston once before, having been selected by the Red Sox in the ninth round of the 1998 draft before opting to attend Georgia Tech. Teixeira had no regrets about how that worked out. He had a great time on campus with the Yellow Jackets and then became a first-round pick in 2001. It seemed this second chance was preordained. Teixeira did list Boston among the best cities in the majors.
On the same day that the Yankees broke out the carving board to host the Burnett/Sabathia press conference in the Bronx, Red Sox owner John Henry, president Larry Lucchino, and GM Theo Epstein boarded flights to meet with Teixeira. They met at a hotel near Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, and if Teixeira would accept eight years and $170 million, he’d be playing on Opening Day at Fenway Park. “We went to that meeting expecting to sign with the Red Sox,” Teixeira said. “They told Scott, ‘We’re coming to close the deal,’ which Scott assumed was going to be a better offer. Something happened, maybe on the flight down, but they didn’t bring the deal that we thought they were going to bring.”
Teixeira said that adding a ninth year or boosting the value of the contract closer to $200 million would have cinched it. Neither was offered. “Scott was very honest and said, ‘Guys, that’s what everyone else is offering. It’s got to be a better deal, or we will continue to negotiate with other teams,’” Teixeira said. “At the time, we were negotiating with three or four other teams. It was very confusing. I was like, ‘Well, this is just the business of baseball.’ It didn’t really bother me; it was just surprising.”
The Red Sox had a history of not signing players for more than eight years and they were unwilling to establish a new precedent for Teixeira. After the meeting Henry sent an email to several media members, insinuating that the Red Sox were no longer in the Teixeira sweepstakes. “We met with Mr. Teixeira and were very much impressed with him,” Henry wrote. “After hearing about his other offers, however, it seems clear that we are not going to be a factor.”
The chain of events had Teixeira thinking more and more about the Yankees. Even though Teixeira had been an Orioles fan, Don Mattingly had been his favorite player, and there was allure in playing for the most successful team in history. His final at-bat in the old stadium was a grand slam off reliever Edwar Ramirez, who was moved to tears after the game. If the Red Sox would not go above and beyond, maybe Teixeira belonged on the other side of baseball’s greatest rivalry. “I’ve always loved playing in New York; it suited me,” Teixeira said. “I just knew that if I didn’t go to the Yankees, I’d always wonder, What if? When you go to the best team, the most storied franchise, there’s never going to be any regrets. No offense to the other 29 teams in baseball, but no one says, ‘Man, I can’t believe I never played for the Rays.’ I always had this pull to the Yankees that if they wanted me, I was going to go there.”
Teixeira’s wife, Leigh, had expressed her preference for New York, which was no small factor. The couple, who first met while attending Georgia Tech, had two young children and were planning to set down roots wherever he signed. “She always enjoyed visiting New York. So if she was going to be happy, then I knew I would be happy,” Teixeira said. “We were having dinner at home in Dallas one day, and I said, ‘You make the choice; it’s in your hands.’ She said New York, and that helped. It wasn’t the No. 1 factor, but again, all things being equal, everything kept bringing me back to the Yankees.”
