My Name Is Brian McGuire Cashman, I'm A Survivor

Harvey Araton's Times' love story about the scrappy second basemen from Catholic University

The book on Brian Cashman was that he was a small but scrappy second baseman, excellent speed, active bat, good glove, average arm and stubborn as a Steinbrenner in his approach to the game.
As a four-year starter and leadoff hitter at Catholic University in Washington in the mid-to-late 1980s, Cashman was known for refusing to look down the third-base line at his coach for fear of seeing the take sign.
“I had trouble with secondary pitches,” he said. “If the first pitch of the game was a fastball, I would jump on it and hammer it, opposite of the approach I have as a general manager. I like guys with high on-base percentages.”
Ask Cashman a question, almost any question, and invariably the answer rambles around to what’s best for the Yankees.
One of these years, this admitted workaholic promises to change the subject, take the exotic vacation that somehow eluded him through college and beyond. He will go to Europe, a continent he has yet to set foot on. He will finally make time to explore his religious and ancestral roots.
“My name is Brian McGuire Cashman, Irish Roman Catholic, but I have never been to the Vatican and I have not been to County Cork,” he said, in his peppy monotone and with what sounded like a 50-50 mix of personal regret and professional pride.
Wherever Cashman has traveled abroad — China, Japan, Latin America — his sight was set on the business of summers in the South Bronx. At 43 but in his 25th year of working for the Yankees, he acknowledged that he probably needs to get out more.
“Let’s do it over here — I could use some sun,” he said to a recent interview request, choosing a shadeless corner of the team’s spring training complex. Committed as he is to the Yankees’ cause, the blue-eyed, fair-skinned Cashman has apparently not given up on a state of being — tanned and rested — that has proved more challenging than his unlikely rise from Yankees summer intern to general manager to quarter-century organizational fixture.

"I could use some sun," he says. We could use a starting rotation without A.J. as its number 2 man.
“Let’s do it over here." What do Cash and Harvey plan on doing?