Hubris.

 

SPOILER ALERT:

If you have never seen this movie—The Sweet Smell of Success, starring Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis—stopping reading immediately and watch it. 

It's one of the greatest films of the 1950s, beautifully shot and a dazzling writing job by Clifford Odets, Ernest Lehman, and Alexander Mackendrick. It's McCarthyism in nightclub noir, a tale of New York celebrity so gritty, dark, and breathtaking that Barry Levinson has characters obsessively quoting it in Diner.

All right, you've been warned of spoilage. 

The plot of The Sweet Smell of Success revolves around evil—and I mean evil—gossip columnist Burt Lancaster, one of the most powerful figures in the city. He employs scrambling, amoral press agent Tony Curtis to break up the engagement of Lancaster's younger sister (Susan Harrison) to an all-American jazz guitarist (perpetual movie straight man, Martin Milner).  

Curtis does—but it's not enough for Burt, who over the course of this scheme has been insulted to his face by Milner. Despite having told the young man, "You're dead, son. Get yourself buried."—breaking up the engagement is suddenly not enough for Burt. He wants Milner physically damaged, and framed for drug possession, and inveigles Curtis into setting this up—much against his better judgement. 

It's not so much that Tony's character, Sidney Falco, balks at how immoral this all is. It's that he can see that it's too much—that Lancaster's hubris is going to undo them both. Which it does.

 

All of which brings me to Brian Cashman and Gleyber Torres. Of course.

It wasn't enough, when Derek Jeter was negotiating for his last Yankees contract, for Cashman to go hard on Jeets, who was already 36 and just starting to fade. Sure, maybe a cut in salary was inevitable—hell, even Babe Ruth got cut in his last years. 

It was more the way he did it, than anything else, that was so...Cashman being Cashman.

Rather than simply low-balling Jeets, Cashman also brought the negotiations to the press, and used some of his favored reporters to spread around just how he put it to one of the Yankees' greatest players.

He told Derek Jeter to his face—Cashie let us know—that he could be replaced. When a seething Jeets asked with who, The Brain gleefully recounted that he replied, without hesitation: "Troy Tulowitski, for one."

Snap! That's tellin' 'em, Bri!

Jeter fumed—and signed, for a big cut. 

But like Lancaster's columnist, J.J. Hunsecker, that wasn't enough for Cashman. As always, he had to demonstrate just how brilliant he was—and get his "revenge" on someone he'd already bested.

In 2018, that meant his "steal" of Giancarlo Stanton from Jeter when he was running the Marlins. Cashie even got his own Sidney Falco's,  Bob Klapisch and Paul Solotaroff, to write a whole book, Inside the Empire: The True Power Behind the New York Yankees, excoriating Jeter and worshipfully praising Cashie.

A sample of their deathless prose:

"There is, in the fixity of his gaze and jawline, the set of a man taken lightly for too long. He's one of those people who came to power fairly, on the strength of his smarts and sweat equity. To be sure, he used a family connection to land an internship with the Yankees while still in college."

Sure, "smarts and sweat equity" to "family connection." That tracks.

But it still wasn't enough—especially after everyone saw who the real mark was in the Giancarlo deal.

Next, Cashman actually brought Troy Tulowitski to the Bronx, even though poor Tulo had never managed to play so much as a full season after 2011. He played 5 games, hit .182, and retired.

Embarrassing.

But if there's one distinguishing characteristic about Brian Cashman, it's that he's never afraid to make the same mistake twice. Or three, or four times.

Next up was the rock upon which Bri would build his very own Yankees dynasty, the Shortstop a de Future...Gleyber Torres. Never mind that he would have to switch positions. He would be Brian Cashman's Derek Jeter, only—as the old Six-Million Dollar Man line went—BETTER. Better? Better, stronger, faster.

Well, we all saw how that worked out. 

Now, though long back at second base, The Gleyber seems to be having an epic fail. A quarter of the season in, he's at .209 with a .550 OPS, 1 HR and 7 RBI. He's on a pace to strike out 156 times—a career worst.

Gleyber also brings so little else to his game. He's a bad baserunner, with no instincts. He's on pace to make 20 errors at second—and to lead the AL in that stat for the second year in a row.

Does he need glasses? A new head? I dunno. But the fact is that, at just 27, The Gleyber is done—maybe the biggest Yankee washout of all time, considering the expectations for him.

Yet I don't expect Brian Cashman to give him a $6-million makeover. I expect it to be 20 or 30 times that number, if Torres can play at all decently for any part of this year. That will be a(nother colossal) Cashie mistake—which will then give HAL another excuse not to go all-out to win a ring. 

But have no fear, whether Gleyber stays or goes, Cashman is already hard at work at destroying his next Jeter "replacement." Let's face it, folks, after that blistering early start, Anthony Volpe—a delightful young man—is in free fall, on his way, perhaps, to being not the next Derek but the next Gleyber.

Volpe's hitting .209, with all of 3 homers and 12 RBI over the last 4 weeks. He's on a pace to strikeout 160 times. He seems to have stopped stealing much, and his fielding has become frankly erratic. 

Yet I'm sure the Yanks will do nothing to try to turn him around. He will keep hitting in the leadoff spot that obviously puts too much pressure on him, keep using the same approach to the game that Brian Cashman and his analytics experts have no doubt determined is the very best one possible. Keep failing the same way, over and over again, just like Cashman's Yankees, which is the very definition of...

Hubris.

General manager of the Yankees? My big toe would make a better general manager of the Yankees.