Canary, meet coal mine.
This week's New York Times Magazine features the annual, exculpatory whitewash of Brian Cashman. Can the Yankee Apocalypse—Yankelypse?—be far behind?
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/06/magazine/yankees-brian-cashman.html
I guess we should be grateful that this one is not a book-length hagiography, such as Bob Klapisch and Paul Solotaroff's 2019 Inside the Empire: the True Story Behind the New York Yankees, which was timed to celebrate just how brilliant Cashman's acquisition of Giancarlo Stanton (and supposed fleecing of Derek Jeter) was.
Whoops.
Or Andy Martino's 2024 The Yankee Way: The Untold Inside Story of the Brian Cashman Era, which was intended to prove just how brilliantly Cashman had always run the Yankees...and, not incidentally, to demonstrate that there were no hard feelings remaining between him and Derek Jeter.
Within weeks of its publication, we saw the infamous, Fifth Inning Fiasco, and the most disgraceful Yankees exit from a World Series, ever.
This is not to knock Martino, or Klapisch and Solotaroff. It's not easy being a beat reporter, and one of the things Brian Cashman truly is a genius at is trading access for paeans. (Too bad he's not so good at trading players.)
Nor do I have anything against the writer of this new defense of Cashie, Bruce Schoenfeld, a freelance writer who lives in Boulder, Colorado, and describes himself online as a "Journalist, wine drinker, pedant, patriotic liberal, baseball dad."
Mr. Schoenfeld sounds like someone with whom it would be quite pleasant to while away a couple hours imbibing a nice cabernet, high in the Rockies.
Yet when it comes to analyzing the New York Yankees and their general-manager-for-life, Schoenfeld displays what is indeed, shall we say, an Olympian distance, with a lot of critical details missing from the picture.
To wit:
—The piece is entitled, "He's the Most Accomplished Executive in Baseball. The Fans Want Him Gone," and subtitled, "Brian Cashman has presided over four titles and zero losing seasons. Yankees fans demand more."
—Sigh. You can see where this is headed already. The familiar, Yankees fans are all New-York, victory obsessed maniacs who don't understand how good they have it.
And Bruce doesn't disappoint. Following yet another Cashman anecdote about how hard it was to come of age—in his nepo-baby job—under George Steinbrenner, and testimonials from The Usual Suspects (other big-league GMs), we get the standard lecture on how ungrateful we are.
—Schoenfeld looks back at the incredible history of Yankee winning—through 1964, 62 years ago—then has the brass to quote the late Roger Angell, the greatest baseball writer of all time, opining about Yankees fans feeling entitled...in 1972, 54 years ago:
"These fans accept not less than perfection."
The Angell lines in question were actually part of a longer New Yorker piece in which he talked about how Bomber fans were changing in 1972, and how much they loved the advent of Sparky Lyle and an actual pennant race.
—One can't really imagine, say, Roger Angell writing a piece about Yankees fans 54 year before 1972: "Those smug 1918 guys!" But never mind. Cashie, trying to do his best Alicia Keys, takes his cue and goes on and on about how demanding "New York" is:
"New York will keep you motivated. New York will keep you honest. New York will force you to be committed. You can't cut corners in New York. You can't take a day off in New York. You can't sometimes breathe in New York."
Breathe, Brian, breathe. It's okay.
—Infinitely worse than that, after a wildly exaggerated tribute to the greatness of George, Cashman reveals more than he probably meant to by making out that ALL OF US are become the lunatic who made his young life hell:
"If there are 10 million Yankees fans in the metro area, that mentality has created 10 million George Steinbrenners who are buying the tickets and calling the talk shows."
Oh, the humanity! We are filling the ballpark and daring to comment on what we see! Which makes us...George Steinbrenner?
—But none of that stops Cashman from complaining—still!—about how awful we all were when the 2023 Yankees went 82-80 and missed the playoffs.
"But you'd think we lost 100 games. It was ugly and hostile."
—Schoenfeld turns back to tributes from the men who do business with Cashman every day, and who have absolutely every reason to praise and none to ridicule:
Billy Beane calls him, "a truth-teller—he's like that privately and he's like that publicly. He can be brutally honest." Another GM calls him, "the most honest baseball executive I've ever encountered," while Schoenfeld himself notes that "Cashman prides himself on his transparency."
—Think about this for a moment.
Are either brutal honesty or transparency really qualities you want in a baseball general manager? Brutally honest...as in his constant bragging about how he told Derek Jeter that he was no Troy Tulowitski?
Neither the brutality nor the honesty was particularly useful—and worse than that, they distracted from a baseball assessment that proved to be dead wrong.
—Schoenfeld's John Denver perspective shows in many other ways. One is how he speculates that what is really bugging us poor Yankees fans is how we've been replaced at the top by the hated Dodgers.
First, as a sports fan, shouldn't you dislike that a rival team has figured out how to manipulate the system...and that your perpetual GM has not?
Second, long before the Dodgers rose again from bankruptcy, what we actual Yankees fans hated was how constantly we were getting beaten by the Boston Red Sox. And the Houston Astros. And the Detroit Tigers...
—What's most significant in this Homage to a Lightweight, though, is what's missing.
—Schoenfeld runs back again the myth that it was George Steinbrenner's uncontrolled spending that filled the team with stars and overwhelmed all the opposition with his money.
Those of us who follow the team closely know that this is not true.
That after some highly successful free-agent inkings early on, George made all sorts of bad choices. He was running the team into the ground, and became a target of steady (and deserved) abuse well beyond anything that Brian Cashman has endured: constantly ridiculed on SNL and Seinfeld, and subjected to years of "Steinbrenner Sucks" chants.
—Steinbrenner's real, lasting contribution to the Yankees was stumbling into some superb general managers, managers, and other front office people—none of whom he valued, all of whom he forced out after a few seasons. Gabe Paul, Bob Watson, Buck Showalter, and above all Gene "Stick" Michael are who revived the Yankees.
None of them are mentioned here.
—The wonderfully vague words in the head and subhead, "accomplished," and "presided" tell the story. Brian Cashman is "the most accomplished" general manager in baseball? What does that mean? Exactly?
And as numerous commentators weighed in, Cashie "presided" over a dynasty built by Gene Michael, with considerable help from Watson and Showalter. As Schoenfeld himself concedes, 2026 will mark the 11th season in the last 14 in which the Yankees did not finish first.
—Still, Schoenfeld points to all those winning seasons—sure, a real bragging point—and all those playoff appearances...which is not so much.
When Cashman took over the Yankees, 4 of the 14 AL teams, or 28.6%, made the postseason. Today, 6 of 15, or 40% do.
Cashie didn't raise the Yanks. The bar got lowered.
—Missing, too, is how relentlessly the Yankees make their history of success a selling point. The walls of the latest Stadium are plastered with photos of Yankees of the past, celebrating their great seasons and accomplishments.
Everywhere is the idea that we are supposed to buy into the wonders of the past...which we are also told have destroyed our perspective.
—Missing, too—although we do hear from his mother—is how Cashman even used the Yanks' legacy to seduce a woman and blow up his marriage in an embarrassing sex scandal, one that started with him telling the damsel in question something along the lines of, "The Yankees run the world. And I run the Yankees."
—Missing, too, is the utter sadism with which Cashman dragged Joe Torre down to Florida, to fire him in about the most humiliating way possible—detailed in Torre's memoir, The Yankee Years. Or how he pushed such great Yankees as Bernie Williams and Jorge Posada out the door.
—Missing, too, are all the enormous public subsidies that those "10 million George Steinbrenners" allowed their representatives to shower upon Cashman's bosses.
—Missing, too, are the tens of thousands of seats that the Steinbrenners have regularly lopped off their various, gifted Stadiums in order to add luxury boxes, restaurants, and bars for the ultra-wealthy.
—Missing, too, is any mention of the astronomically rising prices over the 53 years of the Steinbrenner era, and geez Louise, why are you guys all so angry?
Must be that New York air, making us all crazy.
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