After fifteen years of being a reluctant shopper - the one guy who showed up every winter with strict orders to overpay for back-nine players - Cashman, the general manager of the New York Yankees, was suddenly in the catbird seat. It was precisely in that spirit of here-goes-nothing that Mike Hill, the director of baseball operations for the fire-sale Miami Marlins, tapped Brian Cashman on the shoulder in November 2017 in the hallway of the Waldorf Astoria in Orlando. What the GMs want - overwhelmingly - is to get younger and cheaper: to trade a couple of peak seasons from their franchise left fielder for a pair of live-armed kids who are on the brink. In this, the Age of the Real-Deal Drug Test and the Can’t-Miss Hall of Famer Clogging the Lineup, nobody wants the fading superstar with the enormous contract. At one point or another, most will pay homage to the guy or two holding all the cards: the lucky executives who happen to have deep wells of talent on their Double- and Triple-A rosters.

Over third and fourth cocktails, GMs pull each other’s strings for leads on what they hope they’ll get done later. Still, it’s not like nothing happens at the GM meetings one month prior. Those events, held in mid-December at another Kubla Khan luxe resort, are a Ford Bronco chase of trades and desperation, capitalism on a four-day crack toot. The free-agent market is barely a week old, no one’s finalized his forty-man roster, and the needs of each team won’t fully manifest until the frenzy of Winter Meetings one month hence. Not a lot gets done at these boys’-club excursions, in part because of the calendar. Their fixed destination is the lobby bar, where someone’s playing piano, the shades are drawn against the late-fall sun, and thirty men with the hardest jobs in the trade can let loose and get buzzed. None of the GMs can putt worth a damn, but the greens are beside the point.

Executives harrowed by the grind of the season - six months of seven-day/eighty-hour weeks back-page eruptions after three-game slumps and side-eyed shade from their high school daughters over another pre-prom party not attended - disappear for four days in mid-November to a luxe hotel overlooking a golf course. The General Manager Meetings each fall are baseball’s version of a buddies’ fishing junket to Belize. Yankees outfielder exits with hamstring injury after legging out singleĬarlos Rodon likes what he sees as he ramps up for returnĪn exclusive excerpt from the new book “Inside the Empire: The True Power Behind the New York Yankees” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, out March 26). How Yankees starter fared in return from sticky-stuff suspensionĪaron Judge does it all to carry Yankees as win streak grows

Inside the Empire by Bob Klapisch