Cashman puts heat on Dombro
NEW YORK — While Dave Dombrowski is interviewing potential managers for 2018 and beyond, his Yankees counterpart still has his team playing this season.
Yankees general manager Brian Cashman’s rebuilding effort has paid off more quickly than anyone expected, and his fingerprints are all over it. The Yankees’ 25-man roster for the American League Championship Series against the Astros includes 13 players who Cashman, at one point or another, acquired via trade.
And so, Dombrowski’s next challenge is right there in front of him.
Through nearly 30 seasons as a general manager and now Red Sox president of baseball operations, Dombrowski has developed a reputation for aggressive trades. It’s how he tried to win in Montreal, it’s the way he made a splash in Florida, and it helped him stay competitive in Detroit.
In barely two years with the Red Sox, he’s already hit the trade market hard.
Now that he’s trying to reach where the Yankees currently stand, can Dombrowski’s modus operandi keep pace with Cashman?
“This is a responsibility that we all share that we didn’t win a world championship,” Dombrowski said on the day he fired manager John Farrell. “It’s my responsibility. You can always do things that will help you.”
In the past, when Dombrowski has tried to help, he has not been shy about trying to do so through the trade market. That’s where he built his reputation for aggressive maneuvers that have followed him from job to job.
In a bold attempt to win the NL East in 1989, Dombrowski brought Mariners ace Mark Langston to Montreal. Langston was terrific, but the Expos were a .500 team, and the deal cost Hall of Famer Randy Johnson.
When Dombrowski joined the expansion Marlins in 1993, he quickly traded for emerging Padres slugger Gary Sheffield, who was a legitimate star by the time Florida won the World Series in 1997. That trade cost a relatively unknown reliever named Trevor Hoffman.
To make the Tigers into a perennial force in the AL Central throughout the early part of this decade, Dombrowski traded large packages of players for Miguel Cabrera, Max Scherzer and David Price. No Hall of Famers went the other way in those deals, but they did cost young talent in Andrew Miller, Curtis Granderson and Drew Smyly.
Not that Boston needs such evidence of Dombrowski’s appetite for highstakes wheeling and dealing.
In just two years with the Red Sox, he’s already gutted much of the farm system in trades for Chris Sale, Craig Kimbrel, Drew Pomeranz and Tyler Thornburg. Dombrowski took over a team that missed the playoffs in back-to-back seasons, and transformed it into one that’s won the AL East two years in a row.
Cashman, though, had a team that finished in fourth place last year, and he built it into one of the four teams left standing this postseason. The Sox might have won the division, but the Yankees are still alive, and Cashman has proven he’s more than a free spender with a Steinbrenner-sized wallet.
Certainly, Cashman has benefited from the Yankees’ deep pockets. He was given permission to release Alex Rodriguez with more than $25 million still owed. He gave $155 million to sign Masahiro Tanaka, a record for a player coming out of Japan. Ten current Yankees are making more than $10 million this season.
But Cashman has rebuilt the organization through shrewd trades, both big and small.
Cashman gave up a reliever named Shane Greene to find Derek Jeter’s shortstop replacement in Didi Gregorius. He gave up a backup catcher named John Ryan Murphy for Wednesday night’s starting center fielder, Aaron Hicks. He gave up reliever Adam Warren to get second baseman Starlin Castro, then he got Warren back along with elite prospect Gleyber Torres in a trade for Aroldis Chapman, and five months later he signed Chapman off the free agent market.
The Yankees muchhyped playoff bullpen consists of eight pitchers, six of which were at some point acquired via trade. Two of the best, Chad Green and Tommy Kahnle, were secondary pieces of their respective trades. And even after being aggressive buyers at this year’s trade deadline — Sonny Gray, Todd Frazier, David Robertson, Jaime Garcia — the Yankees still have one of the game’s most highly touted farm systems thanks to Cashman’s 2016 fire sale when he flipped Chapman, Miller, Carlos Beltran and Ivan Nova for multi-prospect packages.
Trades are supposed to be a Dombrowski specialty — it’s hard to argue the early returns on Sale and Kimbrel, and even the Pomeranz trade is looking better — but the Yankees are still playing because Cashman’s proven he can go the trade route as well.