One eager baseball fan wasted no time in putting Brian Cashman on the spot during a Q&A session on Tuesday night.
The Yankees general manager — who was in attendance for the team’s “Winter Warm-Up” event at the Hard Rock Cafe in Times Square — was asked about the front office’s intentions of pursuing big-ticket free agents during the 2018 offseason. By that winter, superstars such as Bryce Harper, Manny Machado and Matt Harvey will be on the market, and the Yankees are expected to be an interested party.
And so the question came from Ian from Queens, who stood in front of a microphone on behalf of an attentive audience:
“The consensus from every Yankees fan, two years from now, big free agent class. What’s going to happen. Is it Bryce Harper? Machado? Harvey? Everybody wants to know. The talk about baseball is Bryce Harper will be a Yankee.”
Cashman, who sat with a smile on his face on stage, made sure the situation was played safely, blurting out, “You trying to get me suspended?”
Although Cashman is prohibited from discussing the potential pursuit of players who are under contracts with other teams, he still acknowledged the question, and made an attempt at an equitable response.
“Well, this is my hope: First and foremost, as you see we’re transitioning from contracts that we vested heavily in and it did pay off for us in ’09,” Cashman said. “So at the end of the day, we are going to be in a position to do a number of things, and maybe we can turn the clock back to be big-game hunters that we have been accustomed to being.
“I know the talk of the big free agent class of 2018 already had been discussed before the 2016 season started like, ‘Ah, the Yankees are going to wait and reset the clock and go after these guys.’ And since this time, you saw one of our golden nuggets pop out of our system (when Gary Sanchez) established himself as potentially one of the high-end young players in the game. We could have a few more of those, and it’ll allow us to have a lot of different choices to see what’s on the open market at the time.”
Brian Cashman. #NYYWinterWarmup https://t.co/SQwWWaJhAE
— Bronx Pinstripes (@BronxPinstripes) January 17, 2017
In the meantime, Cashman has his focus on their own young players, including Gary Sanchez and Aaron Judge, as well as touted prospects Clint Frazier, Gleyber Torres and James Kaprielian.
“We want our guys to be looked at like that six years from now, and hopefully some of these guys become those guys,” Cashman said. “Therefore, you’re not having to rely on going to the market place and pay a steep price regardless of what their talent level is.
“The other team’s talent … I can’t speak to those guys that are potentially future free agents, but I can tell you our hope is that the young guys that we have in our system become some of the young great players in the game going forward.”
If you want to connect with Tom Hanslin, email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @tomhanslin.
