Brian Cashman has now been part of 2,500 Yankees wins as general manager. He’s built championship teams and survived droughts. Since 1998, he's collected five World Series rings.
But there is one regular-season win that sticks with him more than any other. It’s the one that saved his job before it ever really started.
Speaking with MLB.com’s Bill Ladson, Cashman looked back at the beginning of the 1998 season. Most people remember it as the year the Yankees won 125 games and carved out one of the most dominant runs in baseball history. But before that, the Yankees opened 0-3, swept by the Angels.
Just three games into his career as a general manager, the panic button was already within reach.
“George Steinbrenner was getting ready to fire me,” Cashman said.
Cashman was pulled off the road by The Boss. He knew what that meant.
On April 4, 1998, the Yankees won their first game of the season, a 9–7 extra-inning win in Oakland. It wasn’t clean, but it counted. And for Cashman, it meant everything.
After the win, manager Joe Torre FedEx’d Cashman the lineup card. It came signed by the entire coaching staff with a message written across it and addressed to Crash, his nickname at the time.
“Crash, the first of many.”
They sure were right.
The Yankees won 114 regular-season games that year and cruised through the playoffs to a World Series title. But Cashman says that first win, a grind in ten innings, on the West Coast, with his job hanging in the balance, is the one that sticks out.
He credits the late Gene Michael with keeping Steinbrenner from pulling the trigger. “Give him time,” Michael reportedly told The Boss. “He’ll be fine.”
More than 25 years later, Cashman is still here and still winning.
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