Looking at Cashman's fuck ups with 20/20 hindsight

Look, I'm not a Cashman truther. He's made a lot of really dumb mistakes that have put us in a bad position as a franchise, and had some abysmal contracts. But recently I've seen this narrative in this sub that like 20% of our payroll are Cashman fuckups, mostly in the form of money we owe Stroman, DJ, Rizzo, Hicks, and Rodon. And I think a lot of y'all have some crazy revisionist history.

A truly awful contract that Cashman deserves all the blame for is Josh Donaldson. We traded Urshela, and paid an old Donaldson a ton of money to do jack shit for 2 years. Even at the time people panned the move and deservedly so.

I'll go into each of the aforementioned players to discuss why it's not fair to call them COMPLETE fuck ups.

  1. Marcus Stroman - The Yankees signed Stroman following the 2023 season following nearly signing Blake Snell, but balking at his $225m asking price, which this entire sub laughed at. Stroman is no Snell, but he was widely seen as filling a very necessary hole of being a #3 or #4 starter as a guy who ate innings with some upside. From 2021-2023, Stroman averaged 2.6 bWAR and a 3.45 ERA pitching 151 innings with a 3.60 FIP. He got only 2 years at $37m or $18.5m a year on a very team friendly deal. Unfortunately, Stroman became complete and total ass in 2024, losing 2mph on his fastball and having the highest walk rate of his career. He declined much faster than anyone thought possible, and now we're stuck with him.
  2. DJ LeMahieu - This one drives me absolutely nuts. From 2019-2020, DJ LeMahieu put up 8.7 WAR including a 2020 pandemic shortened year, and batted .336/.386/.536. He finished 4th and then 3rd in MVP voting, while playing nearly every infield position at an elite level. He really wanted to stay with the Yankees so he took an extremely team friendly deal at only $90m total and $15m per year. If 6 years for a 32 year old sounds like a lot, it is, but it was a low AAV, longer term contract to help the Yankees sign more players so as to be luxury tax friendly. He pretty much immediately declined after signing the contract, partially due to age and injuries, but Yankees fans wanted Cashman's head if he wasn't re-signed, and at the time, $15m/year for what was thought to be a MVP caliber player seemed like an amazing bargain.
  3. Anthony Rizzo - Another one that I think is really unfair to pin on Cashman. Our offense was anemic before the 2021 trade deadline, so we went and acquired Rizzo along with Gallo (who I won't even bother getting into on this post). Rizzo was alright, posting 0.5 bWAR and a 110 OPS+ in 49 games. Rizzo, however, was phenomenal for the Yankees in 2022, putting up a 130 OPS+ in 130 games. That netted him a 2 year, $34m contract which fans largely looked at as a bargain, and the Yankees had nobody to replace him at 1B. We all know how that story went: Rizzo put up an .845 OPS in April and .917 in May before colliding with Tatis and getting concussed, and he was never the same after that. He was the worst hitter in baseball for the rest of 2023, and clearly was shot in 2024 too. This one is a really tough break, but given his April/May performance in 2023, it's really hard to pin this on Cashman as it seemed like a phenomenal deal for both sides until that happened.
  4. Aaron Hicks - this is one I believe that Cashman probably deserves the more of the amount of blame for of the players I've listed so far, but I think it's easy to forget the reasoning at the time. Hicks broke out in 2017, putting up nearly 4 bWAR in just 88 games, with a 122 OPS+ playing elite center field defense. Those kinds of players are the most valuable in the game. To then show it wasn't a fluke, he went out and had an OPS+ of 127 in 137 games in 2018, putting up 4.4 bWAR in 137 games. Hicks took a bit of a step back with injuries in 2019, but was overall still good, having a 103 OPS+ in 59 games and 1.3 bWAR, which tracks him for a roughly 3 WAR season assuming he maintained that performance. It was at that point the Yankees gave him the infamous extension - once again, they elongated the contract duration for luxury tax purposes and bet on him, giving him 7 years and $70m, locking him up for ages 30-36. The bet here was somewhat understandable - only $10m a year for a guy who has 4-5 WAR upside but seems to have a floor of roughly 3. In 2020 he went out and showed why he earned that contract, putting up a 122 OPS+ in 59 games and 1.3 bWAR, playing the full season and most importantly staying healthy. It was at that point he completely fell apart, inexplicably turning into one of the worst hitters in baseball seemingly overnight. Was it injuries? Was it him loving golf? Who the fuck knows. At the time, there were definitely a lot of concerns of giving an injury-plagued player 7 years. But you also have to see what Cashman was trying to do - lock up a plus center fielder who has shown all-star capabilities to a cheap, long term contract to be the CF of the future, which he seemed poised to be from 2018 onward. It didn't work out that way. Maybe we shouldn't have given 7 years and in hindsight that seems like a mistake, but I don't think it was completely insane at the time to lock in for $10m/year.
  5. Carlos Rodon - This is a complex one. Rodon was a middling and often injured pitcher with the Chicago White Sox for 6 years (from 2015-2020), putting up a 4.14 ERA/4.26 FIP over 669 innings. His stuff was elite but for injuries or other matters he never was able to put it together, until 2021-2022 where he became one of the best pitchers in baseball, putting up 10.3 bWAR in 2 seasons with a 2.67 ERA, 2.42 FIP and an insane 12.2 K/9. Hitting the market, he was seen as a risky option: which Rodon will you get? Will he stay healthy? I think the consensus at the time was mostly that if Rodon were to stay healthy, he would be elite - there was no question as to his talent and abilities, but his health. The Yanks desperately needed a co-ace to Cole and went all in on Rodon, giving him a 6 year, $162m contract at $27m per year. Predictably, he got hurt in spring training his first year, and when he finally came back midway through the year, he was atrocious. Last year Rodon somewhat bounced back, with a 3.96 ERA over a healthy season in 175 innings and 1.9 bWAR but a 4.39 FIP. Either way, it's extremely evident that although he redeemed himself by being worth *something*, he is not the pitcher he was from 2021-2022, or the pitcher the Yankees paid for. Probably the most concerning thing here is that he was very pedestrian despite being healthy. Once again, the bet was never on his stuff or ability - it was always on his health, but quickly, Rodon has shown that even when healthy he's simply not who he was anymore, and nobody really knows why. As far as fuckups go, this was probably Cashman's biggest and most easily avoided, given there were clear signs he was an inconsistent, injured pitcher. But the thing I'll give Cashman slack for here is the fact that he bet on health, and he got it last year, but I don't think anyone expected in 2022 that if Rodon threw 175 innings, he would put up a 4.39 FIP by 2024.

Conclusion

I think Cashman gets a lot of shit - some deserved, some not, and I also think his victories get ignored fairly often. But in terms of fuckups and what we're on the hook for right now, I firmly believe that some of these contracts almost any GM in the game would have been fucked by if they had the money. I know we all like to sit and laugh at the Angels and the Rendon contract, but at the time it was seen as a really good deal for a very solid player before he completely imploded with injuries. Sometimes shit just happens you can't expect - that's baseball, Suzyn. In terms of the aforementioned players and blaming contracts on Cashman's ineptitude, I think the following list is pretty representative, starting with Cashman's biggest fuck ups, ending with those I largely think he gets too much shit for:

  1. Carlos Rodon
  2. Aaron Hicks
  3. Marcus Stroman
  4. DJ LeMahieu
  5. Anthony Rizzo

Thanks for coming to my TED talk and entertaining my autism.