Brian Cashman retained by Yankees, Kevin Long terminated

For those worried about the Yankees radically changing their modus operandi after consecutive seasons out of the playoffs, forget it: general manager Brian Cashman, the public face of the pinstriped politburo has been retained for another three seasons. On Friday afternoon the Yankees announced they had retained the second-longest-tenured GM in team history to a contract that will keep him in New York through 2017.

In other news, hitting coach Kevin Long was fired and first-base coach Mick Kelleher was let go.

Cashman has been the team’s general manager since early 1998. While it is probably simplistic to think of any team as having a unitary executive structure, but it has never been a secret that at times the Yankees have had a more divided leadership structure than most teams. When the Yankees decided to cut payroll to reset their luxury tax, was Cashman the author of that plan, or merely its victim? When they reversed course and spent like the Koch Brothers sponsoring an Ayn Rand Band Camp, did he support that? And who made the call to tank numerous drafts on picks such as Cito Culver? Longtime farm director Mark Newman, who retired in September? Scouting director Damon Oppenheimer, in that position since 2005? How do you assess a general manager who can only win by hiring mercenary after mercenary? We will have these questions about Cashman for as long as people try to evaluate the work GMs do.

Cashman began with the Yankees as an intern in 1986 and has never worked for any other team, so we have no way of knowing how he might run things under different conditions. Now, there is nothing wrong with spending money if you have it, no sin in buying your way out of whatever blind alley you wandered down by mistake if you have those resources. The problem is that you can’t always do it because the item you need may not be available, or may be available at incredibly disadvantageous terms. Your inability to cultivate your own resources, or trust that you can do so reliably, leads you to make decisions like signing Alex Rodriguez, Mark Teixeira, Jacoby Ellsbury, Brian McCann, and so on until they’re an untenable age.

This is all on Brian Cashman, or maybe it isn’t. Either way, he’s apparently happy to be the face of it all, like a presidential press secretary. One suspects many of us would feel the same: Take the money, take the fame, do the media stuff, occasionally have Rafael Soriano stuffed down your throat and like it. And hey, if the version of the team that Cashman has run (as opposed to that largely assembled by Gene Michael) has won but one World Series in the last 13 years, well, that’s better than a lot of teams have done. On the other hand, other teams haven’t spent nearly so much on near misses in that time either.

One day Brian Cashman will probably join his predecessors Ed Barrow and George Weiss in the Hall of Fame. No one will be sure if it was the right decision.

No doubt we’ll hear more in the near future about how Kevin Long went from being a highly-prized hitting coach whose innovative drills were praised by many players to a guy canned with a year to run on his contract. It is probably fair to say that no coach could have reanimated Alfonso Soriano or Brian Roberts, made Derek Jeter or Ichiro Suzuki five or 10 years younger, strengthened Mark Teixeira’s wrist, and so on. This was an old team and the players are what they are. The Red Sox couldn’t fix Stephen Drew either. Conversely, Chase Headley, Martin Prado, and Chris Young were far better with the Yankees (albeit in small samples) than with their previous teams. Brett Gardner more than doubled his home-run production from 2013.

Sometimes part of being a general manager is deflecting responsibility onto others.

His major fault would seem to be not having a time machine.

“Everything with the Yankees is a short-term process,” Cashman said on ESPN radio today. “Building the perfect beast over time, as you see with the Cubs or the Astros, that’s not going to happen here.” So really, nothing has changed. The Yankees will sign more old guys and hope that they click as they did in 2009. As Casey Stengel said, they say you can’t do it, but sometimes it doesn’t always work.

It’s worked for the Yankees in the past, at least to the extent that they’ve had consistently good regular-season records and annual playoff appearances. It has also resulted in two World Series appearances since 2003 and one win. Again, that beats the Cubs and the Dodgers all hollow. But now so many teams have big television money that it might not work for them in the same way going forward. “It has slowed down the quick fix for us,” Cashman admitted of the new parity in the aforementioned interview. Admitting it, though, isn’t the same as accepting it, and at least in the near term life is going to go on for the Yankees, and for Yankees fans, in the same old way.