Brian Cashman was 19 years old when he took his first job with the Yankees, the organization he rejoined for three years and roughly US$5.5 million on Thursday. That was in 1986, and three years later he started a full-time career that will now take him past his 40th birthday.
In all those years, Cashman said Thursday, he could not remember the Yankees' ever holding the first organizational meeting of the winter in New York. It was always in Tampa, Florida, home to the principal owner George Steinbrenner and his many advisers. Not anymore.
It may be a symbolic gesture, but what it symbolizes means everything to Cashman. Though it is not spelled out in his contract, Cashman said that he received an understanding that he, and only he, would sit atop the chain of command in the Yankees' fractured baseball operations department.
"I'm the general manager, and everybody within the baseball operations department reports to me," he said. "That's not how it has operated recently."
Cashman said that Steinbrenner and the rest of the Yankees' upper management -- including the general partner Steve Swindal, the president Randy Levine and the chief operating officer Lonn Trost -- supported him.
The in-fighting below him made last season miserable, Cashman said.
"There's been some splintering off that's caused a lot of animosity and taken our focus away from our opponents and created opponents among ourselves," he said. "That, obviously, was not a good thing."
Cashman was referring to Steinbrenner's lieutenants in Tampa, whose suggestions often led to roster moves that undermined Cashman's authority. Privately, Cashman longed for the chance to have as much autonomy as his peers, which is why he nearly left the only organization he has known.
"It took as long as it did for a reason," said Cashman, whose current contract would have expired on Monday. "My preference was to stay, but I was prepared to go if I had to."
Cashman had other reasons to stay; his family is happy living in Connecticut, close to his wife's relatives. The Yankees pay him very well, but other teams, he said, could have offered comparable money.
Cashman could have sought another job and probably gotten one. But he said the Yankees now seemed committed to working cohesively.
That was the message he heard in negotiations with Swindal, who is Steinbrenner's son-in-law and has been named as his successor.
"I think there should be more phone calls and more face-to-face meetings, and the guys from Tampa can come to New York and vice versa," Swindal said in a telephone interview.
"Certainly there should be better communication; there's no excuse with modern communications as we have it today. That's where we've fallen short, and I blame all of us for that."
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