Brian Cashman’s latest sad shot at the Astros has been nearly a decade in the making

The New York Yankees are on a roll after outlasting the Cleveland Guardians in a wild five-game ALCS to return to the World Series for the first time since 2009. (Hey, while 15 years between pennants might not qualify as a “drought”), for most fans it’s all relative.)

GM Brian Cashman in particular should be feeling like himself right now. The pressure couldn’t have been turned on more after missing the postseason entirely in 2023, and he responded to a must-win season by pulling off one of the biggest trades in franchise history and making several moves in the ballpark moves that brought his team in line. four wins from a title. It was one of his best team-building jobs yet, and now a showdown with the powerhouse Los Angeles Dodgers awaits on the sport’s biggest stage.

You’d think that ahead of the biggest series of his professional life, Cashman would be involved in every way possible to give the Yankees an edge. Instead, he’s busy settling years of scores.

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Cashman appeared on High Heat with Chris “Mad Dog” Russo on Tuesday to talk about the Yankees’ postseason run so far and how he feels about the matchup with LA. But in response to a very innocent question about what it felt like to finally score, when he returned to the World Series after fifteen years—by far the longest drought of Cashman’s tenure—he went in a completely different direction: that fifteen-year drought, so Cashman argued, “does not accurately reflect history” because it is not taken into account. the fact that New York was robbed of a pennant by the Houston Astros in 2017. (Cashman’s response begins around the 1:15 mark in the video below.)

“I hate that 15-year thing because it completely forgets and discounts the fact that another organization cheated us when we were finally at the very end,” Cashman said. “If you knew what was going on, I don’t think they would have been advancing… I think we would have been advancing.”

Well then! That’s one way to start a firestorm days before your team plays the biggest game of the season. I certainly don’t plan on rooting for the 2017 Astros: there is overwhelming evidence to suggest the team cheated in a way that was at least a step above the rest of the league, and the plan to sign could very well have been the difference between the team winning it all and an early exit in the postseason. You can’t blame Cashman for harboring that grudge, especially when it came at the expense of a team that was one win away from a pennant — and failed to get that win thanks to an inability to win in Houston, where sign stealing would have been in effect.

Still, is this the best look for Cashman and the Yankees right now? New York is finally over the hump, as the Astros were bounced by the Detroit Tigers in the Wild Card round; Shouldn’t this be the time to move on and put the whole thing behind you? And even from a purely practical standpoint, how can this help your team prepare for what should be a tough series against a very good Dodgers team? Do you want Aaron Judge to have to answer another series of questions about a series that took place almost a decade ago?

This feels like something Cashman should have let fly in the group chat instead of in front of a microphone. It’s fine that he wants to rub Houston’s face in his and his team’s success, but they don’t call it the high road for nothing.