TAMPA — “Baseball is baseball,” Don Mattingly said last week, on the other coast of this state, as he prepared his Giancarlo Stanton-less Marlins for a rebuild. The reigning National League Most Valuable Player will adjust to the Yankees’ brand of baseball in the bruising American League East, the Marlins’ manager opined.
Then I asked Mattingly, the iconic former Yankee, how he felt Stanton would do with the New York media.
“That’s probably the biggest difference,” Stanton’s former skipper responded. “When you play in the past environment, here, it has not been a culture of winning. It has not been stacked stadiums. A four-game losing streak here is a lot different than it is in New York. That’s probably his biggest adjustment.”
The outfielder/designated hitter must adapt from life in South Florida’s Siberia, where media and fan interest was minimal, to the Bronx’s red-hot media intensity. While his mixed track record from the Marlins suggests this won’t come naturally to Stanton, he also has shown enough promise already — and the Yankees have enough experience on this terrain — to provide optimism.
“It’s fine,” Stanton told The Post on Tuesday, following a Yankees workout at George M. Steinbrenner Field. “I’m OK with it as long as it’s structured. As long as I can come by my locker and if I forget something, that doesn’t mean the moment someone sees me here, I get attacked. As long as it’s, ‘Set aside this amount of time, this guy needs you, that guy needs you,’ then fine. That’s how I like it.”
Jason Zillo, the Yankees’ vice president of communications and media relations, facilitated this interview, and he has been and will be Stanton’s point man. The two have been in regular contact since Stanton became a Yankee in December.
The Yankees, at the urging of general manager Brian Cashman, hold media-training sessions (about 30 minutes per session) on the very first two days of full-squad workouts. Every Yankees player sees the infamous 2005 footage of new Yankee Randy Johnson going after a cameraman on a Manhattan street. That’s Exhibit A for what not to do.
“There aren’t any tricks or magic fairy dust that I can give you that is going to lead to a solid relationship with the media that are covering you,” Zillo said. “Be honest. Be accountable. … When the media are at your locker, stand up and look them in the eye. … If you see someone at your locker every day for six months, it would be good to know their name.”
“I think everybody just gets scared on the outside looking in,” said CC Sabathia, who played in small-market cities Cleveland and Milwaukee before joining the Yankees in 2009. “It’s intimidating. But once you get here and see that there’s young guys doing it, old guys doing it, it’s still baseball. It’s the same thing. I think he’ll be fine.”
Stanton performed well at his introductory news conference, held at the Winter Meetings in Orlando, as he didn’t hide his distaste for the Marlins’ old ownership or their new CEO Derek Jeter. At the Baseball Writers Association of America’s New York chapter dinner last month, he offered a touching shout-out to his fallen Marlins teammate Jose Fernandez and interacted smoothly with his new teammate Aaron Judge. He has shined.
Which represents a step up from his most recent national exposure. At last year’s All-Star Game at Marlins Park, Stanton bristled at questions about him and Judge, at one point saying, “Hopefully he has to answer as many questions about me as I do about him.” After getting eliminated by his new teammate Gary Sanchez in the first round, he didn’t hold a news conference to congratulate the champion Judge.
“I was pretty beat up,” Stanton said, as the Marlins had played in San Francisco the weekend before the All-Star break and Stanton’s attendance as an “ambassador” was required at many promotional events. He admitted: “It was tough trying to enjoy an All-Star Game in my city. I was like, ‘Man, I’d rather just enjoy this than be the parade guy.’ That was that.”
As for his dislike of the Judge questions, Stanton told USA Today last week that he felt the media was trying to create a rift between him and Judge. I told him on Tuesday I didn’t believe that to be the case at all. That it was a simple, fun story about two really big guys who could smash a baseball.
“I think they wanted that side-to-side thing where there’s National League-American League. The new guy and the veteran,” he said, accurately. “But I feel like they did a bit try to do that.”
OK. I didn’t see that. Regardless, the questions surely will get tougher down the road.
The Yankees have a foundation in place for this. They have leaders such as Sabathia and Brett Gardner who learned from Jeter, Andy Pettitte and Mariano Rivera, and a front office that supports that leadership. It’s on Stanton to watch and learn.
“[My] best learner is my eyes right now,” Stanton said. “See how [veteran teammates] approach it. See things that are normal to them that aren’t normal to me. That’s the quickest way to make it normal for me.”
The new normal can be lucrative for Stanton, who aspires to expand his brand with endorsements. Or it can be destructive, as it was with the Big Unit. The Yankees — and Stanton, too, it appears — will work diligently to steer this adjustment the right way.