A nice write-up about the Yankees GM

Men’s Journal did a really nice story on Yankee’s General Manager Brian Cashman. Here’s an excerpt:

“There are some jobs in this world that are really, really hard to screw up. If the title on your business card reads something like “Mrs. Aristotle Onassis” or “Mrs. Prince Rainier of Monaco” or “Mrs. Bald-and-Sweaty International Arms-Trading Gazillionaire Adnan Khashoggi” — if you need a team of Sherpas just to carry the credit cards issued in your name — it’s probably not unreasonable to assume that you know a thing or two about shopping.

Of course society is going to give you a pass if you don’t know a whole lot about more useful stuff, like how to feed the poor, calibrate ground-to-air missiles, or dredge the Duluth shipping canal. But if you’re six or seven years into one of those marriages and you still don’t know how to buy a fur coat or a Fendi handbag, we’re all going to have to assume you’re completely brainless, a cabbage in heels.

And would you blame us, Brian Cashman? Because objectively speaking, the job of New York Yankees general manager should be the single most failure-proof position not only in sports but in all of human society. Giving a normal, red-blooded, pattern-baldness-suffering American male access to the Steinbrenner fortune and asking him to buy 25 baseball players a year in an unregulated market is no different, in any meaningful way, from handing Sarah Jessica Parker a blank check and asking her to fill a three-bedroom apartment with shoes and dresses. And we’re not even asking her to get good deals. All we ask is that the outfits match.

It’s obscene that a job like this even exists. But for someone to have this job and fuck it up is just appalling, the kind of gross disrespect for our own good fortune that makes it hard for us Americans to look the Third World in the eye. What Brian Cashman has accomplished as GM of the Yankees over the past few years, in turning a perennial World Series champ into a third-place also-ran, is like walking into a backstage party for Led Zeppelin with a two-pound bag of coke and a 28-inch penis and failing for a whole night to get laid.”

Brian Cashman: The Bad Lieutenant [Men’s Journal]