Brian Cashman may be taking the heat from Yankees fans, but one of baseball’s most influential voices says the outrage is badly misplaced.
Billy Beane, the longtime A’s executive and a central figure in the Moneyball era, came out swinging in defense of the Yankees’ general manager. Beane, who spent years matching up against Cashman, didn’t just praise him - he put him in rare air.
“Cash is the greatest general manager in the history of the game,” Beane said in a telephone on Thursday.
That kind of endorsement lands differently coming from Beane, a minority owner of the A’s and senior adviser to owner John Fisher, who served as Oakland’s general manager from 1997-2015 before moving into his current role. He knows the job, he knows the pressure, and he knows what it looks like when a front office is actually getting things right.
Beane’s argument is simple: the anger aimed at Cashman ignores how baseball works now. The regular season rewards the best teams over 162 games, but October is a different animal - a short tournament where randomness can flatten even the strongest roster. In his view, that’s the real reason a franchise like the Yankees can go years without a title, not some fatal flaw in the front office.
He pointed to the sport’s structure and compared it to college basketball, where adding more teams and more rounds makes it harder for the truly dominant program to keep stacking championships. The same thing, he said, has happened in baseball as the playoff field has expanded.
Beane also pushed back on the idea that the Yankees are uniquely stuck in some kind of failure loop. Since 2009, he noted, the two teams with the most wins are the Dodgers and the Yankees.
The Dodgers have won 1,665 regular-season games. The Yankees have won 1,613.
And Cashman’s own résumé, Beane argued, should carry more weight than the social media noise. He cited Cashman’s four championships, seven 100-win seasons and 2,685 regular-season victories, saying no other GM has matched that combination. The added point, in Beane’s eyes, is durability: Cashman has done it all with one franchise longer than anyone else.
Beane wasn’t blind to the frustration in New York. He said fans have every right to be upset after 17 years without a championship. But he believes their anger should be aimed more at the postseason setup than at Cashman himself.
“The expectation is that you’re supposed to go to the playoffs every year - and guess what, the Yankees do,” Beane said.
He contrasted that with his own days in Oakland, where the margins were different and the pressure came in waves. Big-market teams like the Yankees don’t get that luxury, he said, and the club’s consistency should not be dismissed just because the final step has been so hard to clear.
Beane also brought up how quickly fortunes can swing around the league. The Rays were the American League’s best team this year after finishing 17 games out last year, and the Blue Jays went from winning the East one season to finishing last the next. In that kind of environment, he said, steady contention matters.
When the conversation turned to whether the Yankees need some hidden formula to finally break through in October, Beane said the sport has gotten too smart for easy answers. Front offices across the game are sharper than ever, he said, which makes finding a secret edge much harder.
He did, however, point to a familiar baseball truth: the teams that keep doing the basic things well often end up on top. He referenced the Rays and Brewers as examples of clubs that leaned into old-school execution and still found success.
Beane also noted that the Yankees’ postseason loss came against a team that had already beaten them in the regular season. The Rays were better over 162 games, he said. And he added that Aaron Judge, “arguably the game’s best player for almost the last 10 years,” was not in the postseason, which obviously mattered.
That led to another familiar criticism of the Yankees - that they lean too heavily on home runs and don’t play clean enough baseball. Beane didn’t buy that complaint either.
First, he said, the Yankees are winning a lot of games, which means something is working. Then he pointed to the Brewers, who out-homered the Dodgers 7-1 in the League Championship Series and out-homered the Rays 3-1 in the World Series. In his view, the math is pretty straightforward: if you out-homer your opponent, you usually win.
“If you out-homer your opponent, you have a 70% chance of winning,” he said. “So why does everyone get upset about launch angles? If that’s what wins games, I’ll take all I can get.”
Beane closed with one more shot of admiration for Cashman, describing him as a sharp operator who tracks everything and forgets nothing.
“It’s true. Brian’s mind is like a steel trap.
The little bastard keeps notes on every conversation he’s ever had - including with his friends. He’ll say, ‘You told me this in 2007’ - and of course he’s always right.”
For Beane, the conclusion is clear. Cashman is not the problem. He’s one of the best to ever do it.
“Cash is one of the best that’s ever done this job. Period.
In any sport. And the record says so.”
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