How Brian Cashman Responded To New Red Sox Sonny Gray’s Yankees Hate
Gray said he 'never wanted' to play for New York
Sonny Gray quickly ignited one of MLB’s fiercest rivalries upon joining the Boston Red Sox.
Right after getting traded from the St. Louis Cardinals, Gray shared no qualms about competing against the New York Yankees. The starting pitcher called it “easy” to go to a place where everyone hates his former team and claimed that he “never wanted to go there in the first place.”
Yankees general manager Brian Cashman corroborated that assertion when recalling a conversation between him and Gray a year after the Bronx Bombers acquired him in 2017. Gray expected to get moved before the 2018 trade deadline.
“He said, ‘Hey, can we talk?'” Cashman said Sunday at MLB’s Winter Meetings, per MLB.com’s Bryan Hoch. “We closed the door and he said, ‘I thought you were going to trade me.’ Publicly, I was trying to get pitching and bullpen (help). Why would I trade a starter when we needed pitching badly?
“That’s when he told me he never wanted to be here — he hates New York, this is the worst place (and) he just sits in his hotel room. He told me all this stuff and I said: ‘Well, it’s a little late now.'”
However, Cashman claimed Gray previously got the word out that he wanted to join the Yankees.
“When he was with the A’s, he was telling our minor league video coordinator, ‘You’ve got to get me over to the Yankees. Tell Cash, get me over to the Yankees. I want out of Oakland. I want to win a world championship.’ He was communicating that to a number of different people, and it was getting to us, that he wants to be a Yankee,” Cashman said.
Cashman pressed Gray on that perceived desire to play for New York when the right-hander expressed his discontent in the 2018 meeting. According to Cashman, Gray said his agent “told me to lie” to avoid hurting his free-agent value.
“Nothing I can do about it now,” Cashman said he told Gray. “I wish you’d told me beforehand. I wish we knew this before we ever tried to acquire you.”
Gray posted a 4.51 ERA in 195 2/3 innings with the Yankees, who traded him to the Cincinnati Reds before the 2019 season. The three-time All-Star can get revenge on his former team as a member of Boston’s rotation next year.
