ORLANDO, Fla. — Sonny Gray spent the past week torching the Yankees. He said he never wanted to play in New York. He claimed the organization ruined his career. He declared it was now “easy to hate” the Bronx Bombers.
Brian Cashman had heard enough. On Sunday night at the Winter Meetings, the Yankees general manager fired back with a bombshell. Gray did not just dislike New York. He lied his way into pinstripes.
According to Cashman, Sonny Gray admitted in 2018 that his agent instructed him to fake enthusiasm about joining the Yankees. The deception was designed to protect his free agency value.
The private meeting that revealed everything
After the 2018 trade deadline passed, Gray asked Cashman for a private conversation. They met in the Yankee Stadium office of Chad Bohling, the team’s senior director of organizational performance.
Gray expected to be traded. He was surprised when the Yankees kept him.
“He said, ‘I thought you were going to trade me,'” Cashman recalled. “I was like, publicly I’m out trying to get pitching, starting pitching and bullpen. Why would I trade a starter when we need pitching badly?”
That is when Gray dropped the truth.
“That’s when he told me he never wanted to be here,” Cashman said. “He hates New York. ‘This is the worst place.’ He just sits in his hotel room.”
Gray blamed his agent for the deception
Cashman reminded Gray that he had actively campaigned for a trade to the Yankees while pitching for Oakland in 2017.
The Yankees had sources inside their organization confirming Gray’s enthusiasm. A minor league video coordinator had been Gray’s roommate at Vanderbilt. Gray told him to pass along a message.
“Tell Cash, get me over to the Yankees,” Cashman recalled Gray saying through that connection. “I want out of Oakland. I want to win a world championship.”
When confronted with this contradiction, Gray pointed the finger at his agent, Bo McKinnis.
“My agent, Bo McKinnis, told me to do that,” Gray said, according to Cashman. “He told me to lie. It wouldn’t be good for my free agency to say there are certain places that I don’t want to go to.”
McKinnis declined comment when reached by The Athletic on Sunday.
Cashman expressed frustration over wasted resources
The Yankees traded Dustin Fowler, James Kaprielian and Jorge Mateo to Oakland for Gray in July 2017. The organization believed it was acquiring a pitcher who desperately wanted to be in New York.
“I wish you’d told me well beforehand,” Cashman said he told Gray during their 2018 meeting. “I wish we knew this before we even tried to acquire you that you never wanted to come here. We tried to do our homework.”
The confession came too late to undo the damage.
“Nothing I can do about it now,” Cashman recalled telling Gray. “So now we’ll just have to play the year out and this winter I’ll do whatever I can to move you and we moved him to the Reds.”
Gray’s miserable Yankees tenure
Gray went 15-16 with a 4.52 ERA across 41 games for the Yankees. He never looked comfortable. The results were poor.
In August 2018, he was dropped from the rotation after smirking when fans booed him following a rough outing against Baltimore. He walked off the Yankee Stadium mound in the third inning of a 7-5 loss.
At his introductory press conference in 2017, Gray had offered a very different message. “I couldn’t be happier with how it all played out,” he said at the time. “And I couldn’t be happier to be here.”
Cashman now knows that statement was part of the charade.
Gray revives the feud from Boston
The Cardinals traded Gray to the Red Sox last month. Boston acquired the three-time All-Star along with $20 million to help cover his $41 million guaranteed contract.
Gray wasted no time reigniting his Yankees hatred during his introductory press conference on Dec. 2.
“New York was, it just wasn’t a good situation for me, wasn’t a great setup for me and my family,” he said. “I never wanted to go there in the first place.”
He added fuel to the rivalry fire moments later.
“What did factor into my decision to come to Boston is it feels good to me to go to a place now where, you know what, it’s easy to hate the Yankees,” Gray said. “It’s easy to go out and have that rivalry and go in it with full force, full steam ahead.”
Now 36 years old, Gray is 125-102 with a 3.58 ERA over 13 major league seasons. He has become a three-time All-Star since leaving the Yankees. He finished second in the 2023 AL Cy Young voting while pitching for Minnesota.
The talent was never in question. The honesty was.
Cashman made sure the baseball world heard that part of the story. Seven years after Gray’s deception, the Yankees finally had their say.
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