Yankees' Brian Cashman on winter meetings: 'Haven't accomplished anything'

ORLANDO, Fla. – Brian Cashman went the glib route in answering how he felt about what he “accomplished” at this year’s winter meetings.

“Haven’t accomplished anything,” Cashman said Wednesday morning, a few hours before departing the meetings.

The longtime Yankees GM was hardly alone in that regard.

Many years, some of the sport’s most significant moves take place during the winter meetings. Last year, for instance, Juan Soto went to the Mets and the Yankees acquired Max Fried.

This year, it was mostly an industry-wide snoozefest, the exception being the Phillies bringing back Kyle Schwarber and the Dodgers – naturally, the Dodgers – whisking away Edwin Diaz from the Mets. And there was, of course, the early afternoon deal Wednesday that saw Pete Alonso sign with the Orioles.

“This market seems to be [moving at] glacial speed,” Cashman said, speaking a couple of hours before the news of Alonso joining an already loaded AL East had broken. (The Yankees were never interested in Alonso.) “There’s not a lot of the inventory that I’m interested [in] coming off the board yet. So that means it’s tough to get. My experiences, I would assume, are the same experiences in other camps, but you keep working at it.”

What are those experiences?

“Don’t like the asks coming our way and don’t like [from] the opposing teams what I’m trying to pull from them on the trade stuff, they’re not liking currently,” Cashman said. “But we do have some conversations that possibly could lead somewhere. But, clearly, obviously, if we had something, we would have done it.”

Cashman departed these meetings with the same needs as when he arrived. The club’s top priority is re-signing outfielder Cody Bellinger but the Yankees face plenty of competition in that regard as deep-pocketed teams such as the Mets, Dodgers, Phillies and Blue Jays also are interested. The Mets, who have taken major PR hits recently with the losses of three of their most popular players – Diaz, Alonso and, before that via trade, Brandon Nimmo – potentially could be even more formidable in the Bellinger sweepstakes.

If the Yankees strike out on Bellinger and the other top outfielder on the free agent market – Kyle Tucker, who also could be a target of the Mets and some of the other clubs interested in Bellinger – there is always the trade route to address the need.

Though Cashman has said if nothing develops on that front this winter, he would be comfortable going into the spring with Jasson Dominguez competing with Spencer Jones for the starting leftfield job (one that would be Dominguez’s to lose). Still, few in the industry believe the Yankees actually would be comfortable doing that, and more than a few inside their organization certainly are not.

For his part, Cashman multiple times during these meetings referred to his team as “too left-handed” so the desire is there to bring in a righty bat. Additionally, Cashman is exploring both the reliever and starting pitching markets.

But Cashman also has stated multiple times this week he doesn’t view his roster needs this winter as significant as those of a year ago. That offseason brought, after Soto bolted to the Mets, headline acquisitions like Fried, Bellinger and Devin Williams (who has since signed with the Mets).

“I think last winter, after Soto had declared himself, there was a lot of areas that had to be attacked,” Cashman said. “Don’t misinterpret that as saying that I don’t recognize that there’s areas of weakness on this roster that we need to improve upon, but it’s just not as prevalent as last year where we really had to do a lot of different things on the run…we have good players spread throughout this roster. How do I reconfigure it to make it better, how do I import certain options to make it better is obviously what I’m trying to navigate.” 

Which leaves his manager to, like everyone else, wait.

“You never know how the winter’s going to unfold,” Aaron Boone said Wednesday morning. “There’s been, obviously, winter meetings where it like, boom, everything happens and everything breaks. I just think, just as an industry, this one’s been a little quieter. Certainly, it has for us to this point. But I think it’s important to know that this isn’t the end of the winter. We’ve got two months until spring training and whatever happens between now and then, I think we’re going to be really good…We’ll see how it unfolds. Still some runway to do some things, which I’m sure we will.”

By Erik Boland

erik.boland@newsday.comeboland11

Erik Boland started in Newsday's sports department in 2002. He covered high school and college sports, then shifted to the Jets beat. He has covered the Yankees since 2009.