No position fazes Yankees' Oswaldo Cabrera . . . not even that of broadcaster
The Yankees’ Oswaldo Cabrera gets high-fives from his teammates in the dugout after hitting a three-run homer in the bottom of the third inning of a spring training game against the Rays at George M. Steinbrenner Field in Tampa, Fla., on Saturday. Credit: Newsday/J. Conrad Williams Jr.
TAMPA, Fla.
You would think Oswaldo Cabrera already had enough on his plate, being asked to play a number of positions while proving that what he did last season, in his panic-button role as an unlikely hero for the nosediving Yankees, was no fluke.
But Cabrera, who turned 24 last week, doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking about his limitations. In fact, he keeps asking for more.
For Saturday’s game, Cabrera agreed to be mic’d up for the YES Network broadcast of the matinee against the Rays, a duty that had him in a running dialogue with the broadcast booth of Ryan Ruocco and Jack Curry while the game was going on.
So as Cabrera patrolled a wind-whipped rightfield, he joked on-air about the defensive-alignment card and even went as far as to lobby manager Aaron Boone to add another position to his extended list. Cabrera was hoping to get a shot at centerfield, but in talking about it afterward, he sounded a little worried about coming on too strong during the broadcast.
“That was not to say I want to play centerfield,” he said with a smile. “Just that if I want to pick one position that I’ve never played, it would be centerfield. If I had to pick one position, why not?”
Boone was on board with it. He’s thrown everything else at Cabrera, who’s clearly earned the manager’s trust despite their relatively short time together at the major-league level (44 regular-season games). He played every position but pitcher, catcher and centerfield last season and Boone plans to try him in center soon, possibly bringing him in to replace Harrison Bader in the later innings. As for the regular season, he'd be more of a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency candidate.
“In a pinch,” Boone said. “We should get those shirts made, ‘Where’s Oswaldo?’ ”
When told those T-shirts already exist, Boone was bummed.
“Oh, man, I thought I just came up with that,” he said. “But look, he’s one of the guys that if you got in any situation, with what he’s shown us so far, you feel good about him anywhere on the field. I don’t necessarily see him being a regular centerfielder for us at any point, but I want to get him at least exposed to it. I don’t know how much I’ll do it down here, but just get used to how much we’re moving him around.”
If there’s anything Cabrera can’t handle, the Yankees haven’t seen it yet. That includes being strapped with a remote power pack and microphone for Saturday’s game. “That was quite an apparatus on his waist,” Boone said.
In typical fashion, Cabrera was totally unfazed by it.
“If you’re focused, you can be talking at the same time,” he said.
Cabrera whiffed in his first at-bat, then hammered an 80-mph changeup from the Rays’ Evan McKendry way over the rightfield wall for a three-run homer. He hit six in 154 at-bats last season, including three in a six-game stretch in mid-September, and finished the year batting .247 with a .740 OPS.
Cabrera not only was hurled into the most pressure-filled part of the regular season, with the Yankees losing 11 of 13 right before his promotion, but was pushed into the outfield with regularity — after never playing there before his arrival.
He excelled in the unfamiliar role, delivering an energy down the stretch that the Yankees had been lacking, and now has put himself into the leftfield derby during spring training (though Aaron Hicks still figures to have the inside track for the Opening Day gig).
The Yankees greatly value Cabrera’s versatility, and his ease on the big stage, basically from Day 1, is not to be underestimated. That’s something that can’t be taught, though if you ask Cabrera about his knack for performing under the bright lights, he doesn’t view it as some special quality.
“I’m not a superstar,” he said. “But I’m always working, trying to get some consistency, trying to get my confidence up, like, OK, I’m here, I can do this. I don’t try to put too many things in my mind.”
Cabrera also stands out as a good example to the other prospects looking for their turn as someone who got his shot and made the most of the opportunity. He says they ask him what it was like in the Bronx, and Cabrera tells them it’s still the same game and that all the Yankees wanted from him was to be the player he was for Scranton.
“They told me, we don’t need heroes here,” Cabrera recalled. “We need the same guy that was in Triple-A. We don’t need anything else. And that’s the same message I say to the younger guys; we don’t need to do too much. We just need to do the things that we know.”
In Cabrera, the Yankees got a hero of sorts anyway, and now he’s grown into a player even he didn’t envision — a surprisingly good corner outfielder. They should be so lucky with the next prospects in the pipeline.
“That’s a credit to him and his makeup,” Boone said. “He’s a special guy. Hopefully he’s one in a long line of guys that we’ll continue to see come up and impact us.”
The thing about Cabrera: You just never know where on the field he’ll be doing it from.
David Lennon is an award-winning columnist, a voter for baseball's Hall of Fame and has covered six no-hitters, including two perfect games.
