Orlando, Florida – Brian Cashman says sonny gray Admitted that he expressed his desire to play in New York at the behest of his agent so as not to hurt his free-agency value and did not voice his dislike of the Big Apple until the 2018 trade deadline.
Following their arrival for Major League Baseball’s winter meetings, long New York Yankees The general manager was asked about Gray, who was acquired boston red sox in a business from St. Louis Cardinals Last month. The veteran starter talked about his 1 1/2 seasons in New York during a Zoom news conference on Dec. 2 announcing the signing.
“New York was not a good situation for me, not a very good situation for me and my family,” he said. “I never wanted to go there before.”
Gray was traded from Oakland to the Yankees in July 2017 and went 15–16 with a 4.52 ERA with New York. He was removed from the rotation in August 2018 after smiling at booing fans while walking off the Yankee Stadium mound in the third inning of a 7–5 loss to Baltimore. He was traded to Cincinnati in January 2019.
“After the deadline came up, he asked to meet with me. He said, ‘Hey, can we talk?'” Cashman said Sunday night after arriving at the winter meetings.
Cashman recalled meeting with Gray in the clubhouse office of Chad Boehling, the Yankees’ senior director of organizational performance.
“He said, ‘I thought you were going to trade me,'” Cashman said. “I was like, publicly I’m trying to get into pitching, starting pitching and the bullpen. Why would I trade a starter when we desperately need pitching? … And he says, ‘Well I have to tell you, I never wanted to -‘ That’s when he told me he never wanted to come here. He hates New York. It’s the worst place. He just sits in his hotel room.”
“I said, ‘Well, it’s been a while now,'” Cashman recalled. “So then I told him, I said, but you said you wanted to be traded here. And he said, ‘My agent, Bo McInnis, told me to do it. He told me to lie. It wouldn’t be good for my free agency to say there are some places I don’t want to go.’
“And I said to him: There’s nothing I can do about it now. I wish you would have told me earlier. I wish we would have known before we tried to get you that you never wanted to come here,” Cashman said. “We tried to do our homework… and I said now we have to play all year and this winter I will do everything I can to transfer you and we transferred him to the Reds.”
Cashman said the Yankees had a minor league video coordinator who was Gray’s roommate at Vanderbilt and that Gray had told his former roommate: “Tell Cash, get me to the Yankees. Blah, blah, blah. Like I want to get out of Oakland. I want to win a world championship. Blah, blah, blah. So, and it wasn’t just him. He was telling a lot of different people who were telling us, that he wanted to be Is. A Yankee.”
Gray, now 36, is a three-time All-Star and is 125-102 with a 3.58 ERA in 13 seasons with the Athletics (2013-17), Yankees (2017-18), Reds (2019-21), Minnesota (2022-23) and Cardinals (2024-25). The right-hander waived the no-trade provision for the Red Sox to accept the deal.
Gray said, “What factored into my decision to come to Boston is I love going to a place now where, you know, it’s easy to hate the Yankees, right? It’s easy to go out and have that rivalry and go all out.” “I like the challenge. I appreciate the challenge. I accept the challenge. But this time just go out and be yourself. Don’t try to be anything other than yourself and if people don’t like it, it is what it is. I am who I am and I’m okay with that.”
