TAMPA – If he thought about it the way you would think about it, the way I would think about it, then Melky Cabrera probably couldn’t do the job he’s going to be asked to do this season. Cabrera understands the value of the real estate he roams. He appreciates it. He reveres it. But he isn’t overwhelmed by it. He can’t afford to be.
“I know where I am when I am out there,” Cabrera said. “It is an honor to play there. But I have a job to do, and I know my team relies on me to do it.”
There have been so many poems and paeans penned about center field at Yankee Stadium that you half expect it to smell like burning incense out there. There have been so many legends hatched on that stretch of lawn that to stop and ponder the lineage is to stop dead in your tracks, paralyzed by the enormity of it all.
Yet there are only 81 regular-season games left to be played out there. No matter how close they come to replicating the Stadium’s feel and its aura in the Yankees’ new playpen across the street, the fact is there will be a separate set of land coordinates defining the borders of center field at the new place. It will be close to where Whitey Witt played, back in the Stadium’s first year of 1923, close to where DiMaggio played, close to where Mantle played, and Murcer, and Mick the Quick, and Bernie Williams.
It just won’t be where they played.
Eighty-one games left for the most important patch of land in baseball history, if not all of American sport. And Melky Cabrera will be the one who gets to patrol that precinct, walk that beat, most of the time.
“I’m sure the older he gets, the more he’ll appreciate the other people who have roamed the position,” Yankees manager Joe Girardi said. “I think he’s like the rest of us, the older we get the more we appreciate things like that.”
Besides, Girardi said, the most important name of all, to a 23-year-old kid like Cabrera, belongs to Williams, who was also shy, also a switch-hitter, also something of a skeptical heir to the throne when he first drew the assignment almost 18 years ago.
“I would think,” Girardi said, “that he knows all about Bernie.”
“I do,” Cabrera said. “Bernie is a guy who played the position well, who played the game for the Yankees the way I want to. I know he always said what an honor it was to play center field for the Yankees, and now I know exactly what he meant.”
A lot has had to happen, some of it fortunate and some of it downright serendipitous, for Cabrera to be the Yankees center fielder who will get to bid the last and longest farewell.
Williams first had to succumb at last to the inevitable rigors of age. Kenny Lofton had to all but light himself on fire. Carlos Beltran tried to offer himself at a discount; the Yankees said no, thank you. Johnny Damon was signed to a four-year deal, managed to serve only one full season in center. Torii Hunter, Aaron Rowand and Andruw Jones were all available this offseason for the right price; in past years, the Yankees most assuredly would have met one of those numbers.
But these are the new Yankees, the youth-ignited Yankees, the fiscally restrained Yankees, and in that business plan Cabrera is a cozy fit guarding left-center to right-center. And on a team that shouldn’t suffer for offense, the Yankees will gladly sign up for a similar year to the one Cabrera turned in last year: .273 average, eight homers, 73 RBIs, 13 steals.
More pertinently, he played a terrific center field, committed only four errors and had 16 outfield assists – 14 of them from center.
“Whatever I can do to be a help, I try to do,” he said. “Center field is important on any team, but especially on this team.”
He meant the position, of course, but only at Yankee Stadium could that also mean center field itself. All the names. All the years. And now 81 more games before the Yankees flee across the street, leaving center field to the ghosts, starting with a man named Whitey and ending with a kid named Melky.