Joel Sherman

Joel Sherman

MLB

Going ‘Steinbrenner big’ hasn’t always worked out for Yankees

This is how it is on the day of a huge Yankees press conference. It is a grand wedding. Both sides talking lovingly about each other — about the magnificent present, a more glorious future.

The Yankees will be the Yankees, of course, unable to restrain the hubris, doting on their own magnitude — local and global. Strike up the brand.

On this day — momentous day in the pinstripe parlance — the Yankees welcomed Masahiro Tanaka. In this version of the Stadium. In a large space called the Legends Club. With hundreds of media members there to chronicle it all, click hundreds of pictures, give it that feeling of red carpet and inauguration rolled into one.

Ten years ago this week, it was across the street. At the previous Stadium. In what was called the Stadium Club. Again there were a few hundred media. And, yes, all the same grand themes, those wondrous visions of greatness and championships.

That coronation was for Alex Rodriguez, and you shouldn’t let time and the revelations of time cloud your memory. The Yanks essentially held a group high-five. They not only had snared the best player in the game at 28, but had pulled him away from the clutches of the Red Sox. The theme was that they had Ruth-ed Boston yet again, assuring another eight decades of misery in New England, more parades in New York.

George Steinbrenner hailed this “a big, big one,” calling it another Reggie moment, praising Rodriguez as “an outstanding young fellow.” The general manager then and now, Brian Cashman, used the word “ecstatic” to describe his feelings about consummating this “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” Joe Torre — yep Joe Torre — lauded not only A-Rod’s ability, but “class.”

And then, on this, another mid-February day a decade later, A-Rod’s was the name not to be spoken. At the first Yankees function since Rodriguez withdrew his lawsuits against MLB and commissioner Bud Selig, and against the players’ union, team officials seemed as anxious to comment on that legal maneuver as they would, say, their history of sexually transmitted diseases.

Hal Steinbrenner, who sat on the dais for both of these auspicious events, said, “I’m not getting into that because we are not here today to talk about that.”

Cashman delivered a no comment. Manager Joe Girardi said something, but nothing at the same time.

And if there is a lesson to be gleaned from any of this, it is that as much as the Yanks believe they know about Tanaka, they truly go into the marriage not knowing nearly enough, almost certainly way less than they knew about A-Rod.

Think about it. Alex Rodriguez was one of the most famous athletes in the world when the Yanks obtained him. He had been probed and prodded and scouted since his teenage years, emerging as the best schoolboy player perhaps ever, the No. 1 pick in the 1993 draft. He played quite publicly in this country, against major league competition, with teammates who would be sprinkled throughout the game.

And sure there was a whisper here and there, maybe more from Buck Showalter, perhaps flares from his ill-conceived comments about Derek Jeter in Esquire. But at their big fete, the giddy Yanks never for a second had the full scope of the man. His need and greed, insecurity and insincerity, selfishness and self-doubt. Only within the marriage — all the stuff after the press conference — did they see the full landscape.

So, yes, the Yanks have scouted Tanaka for several years, including every one of his home starts in 2013. Their analytics department broke him down mathematically and saw no shot at Kei Igawa II. Every overturned stone screamed the righty is uber-competitive, drawing favorable comparisons to Hideki Matsui and Orlando Hernandez for poise and self-assurance even in strange environs.

And he is 25. Boy did the Yanks love that. A chance to get the full prime of a player they project — whatever Cashman’s No. 3 public proclamations — as a top-of-the-rotation cornerstone.

So they acknowledge, yet mostly dismiss the other stuff. The absurd buildup of so many innings already in Japan. That he never has worked every fifth day. That he never has worked regularly with the bigger MLB baseball. That he never has faced lineups like he will face now. That you never know how $155 million truly will impact anyone or the fame or the pressure or the failure that is inevitable on such a stage.

“This is big,” Cashman said. “This would make The Boss proud. This is Yankees big, this is Steinbrenner big.”

The old man still was around, still vibrant enough in 2004 to sketch the A-Rod acquisition in the same grandiose style. The Yanks and George Steinbrenner just knew they had obtained a sure thing, a kill shot to the Red Sox, happiness in a uniform.

You never know.