TAMPA — Word would come that an opponent was promoting a player to face the Yankees. And from 2014-17, it was the responsibility of Steve Swindal Jr. and Matt Ferry to input the video and scouting information.
The Yankees were still using an outside third-party platform. So this was done manually. It would take at least a half hour, perhaps up to an hour. And when either Swindal or Ferry was away from the park on personal time, they had to contact each other to determine who could more easily make an excuse to family and/or friends for the painstakingly detailed work of clipping video and redoing reports so, say, Mark Teixeira or a coach could learn in time for first pitch about a potential opponent.
Swindal calls it possibly “the least favorite thing” he has had to do with the Yankees.
Because often the grunt work did fall to him — the grandson of George Steinbrenner, the nephew of Hal Steinbrenner, and very possibly the man who will take the baton from both to one day run the most recognized sports organization in the world.
“I know the connotation of nepotism,” Swindal said Wednesday in a suite overlooking the field named for his grandfather. “I know what comes with that. I want to at least show to the people here that that’s not who I am. And I hope I’ve accomplished that.”
He should feel secure there. Aaron Boone echoes what you hear often about the man who might be pinstriped king: “I respect his work ethic.”
Ferry said, “The biggest compliment I can give Stephen is you’d never know who he is. He never introduces himself as a member of the Steinbrenner family.”
Swindal is 35 now. By title, he is the Yankees’ assistant director of player development. But he clearly has grown in stature within the organization beyond that title. He is a consigliere to Hal and generally viewed inside and outside the organization as the most logical heir to replace Hal, 54, at some point.
Why? Because he is the George Steinbrenner grandchild who has most immersed himself in the organization. He has spent a lifetime loving the team (his first baseball memory is a miserable one for him, Seattle’s Ken Griffey Jr. sliding into home in the 1995 Division Series to eliminate the Yankees) and since his teenage years has been working his way through every department in the organization to learn the family business — from photocopying newspaper clips of articles in media relations to now having a vote on trades and free agency.
“I think I understood at an early age that I was obviously born into a family where I was going to have opportunities that other people might not have,” Swindal said. “To hide from that, would be kind of silly. I feel like if you have the opportunity, you should seize it and make the best of what you can. To me that was learning as much as I possibly can from the bottom levels and, trying to work up and understanding how it operates. It was for me to understand how this entire thing operates.”
What is new for Swindal is not the Yankees. It is talking publicly about the franchise — and himself. He has not previously sat for an extended interview. But he accepted a request this time because, in part, he did not like portrayals last year. The team struggled to its worst season in three decades and Swindal and a few key lieutenants were depicted in some areas within the game and in a few media reports as forming a cabal off-stage influencer pushing the organization hard toward analytics.
Swindal describes that perception as wrong — “I will hear more often that I am not analytic enough.” Brian Cashman used harsher terms to dispute the criticism. Both basically agreed, though, that it is hard to reverse hardened public views unless you win the World Series.
What cannot be disputed, though, is that Swindal’s role and influence is growing — and he got there one rung at a time.
Swindal, the second child of George’s daughter Jennifer acknowledges how blunt and gruff his grandfather could be, but, “His grandkids could do no wrong.” He did see The Boss in how George would zealously zing umps at Little League games to defend his grandchild, to the point that the family had to say games had been rescheduled to times when George could not attend.
Swindal and George bonded over pro wrestling, going regularly to the matches. He speaks glowingly of so much time with his grandfather that it just became obvious, “This [working for the Yankees] is all I ever wanted to do.”
He attended the same prep school, Culver Military Academy in Indiana, as his grandfather. He was a defense-first infielder who recognized no baseball future on the field and so was a sports administration major at North Carolina. Before his freshman year in college, he worked in the summer of 2007 in New York for the Yankees — one week in each department.
Each summer in college, he would return to the team to work in a different department, and upon graduation, he built a plan to do two years in each department. He began in stadium operations. He did payments and time sheets for electricians and helped with concerts and ballpark bar mitzvahs. He moved into baseball ops next and, well, never left.
Cashman showed him patience. Former assistant GM Billy Eppler, in particular, invested time to explain how the Yankees process worked in player procurement from amateur to trade to free agency. In a phone conversation, Eppler recalled, “It was evident from the beginning not only that he had baseball bloodlines, but baseball passion. His appetite for knowledge and eagerness to learn, he was just a sponge.”
Swindal said, “The baseball, it was just kind of an alignment and I loved it. Being in the war room for the trade deadline. It’s a big deal. You get invited and you have to earn it.”
It took him three years in baseball ops before receiving that invite.
“I understand it can be a weird situation for some people, but when I am in that room, I am not wearing an ownership hat,” Swindal said. “I am someone who worked their way here. And if you have a disagreement with me, let’s go. It is about what is best for the team.”
He said he has one vote in the room, same as anyone else, and insists he can lose the vote and will not unduly try to influence Hal to his side. “I respect the process.”
Swindal also acknowledges that he is close to Ferry, who is now the director of baseball operations, and Kevin Reese, who moved to Tampa about the same time as Swindal to run player development. The perception has grown that leads to Swindal forming a coalition with that duo within the organization. Swindal counters by saying he is more likely to vociferously debate with them than others because of the closeness and stressed wide-ranging respect and good relationships with all the key members of baseball operations.
daughter Jennifer. Charles Wenzelberg / New York Post
But he also said he learned from his grandfather, uncle, and father it is fine to have friends in the organization. Oh yeah, his dad, Steve Sr.
In 2005, George Steinbrenner announced that Jennifer’s husband, then second in command as a general partner, would succeed him. In 2007, Swindal was arrested in St. Petersburg for a DUI. Not long after, Jennifer filed for divorce. Not long after that, Swindal Sr. — on a pathway to running the Yankees — was out of the family business.
“It is definitely a different life,” Steve Jr. said if his father would have become George’s successor. “But things happen the way they do. You can’t control it. So you just pivot and you make the best of it. I’m very lucky that Hal and I are very close. It shook things up and thank God I was at boarding school at that point.”
Hal eventually succeeded his father after a brief and tempestuous period when it seemed his older brother, Hank, might fill the void. But Swindal Jr. uses already living through “the heir apparent thing” with his dad in explaining why it is foolhardy to look too forward on such a matter.
“It’s not on the radar,” Swindal Jr. said. “Hopefully, Hal’s not going anywhere for a long time because I think he’s really good at this. And I don’t think he gets the credit he deserves because he’s not as outspoken as my grandfather was. He’s really, really, really good at this. Unfortunately, the championships, the World Series this past 10 or 12 years haven’t come to show that. But I will be his fervent defender. I really do think he’s great. So that’s the first part — I don’t think he’s going anywhere. So I don’t know if it’s productive to think about that. What I know is that we’ve got a bunch of us in my generation. We want to tackle this thing right now and provide value to get wins now.”
Hal is proud of his nephew, noting what Steve Jr. did not bring up to emphasize leadership skills and that cohorts gravitate to him; that at Culver Steve Jr. was named a regimental commander — the highest position in the cadet corps. But Hal did not want to comment for this story because he felt it would be wrong to single out one of his cousins, when Hank Steinbrenner’s children, George Michael and Julia; Steve Jr’s sister, Haley; and George Steinbrenner’s other daughter, Jessica’s children, Michael and Robert, are all involved in various areas of the team. And Hal’s own children may one day want involvement, too.
“Obviously, I would love to do it,” Steve Jr. said. “If that opportunity arises, sure, I would love to do it. But I wouldn’t mind if I would do it with my cousins either. I don’t have the complex of I have to be the one. If Hal in his opinion thinks that three of us do it and that might be the best way to win, I’m in.”
It will be up to Hal to recommend a successor someday and then have the rest of MLB ownership vote upon it. Until then, Swindal said there is an “interest among the cousins” to work together and avoid Succession-esque nastiness. Besides, he said, “Hal loves this. He’s obsessed with this; getting us a World Series. And I don’t see that burning out anytime soon.”
What resonates for Steve Jr. instead is that this is “a true family business,” and, thus, the regular stories about the franchise being sold?
“It’s not even in the realm of my thoughts because we love it here. My generation [of Steinbrenner grandchildren] has shown a desire to continue keeping this in the family and we work really well together, me and my cousins and we want to continue to nurture that. We want to build our professional relationships together and be together as a unit so that if it does come to the chance where it gets passed on to this next generation, we’re going to be ready to go.”
Clearly, though, the Steinbrenner cousin with the most time spent working in and throughout the organization is Steve Jr. He was central to meetings at the beginning of the offseason to try to find better pathways for the organization internally to ward off the perception that baseball operations were warring and that Hal and Cashman were favoring analytics.
“There’s so many teams that are more on the cutting edge of analytics than we are,” Swindal said. “You kind of hear me scrambling, because I don’t see us as being too analytical. I’m cognizant that there might be some people that feel that way. I feel like we’ve addressed it internally. To me, all I care about is we got it right here. I feel like we are in a really good place because of it. I think you’ll see a difference this year with those types of conversations.”
And that difference is something Steve Jr. could truly bond with his grandfather about because, though a season could not be scripted like a WWE match, for George Steinbrenner there was only one acceptable outcome.
“I do think every year going in that we are going to win a World Series,” Swindal said. “There’s going to be times that I let myself get a little higher or lower than normal. This is one of those higher times where I feel like this team is set up to do that. We’re going to be really good.”
