TAMPA — This Yankees season, at the outset, looks a lot like last season:
Could go quite well, quite poorly or somewhere in between.
No one would be surprised if they lived on the precipice of the playoff bubble, a few bounces and breaks determining their entry to October.
Which is why the actions of an alumnus and his deputies might prove so crucial. The Yankees reside with management on the labor divide. Yet they’ll be relying on the legal savvy of the players’ union, and the old friend leading that union, very soon.
“It’s a very difficult conversation to have. It’s a very sensitive issue to discuss,” Tony Clark, executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, said Sunday at George M. Steinbrenner Field. “But our job is very fundamental. We protect, defend and advance the rights of our members. That’s what we do.”
All of baseball will face a big test as soon as Monday, as commissioner Rob Manfred’s decision on discipline for new Yankees closer Aroldis Chapman is imminent. As The Post’s Joel Sherman reported recently, Manfred’s suspension for Chapman, based on an Oct. 30 incident involving his girlfriend at the left-hander’s Miami-area home, could reach the 30-40 game range.
Chapman already is on record saying he will appeal any penalty, so the next step would be a hearing with independent arbitrator Fredric Horowitz, who memorably lessened Alex Rodriguez’s Biogenesis-related penalty from 211 games to the entire 2014 season. That appeal would be led by Clark, a first baseman on the 2004 Yankees, and the union’s lawyers, as well as outside attorney Jay Reisinger, who has worked with A-Rod, Andy Pettitte and Sammy Sosa among many other ballplayers.
Both sides will push for an expedited hearing with Horowitz, in an attempt to reach a denouement before Opening Day. If Horowitz can’t hear the case and rule on it by the Yankees’ April 4 season opener, then Chapman would start serving his penalty in the interim. While baseball could yank Chapman out of spring training, too — the language in the domestic-violence policy, launched just last year, leaves considerable room for interpretation — it’s difficult to see what would be gained by that on baseball’s side. Chapman already is here and quietly preparing for his season.
Just as the policy itself is open to interpretation, so too is the Chapman incident. It’s not like that of former Met Jose Reyes, who was arrested in Hawaii for alleged domestic abuse and now awaits trial. Nor is it like that of the Dodgers’ Yasiel Puig, who appears likely to escape penalty after an offseason incident that was blown out of proportion by TMZ. The government will not be pressing charges against Chapman, yet something happened that caused his girlfriend to call the police and Chapman to fire his (legally registered) gun in a set-aside garage.
What does that amount to? It’s hard to say. We have an unprecedented case being adjudicated by an untested policy.
“When you talk to experts who have been in the [domestic violence] field for a long period of time, you realize there is no ‘One size fits all’ that even if, on the surface, there are issues and concerns related to a particular case, even if on the surface it looks similar to another one, it may not be,” said Clark, after meeting with the Yankees’ players. “And as a result, there needs to be considerations made to take that into account.”
Clark’s most memorable moment as a Yankee arguably came in American League Championship Series Game 5, when he ripped a two-out, ninth-inning double that bounced over Fenway Park’s short right-field wall. The grounds rules meant that Ruben Sierra, running on contact, had to stop on third base instead of scoring the lead run. The Red Sox, you might remember, built off that favorable bounce to win Game 5 and the series in their historic comeback.
Clark’s impact with the 2016 Yankees will rely on more than a bounce. The more the Yankees have Chapman this season, the more likely they’ll reach their goal. The difference between, say, a 40-game suspension and a 15-game suspension could decide everything. Very shortly, if indirectly, Clark will be up to bat for the Yankees again.