ORLANDO, Fla. — It all started with a little Gray lie?
Sonny Gray made waves last week after he was traded from the St. Louis Cardinals to the Boston Red Sox, saying that he “never” wanted to play for the New York Yankees in the first place and that he was excited to join Boston, “where it’s easy to hate the Yankees.”
But Yankees general manager Brian Cashman said Gray lied behind the scenes about wanting to play for the team before the club acquired him in 2017 in what wound up as a failed marriage.
Speaking to reporters at the Winter Meetings on Sunday night, Cashman said Gray — then pitching for the Oakland Athletics — was telling people at the time that he wanted to play for the Yankees and that Gray later admitted he was fibbing the whole time.
“When he was with the A’s, he was telling our minor-league video coordinator, ‘You got to get me over to the Yankees,’” Cashman said. “‘Tell Cash, get me over to the Yankees. I want out of Oakland. I want a championship.’”
Cashman said Gray was “communicating that to a number of different people … that he wants to be a Yankee.”
But in his second season in the Bronx, after Gray told Cashman he was surprised the Yankees didn’t trade him at the 2018 deadline, he came clean to the general manager.
“That’s when he told me he never wanted to be here,” Cashman said. “He hates New York. ‘This is the worst place.’ He just sits in his hotel room.”
Cashman said when he reminded Gray he had told people he wanted to be traded to the Yankees, Gray laid the blame on his agent, Bo McKinnis.
“(McKinnis) told me to do that,” Gray said, according to Cashman.
Cashman said Gray told him McKinnis “told me to lie” because “it wouldn’t be good for my free agency to say there’s certain places that I don’t want to go to.”
“In 2017, Sonny did not have no-trade rights with the Oakland Athletics, so he had no legal right to have input as to where he would be traded or if he would be traded,” McKinnis told The Athletic when reached for comment Sunday night. “As such, he made no statement that he did or did not want to be traded to any specific team, and thus, there was no statement that could have included a lie.
“The Athletics had no obligation to inform Sonny of any trade communications they had with other clubs, so they never told him they were potentially trading him to any particular team. As an aside, if a player does not want to play for a particular club — thus potentially not performing at their best if they were with that team — it does not help their career and future free agency to lie their way into a trade to that club.”
A short while later, McKinnis sent another message to The Athletic:
“So, Brian is trying to make people believe I told Sonny to, in Cashman’s words, ‘lie’ to the minor-league video guy to try to get Sonny to the Yankees — even though, per Cashman, Sonny did not want to be with the Yankees — to subsequently somehow help Sonny’s free agency. This makes zero sense. … Further, the words, ‘I want out of Oakland,’ have never been said by Sonny. He loved his time with the A’s.”
Cashman said he told Gray the Yankees might not have traded for him if they had known how much he didn’t want to play for them.
“‘I wish you would have told me well beforehand,’” Cashman recalled saying to Gray. “‘I wish we knew this before we even tried to acquire you, that you never wanted to come here.’ We tried to do our homework.”
Sonny Gray went 15-16 with a 4.51 ERA in 41 games (34 starts) for the Yankees. (Elsa / Getty Images)
At his introductory news conference at Yankee Stadium in 2017, Gray appeared thrilled to join the team.
“I couldn’t be happier with how it all played out,” he said at the time, “and I couldn’t be happier to be here.”
Then Gray spent a miserable 538 days with the club, going 15-16 with a 4.51 ERA in 41 games (34 starts). He was frequently booed before the Yankees traded him to the Cincinnati Reds in January 2019.
When the Yankees acquired Gray for Dustin Fowler, James Kaprielian and Jorge Mateo, he had already been an All-Star with Oakland in 2015. He has since made All-Star teams as a member of the Reds and Minnesota Twins.
Gray immediately struggled when he joined the Yankees midseason in 2017, going 4-7 with a 3.72 ERA in 11 starts and never seeming to be on the same page with then-pitching coach Larry Rothschild. Then, in 2018, he went 8-7 with a 5.08 ERA in 20 starts before the trade deadline. Cashman said Gray thought the Yankees would trade him before the deadline. When it didn’t happen, the pair spoke in an office at Yankee Stadium.
That was when Gray revealed to Cashman that he never wanted to be a Yankee in the first place. Cashman replied that in the offseason, he’d do his best to trade him.
“I told him, ‘Nothing I can do about it now,’” Cashman said.
— Ken Rosenthal contributed to this report.