How Yankees prepare players to face the media: A behind-the-scenes look

TAMPA, Fla. — Gerrit Cole landed at Los Angeles International Airport on March 12, 2024, not in the best of moods.

In addition to being tired after the roughly 5 1⁄2-hour flight from Tampa, Cole was a little scared. The righthander, among the most durable pitchers of his generation, was experiencing discomfort in his right elbow. After being evaluated by Yankees doctors in Tampa, he flew west to meet with orthopedic specialist Dr. Neal ElAttrache for a second opinion.

The whole trip — between Cole, the Yankees and his representation — was a mostly cloak-and-dagger affair. But Cole no sooner had exited LAX when a lone freelance cameraman greeted him and began peppering him with questions as he walked with his driver toward an elevator in a nearby parking area.

“How you doin’, man?”

“You all right?”

“Gerrit, anything you can say to fans?”

“How’s that arm?”

And more.

Cole never broke stride and didn’t answer other than calmly asking the photographer to give him “a little space.”

The scene immediately brought to mind the infamous clip of future Hall of Fame pitcher Randy Johnson, the day before his introductory news conference as a Yankee in 2005, shoving a Channel 2 cameraman on his way to take his team physical.

And as the stone-faced Cole briskly walked, head mostly down, outside LAX trying to escape the persistent prober, the ugliness of the Johnson scene that occurred on Madison Avenue came to his mind as well.

Cole, a baseball history buff who grew up a Yankees fan, unquestionably was aware of the incident, but he thought of it for another reason. Cole, who signed with the Yankees before the 2020 season, had seen the clip during one of the media training sessions — mandatory for all uniformed personnel — that have been a part of spring training every year since 2007.

“I was thinking of that video the whole time,” Cole said. “I was telling myself, ‘It’s not going to last forever. Just keep walking, stay focused.’ ”

Cole smiled at one of his final thoughts as the uncomfortable encounter came to an end.

“And thank you, Randy,” he said.

Important business

Professional baseball players typically are at their most relaxed during spring training, but that doesn’t mean they go about their work without purpose and seriousness. It is where routines are established, a six-week period in which every organization begins its preparation for the grind of the 162-game regular season.

There is endless work in the cage, in the bullpen, live batting practice, ground balls, pop-up drills and more.

And meetings. Many, many meetings, the number of which have only increased over the years as analytics and performance science have become such a big part of the sport.

“A lot of [expletive] meetings,” one Yankee said with a rueful laugh.

But the media training meetings, generally speaking, not only are exceedingly popular with players but seen as necessary.

“It’s important because it’s nothing you’ve ever seen before for a lot of kids,” Aaron Judge, drafted into the organization in 2013, said of the throng of media covering the Yankees on a daily basis, particularly at home. “Especially for me, growing up in California, a small farming community [Linden]. I’m not from a big city, I’m not around a big market, big media. Obviously, once you get drafted, you kind of get an understanding of what it’s going to be like, but it’s a whole ’nother level when you get to the big leagues.”

Yankees media training is the creation of Jason Zillo, who joined the organization as an intern in the PR department in 1996 and worked his way up in that wing before assuming his current position, vice president of communications and media relations, before the 2007 season.

Wanting to change things up a bit — there was informal media training previously, which consisted of a single-page handout and not much else — Zillo instituted a form of what exists now.

It is tweaked year to year — social media, for instance, is front and center in a way it wasn’t 10 or 15 years ago — but the basics have remained the same.

“It’s properly titled media training, but in its essence, it’s media education,” Zillo said. “We’re not programming guys. We’re trying to arm them with something more than a squirt gun when they’re talking on such a stage that has such magnification to it. It’s educating them. Just providing them more of an understanding of the scope of things here and how magnified it is.

“And it doesn’t necessarily mean bad. It’s just there’s more people interested in what they do individually and what this organization does collectively than most other sports organizations in the world. And it doesn’t have to be negative.”

Cashman endorsed

Before implementing anything of the sort, of course, Zillo had to get permission. Brian Cashman, with the franchise since 1986 as an intern and the general manager since 1998, gave it.

“Vitally important,” Cashman said. “As far as I’m concerned [with spring training priorities], it’s physicals, team meeting, then media training.”

Cashman said “every once in a while” a member of the coaching staff might attempt to “push” the training sessions to an unspecified date later in spring training. That request always elicits a firm “no.”

“We need this on the front end because we want to educate our players that they’re on the clock 24/7 as New York Yankees,” said Cashman, who usually attends, as do a handful of executives and behind-the-scenes staffers. “They’re never on their own time [on or off the field] . . . These training sessions are designed to be a guardrail rather than needing an ambulance to pick up the pieces at the bottom [when something goes wrong].”

Inside the training

Judge, since his Rookie of the Year season in 2017, is by far the most in-demand player when it comes to the media. Regardless of stature, though, every player goes through it, just as Judge has during spring training since his first big-league camp in 2015.

Pitchers and catchers, who report first, have two 45-minute sessions on back-to-back days; position players, who report five days later, have their own back-to-back 45-minute sessions.

All players who have 0-3 years of service time are required to have a third 45-minute session, the majority of that one involving role-playing in which three players, prepped by Zillo, act as reporters and one player is on the receiving end of what can be some pointed questions.

One example this year was top position prospect George Lombard Jr. facing questions from Will Warren, Spencer Jones and Zack Short.

Given the sensitive nature of some of the questions lobbed at Lombard, players declined to specify the queries. Multiple people mentioned that Lombard “aced” the feet-to-the-fire test, but if he hadn't, behind the scenes was the place to do it.

“You can make a mistake, and that’s the time to make a mistake and learn from it,” Lombard said. “It’s just good preparation.”

Zillo provided an example from recent years when one player got caught “flat-footed” and “shellshocked” in such a scenario as teammates grilled him about some social media posts from long ago in which he expressed his views on politics.

“He clearly never thought in a million years that that information would circle back around [to him],” Zillo said. “He was stumbling and bumbling.”

Zillo added: “We can find things just by simply searching the internet and tweets and retweets from guys. There’s a historical timeline from when they entered the social media sphere . . . and those all count, unfortunately. You can find stuff on voting by us just doing a Google search. It’s incredible, and scary, what you are able to unfurl without an expertise or not a lot of effort.”

Each player on the first day of media training receives a glossy four-page media training information guide — written in English and Spanish — that highlights some of the topics that will be covered in the video presentation.

Among them: “The dangers of social media,” ways of offering “no comment” on particularly sensitive topics, avoiding “hypotheticals” and, on the front page in bold letters, the acronym “A H H A” for Accessibility, Honesty, Humility and Accountability.

The latter repeatedly is stressed, especially by veteran players, because it simply is not acceptable to dodge the media after a performance that negatively impacts a game. And that has nothing to do with inconveniencing the media. It’s about not hanging teammates out to dry.

“If you avoid the media . . . then it falls on someone else to answer questions you should be answering,” second-year pitcher Cam Schlittler said. “It’s a respect thing to your teammates.”

There are video clips — some from baseball but not all — showing good examples (as well as bad) of media interactions, with an open-floor discussion to follow of what the athlete did well and didn’t do well.

The bad examples often prompt the most discussion, as well as plenty of laughter. The most-cited one from this year’s video package — one that has been shown many times over the years — was of former Mets closer Billy Wagner in May 2008. In an empty clubhouse after a 1-0 loss to the Nationals, Wagner, elected to the Hall of Fame in January 2025, wondered “why the [expletive] the closer’s being interviewed and I didn’t even play.”

Cole called the clip “hysterical” but spoke of the larger lesson.

“It’s a great clip about accountability,” he said. “The point of that clip isn’t about Billy popping off. It’s that there’s literally no one else that played that day that’s available to the press. That’s the only person they can ask, and it’s not his responsibility.”

That is something policed by the players. Just twice since 2009 has a Yankee who played a significant role in a loss intentionally dodged the media.

The first was in 2011 when Rafael Soriano, signed as Mariano Rivera’s setup man, didn’t talk after imploding in an early April loss.

The other, even more headline-grabbing, was when Clint Frazier butchered three balls in rightfield in a loss to the Red Sox on June 2, 2019, and bolted.

In the case of Soriano, Rivera jumped the reliever the following day, telling his teammate: “We don’t do that here.”

Before leaving the clubhouse after his rough game, Frazier was encouraged by, among others, Judge and Brett Gardner to talk that Sunday night. He ignored them, as he regularly did when it came to pretty much all of the advice about being a big-leaguer he received from a slew of veteran teammates.

“That’s the thing we talk about all the time,” said Lombard, whose father, George Lombard, played in the majors. “You see all the great ones — Judgie, Big G [Giancarlo Stanton], Cole, all of our guys — do it. It just comes down to being a good teammate.”

On occasion during one of the sessions, an active Yankee who publicly, well, steps in it will get singled out and made an example of, though in a good-natured way. One such player in spring training this year was Schlittler, though not for the reason one might have predicted.

“I thought social media would be brought up. I was surprised it was not brought up,” he said with a sheepish grin.

That was a reference to Schlittler’s posts on social media after his historic performance in the deciding third game of last October’s Wild Card  Series victory over his hometown Red Sox and the anger he took to the mound with him in that game —  and expressed in various ways afterward — that stemmed from the online abuse his family, particularly his mother, got from some Boston fans before the game.

No, what  was brought up in media training, he said, was a postgame interview in which Schlittler talked about pitch-tipping.

The flame-throwing righty, who became an instant phenomenon after getting called up early last July, got shelled for four runs and five hits in 1 2/3 innings in a Sept. 5 loss to the Blue Jays at the Stadium. Six days later, Schlittler allowed one run and five hits in six innings in a victory over Detroit.

Afterward, responding to a question about what “adjustment” he made from the Toronto start, the affable Schlittler, clearly comfortable from Day 1 in front of a microphone, said the main one was “probably not tipping my pitches. For me, that was something I worked on all week.”

If it had been a game show, Schlittler would have heard the buzzer for giving an incorrect response.

“Bringing up tipping in a postgame interview, talking about it on the YES Network,” Schlittler — who combines the bluntness typical of many who grew up in the Northeast with the even delivery of a comedic straight man — said this past week. “A good example for everyone else. Don’t need to bring it up, don’t need to give teams another reason to look into yourself. A little embarrassing, but it’s a good example of getting better.”

“Better,” Zillo stressed — and veteran players echoed his words — does not mean muzzling personalities and turning the clubhouse into a group of cliche-spewing automatons.

“Everybody has their own personality,” Zillo said. “They see all of this stuff differently. This isn’t a cookie-cutter thing. One thing they share in common is they love baseball and they’re really good at it. There’s a lot of things uncommon with them, including how they view all this.”

It's OK to be outspoken on any number of things — including issues unrelated to baseball that a player might be passionate about — but players must remember there can be consequences. The primary one of those, Schlittler said, is becoming “a distraction” in the clubhouse.

Cashman calls it learning the power of “no comment.”

“[Media training] reminds them they’re baseball players first and foremost, and if they enter other arenas, which is their right, obviously, they’re going to subject themselves to more scrutiny,'' he said. "But they also have the power of . . . not answering the question. If handled properly, it’s a benefit. If it’s handled improperly, it becomes detrimental.”

CC Sabathia was a mentor of Judge early in the captain's career when the Hall of Fame pitcher’s career was winding down. Judge said a memorable video clip from one of his first media training sessions — a clip not in this year’s presentation — involved Sabathia at a red-carpet event.

“He kept getting asked about something political and he said, ‘Hey, I’m a baseball player. If you have baseball questions, I’ll answer them for you,’ ” Judge said. “If you’re not well-versed in the area that they’re asking you about, it’s better to say, ‘Hey, you need to ask somebody else.’ That’s one clip that’s always stuck with me because you never know where you’re going to be or what the moment’s going to be when someone might ask you something about something political or something going on in the world or even something with another team. Just finding ways to stick to what you know is the best way to go.”

Judge and Cole sit in the front row for the sessions, something younger players instantly take note of. While Cole said he generally sits in the front row for most team meetings, doing so for media training “should be taken” by his teammates as a signal.

Said Cole, “That is a subtle way of saying, ‘Hey, this is important.’ ”

By Erik Boland

erik.boland@newsday.comeboland11

Erik Boland started in Newsday's sports department in 2002. He covered high school and college sports, then shifted to the Jets beat. He has covered the Yankees since 2009.