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.<\/p>\n
Speaking to reporters at the Winter Meetings on Sunday night, Cashman said Gray \u2014 then pitching for the Oakland Athletics \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen he was with the A\u2019s, he was telling our minor-league video coordinator, \u2018You got to get me over to the Yankees,\u2019\u201d Cashman said. \u201c\u2018Tell Cash, get me over to the Yankees. I want out of Oakland. I want a championship.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Cashman said Gray was \u201ccommunicating that to a number of different people \u2026 that he wants to be a Yankee.\u201d<\/p>\n
But in his second season in the Bronx, after Gray told Cashman he was surprised the Yankees didn\u2019t trade him at the 2018 deadline, he came clean to the general manager.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s when he told me he never wanted to be here,\u201d Cashman said. \u201cHe hates New York. \u2018This is the worst place.\u2019 He just sits in his hotel room.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201c(McKinnis) told me to do that,\u201d Gray said, according to Cashman.<\/p>\n
Cashman said Gray told him McKinnis \u201ctold me to lie\u201d because \u201cit wouldn\u2019t be good for my free agency to say there\u2019s certain places that I don\u2019t want to go to.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIn 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,\u201d McKinnis told The Athletic when reached for comment Sunday night. \u201cAs 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe 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 \u2014 thus potentially not performing at their best if they were with that team \u2014 it does not help their career and future free agency to lie their way into a trade to that club.\u201d<\/p>\n
A short while later, McKinnis sent another message to The Athletic:<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, Brian is trying to make people believe I told Sonny to, in Cashman\u2019s words, \u2018lie\u2019 to the minor-league video guy to try to get Sonny to the Yankees \u2014 even though, per Cashman, Sonny did not want to be with the Yankees \u2014 to subsequently somehow help Sonny\u2019s free agency. This makes zero sense. \u2026 Further, the words, \u2018I want out of Oakland,\u2019 have never been said by Sonny. He loved his time with the A\u2019s.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cashman said he told Gray the Yankees might not have traded for him if they had known how much he didn\u2019t want to play for them.<\/p>\n
\u201c\u2018I wish you would have told me well beforehand,\u2019\u201d Cashman recalled saying to Gray. \u201c\u2018I wish we knew this before we even tried to acquire you, that you never wanted to come here.\u2019 We tried to do our homework.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/GettyImages-1017347402-scaled.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n Sonny Gray went 15-16 with a 4.51 ERA in 41 games (34 starts) for the Yankees. (Elsa \/ Getty Images)<\/p>\n
At his introductory news conference at Yankee Stadium in 2017, Gray appeared thrilled to join the team.<\/p>\n
\u201cI couldn\u2019t be happier with how it all played out,\u201d he said at the time, \u201cand I couldn\u2019t be happier to be here.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t happen, the pair spoke in an office at Yankee Stadium.<\/p>\n
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\u2019d do his best to trade him.<\/p>\n
\u201cI told him, \u2018Nothing I can do about it now,\u2019\u201d Cashman said.<\/p>\n
\u2014 Ken Rosenthal contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ORLANDO, Fla. \u2014 It all started with a little Gray lie? Sonny Gray made waves last week after…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":63988,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[3472,20,9,11,10,321,8781],"class_list":["post-63987","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-boston-red-sox","tag-mlb","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-new-york-yankees","tag-oakland-athletics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63987","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63987"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63987\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}