As far as his baseball life goes (his private life is another matter), Brian Cashman has lived a charmed existence. He has spent two and a half decades being in the right place at the right time.

When Cashman was old enough to join the working world in 1989, a good friend of his father’s had a job for him. The friend was George Steinbrenner, and the job was at Yankee Stadium as an assistant in baseball operations.

He was there – and briefly in Tampa – as Steinbrenner plowed through five of his first 16 general managers. Cashman became the 17^th when Bob Watson could no longer tolerate Steinbrenner after two years and retired.

Inheriting a team that had the highest payroll in baseball and, bulked up by the owner’s free-spending ways, would reach the unprecedented $200 million level eight years into his tenure, Cashman was playing on an uneven playing field.

Cashman, however, has not produced a World Series winner after 2009 and, based on Steinbrenner’s history, would not have retained his job as long as he has had Steinbrenner not died in the middle of the 2010 season.

In significant ways, Hal Steinbrenner has adopted the opposite style of his father and last year he extended Cashman’s contract for three years. That decision bothered some Yankees fans and other observers.

I recently wrote a column saying the Yankees made a mistake, that 17 years in the position were long enough and that Cashman had outlived his usefulness. Cashman didn’t appreciate my view and told people I was “out to get” him, as though he were above criticism or questioning.

Because Cashman hadn’t taken or returned my calls for a couple of years, I was surprised when he got on the phone Friday when I called him. It wasn’t a long conversation. In fact, it wasn’t a conversation at all.

“Why are you bothering calling me?” he asked gruffly. “Lose the number. Write your shit.”

And he abruptly hung up.

I was calling Cashman not to ask him about the Yankees but about the person who really is “out to get” him. For at least the last six weeks – it could be a lot longer – this person has anonymously filled reporters’ inboxes with e-mail criticism and derision of Cashman, extending his commentary to the affairs the general manager has allegedly had with two women.

I say allegedly, but whatever the episodes were they were enough for Cashman’s wife, Mary, to divorce him and accept $1 million a year for alimony and child support.

The e-mailer doesn’t put his own name on the address line of the messages he sends. He makes up addresses, primarily using names of former Yankees’ players, some of whom are so obscure in the team’s history it indicates that the perpetrator has been around a long time and has an intimate knowledge of the Yankees over the years.

I have tried to get the fellow to contact me but to no avail.

“We know about that guy,” Dan Halem, Major League Baseball’s executive vice president of labor relations, said earlier this month after I was told he was the official to talk to about the matter. “There’s really nothing for us to do. This is like par for the course. It happens. There are a lot of crazy people out there, a lot more than people think.”

When I called Halem last week to find out where the matter stood, he said there was nothing more he could say. According to a person familiar with the ongoing events, a representative of MLB talked to the individual three or four weeks ago but obviously has not succeeded in inducing him to abandon his bizarre quest, whatever his quest is, other than making Cashman look bad.

I received my latest e-mail just after noon last Saturday. It was No. 121.

“Baseball reported it to local law enforcement,” a lawyer familiar with the case said. “In addition to contacting news media, he has used Yankee names. It was reported it as harassment and impersonation. It’s a law enforcement matter now.

“Baseball knows his name, but they don’t know where he’s from or where he lives.”

What hasn’t been determined apparently is whether the individual is doing anything that is criminal. If he has done anything that is considered to be criminal, authorities would most likely have taken action already.

If there is any pattern to the e-mailer’s efforts, it is that he reads an article or column in a New York newspaper or on an Internet website, then sends an e-mail to the writer, copying other writers. He usually included me as a blind copy.

In his fraudulent context, I have received e-mail in the past six weeks from Thurman Munson (written and sent from the great beyond, I assume), Bob Watson, Gary Waslewski, Reggie Jackson, Dick Tidrow, Gary Thomasson, Mike Mussina, Clete Boyer, Yogi Berra, Fred Stanley, Bernie Williams, Lou Piniella, Larry Rothschild, Dale Long, Ron Guidry, Brian Doyle, John Wetteland, Catfish Hunter, Ruben Sierra, Mickey Mantle, Rich Gossage and Bake McBride.

The e-mailer also used the names of women who allegedly had affairs with Cashman – Kim Brennan and Louise Meanwell, a.k.a. Louise Neathway.

Hardly a day goes by without an e-mail; I have received as many as nine in one day. The e-mailer obviously works very hard at his perverse pleasure. All I did to express my view of Cashman’s ability as a general manager was write a column.

Here are some examples of the e-mailer’s Cashman quest:

From “Jim (Catfish) Hunter” to John Harper, New York Daily News, copies to D. Mark Winfield and me:

Since all baseball operations departments began reporting to Cashman, the franchise has won only one (1) ALCS and only one (1) World Series – both in 2009, and both because of Rodriguez’s historic performance more than that of any other player.

Rodriguez has not been sued as often as Cashman has in the last fifteen (15) years: e.g., (http://nypost.com/2015/01/23/cashman-stalker-suit-accuses-yankees-gm-of-being-an-e-snoop/).

Both men graduated high school.

What does it mean for “A-Rod” to come “face-to-face with ‘the likes of Brian Cashman’”? I still don’t get it.

From “Bob Watson” to Mike Vaccaro, New York Post, copy to me:

“… You know who [Alex] Rodriguez needed as an adviser here? He needed Mike Ehrmantraut… this was the advice that he famously gave Walter White…: ‘The moral of the story,’ Ehrmantraut told Mr. White, ‘is that I chose a half measure, when I should have gone all the way. I’ll never make that mistake again. No more half measures, Walter.’

This is, always has been, A-Rod’s grandest failure: he specializes in half measures… He can’t stop acting like [a dope].”

http://nypost.com/2015/02/17/a-rod-plays-the-dope-again-with-half-measured-mea-culpa/

The G.M. specializes in half measures, too:

Cashman should have had Louise Meanwell arrested and incarcerated in Rikers Island on charges of stalking and harassment within days of spending the night with her in her lower Manhattan apartment as a measure of discrediting her in the event she decided to go public with their ten-month affair in the future, from the beginning.

Instead, he chose the half measure after hacking into her email account for the purpose of obtaining information useful in discrediting her, and then using a cell phone number he uncovered to contact her mother and convince the woman to call 911 with a pre-written script claiming her daughter was an imminent danger to herself and others in order to have the daughter involuntarily committed to a psychiatric facility – only to have the NYPD respond to Ms. Meanwell’s apartment and find her entertaining friends.

And he was actually stupid enough to admit to the mother that he obtained her number by hacking into her daughter’s email account: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2923597/Yankees-manager-Brian-Cashman-spied-mistress-emails-threatened-mother-tried-committed-threatened-public.html.

This is the dope the Steinbrenners have running the New York Yankees, and Alex Rodriguez apologizing to.

From “Fred Stanley” to me:

“Brian Cashman listened as [Bob] Watson announced his resignation [on Feb. 3, 1998]… Cashman, the new general manager of the Yankees… admitted that evaluating talent is not his strength…Cashman has been… called ‘George Costanza’ in reference to the character on ‘Seinfeld…’ In his first day on the job, Cashman [revealed] that he, personally, would not give Bernie Williams $11 million a year…

Life will get stickier for Brian Cashman and his wife, Mary… ‘He’s 30 years old and he has a job that some people would die for,’ Mary Cashman said. ‘I would never give him reason not to do it.’

[Cashman's] father…. has been friends with [owner George] Steinbrenner for almost 25 years… Cashman became [a] major league administrator in 1993 and had been an assistant general manager beneath Gene Michael and then Watson over the last five years…“

Life did, in fact, get a little stickier for Cashman and his wife, Mary: http://nypost.com/2012/02/04/yanks-gm-makes-quick-visit-to-wifes-house-day-after-she-filed-for-divorce/.

From “Louise Meanwell” to Dan Martin, New York Post, copy to me:

“Time for [the New York Post's 2013-14 ranking of] the top 10 general managers in baseball…

6. Brian Cashman… Cashman’s inclusion always generates controversy among angry Yankees fans… Fourteen postseason appearances in 16 years, even with a payroll advantage, is nothing at which one should sneeze…”

http://nypost.com/2013/11/13/ranking-baseballs-10-best-gms/

If New York had the sixth-best G.M. in Major League Baseball in 2014, the same G.M. has been with the organization for more almost two decades in that role, and the same G.M. has the second-highest payroll in MLB, then how is it possible Baseball Prospectus has the team coming in with only 80 wins in 2015: http://www.baseballprospectus.com/fantasy/dc/#help?

Is fourteen postseason appearances in 18 years, and as many League Championships won in the last eleven (11) years as the Colorado Rockies, something at which one can sneeze? When can “angry Yankees fans,” who travel to The Bronx to pay the highest prices in the U.S. (with fans in Boston) to see a baseball game, sneeze?

From “Louise Meanwell” to George King, New York Post, copy to me:

Why was the title of this article changed from “Questions surrounding 2015 Yanks similar to those in 1996,” to “What these Yankees have in common with group that started dynasty”? Did Cashman call the Post and read someone the riot act (e.g., https://twitter.com/ESPNNYYankees/statuses/372794330794033152)?

From “John Wetteland” to me:

“… Asked if he could recall a Yankees spring training that housed as many ‘ifs’ as the 2015 club has in the days before pitchers and catchers report this week, [general manager Brian Cashman] immediately pointed to 1996.

‘We had a lot of ifs then,’ said Cashman, who was an assistant GM [in 1996]. ‘The ifs were everywhere… We had… a young catcher, Joe Girardi was in his first year… “If” was everywhere.’”

http://nypost.com/2015/02/14/questions-surrounding-2015-yanks-similar-to-those-in-1996/

Girardi was a 31-year-old seven-year veteran in 1996. And the New York media is characterizing Alex Rodriguez as “delusional.”

I’m not a law enforcement official or even a lawyer so I can’t say with authority if these e-mails merit a criminal complaint, but I would doubt it. The man is sending them to reporters, and there’s nothing illegitimate about that. If he were sending them to Cashman, it could constitute harassment, but he’s not.

Is he acting illegally by appropriating others’ names? I’ll let someone else decide.

If Lou Gehrig were alive, being the modest man he has always been portrayed as, he would probably shrug it off and find an excuse for it. Babe Ruth, on the other hand, would very likely see it for the crass money-making gimmick it is and blister the New York Yankees for cheapening the honor they bestowed on him by retiring his famous uniform No. 3 June 13, 1948.

The Yankees, in recent years, have gone into the business of increasing ticket sales for games at Yankee Stadium by retiring uniform numbers and putting up plaques in what they call Monument Park at Yankee Stadium.

They have cheapened their legitimate honors so much that they may as well go the rest of the way and start selling plaques to fans for hanging among the monuments for Ruth and Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio.

The Yankees introduced their Monument Park expansion last year when they added plaques for Tino Martinez and Paul O’Neill, two very good players, who contributed to World Series titles but weren’t on the level of previously honored players.

The Yankees are going even further this year, retiring the uniform numbers worn by Jorge Posada, Bernie Williams and Andy Pettitte and putting up plaques for each of them and a plaque for Willie Randolph.

“The ceremonies are part of a recognition series that saw the honoring of Joe Torre, Rich ‘Goose’ Gossage, Tino Martinez and Paul O’Neill in 2014,” the Yankees said in a news release.

In the Yankees’ ratings, retiring a number ranks above a plaque, but bestowing both honors on the same player, manager or executive is special. That’s what they did with Torre last season. However, the year before, they retired Mariano Rivera’s number (42) but didn’t put up a plaque for him,

My guess is they will do the plaque another time, perhaps when he is inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame. Last summer they unveiled a plaque for Gossage, who went into the Hall of Fame in 2008, but didn’t retire his number.

Perhaps they will retire Gossage’s number and unveil a plaque for Rivera in future seasons when those special days would attract large attendances.

This whole business, I’m certain, is all about attendance. On the day the Yankees retired Rivera’s number (Sept. 22, 2013), the attendance was 49,197. The average attendance for the other 80 Yankee Stadium games was 40,380. Last year’s four days of celebration, as well as Derek Jeter’s last home game, each exceeded 47,000 in attendance. The other 76 games averaged 41,623.

As high as Yankee Stadium ticket prices are, even an additional 5,000 fans bring in meaningful revenue.

If there are other criteria for posting plaques or retiring numbers, they escape me. I asked a Yankees spokesman via e-mail who makes these decisions and on what bases, but I received no reply. Let me suggest some reasons.

Reggie Jackson had his No. 44 retired in 1993 and a plaque hung in Monument Park in 2002. Why either one?

(a) Because he hit three home runs in a World Series game in 1977

(b) Because he fought with Billy Martin in the dugout

(c) Because he defied Martin and made him so angry that the manager flung an empty beer bottle against a wall in his office

(d) None of the above

The correct answer is (d). The Yankees honored Jackson because his Hall of Fame plaque shows him wearing a Yankees cap. Why is he wearing a Yankees cap even though he played for three other teams, twice as long with the Athletics? Word at the time the cap was decided was that George Steinbrenner made it worthwhile financially, in addition giving him a post-playing career job.

Let’s look at another former star outfielder. The Yankees have neither retired Dave Winfield’s number 31 nor posted a Monument Park plaque in his honor. Why not, considering what the Yankees have done for Jackson?

I can think of two possible reasons:

1. Steinbrenner resented Winfield and wound up being banned from baseball because he paid a sleazy two-bit gambler $40,000 to get dirt on him, and
2. Have you seen Winfield’s Hall of Fame plaque? He is wearing a San Diego Padres’ cap. He chose the Padres despite Steinbrenner’s effort a la Jackson to induce him to make it Yankees.

Posada, Williams and Pettitte haven’t made and aren’t likely to make the Hall of Fame, but the Yankees aren’t waiting to find out. Those three sellouts will be money in the bank.

That the Yankees are retiring Pettitte’s 46 is especially intriguing because, according to the commissioner’s office, he will be the only player to have his number retired who has admitted using performance-enhancing drugs.

Randolph will not have his number retired, and though he told me he’s delighted with the plaque, I don’t understand why the Yankees are retiring numbers wholesale but are not including Randolph.

“This is such a tremendous honor,” he said. “It’s an unbelievable honor. And it’s on old-timers day. Goose, Bucky, Mickey, Oscar could be there. Goose was on old-timers day last year. I never dreamed I’d be out there.”

But why not a retired number, considering the way the Yankees are passing them out? Is he any less deserving than Posada, Pettitte and Williams?

A Brooklyn native, Randolph was the Yankees’ second baseman for 13 years, their captain for three. He coached for them for 11 years. He played on two World Series championship teams and coached on four others. Who has been more Yankees than Randolph?

After being jobless for three years, since he coached for Baltimore in 2011, Randolph also had a status that would have served the Yankees well as a coach. They were looking for one, having fired their first base coach, Mick Kelleher, and interviewed Randolph.

However, instead of hiring a first base coach, they hired a third base coach, Joe Espada, and moved the previous third base coach, Rob Thomson, to bench coach and the previous bench coach, Tony Pena, to first base. Espada was a coach with Miami for eight years, the last four at third base.

In case the Yankees forgot, Randolph coached third base for them for 10 years.

When Bud Selig left the commissioner’s office Jan. 25 after 22 years, he did not leave a clean desk behind. Rob Manfred, his successor, inherited several juicy items on which Selig had not acted.

In his strategically procrastinating way – that is, I don’t want to have to decide this – Selig ignored for more than 17 years Pete Rose’s application for reinstatement to the game he had left involuntarily in 1989.

Rose, however, was not alone in dangling from Selig’s rope. The commissioner’s college fraternity brother, Lew Wolff, has been waiting for six years or more to learn if he would be permitted to move his Athletics from Oakland to San Jose.

Much more recently another issue landed on Selig’s desk on East Wisconsin Avenue in Milwaukee, and he has gladly passed it on to Manfred’s desk on Park Avenue in New York. The Tampa Bay Rays filed a tampering charge against the Chicago Cubs in November, accusing them of inducing Joe Maddon to opt out of his contract with the Rays to manage Chicago’s Wrigley Field wonders.

Those are the issues with which Selig could have dealt before heading into retirement but opted to leave them for Manfred. The $25 million or more Selig was making in each of his final years wasn’t enough for him to feel responsible for such decisions. Instead, it was “let my buddy Rob do it.”

One other issue remained, and this is one that may be still hanging around when Manfred’s successor takes office, and I’m not assuming one five-year term for the new commissioner.

The Rays desperately need a new playground, and that facility may be impossible to achieve as long as team owner Stu Sternberg doesn’t want to abandon St. Petersburg. Selig, however, didn’t seem to do anything noticeable to help advance Sternberg’s cause.

I spoke with Manfred about each of these issues on the telephone last Friday. He initially commented on them in an e-mail but called me when I let him know I had more questions than he had answered.

The Rose matter erupted recently following interviews Rose did with the advent of Manfred as the new commissioner. Rose agreed in 1989 to be placed on the permanently ineligible list, thus removing himself from Major League Baseball.

He appealed for reinstatement in 1997, but Selig never acted on the application. Whenever he was asked about it, Selig said he was studying it. It was his way of avoiding making a decision.

In his e-mail to me, Manfred said, “In fairness to Mr. Rose, I do not wish to talk about this matter publicly except that I intend to be fully prepared and informed about the facts of the matter in the event that I receive a formal request from Mr. Rose or his representative.”

When I spoke to Manfred, I asked him if he would act on the 1997 application or require a new application from Rose.

“I’m not going to say anything about the Rose process,” the new commissioner said. “We’ll figure out what we’re going to do.”

Rose, meanwhile, continues to misunderstand his position. For example, he told USA Today, “I just want to be on that writers’ ballot. Let the writers decide. If they want me in, I’m in. If they don’t feel I should be in, I can live with it. Once they lift my ban, I should be just like anyone else. If I’ve never been on the ballot, my clock should start at zero. That will give them 10 years to decide, if they need it.”

Sorry, Pete, you long ago forfeited your right to be on the writers’ ballot.

“According to the current Hall of Fame rules,” said Jack O’Connell, secretary-treasurer of the Baseball Writers Association, “Pete Rose has been out of the BBWAA voting jurisdiction since after the 2006 election. The Hall’s board of directors would have to decide how it wishes to proceed.

“I do not believe anyone has come off the ineligible list since the Hall ruled in 1992 that no one on it could be considered for election, so this is an unprecedented area. But according to the rules, Rose is wrong if he says he is going on the writers’ ballot. Again, that would take a decision by the Hall’s board. I have had no discussions about Rose with anyone at the Hall since 2007.”

Rose is misguided in other ways. After lying for 15 years by denying he ever bet on baseball games, he admitted it in his book, but he said he never placed bets from his manager’s office. John Dowd’s airtight investigation demonstrated otherwise.

Commissioner Selig could easily have rejected Rose’s reinstatement request, particularly because A. Bartlett Giamatti, whom he has always described as his very good friend, was the commissioner who investigated Rose and found him to have violated baseball’s most sacred rule.

Selig, however, chose to let Rose’s application sit in a desk drawer for the last 17 years of his 22-year tenure. The San Jose matter, as unnecessarily prolonged as it has been, hasn’t taken that long. Manfred will resolve that issue, too, though not while the matter is in litigation.

The city of San Jose has lost its lawsuit in federal and appellate courts, and earlier this month the city council voted to appeal the latest ruling to the United States Supreme Court, claiming Major League Baseball is violating antitrust laws by blocking the A’s move.

For San Jose to win the case, the Supreme Court has to overturn the court’s 1922 decision, which is extremely unlikely to happen. The court has never demonstrated a desire to overturn the original decision, even though time and circumstances have changed significantly.

Subsequent SCOTUS decisions have said or suggested that if the 1922 decision is to be altered, Congress is the appropriate body to do it, and Congress has never shown an inclination to do such a thing.

“It’s important that we prevailed in the recent litigation because the exemption has been very important to the way we’ve done business,” Manfred said in the e-mail.“I also think that it’s a good thing that hopefully this will be the end of the San Jose litigation.

“Litigation often distracts people from what the real issue is. And I think the real issue for us, going forward, is that the A’s need a new ball park, and we need to get focused on making sure that we get that done as fast as we can.”

On the telephone, Manfred wouldn’t say how he felt about allowing the A’s to move to the south segment of the bay but said, “We have ongoing litigation with San Jose that we intend to defend vigorously.”

MLB officials are focused on burying the San Jose lawsuit. By now, city officials most likely realize they have to win to have any chance of getting the Athletics. With its lawsuit, the city has done its case no good. Unless it wins in Washington, San Jose will not win in New York.

Had Selig not withheld a decision for so long and had wanted to do what was in the best interests of baseball, San Jose, the 10^th largest city in the United States, would already be home to the Athletics.

However, March 30 will mark six years since Selig appointed a three-man panel to study the situation, and San Jose grew tired of waiting and sued. As it will most likely turn out, the city’s impatience was inadvisable and foolish.

Unless the outcome forces him to allow the A’s to move, why would Manfred give San Jose a major league team after the city challenged the game’s antitrust exemption and forced M.L.B. to spend millions in fighting the suit? San Jose, after all, has no greater right to a team than any other city.

Nevertheless, the Athletics will not survive at their present site. Manfred didn’t acknowledge that likelihood but said, “I think there’s a possibility of getting a stadium in Oakland.”

The Rays need a new park, too. Recent rumors have raised the possibility of the team leaving Tampa Bay for Montreal.

Speaking of the Rays’ owner, Manfred said in his e-mail, “Stu Sternberg has stated repeatedly that he wants his club to remain in Tampa Bay. We ardently support Stu’s optimism and his vision.  With an appropriate facility, Tampa Bay can be a vibrant major league market.”

The Rays and the rest of Major League Baseball have known since their inception in 1998, the year Selig was formally elected commissioner and Manfred became MLB’s chief labor executive, that the Rays needed a new park. That is another issue Selig left for Manfred.

“We’re supportive of their efforts,” Manfred said.

The most recent left-over development facing Manfred is the Rays’ tampering charge against the Cubs, who are not new to tampering suspicions.

The Cubs’ quick signing of Maddon to manage them raised suspicions that they induced Maddon to opt out of his Rays’ contract for a 5-year, $25 million contract in Chicago.

“There is an ongoing investigation,” Manfred said in his e-mail. “When the investigation concludes, we will be transparent.”

When I asked Manfred on the phone to expand his comment, he said, “It’s an ongoing investigation about which I will not comment.”

When the Cubs hired Theo Epstein in 2012 as their president of baseball operations and Epstein hired Jed Hoyer as general manager, some baseball people suspected tampering. However, no one filed a tampering charge, and Selig said he had no reason to investigate the hirings.

During his tenure as commissioner, Selig played down tampering to the extent that he gave the impression he didn’t care about it. By saying “we will be transparent” when the Maddon investigation concludes, Manfred is offering a refreshing approach that didn’t exist under Selig.