YES Network’s Gracie Cashman: ‘I want to prove I deserve to be here’

Gracie Cashman, the daughter of longtime New York Yankees general manager Brian Cashman, has lived largely in her dad’s shadow for most of her life in the eyes of the public. But now, she is looking forward to forging her own path in the family business of baseball in a different way.

Cashman, a 25-year-old graduate of Northwestern, now finds herself in an enviable position of working as the host of the YES Network series called The Story of My Number, which premiered on Thursday and will feature a number of Yankees greats of the past including Don Mattingly, Andy Pettitte, CC Sabathia, Tino Martinez, Nick Swisher, and current manager Aaron Boone.

In a recent conversation with Jenna Lemoncelli of the New York Post, Cashman detailed that she is eager to prove that she is more than capable of excelling in her new role, and that she didn’t earn this opportunity because of her father’s status within the organization.

“I think sometimes you enter a space talking about baseball, and in terms of success in baseball, my dad is extraordinarily high up there, so I completely get the assumption or the way that it looks to walk into a room being his daughter,” Cashman told Lemoncelli. “There’s definitely something to prove there, that I earned it and I deserve to be here, and that I worked to be here, and that I worked to stay here.

“The door was not kicked down [for me], and I was not shoved through it. And I don’t want it to go unacknowledged that I completely understand that those connections are there and impact those decisions. So, I’m not blind to that. But I think because I’m aware of that, I go in and I really want to prove that I deserve to be here, and that they made the right choice in picking me and that it wasn’t just a fluke nepotism thing.”

Naturally, people are going to gravitate to that assumption with anyone talking baseball with the last name of Cashman attached. But Cashman, who first got her start talking baseball on a reality show powered by DraftKings called The Tryout, seems to be determined to break away from that stigma.

But still, it will certainly take a bit of an adjustment for Cashman to cover the Yankees organization that she has been around her entire life, which she detailed in her conversation with Lemoncelli.

“It feels weird to call anybody that my dad works with his co-workers, because I’m positive they’re all gonna be at my wedding,” said Cashman. “They are his only friends, they are deeply engrained in our lives. So it’s really special to then get to work to an extent for the organization, but also in talking about these really special memories and it was definitely informative.”

[New York Post]