"Brian Cashman, above all, knows the peril of being acclaimed champion of winter in baseball. It was, after all, Cashman himself who anointed Theo Epstein with that title last offseason after his Red Sox counterpart's spectacular hitting haul of Adrian Gonzalez and Carl Crawford – and we all know how that worked out.

Nevertheless, after Cashman's stunning Friday the 13th pitching parlay, in which he swooped into the stalled marketplace and came away with two top-of-the-rotation starters in Michael Pineda and Hiroki Kuroda, as well as an elite pitching prospect in 19-year-old Jose Campos, he has earned himself GM of the Winter honors. Somewhere, after this all came down Friday night, you could almost hear the ghost of Russ Hodges shrieking: "The Yankees win the pennant! The Yankees win the pennant! The Yankees win the pennant!""