Cashman and Epstein Recall the Recent Yankees-Red Sox Past In his first year as the general manager of the Boston Red Sox, before he learned an unwritten rule of the job, Theo Epstein made a trade proposal to Brian Cashman, his counterpart with the Yankees. "Shea Hillenbrand for Nick Johnson," Epstein recalled Tuesday night on a stage with Cashman at Sacred Heart University. You just laughed at me. As the new president for baseball operations with the Chicago Cubs, Epstein is finally free to deal with Cashman. In their nine years as peers in the game's fiercest rivalry, they did not make a trade with each other. The Yankees and the Red Sox have not consummated a deal since August 1997, when Boston sent first baseman Mike Stanley to the Yankees for the pitching prospect Tony Armas Jr. The Red Sox soon used Armas to acquire Pedro Martinez from Montreal, a countermove that still stings. "That was a bad, bad situation," said Cashman, who was then the Yankees" assistant general manager. The dominoes do connect. Epstein inherited Martinez from his predecessor, Dan Duquette, and skillfully added veterans to build a champion in 2004. Three years later, with a more homegrown roster, the Red Sox won again. In the process, Cashman came to fear Epstein - and Epstein, meanwhile, fretted over Cashman. The veteran general manager Kevin Towers, a mentor to Epstein and a close friend of Cashman's, played middleman. "I called him all the time, like, "Hey, what's Theo doing?" " Cashman said. "And he tells me, "Theo says the same thing." " That drew laughs from the crowd here - technically in New England but much closer to the Bronx than the Back Bay. Epstein has been around lately for charity events and to see his family, which is still in the process of moving to Chicago. Epstein is a Patriots fan and will keep a close eye on the Super Bowl, while Cashman roots for the Giants. Cashman roomed in Manhattan with Tim Coughlin, the son of the Giants" coach, during his early years under George Steinbrenner. "He's got a lot of George stories," Cashman said. The pressure of working for Steinbrenner was an obvious burden, but at least, through 2000, the Yankees were winning the World Series nearly every year. The next decade brought the rise of Epstein's Red Sox, and with it a different kind of pressure. In Epstein, Cashman had a bold new rival with a bloodless streak he admired. "A lot of times you get wrapped up in emotion," Cashman said. The Red Sox, once Theo got in there and they started going in the right direction - and obviously passed us, and won the championships - their decision-making was pure, objective analysis, with a lot of discipline about what's best for the Sox rather than the emotional ties to an individual player. The Red Sox, Cashman said, seemed to consistently make the right choices, not the popular ones. For the Yankees, he said, it was like hitting a reset button on their own decision-making. "The best compliment you can give is when you start studying your opponent," Cashman said. We actually took a lot of different things that they were doing and have acclimated into our business. To Epstein, Cashman was equally dangerous, and not just because of the Yankees" payroll. Cashman is easy to talk to, Epstein said, and thus well connected with the marketplace. He seemed to be everywhere, and capable of anything. "We tried to focus on just executing our strategy and building our organization the way we wanted to," Epstein said. We got some rewards from that. But I was never able to totally relax, because I felt like he was always lurking. Epstein was an early adapter to the information revolution of the last decade, easily acquiring David Ortiz, Kevin Millar and Bill Mueller when other teams undervalued them. Epstein lamented that those players would be highly sought now; the 2003 publication of "Moneyball" spilled the secrets. "All of a sudden, within two or three years, the entire landscape had changed," Epstein said. It was a lot harder to make deals and to find value in the free-agent marketplace. And now, it's virtually a flat landscape. Free agency, in particular, has become a bad bet, and Cashman and Epstein have wasted plenty of money. In Boston, Epstein left behind six years of Carl Crawford's seven-year, $142 million contract. Before the Red Sox signed Crawford, Cashman had dined with his agent, trying to drive up the price. "All these negotiations, the team that doesn't sign the guy is better off than the team that actually signed the guy - the joke's on us," Epstein said, before relating the story of his 2002 courtship of Jose Contreras, who signed with the Yankees but failed in New York. Sometimes, there's a winner's curse. Epstein is averse to believing in curses. His Red Sox team destroyed Babe Ruth's in 2004, and now he is charged with delivering a championship to a Cubs franchise that has not won the World Series since 1908. Getting there, Epstein said, will mean rebuilding the infrastructure of the organization, stocking a thin farm system and waiting for imported prospects like Anthony Rizzo to develop. He has not made a deal with Cashman yet, but Cashman has made a hire from the Cubs. On Tuesday, a couple of hours before their speaking engagement, Cashman named Jim Hendry as a special assignment scout. Hendry preceded Epstein as the head of the Cubs" baseball operations. With Hendry helping the Yankees, Cashman's first trade with Epstein - a decade in the making - cannot be too far behind.