NEW YORK — If you could pick a fantasy baseball day to be general manager of the New York Yankees, any day, you would pick a 16-1 victory over the Boston Red Sox to close out a critical series in the Bronx.Problem is, the job hasn’t been open since the winter of 1998, when Brian Cashman was promoted into the big chair. He started in the organization as a Division III baseball player in 1986, when a friend of his father’s, a racetrack publicist, loaned the college kid a little money (he’d lost some playing cards) and offered to get Cashman an internship with his buddy George Steinbrenner.The Dodgers fan who grew up hating the Yankees was raised by the Yankees to hate the Red Sox. Forty years after that internship, Cashman was busy Sunday watching his team take the four-game series from its rivals to earn some breathing room in a wild-card race favored to end exactly where it did last year — at Yankee Stadium, site of Boston’s elimination in three.But with 25 games to go in the 17th season played since the Yanks last won a championship, Cashman said, “We are not where we want to be. We want to try to win the division. … When the dust settles, that’s our first goal.”Just not the last goal.“There are some serious potential World Series champions calling the American League home right now, a number of teams more than capable of doing that, including Boston,” Cashman told The Athletic. “We want to be that team.”Aaron Judge liked what he saw in Sunday’s rout of the Red Sox. The injured star is nearing a return. (Vincent Carchietta / Imagn Images)Asked if his Yankees were good enough to win their first World Series title since 2009 — assuming Aaron Judge’s return to full health, of course — Cashman said, “I think we have the talent to do that.“I’ve seen teams that are world-championship caliber not make it, not just us but elsewhere, and I’ve seen teams that didn’t look World Series capable all of a sudden get hot and run the table. It works a lot of different ways. It’s a whole different resetting of the clock for all teams that qualify for the postseason.”As GM, Cashman is about to take the Yankees to the playoffs for the 24th time. They settled for the AL’s top wild-card seed last year after losing the divisional tiebreaker to the Toronto Blue Jays and then paid the price for it in a four-game Division Series loss.The Yankees poured their heart and soul into winning back-to-back sudden-death games against Boston in the wild-card round to advance. “And then we couldn’t line up our pitching for that next round,” Cashman said. “It doesn’t mean we couldn’t have overcome Toronto regardless, but that didn’t help. If we win the division this year, we can line up our pitching the way we want. Tampa is making it difficult, but there’s still time on the clock.”The Yankees have four late September games left to play against the Rays, whose dramatic 11th-inning comeback victory over the San Diego Padres on Sunday kept their AL East lead at 4 1/2 games. But between now and then, Judge will very likely be back in the lineup.The captain will be traveling with the team on its West Coast trip and, according to manager Aaron Boone, intensifying his pregame workouts. Barring a setback, the Yankees expect Judge to return in the coming weeks, maybe against the Colorado Rockies (Sept. 8-10) or the Minnesota Twins (Sept. 14-16).Maybe against the New York Mets on the 25th anniversary of 9/11.“I’ll sign up for whenever he’s ready,” Cashman said, “and what that date happens to be is yet to be determined. I’ll sign up for making sure we get him back and he’s fully capable and prepared for what comes next, which is obviously going to be a grind. He’s going to step into a fast-moving, fast-paced game, but he knows what he’s getting into.”Neither Cashman nor Boone seemed terribly concerned about rookie shortstop George Lombard Jr. and his tweaked knee, with the GM saying that a short-term stay on the injured list would only occur “if he has lingering soreness and we are forced to do that.”Meanwhile, there doesn’t appear to be a team in the AL that matches up with the pitching and the Judge-led roster that Cashman has assembled. Tampa Bay might play baseball better than the Yankees do, just like Toronto did last fall. But if the Yanks have the active bodies they are supposed to have in October, there’s little question they should be representing the AL in the Fall Classic.“All I’m focused on is figuring out how to win this thing,” Brian Cashman said. His expiring contract is a topic for “another day.” (Jayne Kamin-Oncea / Imagn Images)Cashman has taken the Yankees to the World Series seven times, including the five-game loss to the Dodgers in 2024. He knows he has an ever-growing legion of loud fanbase critics who don’t care about all that, who only want to talk about the title drought, and who should really consider what it is like to root for the Mets or Jets … or what it was like to root for the Knicks without winning it all for a half-century-plus.But at 59, Cashman said he is just as hungry to win a ring today as he was that February day he was promoted in 1998. “You’re not in this for any other reason but to take pride and joy in delivering a championship and to be part of a special group of people that gets there,” Cashman said.“We’ll see where this year’s team takes us. We’ve got a month to go, and we haven’t even punched our playoff ticket yet, so we’ve got to get in. … But the goal is that opportunity for a lifetime of memories for those who haven’t been a part of a championship in the past, and for those who have.”Cashman’s contract expires at season’s end, and he is expected to sign an extension with Steinbrenner’s son Hal. The GM did not care to offer much about his status Sunday other than to say, “I like how Jazz (Chisholm Jr.) answered it. He’s a free agent at the end of the year too, and he just said he wants to win the World Series and nothing else really matters.“My contract is for another day. It’s not something I control or am thinking about. I’m very honored to be a part of this franchise as long as I have, but right now all I’m focused on is figuring out how to win this thing.”The whole thing.If the Yankees do finally win their 28th championship, Sunday’s blowout in the Bronx will be a day to remember. Red Sox fans will recall a diving center-field catch that wasn’t ruled a catch in a scoreless game that devolved into an unholy mess.Yankees fans will recall a powerful statement made by the latest title team built by Brian Cashman, the intern who outlasted them all.