Yankees Mag: Even Better Than the Real Thing

If you had to choose a single word to describe Scott Burrows, you couldn’t do any better than “Australian.”

Everything about the guy screams it, in a way that towers over any other attribute you see upon meeting him. He’s incredibly tall, but stature has nothing on his big, jovial personality, or a laugh that’s contagious enough to be weaponized. He peppers nearly every sentence with words we couldn’t even consider printing here, never offered with menace or bravado; he’s simply a person as comfortable modifying a noun with an f-bomb (or worse) as any more conventional adjective.

Again … Australian.

This past November, Burrows was one of about 90 dreamers who turned the Yankees’ facilities in Tampa, Fla., into a baseball fantasy land. Burrows is a regular participant in the annual Yankees Fantasy Camp, slipping into his pinstripes while sitting at a locker in the renovated home clubhouse at George M. Steinbrenner Field -- the same room where the Yankees players dress during Spring Training, and which the Tampa Bay Rays called home for the 2025 regular season.

As commitments go, Burrows probably puts as much on the line as anyone. Forget, for one second, the not-unsubstantial costs involved with registering for a big league team’s fantasy camp; this is not a cheap vacation for anyone, although you’re unlikely to find a camper who doesn’t feel like they get more than they paid for. The 48-year-old Burrows, though, spends 30 hours in transit from Canberra to Tampa. After connecting in Brisbane this year, he flew 15 hours to Dallas before making the final leg of an odyssey he would repeat in reverse just a few days later. Once he touched down in Tampa, his regular fantasy teammates were there to pick him up, “And then the boys are going, ‘Oh, you’re coming out for beers!’ I’m like, ‘Jesus … sure.’”

Good luck keeping Burrows away from his favorite week of the year, the days that he gets to play ball with the buddies he has been making since his first fantasy camp in 2021, the guys who have come to play a massive role in his life through good times and bad, through sickness and health.

“I couldn’t ask for a better bunch of mates,” Burrows says. “And if you know anything about Australians, mates are a big … thing.” (Use your imagination to fill in the missing word.)

Burrows is without a doubt the perfect illustration of what fantasy camp is all about. The Yankees were part of some far-off magical world for an 8-year-old growing up in Australia in the 1980s, a kid who begged his parents to buy a VCR so he could tape the Game of the Week that aired at 3 a.m. Navy blue was Burrows’ favorite color, so he chose the Yankees, in the same way that some American kid might fall for a particular European soccer club or perhaps a favorite planet.

It’s a fantasy, right? The crazier, the better.

Some 40 years later, a veteran passenger on what purports to be a once-in-a-lifetime trip is right where he belongs, and in good company. You’d be shocked how much us denizens of the real world can learn from a couple days spent in fantasy land.

***

AmySue Manzione has been running Yankees fantasy camps for 20-plus years, managing an operation that includes two men’s camps (one in November, one in January), a women’s camp and a family clinic. Along with a small but hardworking staff, she puts together everything to give the participants the experience of a lifetime, from honoring team requests for players returning to camp to helping coordinate on-field birthday celebrations. Of course, that’s on top of her other responsibilities. And she’s always trying new things: This past January, she coordinated with the Braves to bring over their fantasy campers from North Port, Fla., to play against the Yankees attendees and enjoy a roundtable discussion about the 1996 World Series with veterans of those Braves and Yankees teams.

Years ago, when Manzione started with the Yankees, she was working at the reception desk at Steinbrenner Field when -- during her first week -- one particularly ill-fated fantasy camp required three separate ambulance visits. “There were three heart attacks that week, and I’ll never forget the Boss throwing a fit,” she says, laughing (while also acknowledging that they haven’t had any such problem since).

But aside from making sure that everyone stays healthy and well fed, Manzione sees her role as catering to the guests who pony up to be treated like Yankees for a week. “To me, if you’re not here, I’m not here,” she says. “I’m here for you. So, whatever you guys need, whatever you guys want.”

The November camp this year had eight teams, while the January edition -- typically a bit more cutthroat, but still fun for all skill levels, Manzione says -- had 10. Each team gets two former Yankees as coaches, along with training and other support staff. Ask any participant, and for all the joy of playing at GMS Field and the Minor League Himes complex, for all the excitement that comes with being around beloved former Yankees, little compares to the experience of walking into a clubhouse and seeing your nameplate above a locker with a sparkling jersey hanging inside.

“You can think about what it might be like, but you don’t realize what it is until you’re here,” says Tony Imbimbo, who lives in Connecticut and works in research development for NYU Medical School. “The first time I walked in, I just started taking pictures because this was amazing.”

Imbimbo played on the Bats in November; his coaches were Mike Torrez and Charlie Hayes. Torrez pitched a complete game in the 1977 World Series clincher and caught a popped-up bunt for the final out. Hayes caught a pop foul for the final out of the 1996 World Series, kicking off the most recent Yankees dynasty. Despite their remarkable connection to iconic moments, Torrez and Hayes aren’t Hall of Famers, nor are they what most fans would call legends of the game, but like anyone else who wore a big league team’s uniform, they have memories to share and insight to offer anyone who cares to listen. Manzione knows that she’s probably not going to convince titans such as Derek Jeter to spend a week coaching and entertaining fantasy campers, but she also knows that the veterans who simply enjoy the opportunity to teach some ball and spend the rest of the time laughing about old times are the best people for events such as this.

“First and foremost, you want them to have a really good time,” says Homer Bush, a reserve on the 1998 Yankees and a regular fantasy camp coach. “And if I can give them a nugget or two to help their performance, that’d be a nice little goal. But for the most part, just come here and have a good time and get away from your regular life.”

For Ed Reynolds, November marked his sixth time putting on the pinstripes, and he is something of a fantasy camp professional. Inspired by the experiences he has had in Tampa and elsewhere, he recently started his own camp at legendary Negro Leagues ballpark Rickwood Field in Alabama. Reynolds has run five camps there so far, and he says that they have raised about $54,000 to support the historic landmark’s upkeep. Bush and Gil Patterson are among the names familiar to Yankees fans who have coached at Rickwood, and Reynolds has taken the things that he has learned at Yankees camp and the others he has attended to create his version of perfection.

Reynolds knows that the renovated clubhouses at Steinbrenner Field are a nice amenity, but considering the draw of Rickwood Field, where the locker facilities could charitably be called spartan, he also knows that a fantasy camp doesn’t succeed or fail based on any luxury elements. Instead, he offers a quote that he put on the back of a baseball card issued to participants of another camp:

“You never get tired of being 12 years old again.”

***

To be sure, 12-year-olds need discipline, and while everything about the fantasy camp experience is light-hearted, the punishment for falling out of line can be plenty real -- and costly.

Every morning after breakfast, the entire camp comes together for a kangaroo court, a tradition straight out of real-life baseball in which teammates keep each other in check. Fail to run out a grounder? Ignore a take sign and swing at a 3-0 pitch? Give up a hit on an 0-2 count? Expect to be fined.

At Yankees camp, Mickey Rivers is judge, jury and executioner, assessing fines with wisecracks and barely anything resembling concern. As silly as the whole thing seems, it’s a huge part of building camaraderie among the campers, while also giving a sense of the accountability that helps big league teams thrive. “You try to just have fun,” Hayes says. “This morning in kangaroo court, we had fun with a rookie kid. I went up to him after it was all over, and we were playing our first game. I said, ‘I hope you’re not going to take that personally. We’re just having fun.’ That’s how we do it. And he got two hits today!”

The details of the court proceedings at fantasy camp are almost entirely unprintable for a pair of reasons. First, again, the language; this is an R-rated room. But more importantly, one shudders at the possible punishment for being caught taking notes during the proceedings. From memory, the players on the Thunder, who had a particularly rough outing the day before, got fined $5 per error. (Conveniently, they were also allowed to pre-pay for any future errors.) Another player got called out for running onto the field to play defense while still wearing his helmet. He realized what he had done wrong and chucked the helmet back toward the dugout, but it ricocheted off the ground and hit one of his coaches, Clay Bellinger. That cost him a crisp $20 bill.

The whole thing is done in a boys-will-be-boys manner. If the guys are riding you for something, that probably means you’re part of the group.

“If they didn’t make fun of me, I’d be concerned,” says Tim Martin, a pilot who attended both 2025 camps, in January and November. “If they were ignoring me, I’d be like, ‘I’m doing something wrong.’”

Martin is a Navy vet, and he’s not alone in noticing a certain familiarity beneath the veneer of fantasy camp’s manicured fields and well-laundered uniforms. “I was 24 years military,” he says. “When I got out, everybody was saying, ‘It’s not the same.’ This fills my band-of-brothers jones.

“We have something in common that is just so Field of Dreams, man.”

Those happy few do a little bit of everything together over the course of the week. They eat together, they drink together, they travel into town together (pity the newcomer who takes the camp-provided bus, not knowing that he’s supposed to ride with teammates). In plenty of cases, the bond isn’t just created by the whims of a team assignment. Robby Berger has a couple million followers on his various Instagram accounts. He’s a golf influencer and a Cameo superstar, and when he and his brother, Brian, decided to take their father, Mike, to celebrate his 70th birthday, they knew they’d be among the youngest participants. Berger spent the days having the time of his life, while also creating loads of content, then noticing with pride the reactions his videos were getting from guys such as Anthony Volpe, Austin Wells and Anthony Rizzo. But any bravado they walked into camp with faded quickly as Robby and Brian, while lucky to leave with muscles intact and bones in one piece, still felt aches and pains they never imagined possible. It was all worth it, though, as they watched their father smile (albeit through an ever-present and constantly worsening limp).

“My dad’s getting older, and I don’t know how long he’ll be able to come back and do these,” Berger said. “So, I’m really not taking it for granted.”

***

Martin became something of a star at the January 2025 camp, in less-than-ideal fashion. He made it into the post-camp blooper reel twice, which wasn’t actually the worst part of the experience. He also ruptured his Achilles and found himself devastated in his hospital bed down the street from the camp facilities, realizing that the experience he had waited 30 years for was over. His wife picked that moment to share that his two brothers and sister had chosen to surprise him by coming to watch him play.

So Manzione decided to let Tim’s brother finish out the week in his place. The uniform fit, so why not?

“God, I love this place,” Martin says. “They can’t do anything better.”

Martin needed a redemption tour, so he was back in November. “This has already been the greatest week of my life,” he says of the second go-round of a once-in-a-lifetime experience. He’s far from alone.

“I literally just had this conversation a week ago,” Manzione says, recalling a woman who was thinking of sending her boyfriend on the trip of a lifetime. “She was like, ‘Oh, it’s his 50th birthday. I’m going to present it as a once-in-a-lifetime thing.’ And I was like, ‘Stop right there. He’s young. I’m just warning you: This is not going to be one and done.’ And she was like, ‘I’m kind of afraid of that.’”

This past January, 90 of the 130 campers were repeat attendees, a shockingly high percentage. They help Manzione’s staff create the camp’s institutional memory, maintaining a Hall of Fame and helping rookies learn the ropes. A lot of them play on the same team every year; one team, the Blanchards (named after former Yankee and beloved fantasy camp coach Johnny Blanchard) has a stunningly diverse collection of merch. They have a WhatsApp text chain that is wildly active throughout the year, and Burrows notes that when they reunite in Tampa, the team rents the biggest vehicle it can get to shuttle them around. They dub it the USS Blanchard. “It takes about three minutes to walk around,” he says. “It’s like an aircraft carrier.”

The returners make the camp what it is, but the natural counter to that is that people notice when a regular isn’t back. In 2024, Burrows learned that some health problems he was dealing with were more serious than he realized, and that it would force him to miss camp for the first time since 2021, when his work for Australia’s defense department had him posted in Washington, D.C., and his boss told him to take a week to head to Florida and live out a dream he always talked about.

Not content to let a camp go by without Burrows feeling involved, his teammates had something up their sleeves. “They rang me at 5 in the morning,” he says. “I’d spent the week in hospital. I’d been up unwell until 2 or 3 in the morning, and then they were trying to get me out of bed at 5:30. There’s 20 messages; I thought someone had died.”

Quite the opposite. The campers just wanted Burrows on the phone to witness YES Network’s Meredith Marakovits -- who serves as the emcee for many of the camp events -- inducting him into the Hall of Fame. Given a clean enough bill of health, Burrows learned that he would be able to return for the November camp. He booked his flight and took a screenshot of the confirmation, then texted his teammates the photo along with a simple question: “Does the USS Blanchard need a navigator this year?” The response was overwhelming. Burrows gets choked up just trying to describe it, before going uncharacteristically silent.

If you ask him, he’ll talk about winning the championship at his first camp, and the emotions of wondering if he’d ever be able to afford to get back, before deciding that he was willing to make other sacrifices to make it possible. Obviously, the baseball is the uniting force behind the camp; what happens on the fields, when the players suit up and get to hear play-by-play over the PA system from Paul Olden is undoubtedly huge. But at the bar on the first night of November’s camp, Jim Leyritz -- whose home run in Game 4 of the 1996 World Series was a key moment in the Yankees’ championship drive -- notes that, “This thing,” referring to the fantasy camp, “isn’t really about the baseball,” adding that the same could probably be said for big league baseball.

Poll the coaches throughout the camp, and it becomes clear: The best memories they have of being big leaguers, the things their brains go back to? It’s usually not the baseball. It’s being with the boys. Traveling together. Living together. Winning and losing together. Getting fined in kangaroo court.

“That’s really one of the biggest things I miss about playing,” says camp coach Adam Warren. “Just hanging out with the guys in the locker room, talking baseball. And that’s what I get to do this week.”

“I don’t know what I’d do without it,” Hayes adds.

For Burrows, that comes through in the reactions he got to his text this year, the F-bombs he drops as he recalls the responses. Like anyone else, he initially thought he was paying thousands of dollars to cosplay as a New York Yankee for a few days. Instead, he learned what it means to be a pro ballplayer, and in particular, a Yankee.

“I got put in with a team of blokes who are just amazing and get it,” Burrows says. “And it took me probably two innings out there -- like literally two innings -- to see that this is what it’s all about."

Jon Schwartz is the deputy editor of Yankees Magazine. This story appears in the March 2026 edition. Get more articles like this delivered to your doorstep by purchasing a subscription to Yankees Magazine at www.yankees.com/publications.