I didn’t want Brett Gardner back for the 2019 season. I had seen enough from the then-35-year-old outfielder and his career-worst season to want the Yankees to go in a different direction. Entering the first true season of this group’s championship window of opportunity, I wanted a younger and better left field, with the assumption Giancarlo Stanton would be primarily used as the designated hitter. I wanted the Yankees to sign Michael Brantley.

I’m not sure if the Yankees ever even gave a thought to signing someone other than Gardner because in the first minutes of free agency, they brought him back on a one-year, $7.5 million deal, believing his career-low .690 OPS in 2018 wasn’t indicative of who he was at what’s now considered to be an advanced age in baseball.

Gardner was said to be the team’s “fourth outfielder” entering 2019, a position which might have gone to Clint Frazier if not for a lost season due to unfortunate injuries. As a reserve player with extra rest, the logic was that Gardner would be more productive than he had been in the career-worst 2017.

In 2019, Gardner went from being the supposed fourth outfielder to being an everyday player. The same thing happened in 2020 and again in 2021. Gardner played the third-most games on the team in 2019, the fifth-most in 2020 and the third-most in 2021.

On Monday, Gardner’s agent Joe Bick said Gardner intended to play in 2022 and prefers to play for the Yankees.

With Aaron Judge, Joey Gallo and (unfortunately) Aaron Hicks under contract, along with Giancarlo Stanton, who the Yankees are cautious to ever let play the outfield (despite his increased production when he does), Gardner would at best be the team’s fifth outfielder. But fifth is still too high on the depth chart. As long as Gardner is on the roster, he will find his way into the lineup with regularity. Injuries will make sure of it.

Before Opening Day in 2019, Gardner went from fourth outfielder to starting center fielder as Hicks started the season on the injured list (after injuring his back on a 35-minute bus ride in spring training) and Stanton joined Hicks on the IL before April 1. On April 20, Aaron Judge joined them both. In what was supposed to be a season in which Gardner would transition from an everyday player to a role player, he played in 141 games.

In 2020, Gardner was back again as the fourth outfielder. Prior to the pandemic ruining and shortening the season, Hicks was set to miss half the season recovering from Tommy John surgery, Judge was going to miss about half the season after the Yankees were unable to diagnose his fractured rib and punctured lung and Stanton was also going to miss half the season with a calf injury. If the 2020 season started on time, some combination of Gardner, Clint Frazier, Mike Tauchman and Miguel Andujar was going to be the everyday outfield.

Spring training in 2021 started without Gardner, but a week into it, he was re-signed. Despite Aaron Boone opening spring training by saying Frazier was now the team’s starting left fielder, in the third game of the season Gardner was starting in left field and would go on to play 140 games during the regular season with only Judge and DJ LeMahieu playing more.

In 2019, the Yankees needed nine outfielders to get through the season. In only 60 games in 2020, they needed seven. In 2021, they used Gardner, Judge, Stanton, Gallo and Hicks, along with Frazier, Tauchman, Andujar, Tyler Wade, Greg Allen, Estevan Florial, Ryan LaMarre, Tim Locastro, Jonathan Davis, Trey Amburgey and Hoy Park.

Last season, the Yankees got a miraculous 287 combined games played from Judge (148) and Stanton (139), and if you’re counting on that type of health in 2022, well, there was a guy in New York who recently won the lottery for the second time in three years. Hicks has missed 251 of the Yankees’ last 401 regular-season and postseason games. He’s now 32 and the most games he has played in a season was 137 back in 2018, which was a hamstring injury, significant back injury and a surgically-repaired elbow and wrist ago. Thankfully, Gallo has been exceptionally healthy in his career.

Gardner can’t be even the Yankees’ fifth outfielder in 2022 because he can never just be a bench option used a couple of days a week. No fourth or fifth outfielder on the Yankees ever remains that.

But if injuries aren’t the reason Gardner becomes an everyday player for the Yankees again in 2022, his manager will be.

Under Boone, Gardner lost his job to Andrew McCutchen after the 2018 trade deadline. Gardner wasn’t in the lineup for the 2018 wild-card game against the A’s and wasn’t in the lineup for Game 1 of the 2018 ALDS against the Red Sox. But when Hicks went down with a hamstring injury in that Game 1, Gardner came off the bench to play the rest of that game, as well as Games 2 and 3. When Hicks was healthy enough to play in Game 4 with the Yankees facing elimination, Boone benched McCutchen in favor of Gardner.

In 2019, Gardner was supposed to be the team’s fourth outfielder for the second consecutive year. But in a season that became about replacement players and “the next man up,” Gardner found himself playing in 87 percent of the team’s games, batting in the Top 4 spots in the lineup 46 times in 141 games, and when the postseason started, Boone penciled him in as the team’s 3-hitter. He would bat third in all three games in the ALDS, and then again in the pivotal Game 3 of the ALCS against Gerrit Cole, in which his first-inning at-bat swung the game (and the series) in the eventual Yankees loss.

Gardner was awful for six of the eight weeks of the 2020 regular season, but the two weeks he was productive happened to come at the end of September and right before the expanded postseason. So when it came time to fill out the lineup card for Game 1 of the postseason, Gardner’s name was on it and Frazier’s wasn’t after Frazier carried the Yankees’ offense along with LeMahieu and Luke Voit through two forgettable months.

Spring training in 2021 started without Gardner, but a week into it, he was re-signed. Despite Aaron Boone opening spring training by saying Frazier was now the team’s starting left fielder, in the third game of the season Gardner was starting in left field and would go on to play 140 games during the regular season with only Judge and DJ LeMahieu playing more.

Boone loves his veterans and he loves Gardner. When the going gets tough, Boone goes to Gardner. When the Yankees’ backs are against the wall and their season is on the line facing elimination, Boone has gone with Gardner every time and every time the Yankees have been eliminated. Boone will continue to go with Gardner every time. He’s one of his guys, and being one of Boone’s guys is in no way tied to ability or performance.

As long as Gardner is a Yankee, he will play, and he will play nearly every day. If injuries don’t force him into the lineup, Boone will. It’s time to move on. It’s been time to move on.

Way back in mid-October, the Yankees decided the status quo of being knocked out of the postseason as early as possible was something they wanted to continue to do as an organization and so they gave Aaron Boone a new contract. A month after that, Boone went on CC Sabathia’s podcast to speak about the 2021 season. Aside from saying the obvious, “As you might imagine, I don’t look at my mentions on my Twitter,” Boone said a lot on the podcast.

Last week, I broke down Boone’s statements of “I make the lineup” and “We’re gonna need a shortstop.” Today, I want to look at Boone uttering the words that should make every Yankees fan question whether or not they want to invest more of their time into this team.

“Do we look largely similar to what we’ve looked like last year?”

That was a real thought the manager of the Yankees had and he had the audacity to actually say in a public forum. That’s not an original or personal thought either. Boone said exactly what the organization is likely considering and has most certainly talked about internally.

It doesn’t matter that Boone followed that question by asking, “Or is there a blockbuster trade or signing that all of a sudden moves this guy out, trades this guy and then that starts affecting everything else?” All that matters is his admission that the 2022 Yankees looking like the 2021 Yankees is a possibility being discussed within Yankee Stadium this offseason.

It’s not a thought any person associated with the Yankees should have. How could any Yankees employee, whether you’re signing checks, making deals, filling out the lineup card, batting third, watering the infield or cold calling prospective ticket buyers think having a nearly identical roster to 2021, which was nearly identical to 2020, which was nearly identical to 2019, and which was nearly identical to 2018 should be an option for 2022?

The 2021 Yankees were the heavy the odds-on favorite to win the American League, and they finished third in their division and fifth in the AL with their postseason lasting nine innings. The 2020 Yankees barely reached the postseason with an eight-team AL field, and were ousted in the ALDS. The 2019 Yankees lost to the Astros in six games after DJ LeMahieu and Gleyber Torres proved you can’t win a seven-game series with two productive postseason hitters. The 2018 Yankees were historically embarrassed and humiliated in four games against the Red Sox, suffering the worst home postseason loss in the history of the franchise.

Boone isn’t the first one to think the Yankees could or should look in 2022 like they did in 2021. Brett Gardner, the last remaining member of the 2009 World Series team and the only Yankee to have ever won anything (even if it was so long ago he likely doesn’t remember what it’s like to win), said nearly the same thing after the team’s wild-card loss to the Red Sox. Wearing his uniform for an extended period of time after what could be his final game as if he were Wayne Gretzky, Gardner used the phrase “run it back,” hoping the Yankees would return the same core and roster in 2022 that has never gotten the job done.

“Running it back” can’t be an option. It can’t be. “Running it back” means an everyday infield of Luke Voit, Gleyber Torres, DJ LeMahieu and Gio Urshela. It means trusting Aaron Hicks to play the first full season of his career at age 32, and knowingly going into another year with Gardner eventually getting everyday at-bats. It means more nonsensical and unnecessary drama on who the starting catcher should be and treating each individual Gary Sanchez at-bat like an audition for his job. It means not having enough starting pitching yet again and it means relying on your bullpen to protect a one-run lead nearly every night.

The Yankees aren’t getting to the World Series and losing because they’re short a starter or adding a big bat to the current roster away from getting over “the hump” Boone likes to refer to. They’re not one player away. They’re a-lot-of-the-roster away. No matter what Boone idiotically says about “how the league has closed the gap on the Yankees” or how “the margin is slim” within the AL, there has always been a gap for his Yankees and the margin isn’t slim.

The problem is while it shouldn’t be an option or a thought, “running it back” is most likely what the Yankees will do. There’s only so much that can change on the roster due to contracts and value, and the easiest route to a 26-man roster in 2022 is staying relatively the same as it was in 2021.

The status quo is the easiest and cheapest route for the Yankees to take and for a team that had the same payroll in 2022 as it did 17 years prior despite exponential growth in their revenue streams, theres’ nothing Hal Steinbrenner likes more than his Yankees looking largely similar to what they looked like the year before.