There’s no Yankees baseball because there’s no baseball right now. The lockout is now more than 10 weeks old and there’s no end in sight or optimism that the season will begin on time. But
There’s no Yankees baseball because there’s no baseball right now. The lockout is now more than 10 weeks old and there’s no end in sight or optimism that the season will begin on time. But there’s going to be baseball at some point (I think), and when there is, the Yankees have a lot of work to do to their roster.
Andrew Rotondi of Bronx Pinstripes joined me to talk about the offseason and lockout, what the Yankees’ plan should be once there is baseball again and who should play shortstop in 2022.
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
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.
Yesterday, I broke down Boone’s statement of “I make the lineup,” which did nothing other than make me feel at ease about the team’s failure to meet expectations since he became manager because it makes perfect sense that someone who uses the process and strategy to create a lineup he described would fail to meet expectations. Today, I want to look at Boone’s admission of the Yankees needing a shortstop.
“We’re gonna need a shortstop. So however we get there, that’s going to be the interesting thing of the offseason.”
Gleyber Torres’ error on Sept. 12 of last season against the Mets on Sunday Night Baseball was the final defensive miscue straw for a player who to that point had seemingly so many straws you’d think he hated turtles and the ocean.
After sitting by and watching Torres boot routine plays since the start of the shortened 2020 season (a season in which he arrived at Spring Training 2.0 out of shape and effectively sent his career into a downward spiral), Boone finally announced Torres would be moving back to second base permanently. Torres’ error led to a Yankees loss at the most inopportune of time, and no one knew at the moment, but three weeks later, the difference between hosting the wild-card game and going to Fenway Park ended up being one win. One single win. In a regular-season full of losses (70 of them for the 2021 Yankees) there were dozens of games the Yankees blew, gave away and laid down for, so it’s not like Torres’ last-ever error at shortstop for the Yankees was the one that led to them going to Boston on Oct. 3, but it certainly helped.
During Sunday Night Baseball on Sept. 26, Alex Rodriguez said he spoke to Marcus Thames before the game and Thames told him when Torres was called into Boone’s office to find out he was moving back second base “his face lit up and it was like a 2,000-pound gorilla was lifted off his back.” If that’s the reaction Torres emitted from being moved off of shortstop and back to second, why wasn’t the move made much earlier in the season? Boone has been praised for his communication skills and so-called ability to connect with and understand his players, and yet he couldn’t sense Torres was unhappy at short and the position was taking a toll on him at the plate, in the field, physically and mentally? Instead it took 40 regular-season games and seven postseason games in 2020 and 108 regular-season games in 2021 for the Yankees to decide to improve the most important position in the infield.
By finally giving in to the fact Torres can’t play shortstop (the same way the organization finally gave into the fact a lineup full of right-handed hitters couldn’t succeed), the Yankees moved him back to second where he played during the 2019 and 2020 seasons and became a budding superstar who looked appeared to be on his way to being a a middle-infield, middle-of-the-order presence for the Yankees for the next decade-plus.
In 1,088 plate appearances between 2018 and 2019, Torres hit .275/.338/.511 with 62 home runs and 167 RBIs. He finished third in the 2018 AL MVP voting despite making his major league debut until the end of April, received MVP votes in 2019 and was an All-Star in both seasons.
In 676 plate appearances between 2020 and 2021, Torres hit .256/.337/.366 with 12 home runs and 67 RBIs. A player who along with DJ LeMahieu tried to carry the Yankees to an ALCS win over the Astros in 2019 had gone from budding superstar to reclamation project, losing his position along the way.
The last time Torres was a good hitter at the plate, let alone a feared hitter, he was 22. He’s now 25. That’s not to say he’s old. It’s to say it’s been a really long time since Torres was worthy of screwing up the entire roster to make sure his bat stays in the lineup. But the Yankees are accommodating Torres as if he’s still the 22-year-old from going on three years ago, and the accommodation is screwing up the entire infield and roster construction.
Moving Torres to second means LeMahieu is no longer at second and I’d rather have the three-time Gold Glove-winning second baseman playing second base than changing positions daily just so a really bad defender and a no longer valuable bat can be an everyday player. As currently constructed, Torres will play second, LeMahieu will play third, Gio Urshela will play short and Luke Voit will play first. I can’t fathom that being the infield once a new CBA is signed and teams are allowed to sign free agents and make trades again, but then again, these are the Hal Steinbrenner Yankees and it wouldn’t surprise me if he had “Status Quo” tattooed in calligraphy across his shoulder blades. “Running it back” with the same roster in 2022 like Brett Gardner suggested he hopes the Yankees do immediately after their wild-card game loss is a real possibility. It’s probably the most likely outcome. Under the current roster setup, LeMahieu moves to a position he’s a lesser defender at and Urshela moves to a position he’s a lesser defender at. All so Torres be can be a New York Yankee.
And Torres will be a New York Yankee. Not because he’s deserving of it anymore, but because he’s still young and inexpensive, and mostly because the Yankees still likely believe he can get back to being the player he once was (the Gary Sanchez theory) and because his value and stock now resemble that of Facebook. (Sorry, Meta.) The only hope the Yankees would have in moving Torres would be in a change-of-scenery type of deal.
Earlier in the offseason I saw the idea of a Torres-for-Cody Bellinger swap mentioned somewhere. I will personally drive the 3,000 miles to Los Angeles and pick Bellinger up myself if the Dodgers would be willing to do that trade, which they wouldn’t be. While Bellinger might have been a less productive hitter than Torres these last two “years,” he still had two monster postseasons and helped the Dodgers win the 2020 World Series. And if the Yankees are banking on Torres returning to his 2019 form when he finished 17th in AL MVP voting and hit 38 home runs with RBIs and posted a OPS, well, Bellinger in 2019 hit 47 home runs with 115 RBIs, posted a 1.035, won the NL MVP and a Gold Glove. So yeah, I’m ready to make the cross-country drive.
Well, before the Yankees pulled the plug on Torres as an option at shortstop, they reportedly tried to trade for Trevor Story at the 2021 deadline. So the Yankees knew Torres wasn’t the present or future at shortstop as recently as July 31 and yet he remained at the position for another six weeks in the middle of a postseason race. If the Yankees were willing to make Urshela the everyday shortstop for the rest of the 2021, it should have been done much earlier than Sept. 13 in Game 144 of the season.
The Yankees would only need Urshela to play shortstop for 19 regular-season games and then however long the postseason would last (it lasted nine innings), and then they would have a free-agent class Story, Corey Seager and Carlos Correa available to them. You never want to need an everyday shortstop (especially if you’re the Yankees and supposedly competing for a championship every year), but if you’re going to need one, needing one after the 2021 season might be the best time in history to do so.
All the Yankees would need to do to add one of those three to their everyday lineup for the foreseeable future would be outbid the other 29 teams. They wouldn’t need to trade away prospects, just spend money. The resource they have a greater advantage of than every other team in the league and the resource they make more of than every other team in the league. But with Steinbrenner publicly admitting he’s personally working to lower the league’s luxury-tax threshold rather than increase it, which would be in his team’s best interest when it comes to success on the field, it’s unlikely the two remaining options in Story and Correa become Yankees. (Seager signed a 10-year, $325 million deal with the Rangers before the lockout.) Add in the Yankees’ top (Anthony Volpe) and No. 3 (Oswald Peraza) being shortstops, and there’s a better chance the Yankees give a nine-figure contract to either Story or Correa.
Prepare yourself for either a full season of Urshela, who the Yankees were so reluctant to let play shortstop everyday that they wait until the 144th game of the 2021 season, or a one-year stopgap with someone who’s an average to above average defender at the plate, but will a near-automatic out at the bottom of the lineup. Get ready for a bottom third of Gardner, Kyle Higashioka and the stopgap shortstop on many days in 2022.
There’s much more to break down from Boone’s offseason appearance on Sabathia’s podcast.
Aaron Boone’s offseason appearance on CC Sabathia’s podcast had a lot of upsetting and disappointing moments.
Today is Day 71 of the lockout. It’s been more than 10 weeks since the baseball world was halted in the most inevitable and predictable shutdown of all time. An event years in the making only made more obvious by the events of nearly two years ago when at one point the owners and players couldn’t agree on playing 60 or 70 games in the pandemic-shortened season.
There has no been little to no news over the last two-plus months, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing since the only Yankees news prior to the lockout was the daily reminder that Hal Steinbrenner is as much like his dad as Michael Kay is as much like Vin Scully. Seemingly every hour leading up to the December lockout a different big-game free agent came off the board while the Yankees sat on their thumbs and grew that much closer to granting Brett Gardner’s wish of “running it back” with the same core and essentially the same roster that hasn’t been good enough for five straight seasons and has gotten progressively worse over that time. The only news since the first of December has been related to coaching hires, and even that news wasn’t any good, as the Yankees couldn’t even complete the hire of a valued baseball mind like Eric Chavez, who ended up going to the Mets.
Spring training is supposed to begin next week with pitchers and catchers reporting. We’re supposed to already be a week-plus into getting 15-second videos on social media of bullpen sessions for pitchers who have already started workouts. Instead, Major League Baseball is no closer to being a thing again than it was more than 10 weeks ago when Rob Manfred told us a lockout would expedite the collective bargaining process.
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. And nothing was more important than when he said, “No one’s ever made a lineup for me. I make the lineup.” Nothing was more important than that statement and nothing was more upsetting than him elaborating on the process he uses to create his lineups.
I have always believed Boone when he has publicly stated he creates the Yankees’ lineup. Not because I think he’s an honest person. We know he’s far from being that after watching nearly 600 postgame press conferences filled with lies and exaggerations about his team’s performance and injuries. I believe him because there’s too much evidence to suggest otherwise. Any Yankees fan who has watched him mismanage and ruin countless games in four years as Yankees manager knows there’s no Ivy League graduate, analytics guru or data scientist who would ever come up with, support or defend the lineups Boone consistently puts together. No one with even a casual understanding of baseball would bat Gardner second (which he did 14 times in 2021), third (which he did three times in 2021) or fourth (which he did three times in 2021). That alone is enough to prove to me that Boone is telling the truth. He has said as much multiple times in recent seasons, including saying, “Ultimately, I’m writing out the lineup and I’m making these decisions,” when asked if he’s a puppet for the front office after the team’s 2020 ALDS loss to the Rays.
It’s not hard to fill out a major league lineup card, especially when it’s the lineup card of the New York Yankees. It should be as easy as it gets, yet this is the process Boone said he uses on Sabathia’s podcast.
“My process for making the lineup is actually a little bit different all the time. There’s the ebb and flow of the season. Let’s assume everyone is healthy and we’re not going to bed that night with ‘We’re waiting to find out if this guy’s available tomorrow.’ So if our guys are available, a lot of times, I’ll buzz by my coaches the night before going home where we may have a thought. A lot of times it’s usually with Mendy where I’ll just be like, ‘What do you think about this guy in tomorrow?’ And we’ll kind of bounce things off. When Marcus was here, I said, ‘What do you think of this guy in tomorrow? This guy out? What do you think about flipping these guys in the lineup?’ So that’s usually how it starts and then when I come in, usually I’ll come into my office and Mendy will follow me in and we’ll kind of go through our different things if theres a little tweak we want to make.
Boone said that’s the process he uses if the team is completely healthy. If he said that’s how he thought about things when the lineup was full of Greg Allen, Tim LoCastro, Estevan Florial, Ryan LaMarre and Rob Brantly in mid-July, it would be somewhat acceptable, but that’s the process he uses when “our guys are available?” He’s not even close to done explaining.
“Sometimes I’ll reach out to like I’ve even done this with Cash and Cash is not usually very much involved at all. But sometimes if I have a tough decision that I’m really wrestling with, I may call Cash on it. I may call Mendy on my way home. I may call Marcus Thames when he was here on my way home. When there’s that tough decision I have when I’m thinking about getting a different guy in tomorrow or sitting a guy a day, I may go to different people and ask their opinion on it, and then ultimately, I gotta decide which way I want to go.”
When Boone interviewed to be manager of the Yankees, he was so extraordinary that the front office canceled all other interviews and didn’t even hold a second round of interviews, handing Boone the job with no prior coaching experience at any level. I’m certain he didn’t explain this process in his supposed spectacular interview.
“We have a very strong analytics department that gives us so much information that kind of helps us decisions, give us context on what we’re seeing, what we’re looking at. And I think the reality is any of the really strong franchises are very strong analytically, but ultimately, the teams that do it the best are able to … the secret sauce is how do you strike the balance? Because every day is unique amongst itself, especially in a big league season when you’re playing 162 games. So you’ve gotta be able to strike the balance, but as Cash puts it, ‘We want to have a buffet of everything available to us,’ so that we can make really good decisions and I think we do that here even though we get criticized about it a lot.”
“Sometimes I’ll start a sentence and I don’t know where it’s going. I just hope to find it somewhere along the way. Like an improv conversation. An improversation.“
OK, that final part was from Michael Scott on The Office, but everything else came out of Boone’s mouth. Now knowing exactly how his lineup creation process works, I feel much more at ease about the team’s failure to meet expectations since he became manager because it makes perfect sense that someone who uses the above strategy to create a lineup would fail to meet expectations. The man who gave that answer was given a four-year extension to manage the sport’s winningest and most prestigious franchise, and in that time he will oversee the decisions of about $1 billion in payroll.
There’s much more to break down from Boone’s offseason appearance on Sabathia’s podcast. Coming tomorrow: Aaron Boone: ‘We’re Gonna Need a Shortstop.’
My book The Next Yankees Era: My Transition from the Core Four to the Baby Bombers is now available as an ebook!
Sometimes I wonder what life would be like if I didn’t care about baseball. To be one of the fans you overhear at a game interpreting a simple rule wrong or asking where Derek Jeter
Sometimes I wonder what life would be like if I didn’t care about baseball. To be one of the fans you overhear at a game interpreting a simple rule wrong or asking where Derek Jeter is or getting overly excited about a ball that results in a lazy flyout. Sometimes I not only wonder what it would be like to be someone like that, but I actually wish I were someone like that. Someone who didn’t care about the results of a game and whose mood and daily life for the majority of each year weren’t impacted by a game they have no control over.
I have wondered this and wished this a lot over the last 12 baseball seasons. Over that time, I have watched …
The Yankees not include Eduardo Nunez in a deal for Cliff Lee, who would single-handedly swing the pivotal Game 3 of the ALCS …
The Yankees go into a season with the smoke-and-mirrors version of Freddy Garcia and a 38-year-old Bartolo Colon who hadn’t pitched in two years as 40 percent of their rotation …
Robinson Cano, Alex Rodriguez, Mark Teixeira, Curtis Granderson, Nick Swisher and Russell Martin go a combined 10-for-79 as the Yankees scored six total runs in a four-game ALCS sweep …
Lyle Overbay play 142 games in a season, Vernon Wells 130, Chris Stewart 109, Eduardo Nunez 90, Jayson Niz 87 and Travis Hafner 82 …
The Yankees go into a season with one expected everyday regular under the age of 30 …
The Yankees go into the next season without one expected everyday regular under the age of 30 …
Go into a third straight season with only one expected everyday player under the age of 31 (Didi Gregorius at 26) and give 428 plate appearances to Stephen Drew (.201/.271/.381), 642 plate appearances to Chase Headley (.259/.324/.369) and 501 plate appearances to Jacoby Ellsbury (.257/.318/.345) …
Build an everyday outfield of Ellsbury (.263/.330/.374), Brett Gardner (.261/.351/.362) and Aaron Hicks (.217/.281/.336), who would hit a combined 24 home runs in 1,621 plate appearances …
Not take on Justin Verlander’s salary at the Aug. 31 deadline as he would single-handedly swing the ALCS by winning Games 2 and 6 …
Not part with Clint Frazier and Miguel Andujar in a trade for Gerrit Cole who single-handedly swing the ALCS the following season with a Game 3 win only to eventually release Frazier for nothing and never play and have no plan for Andujar …
The Yankees’ ALDS Game 3 starter not know the start time of the pivotal game, suffer the worst home postseason loss in franchise history and have their first-year manager manage the team out of the postseason against their longtime rival …
The front office add no starting pitching at the trade deadline and then endure another ALCS loss when the bullpen was asked to pitch 31 of the 54 2/3 innings in the series …
The manager make the most obvious regrettable first-guess decision in history in Game 2 of the ALDS …
The front office go into the season with 40 percent of the rotation made up of arms that hadn’t pitched in two years due to injury and another 20 percent being an arm that hadn’t pitched in a year and a half due to suspension …
The front office think a team could be successful without any left-handed hitting in a lineup, let alone one that plays 81 games in a stadium with a 314-foot, right-field line …
A team that was the preseason favorite to win the American League end up winning finishing in fourth place in the division and fifth place in the AL and have their postseason end in one game be referred to as “a postseason contender” by the team’s general manager …
A manager who has proven to be in over his head in his position and incapable of making even the simplest in-game decisions, while also blatantly lying about his roster’s performance and exaggerating injury news to the media and fans get a new three-year contract with a fourth-year option …
An owner who has not increased the team’s payroll in 16 years despite the team’s exponential revenue growth openly speak about and vote to decrease the current luxury-tax threshold …
A team that has openly admitted it needs to get better, needs a true shortstop, a center fielder and starting pitching did’t sign a single free agent prior to lockout with all of the great starting pitching options no longer available, the only center field option no longer available and now just two shortstop options available.
Since the announcement of his new contract, I have spent the last nearly seven weeks talking myself into Aaron Boone with better players. All he needs is a better roster! Because that will prevent him from batting Gardner third, using Brooks Kriske (or now someone like him) in extra innings in Fenway Park and choosing Albert Abreu over his entire bullpen with the season literally on the line in Game 161 of the regular season. Just give him better players! Unfortunately, with the way the offseason had played out prior to the lockout, the idea of Boone with better players is turning from an idea into a dream, and a rather unrealistic dream at that.
There are two actual starting shortstop options remaining: Carlos Correa and Trevor Story. Correa is by far the better player, but he’s also a jerk (given his comments following the Astros’ sign-stealing scandal and recent evaluation of Jeter’s career) who comes with a lot of baggage. Like CC Sabathia said on a recent episode of his podcast, Correa has set himself up to be A-Rod if he comes to the Yankees in terms of being a dividing figure in the clubhouse and being booed on the field, and I don’t know if that’s a 10-year commitment this Yankees front office wants to make.
I really don’t know what type of commitments they want to make. One would think the Yankees would be all about big-money, short-term deals, like the one Max Scherzer signed with the Mets, but the Yankees were reportedly not even involved in talks for Scherzer. How is that even possible? How is it possible that the Yankees weren’t interested in the best available free-agent pitcher and arguably the best pitcher in the game who would only cost money, something they make more of than any other team?
Not only were the Yankees not in on Scherzer, but they let the reigning Cy Young winner in Robbie Ray sign with the Mariners on what I think is a favorable contract for the Mariners. They watched Kevin Gausman sign with the Blue Jays, and even Jon Gray (who the Yankees once drafted and have always been connected to) was signed by the Rangers. The Rangers also signed two of the available shortstops in Corey Seager (who was my No. 1 choice for the Yankees to sign) and Marcus Semien. The Rangers mean business this winter. The Yankees mean … I don’t know what the Yankees mean.
It keeps me up at night to think the Yankees will sign either Correa or Story (I think they would be more inclined to sign Story since he will be cheaper and they were connected to him in July) and then call it an offseason. This team isn’t a shortstop away from a championship. They are many, many pieces away from that.
If the old adage holds true that you want to build up the middle, then the Yankees’ current middle is Gary Sanchez, (whose name made headlines this week just for being tendered a contract), Gleyber Torres (who was removed from shortstop and is now being forced to second base, which removes the three-time Gold Glove DJ LeMahieu from the position), no one at shortstop and Aaron Hicks (who has played 145 games in the last three years and in that time has suffered a back injury, a hamstring injury and has had his throwing elbow and left wrist both surgically repaired). That’s the Yankees’ middle: Sanchez, Torres, no one and Hicks. World Series here they come! “Postseason contender!” as Brian Cashman called them in his end-of-the-season press conference.
Both Correa and Story make the Yankees much better simply because they’re breathing and the Yankees don’t currently have an actual shortstop on their roster. That sentence reads like a joke, but it’s far from a joke. However, they need a whole lot more than one of those two. Aside from LeMahieu, they essentially need an entire infield since I have given up on Torres, whose mere presence is screwing up the infield alignment, and they need someone who can be trusted to play a full season in the outfield whose name isn’t Brett Gardner.
On top of that, they need starting pitching. They have Gerrit Cole and Jordan Montgomery. Luis Severino has pitched 27 2/3 innings since the end of 2018. Corey Kluber is now a Ray. Jameson Taillon is recovering from ankle surgery. Domingo German flat-out sucks. Clarke Schmidt is always hurt and has put 31 baserunners on in 12 2/3 innings in the majors. In six months, Deivi Garcia went from looking like the future of the rotation to having a future in an independent league. Michael King is a reliever.
Scherzer is a Met, Ray is a Mariner, Gausman is a Blue Jay and Gray is a Ranger. The Yankees didn’t want to go to a second year for Justin Verlander (just like they didn’t want to take on his salary in 2017), so he’s back with the Astros. Eduardo Rodriguez went to the Tigers, Steven Matz to the Cardinals, Noah Syndergaaard to the Angels and Alex Wood back to the Giants. Even Alex Cobb (who signed with the Angels) or a reunion with James Paxton (who went to the Red Sox) would have been viable options. The Yankees signed none of them.
I really hope there’s a multi-player return trade coming before Opening Day because that seems like the only way the Yankees improve their roster. The remaining free-agent pitchers all might as well be J.A. Happ (who happens to also be a free agent) because there’s no one left who will improve the rotation. And unless the Yankees are going to sign Correa and Freddie Freeman, there’s nothing left in free agency to get excited about.
Still wearing his uniform long after the wild-card loss to the Red Sox, Gardner said, “There’s a lot of uncertain, uncharted waters with this team heading into the offseason … Hopefully we’ll have a chance to run it back.”
Well, he may just get his chance. Whenever the lockout ends, the Yankees will still be the same team they were after that loss. The same roster that has never been good enough to win in the postseason and is now not even good enough to get into the actual postseason and play a series. The same franchise that hasn’t been good enough and hasn’t tried to be good enough for the last 12 years.
No one knows when this lockout will end. Next week? Next month? The month after that? After spring training was supposed to start? After the regular season was supposed to start? A break for baseball means a break from the Yankees, and that’s somehow become a welcome relief.
Aaron Hicks isn’t going anywhere with four years left on his contract, and after wrongfully believing in him to be an everyday option for the Yankees the last three seasons, the same mistake can’t be made for a fourth straight season.
The Yankees went into this past season with the same expected lineup they went into the previous season with. Despite Gleyber Torres’ obvious issues defensively at shortstop and despite Aaron Hicks’ inability to play a full season in his career, the Yankees figured Torres would get better at the most important position in the infield and that Hicks would be available every day to play the most important in the outfield. The Yankees gave up on Torres as a shortstop in the final weeks of the regular season, admitting multiple times this offseason there would be a new Yankees shortstop in 2022. The wise move would be to do the same with Hicks and have a new Yankees center field next season as well.
“Obviously looking at shortstop,” Brian Cashman said at last week’s General Manager Meetings. “Maybe center field.”
I’m glad Cashman is at least publicly recognizing the team has a serious problem in center, even if his use of the word “maybe” is petrifying because this isn’t a “maybe” situation.
Back in February 2019 when Hicks was inexplicably given a seven-year, $70 million extension through 2025 (with an option for an eighth year!), the common response was something like, “It’s only $10 million per year and the Yankees can eventually walk away from it.” Sure, if Hicks played his age 29 (2019), age 30 (2020) and age 31 (2021) seasons the way he played in his age 28 season (2018) when he hit a career-high 27 home runs and played in a career- high 137 games then yeah, the contract would be a bargain and the final years of it could be walked away from and wouldn’t serve as an albatross to the team’s payroll. But Hicks has only played in 38 percent (145 of 384) of the Yankees’ games since signing the extension and that seemingly low average annual salary of $10 million suddenly feels like $100 million with the way the Yankees have operated under Hal Steinbrenner. Add in the Yankees’ inability to develop their own starting pitching or middle infield, needing to pay a premium through free agency to fill those holes, and Hicks’ contract has become a problem.
Giving Hicks that extension was regrettable in the moment, considering he spent nearly his entire 20s on the injured list and thinking he would somehow grow healthier and remain healthy on the other side of 30 was more than wishful thinking, it was plain idiotic. But doubling down the last two years in believing he could be the player he was in one of his nine career seasons was even more regrettable. It will once again be an extremely regrettable decision if the Yankees go into 2022 with the idea Hicks will be their everyday center fielder.
Hicks’ inability to stay healthy creates two issues for the Yankees in that it means Hicks isn’t playing and it means Brett Gardner is. I will never not believe Gardner isn’t going to be a Yankee in 2022, or any season. Even if the entire organization stated he wouldn’t be returning and even if Gardner announced his retirement, swearing to never play for the Yankees again, I still wouldn’t believe it. As long as Gardner wants to play baseball, the Yankees will let him play for them.
It’s very likely the Yankees’ 2022 Opening Day outfield will be Hicks in center, Aaron Judge in right, Joey Gallo in left (with Giancarlo Stanton serving as the designated hitter) and Gardner on the bench as the fourth outfielder. When Hicks gets inevitably injured, Gardner will become the team’s everyday center fielder. It’s the same scenario that has played out for the last three years. An outfielder (usually Hicks) gets hurt and Gardner becomes an everyday player.
If Gardner is on the team, he’s going to play. He will never be a true fourth outfielder. Beginning in 2018, he was supposed to be the team’s fourth outfielder. Since then he has played in 470 of 546 regular-season games (or 86 percent). On top of that, he played in all five of the team’s 2018 postseason games, all nine of the team’s 2019 postseason games (batting third in four of them!), in six of the team’s seven 2020 postseason games and somehow batted sixth in the team’s wild-card loss in 2021. Gardner has played in 21 of the Yankees’ 22 postseason games since becoming the team’s fourth outfielder.
If Hicks is the 2022 Yankees’ starting center fielder, the Yankees are going to need someone who can be the team’s actual starting fielder when Hicks goes on the injured list. Someone not named Brett Gardner. Again, the most games Hicks has ever played in a season was 137 in the season before he signed the extension, which means he still missed 25 games, or nearly a month of the 2018 season. Again that was in 2018. Next year it will be four years since he accomplished that “feat.”
Hicks was also 28 when he played in “that many” games. He will be 32 for the 2022 season, and since the 2018 regular season, he missed part of the 2018 postseason with a hamstring issue, missed the first six weeks of 2019 with a back injury suffered during a 35-minute bus ride in spring training, missed the last two months of 2019 with an elbow injury that required Tommy John surgery, would have missed the first half of the 2020 season if it began on time recovering from that Tommy John surgery and then was out for the last 126 games of 2021 (127 if you count the team’s one postseason game) after needing season-ending wrist surgery. So since Hicks’ personal-best 137 games played in 2018, he has suffered a debilitating back injury, had his throwing arm surgically repaired and had his left wrist surgically repaired. For a guy who spent his prime and his career on the right side of 30 on the injured list as well as his first two years in his 30s, I don’t know how anyone could expect him to age well.
Hicks wants to play winter ball this winter since he has barely played baseball over the last three years, though it hasn’t been approved by the Yankees yet. According to Boone, Hicks would probably bat third for the Yankees if they had a game tomorrow.
“He sent me some video of him in the cage the other day swinging and he feels great,” Boone said of Hicks. “I think he looks great.”
Well, if Boone thinks Hicks “looks great” then who am I to argue? Then again, Boone named Hicks his 3-hitter long before spring training ended last season and then when Hicks went 1-for-12 with seven strikeouts in the season-opening series and Joel Sherman asked Boone about moving Hicks down in the lineup, Boone literally laughed off Sherman’s suggestion and responded, “He will be fine.” Eight games later, Hicks was batting sixth, and four games after that, he was hitting seventh before eventually being lost for the season after playing in only 32 games. So yeah, he wasn’t fine and hasn’t been fine. But you do have to take any Yankees player evaluation from Boone with a grain of salt (OK, the whole salt shaker) since he did just spend the entire spring, summer and one fall night defending his team. And it was Boone who said “medicine” would fix Hicks’ wrist back in May when asked if Hicks would need surgery.
“I think it could go either way, really,” Boone said. “In these cases it seems like a lot of times, the medicine works and knocks it out.”
Back in March 2013, Mark Teixeira suffered a similar wrist injury and played in only 15 games that season, batting .151/.270/.340, which is in line with Hicks’ .194/.294/.333 line from his 32 games in 2021. Like Hicks, Teixeira was a switch hitter.
The following season (2014), Teixeira was still feeling the effects of his surgically-repaired wrist and hit an abysmal .216/.313/.398 over 123 games (which is about the amount of games you could only dream of Hicks playing in). It wasn’t until 2015 when Teixeira began to hit like his old self (.255/.357/.548). If Hicks were to have the same return-from-injury woes getting his swing back that Teixeira had, then that means we can expect a very crappy version of Hicks in 2022 and hopefully get him back to being somewhat above average in 2023. (Teixeira was also a former All-Star and MVP finalist and Hicks has a .729 career OPS.
Hicks has now played in 493 of a possible 870 regular-season games as a Yankee (or 57 percent over six years). To put that ridiculously low amount of games played in perspective, Jacoby Ellsbury played in 520 games in his six years with the Yankees and that includes playing zero games in both 2018 and 2019. Hicks has been as healthy as Ellsbury.
The same way Hicks’ inability to stay healthy creates two issues for the Yankees in that he isn’t playing and Gardner is, not building the roster with him as the team’s center fielder for six months solves two issues: it removes Gardner from the equation and essentially makes Hicks the team’s fourth outfielder. Hicks isn’t going anywhere with four years left on his contract, and after wrongfully believing in him to be an everyday option for the Yankees the last three seasons, the same mistake can’t be made for a fourth straight season.
