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.

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.

Yesterday: Aaron Boone: ‘I Make the Lineup’

Coming on Monday: Aaron Boone: ‘Do We Look Largely Similar to What We Looked Like Last Year?

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!