Dear Cash: Keep Gardy and ship out Ellsbury with a lifetime supply of Ace bandages

The fracking aftershocks continue from yesterday's trade. It's clear that another OF will likely go before Brian Cashman dons his elf ears and does his annual rappelling stint down the tallest building in Whiteguilt, Ct. Currently, our OF population resembles rural China before the single-child rule kicked in. If the Yankee OF candidates debated, Fox Business News wouldn't let them all appear. We have:

Brett Gardner
Jacoby Ellsbury
Carlos Beltran
Aaron Hicks
Mason Williams
Slade Heathcott
Aaron Judge
Ben Gamel
Dustin Ackley

The current consensus: Gardy is gone. After all, he's 32 (just two weeks older than Ellsbury, BTW), he crashed at the end of last season like an Elon Musk rocket test, and he hasn't swiped more than 24 bases since 2011. Most of all, he's the guy other teams want. But that's not the reason to trade him.

For starters, Ellsbury's career is on a more Jeb Bushy downward trajectory - (his last three B.A.'s: .298, .271, .257) - and no matter what he's doing next May, every Yankee fan knows Ellsbury is always one checked-swing away from the next MRI. He falls apart more often than the plot of an M. Night Shyamalan movie.  He won't suddenly become Lou Gehrig at age 33.

I don't know if he has a no-trade clause, and if so, how hard he'd invoke it. Nobody's talking about moving to Selig-waukee. But Ellsbury comes from Oregon, and all this talk about Seattle coveting Gardy ought to allow the notion that Hal Steinbrenner bundle some of his hard-inherited money and make a counter offer. It's time to shed Ellsbury's ridiculous 7-year deal, which was announced on the near eve of Joggie Cano's westward exodus, and - hence - always held that pungent odor of a face-saving Yankee p.r. ploy.

Hal should pay off Ellsbury, then call the Dodgers, Giants, Padres, Diamondback and - yes - our trading cousins in Seattle, and offer them cash and a life supply of ankle wraps. I'd rather have Gardy gasping for air in September than Ellsbury back home, icing his testicles. If we're destined to have a china doll in our OF, I'd rather it be Slade Heathcott, whose story - and I believe, potential - is far more enticing than Ellsbury.

I don't mean to knock Ellsbury here. He's a fine player. He just gets hurt too much. Boston realized it. Now, we've realized it. Soon, it will time for another city to realize it. He probably has a few decent seasons left. But this we know: He. Will. Get. Hurt.

The best part of Yankee rumors? They almost never come to pass. That's one certainty about Cashman. He uses misdirection in talks with writers. (He lies.) Nobody in the NYC press corps was mentioning Aaron Hicks until around 3 p.m. yesterday. And right now, nobody is talking about Ellsbury, because Cashman is jiggling the shiny Brett Gardner bauble.

This we know. Somebody will go. Wouldn't it be neat if we showed loyalty, recognized a fighter, appreciated our own, homegrown, solid, overachieving player... and kept Gardy?