Hot Stove! The Outfield!

The Yankees' outfield situation headed into 2020 is best compared to your basic, Neolithic mammoth trap.

You're stomping along, squashing all those little cavemen like so many bugs, when suddenly you put your foot down on what looks like a perfectly ordinary patch of vegetation...and find yourself plunging into a gigantic pit dug by some bunch of idiots.

I'm sure that the Yanks' potential 2020 outfield looks great on paper, which is Cooperstown Cashman's favorite playing field.

Judge, Gardy, Stanton, Tauchman, and maybe Hicks, if he can show pluck similar to this year and make it back from that operation before September.

Oh, and Ellsbury.  Did I mention Ellsbury???  And then there's Estevan Florial and the Very High Ceiling...

On second thought, this doesn't even look that good on paper.

You can count on Judge to be injured for about a third of the season, and to disappoint for the other two-thirds.  Once Gardy gets his new deal, is he going to keep juicing?  Or just revert to the old Gardy, who inevitably got hurt and drooped in the second half?

Who knows if Tauchman is for real—and that weird injury had PEDs written all over it, I have to admit.  And surely we can count on Giancarlo Stanton, the Blanche DuBois of MLB, coming down with another case of the fantods.

And how the hell can you be the New York Yankees and not have a single, minor-league outfielder ready to step up to the big club?

What would I do?  Here's your quick fix:  if El Matador, Andujar, can throw, see if he can play left field, where his relative speed and the arm he used to have should work well.

Keep Tauchman, and give it a long, hard think before you cut Maybin, who can do a lot of things.  You might have to keep Gardy as insurance, if Andujar can't move to the outfield.  Seriously consider signing Martinez if the Red Sox cut bait, though of course he's mostly a DH.

But above all, give The Red Menace a clean slate, and let him show what he can do.  Maybe even in centerfield, where he'd have one less wall to deal with.  He may be too broken to fix, but we need to take that chance.

WWCCD?  Exactly what you expect.

Frazier will be traded—and with Coops having systematically destroyed his value, he will bring even less than Cashman's disastrous Sonny Gray deal netted.  Maybin will almost certainly be cut.  And of course HAL is not going to sign off on a big signing like Martinez.

That leaves an outfield thinner than finely shaved Swiss cheese:  Judge, Stanton, Tauchman, and a Gardner doubtless signed for entirely too much money and too much time.  Coops will, as usual, assume that the best-case scenario will undoubtedly come true—that Hicks will be gamboling about the Stadium grass by June, and Florial will suddenly blossom.

Don't count on any of it.  We will be lucky if Tyler Too and Thairo the Pharaoh aren't patrolling the outfield come July.