Greg Bird, for example.
I still blame him for our current predicament. Not personally, mind you: Players come and go, and most crap the bed. That said, Bird in 2016 looked as sure a bet as we'd seen in this millennium. Every spring training, he killed. He fielded his position and, at least in the beginning, he hit to the opposite field. Best of all, he batted lefty - a critical component to every great Yankee team: the LH 1B.
Bird delivered what remains arguably our greatest post-season moment in the last decade: His HR off Cleveland's Andrew Miller broke a game three deadlock, propelling the Yankees into the 2017 ALCS. That night, he seemed to explode into stardom. Cleveland couldn't get him out. I would have bet the house: He'd be our 1B for the next 10 years.
Last year, he didn't see one pitch. Not one.
At age 27, he might be done. He's a free agent.
We know what happened to Bird - and, yet, we don't. He had a bad foot. The injury kept returning, and he couldn't hit with it. Over two years, with Bird resting his paw, the Yankees tried Ji-Man Choi, Chris Carter, Garret Cooper, Tyler Austin, Neil Walker, Brigadoon Refsnyder and finally Luke Voit, the current first-base lug nut. Most hit lefty. And that's still the issue.
With Voit at first, the Yankees tilt far too heavily to the right. (LH Mike Ford was terrible this year, leaving us no option.) As a result, we played Brett Gardner in LF, benching Clint Frazier and forcing Miguel Andujar to the mines of Scranton. Also, we batted Aaron Hicks - Mr. 220 - third, just to break up the RH string.
Bird should have been our LH 1B, batting third, between Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton, driving in 100 runs per season.
I am of the persuasion that the Yankees must trade Voit, a popular player who is surely at his peak. But they probably won't get what he's worth, and moreover, we have no young LH prospect ready to step in. We can trade for another veteran! (Sigh. How about a show of hands? Who out there wants us to trade for another veteran? Yeah. That's what I thought.) So... what do we do? Maybe sign Greg Bird? (That's a joke.) He's looking for work. And I'm looking for a reason to believe.
Lefty-righty splits should be based on actual performance, not on a rigid directional spread. Neither Gardner nor Ford could hit left- or right-handed pitching this year, and displayed little power, so it just STUPID to give them precedence over Frazier AND Andujar--a typically doltish Cashman blend of recency bias and veteran bias, and let the empirical reality under his nose be damned. The guy is an idiot--no need to embellish it any further.
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