Will the Yankees keep the wrong Frazier?

Everyone knows the Yankees last week pulled off an incredible bank heist in swiping Gioncarlo Stanton from Derek Jeter, with or without the gift basket. Unfortunately, now comes the hard part:

Laundering the money.

Yesterday, they cleaned $13 million by dispatching Chase Headley back to San Diego. Sadly, to do this, they had to add a serviceable young arm, Bryan Mitchell, to the bundle. Now... with Headley and Starlin Castro disappeared, Cooperstown Cashman has effectively washed $22 million from next year's payroll. The Mafia would be envious. But the big purge - Jacoby Ellsbury's $22 million per season - is yet to come. And there is no Maytag large enough to handle it.

Today's grapevine of the Gammonites - via George King of the NY Post - suggests that, for the Yankees to jettison Jacoby, we might have to add Clint Frazier to the pot. 

You know what I think of that? Blaughhhh. I just puked on my keyboard. To vanish the Chief - a solid center fielder who could easily be the MLB Comeback Player of 2018 - we'd have to include a rising slugger like Frazier? Pardon me. Blauuugh. Frazier remains one of the Yankees' most intriguing young players - a larger than life personality, a potential star - and we're supposed to turn him into the spoonful of sugar so another team can swallow Ellsbury? No fukking way... No, no, no... blauggh!

I get it that baseball has become the upside-down, and that bad contracts now overwhelm even great players. And with Stanton aboard, the Yankees now possess perhaps the two worst contracts in Major League Baseball, if not all of professional sports. That's okay; we're a big, wallowing Death Star. We can handle boondoggles - as long as we don't do something incredibly stupid... which brings me to another gem currently circulating on George King's terror wire: 

That Cashman is considering signing Todd Frazier.

Yep, the young Frazier would go, and the old one would return. Seriously, can you feel the hope draining from your system? Sure, the Toddfather is a sweetheart, and he loved being a Yankee, and he wants to play close to his Jersey home - but he hit .212 - Chris Carter territory, and when the music stops on his deal, mark these words: We will be adding a decent prospect just to coax some other team to take him off our sweaty little hands.

Expensive veterans are baseball's version of the outmoded Hewitt Packard desktop: To get rid of it, you must pay a recycling fee.

Worse, Cashman is supposedly looking for a veteran 2B to "anchor" the infield. That's "anchor" - as in "immovable." Will the Yankees suddenly ditch a youth movement that brought us Aaron Judge, Gary Sanchez, Luis Severino and Greg Bird, and return to the ways of 2010-2016... the good ole days of Pronk and Soriano? If we sign the Toddfather, that means Miguel Andujar rots in Scranton, until - of course - he becomes the sweetener to deal another bad contract. And will we sign some ghost of Stephen Drew to handle second-base? Will we turn to stopgap veterans, as we did last spring with Carter. Wow. Can you feel the excitement draining? Let's bring Brian Roberts out of retirement!

Yeah, I recognize that Andujar and Glyber Torres - the seeming heir apparent at second base - are no sure things. Neither was Aaron Judge last spring. In fact, on the final weekend of March, the Yankees were debating whether to send him back to Scranton for more seasoning. (Imagine this, for a moment: Disillusioned and depressed, Judge might have slumped in Triple A, and who knows where we would be now?) Part of what made the Stanton heist so exciting was the notion that the 2018 Yankees would be a mix of established and rising stars - the returning sluggers plus the youth of Glyber, Clint, Andujar, Chance Adams and Justus Sheffield. Now, suddenly, we're actually thinking of trading Clint Frazier merely to launder Ellsbury's contract? Wow. Now there's a grim foreshadowing of the day when Stanton starts to degrade, and we're still on the dime for $100 million.

I've said this before, and I realize it's not a popular sentiment: If the Yankees must eat Ellsbury's contract, then grab the fukkin fork and start chewing. And if we're not willing to do that, then Cashman has to do something equally odious: Grit his teeth, keep the Chief, and trade Brett Gardner instead. We must not trade prospects. The rebuild isn't over. This isn't about 2018. It's about the next 10 years. We are not the Houston Astros, looking at a one-and-done. Let's keep the right Frazier.