HE’S GOT NEXT
With Sanchez and Judge already crushing Yankeeland, Frazier has makeup to be next in 2018
MOOSIC, Pa. — Just after 2 p.m. on Cinco de Mayo, the northern Pennsylvania sky thick with cloud cover that looks like weekold Manhattan snow blackened by car exhaust, the RailRiders’ resident redheaded slugger enters the home clubhouse wearing light khakis and white sneakers, a Louis Vuitton bag slung over his shoulder.
Rick Ross’ “She on my d—” blares from the speakers hanging around the oval room, and other Yankees prospects relax in lounge chairs, their eyes glued to the TV screens where one of their former RailRiders teammates, home-run machine Aaron Judge, and the real Bronx Bombers get ready to play the Cubs at storied Wrigley Field – a mere 700 miles west of PNC Field.
Clint Frazier, the 22-year-old blue chip outfield prospect and the RailRiders’ designated hitter on this Friday night, wears his curly ginger locks short these days, his hairline even with his earlobes.
It’s been two months since Frazier diffused a mini-media maelstrom by consulting with Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson and Yankee manager Joe Girardi about shearing his then shoulder-length hair. And it’s been a month since the Georgia-born Frazier accepted Yankees radio broadcaster Suzyn Waldman’s apology via Twitter following Waldman’s claim that Frazier asked the organization to “un-retire” Mickey Mantle’s No. 7.
Frazier says all of that spring training blather is in his rearview mirror now, and that his first Yankee spring training experience was a rich and rewarding experience that stretched well beyond a barber’s shears and defending his reputation. The multiskilled outfielder “played great in the spring,” according to Yankees general manager Brian Cashman, and now Frazier is letting his bat and glove do the talking in the International League, where everyone is taking notice – from his RailRiders teammates to his TripleA manager Al Pedrique and all the way up the pinstriped hierarchy, including Cashman and the Bombers’ front office.
“I enjoyed it. As far as being around the guys on the team, I learned a lot,” says Frazier, referring to his time in Tampa – the Yankees’ spring training site. “Any time you get to be around guys like Matt Holliday, or Gary (Sanchez), or someone like Judge, it’s good for you as a player to just kind of see how they go about their business and try to emulate them as much as possible. I’m just trying to get up there with the big league club and try to help out and accomplish a dream.” lll After the blockbuster 2016 deadline trade that brought Clint Frazier, southpaw pitcher Justus Sheffield and two other players to the Yankees from Cleveland in exchange for stud lefty reliever Andrew Miller, Frazier was sent to the Bombers’ Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Triple-A affiliate.
The hype that preceded Frazier – he was the No. 5 overall pick by Cleveland in the 2013 Major League Baseball Amateur Draft – was akin to the headlines Sanchez started garnering right around that same time with his homer binge. Or the same hype Judge is now creating with every blast he sends out of a major league ballpark.
Pedrique, the Venezuelan-born former shortstop who had a cup of coffee with the Mets in 1987 before a trade sent him to the Pirates, says that when Frazier arrived last year, it was a difficult adjustment for the young baseball prodigy, and one that possibly translated to inconsistencies at the plate and on defense.
“Everybody talked about (Frazier), what kind of trade he was involved in, so he put a lot of pressure on himself toward the end of the season,” says Pedrique. “He wanted to show the organization what Frazier was all about. In one game.”
Cashman told the Daily News last year that Frazier “got baptized in Triple-A” during the 25 RailRiders games he appeared in, when he batted .228 for SWB. Pedrique adds that Frazier “was separated from everybody” on the RailRiders at first, after he joined the team.
“We tried to make (Frazier) feel like part of the team,” says Pedrique, who saw then how hard the righty-swinging Frazier was trying to impact a game with one swing. “I told him, ‘Listen, that’s impossible. You need to relax. Be yourself. It’s gonna take some time.’”
Frazier kept up a steady dose of social media posts last year shortly after the trade that made him a Yankee – expressing via Twitter his excitement about wearing the pinstripes, trying to woo an Instagram hottie named Jen Selter, and in November, joking in a tweet to Nationals superstar Bryce Harper that Frazier could provide the former NL MVP with some hirsute tips “when you join the Yankees in the future.”
Frazier also documented via Twitter his winter military-style workouts with trainer Bill Sonnemaker in Atlanta, along with posts like, “i’m my own hype man” (Dec. 8). Frazier had already befriended none other than Reggie Jackson when the two met during Instructional League last year, and Frazier says that when spring training opened earlier this year, he looked to Mr. October as a mentor, while also gleaning valuable advice from the veteran Holliday.
“(Jackson) was in the dugout during most of the games in spring training. When I wasn’t playing, I hid off in the back with him, watching the game, and just talking about things that I’m going through at the plate, or as a player at the time,” says Frazier. “Reggie’s still a very good mentor for me. I’m looking forward to seeing him again. He cares a lot. Any time you get to talk to him, you’ve got to have all your ears turned on.”
Frazier says Holliday’s counsel was more simple and succinct: “Keep your circle small and your world smaller.”
“For me, I was kind of caught up in some stuff that (was) a distraction. (Holliday) just told me to make sure that you know who you have in your corner, and that they’re good ones for you,” says Frazier. “Matt was a really big help for me.” When the media seized on “hair-gate,” Frazier elected to have his red mane cut, even though he says “I came in (to spring training) with my hair fitting the policy.” “It is what it is,” says Frazier, when asked if he’s surprised the hair issue became a story. “People still ran with it. I cut it, and it seemed to calm things down and let me just go out there and play. I can’t predict what people are going to write. I’m not going to give a reaction to it either.” Of the claim by Waldman that he inquired about Mantle’s jersey, and if the Yankees would ever “un-retire” No. 7 – a claim the Yankees said was false – Frazier says only that he's moved past the incident.
“What I tweeted was the apology that (Waldman) extended my way,” says Frazier. “I was trying to bury it after that, just not worry about it.”
Cashman, in addition to being duly impressed with Frazier’s spring training performance, says that he also admires the way Frazier comported himself in Tampa, deflecting the distractions and learning to balance life in a pinstriped fishbowl.
“The more you get to know (Frazier), you realize how driven and determined and caring he is. There’s an interest level in finding the right way to go about things with this organization – ‘Does this work?’ — and he’s trying to find the right balance between the personality he has and the organization he’s playing with,” says Cashman. “So there are clearly growing pains that come with that. With the hair, he voluntarily was going to do what he felt was in his and our best interests – because it became such a fixation with the media – and he just decided to cut it completely.
“The most important side, he played great in the spring, and he’s playing really well at
Scranton,” adds Cashman. It’s Friday night in Moosic, and the RailRiders players wear decidedly un-Yankee colors of glow-in-thedark lime green and black. The announced attendance at PNC Field is 4,443, but it appears there are far fewer fans in the stands on this chilly night to see the game between SWB and the Syracuse Chiefs. Frazier receives a smattering of applause during introductions when it’s announced he is the RailRiders’ DH batting third, and Frazier immediately makes an impact with his bat in his first plate appearance. With two outs in the first inning, Frazier socks a 0-1 fastball off Chiefs righthander Kyle McGowin up the middle for a base hit, but he is left stranded. He hits a sac fly in the third — a rope to left field — and Frazier draws a walk in both the fourth and sixth innings. He ends his night by whacking an RBI single in the eighth inning. The RailRiders romp to a 10-2 win, and Frazier pushes his average north from .239 to .256 after going 2-for-2 with a run scored and two RBI. His average would be even higher if not for what Cashman, Pedrique and even Frazier say is some bad luck with the strike zone Frazier is getting early in the season. “He’s been extremely unlucky. His behind-the-scenes data that we’ve tracked, he’s getting a terrible strike zone,” says Cashman of Frazier. “He’s getting called out on balls a lot. He’s doing a great job of controlling the strike zone, not chasing bad pitches, attacking good pitches, impacting the baseball with hard exit velocity. But he can’t control bad umpire judgment on balls out of the zone that they’re ringing him up on.” Frazier says simply that he’s “run into some tough calls.” “We looked the other day at my expected batting average with balls in play – it’s .368 – but I’m lining out. It’s like every time I get a hold of a ball I hit it right at somebody,” says Frazier.
Pedrique, however, says one of the many positive signs he sees this year compared with 2016 is Frazier’s plate discipline.
“Last year (Frazier) would go to the plate, no game plan, see the ball, swing,” says Pedrique. “Now you can tell he’s putting himself in good hitting counts. He’s laying off breaking balls out of the zone. Last year, he was swinging at them. He’s making solid contact. He’s more consistent right now. It’s exciting, because when you see a kid who’s 22-yearsold and little by little he’s starting to figure things out on his own, definitely it’s a sign that something’s there.”
Frazier says his first RailRiders road roommate was Judge, the towering outfielder now blasting away in the Bronx and beyond.
“It’s fun to see what (Judge) is doing. He’s turning into a superstar up there,” says Frazier. “Yeah, I dream about playing in the Yankee outfield in general. I’m not gonna narrow down one guy to play with because I want to be up there and play with all of them. It’s fun to watch a guy like (Judge) go up there and have the success he’s had. He deserves it, and he’s a great person. He’s getting rewarded the way that I think he should be.”
Frazier says he lives by himself now, and that “it gets pretty lonely sometimes.”
But he keeps in close contact with his parents and older sister, and Frazier says his girlfriend – soon-to-be Wofford College graduate and track athlete Faith Jewkes – is moving to the Scranton area to be with him after graduation from the South Carolina school. He says his relationship with Jewkes “has been really good for me.”
“It’s good when you have someone to kind of hold you accountable for things that you do. Overall, she’s (given) me perspective on things that I thought were problems that really aren’t,” says Frazier. “You can’t have good without the bad. I’ve gone through some bad things, and I’ve gone through some good things. She helps shed light more on the positive things than the negative.”
Frazier says he and Jewkes want to start getting active in charity work in the communities around Scranton, and hopefully in New York City communities in the not too distant future, if Frazier’s baseball arc continues to climb upward.
Pedrique says that he thinks Frazier would be better off spending 2017 with the RailRiders – “Let him get 400, 500 at-bats if possible. Defensively, he needs to be consistent throwing to the right base, see the cutoff man, understand game situations,” says Pedrique. And as long as Judge, veteran Brett Gardner and the other Yankee outfielders are slugging, Frazier’s promotion to The Show may take some time.
Cashman has been around long enough to know not to place an “untouchable” label on any prospect. “Yeah, I don’t think it’s fair to say that to anybody,” says Cashman.
But the Yankees GM also says in the same breath that Frazier’s pinstriped era in the Bronx is something that Cashman and the front office are eagerly awaiting. The redhead’s day will come.
“We gave up a pretty impactful player for the future and opportunity of another player, along with Sheffield and two others,” says Cashman. “Let it play out. Bottom line is, Frazier is not ready for anybody’s major league roster right now, but the development plan that we collectively have between him and us — whenever the time is right in the future, whenever that future may be, I look forward to him being a productive Yankee.”