GOTTA PLAY THE FIELD
If the Yankees are serious about winning a championship, they need to put their nine best players on the field as much as possible. Simple? Yes. Actual chances of this happening? Slim to none.
Players are slowly starting to trickle into the team’s spring training facility in Tampa, the first sign that the season will soon be upon us. Barring an eleventh-hour trade or free agent signing — probably not out of the question, but unlikely given the fact that they’ve had three and a half months to address this and still did nothing — left field is going to be an offensive weakness for this team.
That is, if they play it safe and roll with some combination of Oswaldo Cabrera and Aaron Hicks. Having that duo as the left field plan is insanely underwhelming and sure to launch fans into fits of frustration, with Cabrera because of the natural issues that hamper any 23-year-old, and with Hicks because he might just not be very good anymore. But they are indeed the safe route, in that it saves the team money on the open market and keeps them from having to deal anyone from their internal ranks.
Bryan Reynolds looks like he’ll be remembered as the one that got away. Trading the farm for him would have made the team demonstrably better but could have also been a tad reckless depending on what kind of haul the Pirates were asking for. A low-level free agent deal could have been a palatable, safer option as well, but the Yankee front office clearly has a different definition of safe than the people who fill their ballpark. Those people could be spared from Hicks’ slumps on offense and Cabrera’s inevitable growing pains if the Yankees had ventured away from safety this offseason, though there is still one more “unsafe” option that could unlock an even more potent starting lineup.
Giancarlo Stanton is not going to die if they put him in the outfield.
He’ll easily be the worst defensive player in the Yankees’ outfield every time they trot him out, but Harrison Bader and Aaron Judge are excellent defenders at the other two spots and countless teams from major league history have survived with a defensive liability in left field. It will increase his chance of injury for sure, and the big man has had at least one lower body injury in each of the last four seasons, but putting him in left field also allows for the optimal starting nine to play together.
With Stanton in left — which doesn’t necessarily need to be every day, but perhaps 60 to 70 times, as he did in 2018 — the Yankees can put either DJ LeMahieu or Gleyber Torres at designated hitter while the other one takes second base. This deployment means getting LeMahieu and Torres (good hitters) at-bats over Hicks (a bad hitter) and Cabrera (a talented but still wildly inexperienced hitter). All that for the price of a little defensive downgrade and more miles on Stanton’s