The Yankees are ignoring reality.
Nearly every day since Aaron Hicks went down on May 12, the team has penciled Brett Gardner into center field. This would have been fine in 2019, when Gardner was still regularly hitting the ball hard, slugging over .500 and bopping a surprising 28 home runs.
Those days are way past gone.
Gardner’s numbers have dropped off dramatically since that late-stage resurgence. Now in his age-37 season, Gardner provides negative on-field value for a team that’s been trying to wring offense out of its dry dish towel of a lineup. Now, Gardner was never meant to be the starting center fielder. Ideally, the Yankees would be playing Aaron Hicks in that spot while deploying a rotation of Gardner, Clint Frazier and Miguel Andujar in left field. Hicks’ wrist injury — and more recently, Andujar’s less severe wrist injury — plus Frazier’s bout with vertigo have put the Yankees in a tough spot.
Trading Mike Tauchman in April left the roster with one fewer outfield option, and the refusal to play Giancarlo Stanton in the field has put the Yankees between a rock and Gardner’s .194 batting average. For a team still fighting tooth and nail for a postseason spot, starting a center fielder with a bat made of balsa wood is actively hurting their chances.
Let’s start with Gardner’s raw numbers. Along with the .194 average, he’s slugging an unplayable .304, as 24 of his 37 hits this season have been singles. The patient veteran can still work a walk — his 13.7% walk rate is higher than both Aaron Judge’s and Stanton’s — but now that he’s no longer a stolen base threat, even those free passes have become less valuable. The advanced numbers are even less kind.
By wRC+, a statistic that quantifies a player’s offensive value by weighing each outcome (double, triple, etc.) rather than treating each time on base equally, Gardner is the fifth-worst offensive outfielder in the game. Of the 93 major league outfielders who have made at least 200 plate appearances this season, only four have a lower wRC+ than Gardner’s. The league average wRC+ is always 100. Every point above or below 100 means that hitter is one percentage point better or worse than league average. For instance, Judge’s 147 wRC+ means he’s been 47 percentage points better than a replacement-level hitter.
Gardner has a wRC+ of 76. A replacement-level hitter would be better by a whopping 24 percentage points, and Gardner is still in the lineup every single day.
The Yankees have a few solutions to this self-created problem that they stubbornly and confusingly haven’t addressed yet. They’ve already made a few attempts — first trading for Tim Locastro and now calling up 26-year-old outfield prospect Trey Amburgey, who was hitting .312 at Triple-A — but those aren’t going to make a big enough splash, or even a ripple. Even before Andujar hit the injured list, manager Aaron Boone was playing Locastro next to Gardner rather than over him. That doesn’t make any sense. If the club is going to add outfielders, they need to be Gardner replacements, not neighbors at the bottom of the order.
The Pirates’ Bryan Reynolds and Rangers’ Joey Gallo would be obvious upgrades on the trade market. If the Yankees decide to buy, getting someone that knocks Gardner out of the starting nine is of the utmost importance. But the puzzling aspect of this whole thing is why they haven’t acted sooner. The front office has sat on its hands and watched Gardner hit .192 since May 1, apparently coming to the mind-boggling conclusion that everything is fine.
Part of the devotion to Gardner could be because he’s the last remaining player from the 2009 World Series-winning team. That devotion is somewhat warranted, as Gardner has given a lot to the pinstripes. His 1,421 career hits put him in the top 25 of the franchise’s illustrious history. But the goodwill of the past doesn’t buy any hits today. The Yankees similarly held on to CC Sabathia, the other holdover from the ’09 team, until his body literally gave out during the 2019 ALCS. If Boone, general manager Brian Cashman, and the rest of the Yankees’ think tank run that plan back for Gardner, they won’t have the luxury of sending him off in the ALCS, let alone the playoffs.
If it’s not for purely sentimental reasons, one could at least grant that injuries have put the Yankees in this unfavorable spot. But a surefire way to get new and improved players, and get past the injury excuse, is through spending money. Valued at $5.25 billion, this is something the second-most valuable sports franchise in the world could afford several times over. When straits got dire and Gardner’s production thinned out (which, again, was months ago), the Yankees could and should have dipped into their pocketbooks. It’s not like sending a team cash considerations for a down-the-middle outfielder would have put the Steinbrenners in the red.
The same could have been said in the offseason when the Yankees gave Gardner a two-year deal worth $5.1 million to come back. Upping that dollar amount even slightly — chump change for the Yankees — and chasing, say, Kyle Schwarber, would have been much wiser. The hindsight game is always easy, but the Yankees’ entire season looks much different if Schwarber — who the Nationals got on a reasonable one-year, $10 million contract — were attacking the right field short porch. He definitely couldn’t play center field, but Schwarber’s 25 home runs likely would have been enough to build Judge a semi-permanent home in center.
No matter what the Yankees do in the second half, continuing to push the “season’s on the line” narrative while trotting Gardner out there every day is irresponsible. Whether it’s a trade, moving Judge to center and breaking the glass around Stanton’s outfield glove, or simply playing Locastro instead of the legacy act, something has to be done. It should have been done yesterday, just as it should have been done last week, but this Gardner-sized wound needs treatment, stat.
