The 2016 season hasn’t even started yet, and the injury bug has already taken a bite out of the New York Yankees.
And now, they really have to hope it doesn’t come back for them again.
The day’s bad news involves Greg Bird. Joel Sherman of the New York Post was the first to tease Monday afternoon that the 23-year-old first baseman had been lost for 2016 due to shoulder surgery. Not long after, the Yankees made it official.
Gut, meet punch.
Bird went into the 2015 season as one of the more well-regarded first base prospects in the minor leagues, and he further boosted his stock as he ascended up the ranks. After OPS’ing .825 with 12 home runs in 83 games at Double-A and Triple-A, he broke through with an .871 OPS and 11 home runs in 43 major league games.
In any other organization, a breakout performance like that likely would have netted Bird a starting role going into the 2016 season. But with Mark Teixeira at first base and Alex Rodriguez at designated hitter, Yankees general manager Brian Cashman said earlier this winter that the plan for 2016 called for Bird to spend the year at Triple-A.
“That’s the optimal,” Cashman said, per the Ken Davidoff of the New York Daily News. “Not for Bird, but optimally period, that would be the best.”
But though this may have been the plan, it certainly wasn’t hard to imagine Bird being needed at the major league level in 2016. And now that he’s out of the picture, you can’t help but imagine how much the Yankees might end up missing him.
Take a look at what the Yankees have on paper, and you’ll see a team that could be pretty good in 2016. In fact, FanGraphs projects them to be right in the thick of the American League playoff race with an 86-76 record.
For that projection to come true, however, the Yankees will need to stay reasonably durable. Trouble is, they’re not exactly built to be reasonably durable.
In their lineup alone, the Yankees have seven regulars who are going into at least their age-32 seasons. The elder statesmen of the bunch are Teixeira, A-Rod and Carlos Beltran, who also might be the three biggest injury risks in the Yankees lineup.
Beltran is going into his age-39 season and has played in just 242 games over the last two seasons due to injuries. Rodriguez is going into his age-40 season, and his track record since 2008 says it’ll be a minor miracle if he repeats his 2015 feat of playing in over 150 games. Teixeira is going into his age-36 season and hasn’t played in a full season since 2011.
Unless Bird got some playing time in right field in the minors this year, he presumably wouldn’t have been called on to fill in for an injured Beltran. But he almost certainly would have been called on to fill in for an injured A-Rod or Teixeira and might have proved to be an upgrade over either of them.
As Rotoworld’s Matthew Pouliot tweeted, he actually had Bird projected for a higher OPS than Teixeira going into 2016:
He’s not the only one. FanGraphs’ projections actually hard Bird pegged for a higher OPS than both Teixeira and Rodriguez.
When looking at Bird did in 2015, this isn’t all that hard to believe. The numbers that he put up obviously look pretty good, but what makes them look even better is how he produced them.
Though Bird did swing and miss a bit in posting a 29.8 K%, he also showed a strong eye in posting a 10.7 BB%. He also very much earned his .527 slugging percentage, as Baseball Savant can show us that Bird’s average exit velocity put him in very elite company:
Given this, it’s no wonder that the lefty-swinging Bird didn’t need Yankee Stadium’s short porch to pad his power numbers in 2015. He slugged .459 at home and .611 on the road.
This certainly poses a question for the long run. With Teixeira’s contract set to expire at the end of 2016, Bird figures to be the Yankees’ starting first baseman when he returns in 2017. But because power has been known to need more than a year of recovery time following shoulder surgery, the Yankees have reason to worry whether Bird will be up to the task of filling Teixeira’s shoes.
In the short term, meanwhile, a more pressing question is whether any of their depth pieces could have the kind of impact in 2016 that Bird might have had. And it’s a good question.
Matt Snyder of CBS Sports highlighted Dustin Ackley and Brian McCann as the top backup options for Teixeira. The first is a subpar hitter, and the latter is a natural catcher who’s been roughly an average hitter over the last four seasons. That is, neither figures to be the Johnny-on-the-spot game-changer that Bird could have been.
In the minor leagues, the Yankees’ two most MLB-ready prospects are right fielder Aaron Judge and catcher Gary Sanchez. Judge could be a fill-in option for A-Rod or Beltran, and Sanchez could move behind the plate if McCann is needed at first or at DH. However, Judge was last seen getting a reality check at the Triple-A level, and it was only a year ago that Sanchez’s stock was on ice.
All this is to say that Bird’s season-ending surgery only gives the Yankees another reason to hope and pray for good health in 2016. They already had their chips on an alarmingly old lineup even before Bird went down, and now they might as well be going all-in on an old lineup. They’re going to need their older hitters to fight the good fight against the injury bug.
If they can, the club might actually be able to live up to its fairly optimistic projections. If not, well, that’s probably not going to be so easy.
Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com and FanGraphs unless otherwise noted/linked.
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