Yankees: Not To Worry, This Bird Will Fly Like An Eagle

The Yankees by now, with virtually any other player on the team who is hitting .037 with eighteen strikeouts in only ten games, would have a seat on the bench for him. But they seem to know that their bird will fly. Good for them.

The Yankees have been flying of late with Gary Sanchez and Didi Gregorius, two mainstays of the team as it was crafted by Brian Cashman, absent with leave due to injuries from the lineup. But there’s another integral part of the offense who’s been playing, but is also absent from the lineup in other ways.

Greg Bird‘s brief tenure with the Yankees has been a strange journey that began last year when he suffered a shoulder injury that removed him from baseball activity for then entire 2016 season. The Yankees decided to send him to the Arizona Fall League as a tune up for Spring Training, mostly to give Bird some at-bats to get hit his timing back.

In between, the Yankees decide they need an insurance policy against Bird and they go out and pluck Chris Carter from the bottom of the free agent pool signing him for $3.3 million.

Then, the preseason arrives and Bird lights it up, pounding the ball day in and day out to the tune of a .451 batting average and eight home runs, most of which are screaming drives that leave the ballpark in a split second.

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The regular season comes about and it would be fair to say that of all the players in the regular lineup that Joe Girardi draws up to open the season, Greg Bird presents the least of problems for the team. He’s pronounced healthy and ready to go.

Except that this bird never takes flight and appears to be grounded, even as his team soars without him.

The stats on Bird are ugly enough without repeating them here. Safe to say, though, there are few pitchers in the league who have been getting him out. And that’s because Bird’s been getting himself nearly all the time.

But as I learned yesterday from Aaron Boone, it’s always more useful and telling to look at a player’s upside before making any final judgments. And so it is with Bird that his upside clearly outweighs his current downside, to the point where it’s only a matter of time when that upside will crush any and all doubts about him and his current “illness” will be cured.

Video Courtesy of the YES Network

Slumps are the bane of all players at this level, and that includes pitchers, who “lose” the feel of the slider coming off their hand, as well as hitters, who all of sudden find themselves wildly chasing pitches out of the zone that they would never have swung at before.

Rare is the hitter like Derek Jeter, Robin Yount, and now, Daniel Murphy who always seem to come up with their one or two hits a game. And it’s too soon to tell if Bird is going to be one of those streak hitters who are up one week and down the next.

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All signs indicate that he is not of that breed. The Yankees see the cup half full with Bird with good reason. For one, he has never hit .038 in his life, and two, he has that sweet swing that can never be lost.

It’s just a matter of timing and time when this bird will take flight.

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