Will Yankees Greg Bird be more Moose Skowron or Nick Johnson?

The Saddest Word is, IF

Nick was a promising player and an advanced hitter; sound familiar? He played the game hard and wore his socks up high.

Johnson came up in 2001, joining a juggernaut. He platooned with Tino, taking over the bag full time in 2002. By the next year, Nick was 24 and just figuring out how to hit in the majors. He slashed .284/.422/.472 with 14 home runs and 19 doubles that year.

Those are good numbers. But here’s one that’s not so good: 406. That’s not his BA or OBP; it’s not even his slugging. No, that’s the number of plate appearances he had that year, fewer than he had managed the year before (441).

The problem for Nick was that he was injury prone: sound familiar? That proved to be Nick’s last year in pinstripes, for a while. He returned in 2010, his penultimate year in the show, hitting just.167/.388/.306. And he was healthy enough for only 98 PA’s.

His OBP tells you he still had the eye, but his SLG tells you the worst thing he could do was make contact with the ball. When his career ended two years later—after a year off and one last go with the Orioles—Johnson finished his career with a WAR of 14.6.

That will mean more to you as you read the comparative numbers of other players on this list. Hopefully, Bird will do better. He almost has to have a better career than Steve “Bye Bye” Balboni or Kevin Maas.

Still, It’s Part of the Legacy

Maas holds a special place in Yankees first basemen lore for inspiring the Maas Top girls. This was a seemingly spontaneous movement of women who would take their tops off and dance around the old stadium as if in a Dionystic spell whenever Kevin hit a home run, but that’s an article for another day.

For now let’s look at the pantheon of players who have distinguished themselves with the Yankees, shirts or no.