Yankees: Get ready for Brett Gardner starting over Clint Frazier in Game 1

Yankees fans should be fully prepared for Brett Gardner to start Game 1 over Clint Frazier.

First you steal the turtleneck, then you steal the role in the Yankees lineup.

Like many of his teammates, Brett Gardner has embodied the front seat of a roller coaster this season. The first to experience every emotional dip and turn, hands up and screaming.

He opened the year looking, ahem, entirely washed, surely with the abrupt Summer Camp and shaved-down season to blame. After all, a slow month represented half the year, gone in a flash.

But then Gardner turned things around, and shot up the reliability chart over the season’s final two and a half weeks, as many of his teammates seemed to regress in the heat of battle. All told, Gardner finished a year he spent much of below the Mendoza line hitting .223 with a .354 OBP, good for a 110 wRC+, above league average.

That being said, Clint Frazier is still the better player, at this point. Better hitter, solid defender, needs to be in the lineup if the Yankees are going to insist on starting Kyle Higashioka behind the plate in Game 1 of a playoff series. But don’t shoot the messenger, here: You aren’t allowed to faint backwards into your chair if it’s Gardy batting ninth when the lineups are unveiled on Tuesday.

This is certainly the evil flip side of recency bias at work.

While Gardner has risen with his trademark consistency, always floating back to a certain degree of buoyancy, Frazier has fallen, going 1-for-his-last-20 after his huge Saturday game at Fenway Park last week.

Of course, no Yankee has hit since then — well, except maybe Gardner.

Inserting Gardy into the starting lineup against Shane Bieber based on his small-sample-size rise could be catastrophic, and we would still bank on Frazier here. After all, he’s shown similar bat control to Gardner, stepping up and making contact in pressure situations with runners in scoring position (.310 in 42 PA, vs. .258 in 39 for Gardy).

But in the season finale, with plenty at stake, Aaron Boone inserted Gardner and sent Frazier’s tired legs to the bench. We hope that wasn’t a preview of things to come, but we wouldn’t be stunned.

And neither would you.

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